The Love Letters Read online

  She walked to the dining room, moving slowly, heavily, as though time were tangible, as though she had to push through it like a swimmer against the tide.

  She had forgotten Antonio de Tieve.

  In the dining room he rose to greet her. His face was anxious; he was full of apologies.

  She said, “Forget it.”

  He pulled out her chair, then sat down across from her. He smiled at her, tentatively. “If I forget it, will you, also? It was unpardonable of me, but if we could start again …”

  “There is nothing to start,” she said. “And we will certainly forget it.”

  The waiter who had served them the evening before appeared, beaming paternally over the rimless spectacles that slid down his nose. He spoke nothing but Portuguese, and Antonio had ordered dinner for her. Now he asked her what she wanted for breakfast.

  It hurt her throat to speak. She said, “Coffee, please, and some rolls.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  He spoke swiftly to the waiter, then smiled at Charlotte, speaking in his careful English, “He will bring it right away. One second.”

  Her tired mind repeated the last two words.—One second. One second. One second. Most peculiar to term our smallest fragment of clocked time a second. Is it because it was not the first?

  Antonio had coffee before him, and a plate of some kind of meat with fried eggs. “I need a heavy breakfast,” he said, “to get me through the rigors of the day. Although today is a holiday and I do not work. Madame Napier has visited Dame Violet before?”

  Charlotte shook her head. Violet was in Beja only in winter, and she and Patrick took their vacations in summer when Violet was in England. They had never seen Violet’s treasured villa in Beja, given her by an admirer before Patrick was born. It was a strange gift, perhaps all the giver had to give, but Violet liked it because of its very inaccessibility, because it was the last place on earth one would expect Dame Violet Napier to have a villa.

  “You do not mind if I exercise my English? It fatigues more easily than my French.” He had such an air of vitality, sitting there across from her, that she found it difficult, in her own exhaustion, to believe that he could fatigue easily in anything. He asked, “Did madame perhaps find some books in her room?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There were some books in the night stand.”

  He smiled his charming smile; yes, it was charming, if a little too deliberately so; he was doing his best to erase the night before. “When the front bedroom is not being used, I sleep there,” he said. “Of course I am in it with the understanding that any time she—the old Vieira—can rent it, I move out; she is charging me only for a much smaller room. There are very few tourists in winter, so I move seldom.”

  “The books are yours, then?”

  “Yes. But madame is more than welcome to read them.”

  She made the effort of smiling back.

  “Out of curiosity, tell me: how did a Gideon Bible get to Beja, Portugal?”

  He laughed. “The Bible is part of my research. An American college student gave it to me when I was up north skiing during the holidays. He said he lifted it from a Y in Boston. A Y is a Youth Hostel?”

  “Something like. Where did you learn your languages?”

  “In school, to start with. We have five years of French and three of English. At Coimbra I continued my studies. Then I completed my time in the army, returned to Coimbra for my graduate work, and here I am.”

  At last the waiter came with her pitchers of hot milk and coffee, two rolls, a dish of jam, a tiny curl of butter. She poured coffee and sipped at it gratefully; it warmed her, and the hot milk was soothing to her throat.

  He sat looking at her; she did not like the expression deep in his eyes; but all he asked her when he spoke was, “Did you look at the books?”

  “I glanced at them.”

  “The letters of Soror Mariana?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?” His smile held a questioning that seemed to her to be disproportionate.

  She looked at him and shrugged, not smiling back.

  “You have never heard of Mariana Alcoforado?” he asked. She shook her head. For a moment he seemed to ponder, and when he spoke again, he returned to French. “She was from Beja. A noblewoman. And a nun.”

  He paused for so long that Charlotte finally said, “Well, many noblewomen have become nuns. That’s not extraordinary.”

  “But she was an extraordinary nun. In Beja, of course, we all believe in her.”

  “Believe?”

  “That she wrote the letters. That it all happened.”

  “That what happened?”

  “But you read the letters!”

  She was beginning to be angry. “I glanced at them.”

  “Well?” He was still somehow challenging.

  She shrugged again, and picked up her coffee cup, warming her hands against it. “Many Religious have written about Christ as lover. What’s so odd about that?”

  “She was not writing about Christ.”

  Now she looked at him sharply. “Who, then?”

  “She was writing to her love, but it was not Christ, it was the French soldier who seduced her.”

  Why was she shocked? She had been surrounded by nuns for long enough to view the Religious with detachment, with no illusions of glamour. There wasn’t much in the way of human fault or foible one could not find in a nun.

  She did not like his smile.

  But now he was quoting poetry.

  If I could have my love

  Would my love go?

  If I could know my love

  What would I know?—

  Is what I have

  All that I lose?

  Is what I lose

  All that I keep?

  If my heart could

  How would it choose?

  And must it choose,

  Poor heart, to weep?

  It struck too close to home; she did not like it.

  He waited for her to comment on the verses, but she was silent. He said, “Mariana had her love. Therefore she lost him. Of course for some a nun cannot commit a sin, must preserve a kind of supernatural piosity. They, like the others who are shocked, forget that it was three hundred years ago, that things were different.”

  “You think, then,” Charlotte asked, “that basic values change? that there are no absolutes?” This was the kind of absurd, intense question that got her into trouble. (“It’s an invitation,” Patrick said, “loud and clear.”) She turned to her coffee, wishing, even with her sore throat, that she smoked. It might be one way to keep her mouth shut. There was an ashtray on the table between them, but he had not used it either. They both talked too much.

  “I say that I believe that Mariana had her love,” he said. “This is necessary for me for my work. There should be some integrity in these things. Aside from that I see no particular reason to believe in anything.”

  His brow furrowed, but smoothed as she asked, “Just what is your work?”

  “You will forgive me if for a moment I talk about myself?” He looked at her anxiously.

  “Please do.”

  He told his story fluently, as though it were one he enjoyed recounting, as though it had become by now a small performance. Only a slight tightening of the lines that ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth betrayed tension. “My father was an older man, a respected man, a judge on the bench. He married a young and beautiful wife, and he was to have his first child; and all was very well with them. Then it was the usual story of a colleague lying and cheating and destroying his reputation and from the sorrow and shame of this he died. In her grief my mother came to term early and died of a broken heart—and of having me, puny infant though I was. It was thought of course that I, too; would die, but I did not. So what to do with me? There were no relatives. My father had been ruined by his friend. There was no money, so I was sent to the fathers at the monastery of São Sebast
ian. They saw to it that I received my education. And discipline. One of their disciplines was beating. One of their disciplines was a kick that sent me rolling down the stairs and broke my hip, so that my limping gait reminds me of their disciplines to this day.”

  He did not see as she looked at him, startled. What about the duel at Coimbra? He continued, “It is because of their cold care that I went to University, so for this I must thank them.” He shrugged. “Of course as a result of my years with them I am an atheist.”

  She gave a small laugh. “Does it follow?”

  “As the rains of winter follow the drought of summer. But I am grateful to them for this. I have my spiritual independence as well as my physical.”

  “But you haven’t told me what your work is,” she reminded him.

  He shrugged again. “In one sense it is that I am teacher of Latin here in the school in Beja. But even though I am atheist I know that man does not live by bread alone, and in any event I prefer cake. The teaching is a necessary means to an end, that I may live at all. As for the rest of it, I am a poet.”

  “Was that your lyric, the one you said just a little while ago?”

  “Yes. Did you like it?” Again the quick look, the vulnerable look.

  “Very much. But I would have to hear it again, so that I could really listen. And—it wasn’t in Portuguese!”

  “No. I try to write my poems in several languages, because in one I may find a nuance that is not available in another. It is in the music of languages that I have my gift, and sometimes I think that what I write in English or French is better than the Portuguese that is too easy for me; I am too fluent.”

  She asked, “What about Latin?”

  He scowled ferociously. “After a day of school I have already had more Latin than my stomach can tolerate.”

  She said, “Say your poem again.”

  His expression could change as quickly as a sky with clouds racing across the moon. “I will say another. Listen: it is not my voice that you must hear, but the voice of Soror Mariana.”

  My love is lost

  And so it stays.

  I count not cost

  Nor look for ways

  To love again

  For I love still

  And love is pain

  And pain is naught

  And love, like light,

  Cannot be caught

  And sun and rain

  And nights and days

  My heart have tossed

  A thousand ways.

  For love like light,

  Cannot be caught.

  Fingers closed tight

  Hold naught.

  She did not look at him but down at her clenched hands on her lap. “It’s lovely.” The words seared her throat.

  “It moves you?” he asked.

  She did not raise her head. “Very much.” She tried to open her fingers.

  “I am writing Mariana,” he said. “Writing her, not about her, you understand. Writing her and her lover. It is my magnum opus. Their love. I am not concerned, basically, with historicity. Others have gone into that before me. It is not for us a new subject. There have been many books on Soror Mariana, good, bad, indifferent, romantic, cynical, shocking. I want my book to look at Soror Mariana from all aspects, beginning with her childhood. How, for instance, would you feel if you had been thrust into a convent as a small child when your mother died?”

  “I was,” Charlotte said softly.

  But he didn’t even hear. He was listening only to his own words. “She must have had some of the same feelings I had with the fathers at São Sebastian.”

  Charlotte stood up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You will have to excuse me. I have things I must do.” She left him and went upstairs to her room.

  She lay down on the lumpy, unmade bed. The sun shone through moving clouds, but even this watery light hurt her eyes and she closed them against it. From somewhere downstairs in the pensão came several shrill, sweet chords. For a moment she thought it was a harpsichord …

  Violet …

  But even if a harpsichord, unlikely instrument, could be in this cold pensão, it could not be Violet, still on her way back from Paris, hurrying back to her loved Beja (not knowing that Charlotte was waiting).

  From the way Violet talked you’d think Beja was made in heaven.

  A heaven that was raw and cold, that smelled of mustiness and exhaustion and drains.

  The music stopped.

  She did not know what the unknown instrument had been.

  —Oh, Violet, hurry, hurry, I need you.

  She ached with the need for her mother-in-law, who could be so frighteningly violent, but never when she was contained in the discipline of music; in music her violence was controlled, could be muted, transmuted, into infinite gentleness.

  —Oh, Violet, be gentle with me now.

  Her father had once told Charlotte that only the truly strong can afford to be gentle. He had continued and used the word meek; meek, he said, as in the Beatitudes, and in French meek was translated as debonaire; or it could be translated as chivalrous.

  Ought one to expect so much of anybody?

  It was cold. It was too cold. She tried to pull the blankets about her, but there was no warmth in them. She reached for the book of Soror Mariana’s letters. Antonio had wakened a faint curiosity in her. She opened the book, then let it drop onto the covers.

  “How, for instance,” Antonio had asked, “would you feel if you’d been thrust into a convent as a small child when your mother died?”

  Convent after convent …

  The first one had been in England, and her father, stunned with the shock of her mother’s death, had taken her there. It was summer, and they had gone into a garden where the Mother Superior was sitting in a carved wooden chair, a superb chair, not garden furniture at all, under an ancient pear tree. That was a long time ago, and she could not remember the face of the nun. The features she saw in her mind’s eye under the magnificently starched coif were Violet’s. Why Violet’s? Her father had left Charlotte in the garden with the nun. Her mother had gone somewhere—

  … “To heaven,” the nun who looked like Dame Violet Napier told her, “where she can pray for you even better than she did on earth.”

  “I don’t think she ever prayed for me,” the child Charlotte said.

  “But you say your prayers at night, and grace before meals?”

  “No.”

  The nun’s face tightened briefly. Then she smiled at the child. “These, then, are things you will learn. Do you think you will like that?”

  “I would like to know where my mother has gone,” Charlotte said, “and where my father is going.”

  Violet—no, the nun—studied her. “Your speech is harsh and American, Charlotte dear. We will have to do something about that.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Yes, Reverend Mother.”

  “Yes

  … “Aunt Brites.”

  “Yes, your Reverence.”

  The child looked at the nun. “But you are my aunt.”

  “While you are here in my convent I am the abbess and you call me your Reverence. Because I am Dona Brites Alcoforado you may also call me your Grace.”

  “Yes, Aunt Br—yes, your Reverence—Grace.”

  “It is not wholly your fault, Mariana,” the nun said, smiling down at the child. The wind stirring the branches of the pear tree made a moving pattern on her serene and austere face, on her hands resting on the arms of the carved chair. “Your father is not willing to accept that I am a Religious first, and an Alcoforado and his sister second, that I am indeed both. You will have to learn to think of me as a sister, but not his sister. You have, indeed, much to learn.”

  “Yes, Aunt Brites—your Reverence.”

  … Charlotte stood in the superior’s large and airy office. The windows were open, although the day was cool, and starched white curtains blew in the breeze. Behind the superior’s chair, and high on the wall, was
a large dark cross with an overrealistically carved corpus.

  “Where is my father?” Charlotte asked.

  “He is in Paris. He sent you a postcard.”

  “How do you know?”

  “All the mail must go through my hands, Charlotte.”

  “I want to see my father.”

  “You will see him when he comes back to England.”

  “But when will that be?”

  “I am sure he will inform us when he knows his plans.”

  “I want Reuben and Essie.”

  “Who are Reuben and Essie?”

  “Reuben is the butler and Essie is the housekeeper.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In New York. In our house in New York.”

  “Then it is not possible for you to see them, is it, dear?”

  “I want my mother.”

  “Charlotte.”

  “Where do you think my mother is?”

  “That does not matter.”

  “It matters to me. She never prayed for me. Reuben and Essie did. They went to church but we never went. When I ate with them—my mother and father—we just started to eat. She wore beautiful clothes and painted her eyes. I liked to look at her, but she didn’t like me to touch her, in case I messed her up, you know. But I just liked to look at her. Sister Mary of the Ascension says that people like that are damned.”

  “It is only God who has the power to damn people, Charlotte, not Sister Ascension.”

  “Yes, but what do you think?”

  “Your mother loved your father, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she loved you?”

  “Yes …”

  “I do not think that God will forget that,

  … “nor must we forget, Mariana, that she is in eternity now, whereas we are still in time, and cannot fully understand these things.”

  “But if papa gave more money so that we could say more masses for her soul, Sister Maria da Assunção said she would get to heaven sooner.”

  “It is not Sister Maria da Assunção who is judge of these things, is it, Mariana? However, if and when Francisco deigns to pay us another visit I shall certainly ask him for more money.”