"I follow the rules," said Quart, and instantly regretted it.
"Do you?" The old priest looked at him with intense irony. "Well, my congratulations. You'll save your soul. Those who follow the rules always go to heaven." His mouth twisted as he took a last drag on his cigarette. "To rejoice in God's presence." He threw the cigarette end out of the window and watched it fall.
"I wonder," said Quart, "if you still have faith."
These were strange words, coming from Quart, and Quart knew it. Quite apart from the fact that such questions – more appropriate to the hounds of the Holy Office – were not within the jurisdiction of his mission. As Spada would have said, at the IEA we deal not with people's hearts but with their actions. Let's stick to being good centurions and leave the dangerous task of probing the human soul to His Eminence Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz.
. And yet Quart waited for an answer in the long silence that followed his remark. As the old priest moved slowly round the telescope, his reflection slid along the polished brass tube.
"Still is an adverb of time," Father Ferro said at last, frowning, possibly reflecting on time, or adverbs. "But I forgive sins," he added. "I help people die in peace."
"It's not your office to forgive," Quart said. "Only God can do that."
The priest looked at him, as if he'd forgotten that Quart was there. "When I was young," he said suddenly, "I read all the philosophers of Antiquity, from Socrates to Saint Augustine. And I forgot them. The only thing that remained of them was bittersweet melancholy and disillusionment. Now I'm sixty-four, and all I know about people is that they remember, they're afraid, and they die."
Quart must have looked surprised and embarrassed, because Father Ferro nodded, his hard dark eyes fixing him for a moment. He looked up at the sky. The solitary cloud – maybe no longer the same one -had gone to meet the setting sun, and a reddish glow now spread over the distant buildings.
"I searched for Him up in the mountains for a long time," Father Ferro went on. "I wanted to have it out with Him, a kind of settling of scores, one to one. I'd seen so many people suffer and die… Forgotten by my bishop and his aides, I lived in atrocious solitude. I emerged only to say Mass every Sunday in a small, almost empty church, or to trudge through rain or snow to give extreme unction to a soul who waited for my arrival to die. For twenty-five years, sitting at the bedside of those who gripped my hands because I was their only comfort in the face of death, I prayed to Him. But I never received an answer."
He broke off. It was Quart who spoke now: "Either we live and die according to a plan, or merely by accident." It was neither a question nor an answer. He was just prompting Father Ferro to continue. For the first time, Quart had some understanding of the man before him; and he knew that Father Ferro could sense this.
The old priest's face softened. "How to preserve, then," he said, "the message of life in a world that bears the seal of death? Man dies, he knows he will die, and he also knows that, unlike kings, popes and generals, he'll leave no trace. He tells himself there must be something more. Otherwise, the universe is simply a joke in very poor taste; senseless chaos. So faith becomes a kind of hope, a solace. Maybe that's why not even the Holy Father believes in God anymore."
Quart burst out laughing, startling the pigeons. "That's why you're defending your church tooth and nail," he said.
"Of course." Father Ferro frowned. "What does it matter whether I have faith or not? Those who come to me have faith. That's justification enough for the existence of Our Lady of the Tears. And it's no coincidence that it's a church of the baroque, which was the art of the Counter-Reformation, which declared, 'Don't think. Leave that to the theologians. Admire the carvings, the gilding, the sumptuous altars, the passion plays that have been the essential means of entrancing the masses since the time of Aristotle… Be dazzled by the glory of God. Too much analysis robs you of hope. See us as the solid rock on which to take refuge from the roaring torrent. The truth kills you before your time.'"
Quart raised a hand: "There's a moral objection to all this, Father. What you describe is alienation. Your church, presented like that, is the seventeenth-century equivalent of television."
"So what?" said Father Ferro with a shrug. "What was religious baroque art but an attempt to win the audience away from Luther and Calvin? Anyway, where would the modern papacy be without television? Naked faith can't be sustained. People need symbols to wrap around themselves, because it's cold outside. We're responsible for our last innocent faithful, those who followed us believing that we'd lead them to the sea, lead them home, as in the Anabasis. At least my old stones, my altarpiece, and my Latin arc more dignified than all that amplified singing and the huge screens that have turned services into a spectacle for the masses, dazzling them with electronic gimmicks. The Church leaders think that's the way to keep their customers. But they're wrong, they only degrade us. The battle's been lost, and now the time has come for false prophets."
He shut his mouth and bowed his head, morose. The conversation was over. He leaned on the window ledge and looked out over the river. Quart didn't know what to do or say. After a moment he went and leaned on the ledge beside Father Ferro. He had never been so near the priest. Father Ferro's head came up to his shoulder. They stood like that, without speaking, until long after the clocks on the towers of Seville struck six. The solitary cloud had dissolved and the sun was sinking. To the west, the sky was slowly turning gold. Don Priamo Ferro spoke again.
"I know only one thing: when the seduction is over we'll be finished too. Logic and reason will mean the end. But as long as some poor woman needs to kneel in my small church in search of comfort, the church must remain standing." He took his dirty handkerchief from his pocket and noisily blew his nose. The light from the setting sun lit the white stubble on his chin. "Burdened as we are by our miserable condition, priests like me are still needed… We're the old, patched drum skin on which the glory of God still thunders. And only a madman would envy our secret. We know," said the old priest darkly, "the angel who holds the key to the abyss."
IX
It's a Small World
Worthy of being dark and Sevillian. Campoamor, The Express Train
The floodlights illuminating the cathedral created an area of unreal brightness in the night. Confused by the light, pigeons flew in all directions, suddenly appearing and then disappearing into the darkness among the huge mountain of cupolas, pinnacles and flying buttresses, on top of which perched the tower of La Giralda. It was almost fantastical, thought. Quart, a backdrop as extraordinary as old Hollywood movie sets made of canvas and papier-mache. The difference was that the Plaza Virgen de los Reyes was real, built of bricks over the centuries – the oldest part dated from the twelfth century -and no film studio could have reproduced such an incredible place, however much money and talent they threw at the project. It was unique, a perfect stage. Particularly when Macarena Bruner walked across it and stopped beneath the huge lamppost in the centre of the square. She stood against the golden glow of the floodlit stone facades, tall and slender, her dark eyes calmly fixed on Quart.
"There are very few sights like this," she said.