Quart put the cutting back in the folder and returned it to the trunk with the rest of the papers. Now he knew what Captain Xaloc was looking at in the picture: the cannons of the battleship Indiana. He pictured Xaloc on the bridge, surrounded by cannon fire and smoke, resolved to end his long journey to nowhere.
"Did Carlota ever find out about this?" Quart asked.
Macarena was leafing through an old photograph album. "I don't know," she said. "By July 1898 she had completely lost her mind, so we have no idea how she might have reacted to the news. Anyway, I think they kept it from her. She came up here to wait, until the day she died." She showed him a page of the album. There was an old photograph, with the stamp of the photographer's studio in a corner, of a young woman in light summer clothes, holding a parasol and wearing a wide-brimmed hat covered with flowers, a hat like those in the trunk. The photograph was very faded, but he could distinguish slender hands holding gloves and a fan, light-brown hair gathered in a bun, and a pale face with a sad smile and vacant eyes. She wasn't beautiful, but her face was pleasing: sweet, serene. She looked about twenty. "Maybe she had this taken for him," said Macarena.
A stronger breeze moved the curtains, and through them Quart once again saw the belfry of Our Lady of the Tears. To dispel his uneasiness, he went over to one of the arched windows. He took off his jacket and stood contemplating the outline of the church in the darkness. He felt bereft, as Manuel Xaloc must have felt when he left the Casa del Postigo for the last time and went to the church to leave Carlota's pearls there. "I'm sorry," he murmured, not quite knowing why. He remembered the cold against his hand of the entrance to the crypt, the hiss of burning candles during Father Ferro's Mass, the odour of a barren past rising from the trunk.
Macarena came and stood beside him, and she too looked out at the tower of Our Lady of the Tears. "Now you know all you need to know," she said.
She was right. Quart knew more than enough, and Vespers had achieved his futile purpose. But none of it could be translated into the official prose of a report for the IEA. Monsignor Spada, and His Eminence Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz, and His Holiness the Pope were concerned only with the identity of the hacker and the likelihood of
a scandal in a small Seville parish. The rest – the lives and stories contained within the walls of the church – was of no consequence. As Father Oscar had said, Our Lady of the Tears was too far from Rome. Like Captain Xaloc's doomed Manigua, it was just a small ship heading unsteadily towards the implacable steel mass of a destroyer.
Macarena placed her hand on his arm. He didn't pull away, but she must have felt him tense. "I'm leaving Seville," he said.
She said nothing for a moment, then turned to look at him. "Do you think they'll understand in Rome?" she asked.
"I don't know. But whether they do or not isn't important." He gestured at the trunk, the bell-tower, the city in darkness below. "They haven't been here. The hacker drew their attention for a moment, but to them this is just a tiny point on a map. My report will be filed the minute it's been read."
"It's not fair," said Macarena. "This is a special place."
"You're wrong. The world is full of places like this. With a Carlota waiting at the window, a stubborn old priest, a dilapidated church… The Pope isn't going to lose sleep over Our Lady of the Tears. You people aren't important enough."
"What about you?"
"It doesn't matter. I don't sleep that much anyway."
"I see." She moved her hand away. "You don't like to get involved, do you? You just have your orders." She pushed her hair back abrupdy and moved so that he had no choice but to look her in the face. "Aren't you going to ask me why I left my husband?"
"No, I'm not. That's not necessary for my report."
She laughed quietly, contemptuously. "Your report," she said. "You came here and asked questions. You can't leave without hearing all the answers. You've pried into everybody's lives, so here's the rest of mine." Her eyes were fixed on Quart. "I wanted to have a child, so there would be something between me and the abyss. I wanted a child, but Pencho didn't." Her voice became sarcastic. "You can imagine his objections – too soon, a bad time, a crucial period in our lives, we need to concentrate our efforts and energies, we can have one later… I ignored him and became pregnant. Why do you look away, Father Quart? Are you shocked? Pretend this is confession. Part of your job."
Quart shook his head, suddenly firm. His job was the one thing he was still clear about. "You're wrong again," he said gently. "It's not my job. I told you before that I didn't want to hear your confession."
"You can't get out of this, Father." Her voice was harsh. "Think of me as a soul in torment that can't be turned away. Anyway, I'm not asking for absolution."
He shrugged, as if that released him. But intent on the moon, she seemed not to notice. "I got pregnant," she went on, "and Pencho felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his world. He insisted it was too soon. He put pressure on me to get rid of the baby."
So that was it. Things were falling into place.
"So you did," Quart couldn't help saying.
She smiled with a bitterness he'd never seen in her before. "Yes. I'm – Catholic, and I refused for as long as I could. But I loved my husband. Against Don Priamo's advice, I checked into a clinic and got rid of the baby. There were complications – a perforation of the uterus, haemorrhaging, and I had to have an emergency hysterectomy. Do you know what that means? Now I can never be a mother." Her face was towards the moon. "Never."
"What did Father Ferro say?"
"Nothing. He's old, he's seen too much. He still gives me communion when I ask." "Does your mother know?" "No."
"And your husband?"
Her laugh was dry, brief. "He doesn't either." She slid her hand along the windowsill, towards Quart's arm, but didn't touch it this time. "Only Father Ferro and Gris know. And now you." She hesitated a moment, as if to add another name.
"Did Sister Marsala approve your decision to have an abortion?" asked Quart.
"On the contrary. It nearly cost me her friendship. But when I had the complications at the clinic, she came to see me. I didn't let Pencho come with me, so he thought everything went smoothly. I went home to convalesce, and seemed fine to him."
She turned to the priest. "There's a journalist," she said. "A man called Bonafe. The one who published some photographs last week…"
She paused, as if expecting him to say something, but Quart was silent. The photographs were the least of his worries, but he was concerned to hear Macarena mention Honorato Bonafe.