The Love Letters Read online

  Julia poured hot milk and coffee from silver jugs, lifted a china dome to reveal two delicately poached eggs, removed hot rolls from the folded linen napkins.

  “Are you hungry?” Violet asked.

  Charlotte looked directly at her. “Unto starvation. Unto death.”

  Violet returned the look. “What did you expect?”

  The maid left.

  Violet drummed her fingers on the foot of the chaise longue, not aimlessly, but with definite pattern. She was, as always, practicing, perhaps one of the finger exercises she had worked out for herself, perhaps a phrase she considered was giving her difficulty.

  Charlotte, sipping coffee, looked with relief at the strength of the disciplined hand. Violet’s hands were shorter, squarer than Patrick’s, their power and reach extraordinary for a woman.

  Strength: it was this that had driven Charlotte to Beja in the dead of winter to see violent Violet whose violence was turned to gentleness by the structure of her music, who could play chaos into order. Who could perhaps even now take all the senselessness with which Charlotte was darkened, and play it into meaning.

  As she had the night of James Clement’s burial. Because of Reuben and Essie they had come back to the house on Seventy fourth Street. “But they need us there,” Violet said when Patrick started to protest. “Go on to the hospital, Patrick. Charlotte and I will be all right.” She went into the drawing room and sat at the piano and played Bach until Reuben called them to dinner. They sat at the long table in the dark dining room and Violet managed to keep some kind of conversation going. After dinner they went up to the library for coffee. They were silent while Essie puttered around with the coffee cups, the silver pot. When they heard her heavy footsteps going downstairs Violet leaned back on the black leather couch. The small coffee cup was held in one strong hand.

  “If I have a reputation for arrogance now,” Violet said, “God help me if I had been a failure. Humility is possible only if one is a success. It takes tremendous arrogance to sustain one’s faith in oneself, as an artist or as a human being, if one must do it alone. The feeling of failure is more destructive to the creative artist, like Clement, than to the interpreter, like me. I have Buxtehude and Scarlatti and Vivaldi; but Clement had only himself.”

  She put her coffee cup on James Clement’s desk, picked up his paper knife for a moment as though weighing it, turned the hour glass. “To be driven by a vision that is ignored or misunderstood, and to be faithful to it, as he was—dear God, no wonder he—” She turned from Charlotte with an angry cry, leaned her forehead against James Clement’s bookshelves, and wept.

  Violet’s fingers stopped. Her square hands lay on the ivory brocade, holding power suspended in their stillness.

  “I am not very objective about Patrick, Charlotte. I am not even very objective about you. If you want to talk to me, to tell me what all this is about, why you have come unannounced to Beja, I will try to listen with dispassion and compassion. But I can’t promise you any help except bed and board until you’re well enough to be on your own feet again. Meanwhile please eat your eggs while they’re still warm.”

  (“She’s rude,” James Clement had said. “She has no manners. She has an abominable disposition. She is utterly glorious.”)

  Obediently Charlotte took her fork and broke open one of the eggs so that the golden yoke spilled out of it. “I came wanting all kinds of things from you I shouldn’t have wanted,” she said.

  “And that I couldn’t give you.”

  Charlotte nodded. “But I thought you could. I went to a priest for absolution and he gave it to me, but even though I tried to tell him everything as honestly as I could I felt unabsolved.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he didn’t blame me enough.”

  “Do you want to be blamed?”

  “Not in any masochistic sense. Not for the pleasure of wallowing in guilt. But he seemed to think that I am not at fault. He kept letting me off the hook. So I knew that I must have slanted the picture. Blame is never that unequal. Or maybe it was just that I was having what you call my usual effect.”

  “You are as vague as Patrick was,” Violet said. “He pretends that the subject, whatever it is, does not exist. And you are walking in enormous circles around it. One of you is going to have to center on it.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte agreed. “I thought it would be possible to talk to you about it, but it was easier to tell the priest.”

  … “It seems to me, my child,” Father Duarte said, “that you have spent a great deal of time today recounting peccadilloes to which you usually give very little thought.”

  Mariana bowed her head. A small trickle of perspiration ran down her back. The midafternoon sun poured hotly through the stained-glass windows of the chapel. A shaft of golden light drifted down through the open ceiling of the confession box and seemed to leave a film of dust on her veil. There was always a feeling of dust in the air of Beja in the dry season, borne on the hot wind from the Alentejo plains.

  “Sister Mariana,” Father Duarte passed his hand over his rough head in a tired gesture, “is something troubling you?” Mariana gave an almost imperceptible nod. “You are not yourself.”

  “No, Father.”

  He said in a quiet but definite voice, “You want to confess something but you are afraid.” He looked at her, and this direct confrontation, counter to regulations, unnerved her. She bowed her head but did not speak. Father Duarte said dispassionately, “Remember that you are confessing not to me, but through me, and that there is nothing you need be afraid or ashamed to tell your Lord.”

  Mariana spoke with great effort. “I have lied.”

  “To whom?”

  “To her Reverence. To my Sisters.” She stopped, was lost in silence. She did not hear the voices of the children outside, the birds in the garden, the fountain, a sudden burst of quarreling among soldiers and civilians out on the street.

  “What was your lie?”

  Mariana raised her head, looking above the grille and at the dark wall of the confessional with eyes that were focused far beyond it. “I tried to pretend to them, to myself, that nothing was changed.” Again she stopped.

  “What is changed?”

  She licked her dry lips, pushing her words out painfully. “I can’t tell you.” She turned from the wall and looked at Father Duarte, the old brown priest waiting with controlled strength. “Next time—”

  His voice was deceptively gentle. “Now.”

  “I lied,” she said again, and swallowed.

  “You have already told me that.”

  Focusing her eyes carefully on the bars of the grille, she said, “About the soldiers. The French soldiers who ride by the convent almost every day.”

  “How could you lie about the soldiers?”

  “That they don’t matter to me.”

  “They matter to us all,” he said quietly.

  “That’s what I said, too. That’s how I explained it to the others. But that’s not it.”

  Again he had to break through the heavy silence. “What is it, then?”

  Mariana’s voice was suddenly bitter. “Sister Joaquina saw. She always sees.” Father Duarte raised his eyebrows slightly but did not speak. Her voice came angrily. “One soldier … just one soldier … is all that matters.”

  Duarte did not want to hear what he was going to hear. He tried not to know that it was coming. “It is forgivable to feel a special pride in your brother.”

  “Not Baltazar.”

  Duarte gave a deep sigh of acceptance and sorrow. “Who, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He looked at her in quick hope. “You don’t know?”

  “One of the French soldiers.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know his name. But I see him. And he sees me. No. Now I’m lying to you. I do know his name now. Part of it. I learned it last night. Noël. He is called Noël.”

  “You learned that when yo
u went home?”

  “You knew I went?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s Baltazar’s friend. I don’t know any more of his name than that. Only Noël.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No. He wasn’t there. I wanted him to be there. I prayed for him to be there.”

  “My child, do you know what you are saying?”

  “No. Yes. Father, I don’t know!”

  Now it was Father Duarte’s turn to be silent as he struggled for words. Mariana looked at him, saw his struggle, and closed her eyes against it. If she could have closed her ears she would have, but his words came so quietly that she listened in spite of herself. “My child, we have all been overwrought and overexcited by the victory and the presence of the soldiers. For us here in the Alentejo to be free from Spain at last is enough to raise our emotions to an unstable pitch. I think that you are letting something perfectly normal loom too large, that you are giving an importance to a guilt in yourself that does not really exist.”

  Mariana replied wearily. “That is the kind of thing I tried to say to Michaela. I’ve tried even harder to say it to myself. It doesn’t work. Because I see him. I see him. Whenever they ride by. And he sees me. He sees me far more than if we waved at each other the way the others do. We … and when my eyes are closed I still see him. His face is all that I see.”

  “At least you are aware. Thus there is something you can do about it.”

  “What?”

  “Do I really need to tell you?”

  “Never to go to the balcony when they ride by. Never to look over the garden wall. Yes. I know.”

  “And when this face of an unknown man comes unbidden to your eyes you must replace it with the known face of your Lord and Spouse.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve known you all your life, Mariana. You have great strength. Now you must call on God to give you even more.”

  She did not hear the words of the absolution, though she knew he had given them. She crossed herself and stumbled out of the dark heat of the confessional into the gaudy gold of the chapel.

  There she knelt: had Father given her a penance, given her prayers to say? He must have. But what?

  —O God, I can keep myself from going to the balcony, from looking over the wall for him. It is not going to be difficult never to see him in reality. But not to see him in my heart—I see him now. It is you who will have to stop that for me, dear my Lord, because I can’t do it myself. But I don’t want you to stop it, Jesu, I don’t want you to stop it. If you have once seen a heavenly vision, you long for it over and over again, don’t you? If you have seen the archangel Michael—but why should he make me think of the archangel Michael who has no buttons at all to count?

  You made me, God.

  You made me this way.

  This is the way I am.

  If you want me to change you’ll have to help me. I can’t do it by myself.

  … “I’ve tried to change, but I can’t seem to do it. Sometimes I can manage it on the outside, and this seems to satisfy Patrick, but on the inside I’m still—Charlotte.”

  “But why should you need to change?”

  “One of us has to.”

  “Why?”

  “But don’t you see why, Violet?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You mean you accept the myth: Charlotte and Patrick Napier are the ideal couple?”

  “No, Charlotte. I’m old enough to know that there’s no such thing. But I thought you were both mature enough to have worked out reasonable compromises.”

  “Is that your definition of a marriage? Compromise?”

  Violet lay back against the chaise longue, closing her kohl-rimmed eyes. “I don’t believe in definitions of abstractions.”

  “You think marriage is an abstraction?”

  “As you seem to be using the word, yes.”

  Charlotte pushed her tray aside, one egg untouched, rolls unbroken. “All right. No more abstractions. Let’s be specific. Let’s talk about compromise. Did you?”

  Violet’s fingers began to move again with controlled, calculated precision. “No.”

  “Well, then?”

  “I am not an admirable person, Charlotte. I wish you would get that clear. I am driven by a passion that has overridden honor, decency, love. I destroyed my husband, which is one reason I have never married again. I have picked up love, if you want to call it that, as the need has arisen—and it does arise—and dropped it as it has become an interference with my work. Your father and I: I have sometimes wondered if Clement and I would have married if he had lived, but I think not. My success would have been intolerable for him. And then it would have become so for me, so he in turn would have become intolerable. But he is the only human being in the world who has ever—”

  She stopped, turned her hawk’s face away for a moment, then continued, “Patrick is my son. I have been an abominable mother to him, though on occasion a good companion. I gather he is an excellent surgeon. But I know him very little as my son—or your husband.”

  “He is your son, though.”

  Violet’s fingers continued to move on an invisible keyboard. “And your husband. Who loves you.”

  “Does he? He picks up a scalpel with more real love than when he comes to me. The hospital, the operating room, the problem of the patient, this is what puts everything in its place in the universe for him. I don’t. I’m part of the chaos. And there’s nothing that orders the universe for me. Nothing.”

  … There was disorder everywhere, in the town, and even, it seemed, in the convent, though the rules were reinstated; the life of the nuns was again centered in the chapel, structured by the Divine Office …

  But they could not help being aware of the disorder outside their walls. Schomberg’s soldiers, although officially stationed in the neighboring town of Mertola, were often in the streets of Beja, and children and sisters found excuses to go to the balcony and look down into the street.

  The children were quick mimics of the French and English soldiers as they struggled to speak Portuguese. “English is even funnier than French,” small round Dolores told Mariana. “How hard it must be for them to learn to talk when they have such a peculiar language.”

  At night the town never seemed to quiet down; only in the heat of the day was there any diminution of the merrymaking. The streets were constantly filled with brawls, with soldiers and girls, with dancing. Only the oldest of the lay sisters were allowed to leave the convent to attend to the laundry in the river that was still full and clear from the winter rains, or to go with Sister Cellaress to the market that sprawled down the hill beside the convent. The bell at the convent gate was rung continually by visitors for sisters and children, and, each time it rang, even if she was in the chapel, Mariana would raise her head and listen. It was impossible not to.

  Where was Baltazar, who had not kept his promise to come?

  Joaquina’s father, Dom Alipio de Vasconcelos, had not been to visit his daughter, either, but then, he never did … As she realized this, Mariana looked with pity on Joaquina. Baltazar always did come. Eventually.

  —Oh, dearest Lord, why doesn’t he come? Are you keeping him away to make things easier for me? But it isn’t easier. We don’t always have to like your will, do we?

  —Help me to want what you want for me. Only I don’t know what it is that you want …

  My soul thirsteth for thee. my flesh also longeth after thee: in a barren and dry land where no water is

  no

  help me O Lord

  you have to help me

  it is so dark

  She walked in the safe rectangle of the cloister garden. Her fingers moved against her beads, but the words were only a habit and could not command her attention. The fountain splashed up towards the sun, caught gold, and the breeze, coming in a brief gust of coolness, blew spray in her direction. She held her face up to it.

  From behind her came the old, cracked voice of Sister
Portress. “There you are, dear child. Sorry to interrupt, but you and Peregrina have visitors in the locutario, and Peregrina is already there.”

  Mariana turned to meet the ancient, smiling face. “Visitors?”

  “Your brother and a friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “Did I interrupt a prayer or a dream? Wake up, child. It’s just your brother and one of his friends. Run along and see them.”

  “Yes, Sister. Thank you.”

  It might be anybody the friend.

  It might be the Englishman who had given Peregrina wine.

  It might even be Rui de Melo. Sister Portress wouldn’t remember him because he never came

  So it wouldn’t be Rui de Melo because Rui de Melo never came

  So

  Baltazar had said he would bring him

  Baltazar had said he would bring the Frenchman

  To see him. To see him face to face.

  To have the stars stop, shuddering, in their courses.

  To have her heart wrenched in her body.

  The locutario was a divided room. The large anteroom was for guests and contained some statues the abbess had banished from other parts of the convent, was brightened and cluttered by palms and plants in colored pots and jars, by massive chairs of carved wood and dusty velvet. Waste not, want not, and the lay sisters enjoyed puttering about, cleaning, polishing. Guests could see and speak to the choir nuns through a grille. On the nuns’ side of the partition the room was bare except for a crucifix and a number of plain chairs. It was to this room that Mariana hurried now.

  An Alcoforado—no, a nun trained by the abbess who was also an Alcoforado—could smile, could laugh, could be gay, could hide what was going on in her heart …

  Could thank the Frenchman for saving her brother’s life, for coming to the Alentejo, for taking up the cause of the small, enslaved country …

  Could offer her prayers on learning that Schomberg was taking his soldiers into the field again, that despite the victory the war was not ended, that there might be more fighting …