The Love Letters Read online

  “For masses?”

  “We will say the masses in any case. You have been listening to too much indiscreet chattering. For food, child. Food for you and Peregrina. And food for my sisters. Most of what there is goes to the children, while the sisters are hungry. So I must not be harsh with Sister Maria da Assunção. It does me little good to feed my sisters’ souls if I must starve their bodies. A hungry nun is not a good one.”

  The abbess looked at the blazing sapphire on her finger; her pale eyes seemed to hold and reflect its blue. “It is incongruous,” she said, “but I could not sell it. There is a great deal for you to learn, child. But it will have to wait. Meanwhile, do not worry about your mother. God will do that.”

  “God worries about my mother?”

  “Not now. But there were many times during her life when he must have done so.”

  … Charlotte woke up. Her legs ached from the cramped position in which she had been huddled under the blankets. Her hands and feet were icy cold, her throat a pillar of fire. She could not stay in this room.

  She rose, stiffly, and walked over to the window. Pallid sunlight touched the square, although the prison-like building across the way was dark in the shadow of a cloud. But at least it was not raining, so she could go for a walk.

  Her coat still felt damp from the night before, and she pulled it tightly around her, and tied a scarf over her fair hair. Outside the pensão the ground was puddled, and the damp seeped through the soles of her high-heeled pumps. The beautiful, uncomfortable shoes were for Patrick because in them she walked like a lady; she could not move with the swinging stride that was more comfortable for her long limbs. It wasn’t only Patrick: the sisters had always been at her to walk properly too, but they hadn’t bought her expensive shoes to do it in. They had expected her to move gracefully in the horrible school boots.

  The cobblestones hurt her feet. Buying a pair of practical shoes would give her something to do; it wouldn’t matter if she walked like an English schoolgirl as long as her feet warmed up. She looked in the shop windows, then saw the convent up the hill ahead of her. Would the nuns speak nothing but Portuguese? There would be surely someone who spoke French. She could buy the shoes later.

  She hurried up the hill to the convent. There was no sign of life. The windows were blind and black. She crossed the terrace to the marble bench where she had sat the night before. From there she could see the barred door under the arches, could see a broken window.

  The convent was empty, was dead, though she had a lingering sensation of dark-habited presences; she would not have been surprised to hear the high, light voices of the young sisters, or to see the swing of skirt and rosary moving along the arched cloister. She sat down on the bench, turning to look at the statue behind her. QUEEN LEONOR, the plaque said.

  “Well after Soror Mariana’s day,” came a voice, and Antonio limped across the plaza to her, followed by a large man with a mop of brown-grey hair and beard, and a black mourning band on the sleeve of his brown tweed suit.

  “Mrs. Napier, this is Dr. Ferreira, a friend of Dame Violet’s—and of mine.”

  The doctor bowed courteously over her hand, speaking in impeccable Oxonian. “I’m dining with Dame Violet tonight,” he said. “Perhaps I shall have the pleasure of seeing you then.”

  Not to be able to see Violet alone: it seemed that one unexpected and unpleasant event followed upon another. “Perhaps. I—I haven’t made any plans yet. Do you—do you know what time she’ll be back from Paris?”

  “If she makes her usual connections it should be before sundown. Her chauffeur drives like a madman. You’ll be staying with her?”

  Charlotte said again, “I haven’t made any plans.”

  “She was not expecting you?” The inflection was barely a question; it was almost a statement.

  “I was hardly expecting myself,” Charlotte said flatly. He was Violet’s age, this doctor, he was old enough to be her father; there was something about him that made her feel no need for pretense.

  “Your husband is not with you?” There was no prying in his voice, only courtesy. If he really did know Violet well he would know about Patrick, too, at least that Patrick existed; he might even know that Charlotte existed.

  “No. He stayed in New York.”

  For a moment the doctor looked at her sharply, but he said only, “In any event I will see you at lunch. Since my wife’s death I take most of my meals at the pensão. Senhora Vieira has the best kitchen in Beja. Now I must be off to my surgery.”

  As he left, lumbering heavily across the plaza, Antonio said, “Do forgive me; I am really not following you; I had already planned to meet Dr. Ferreira here.”

  She stared at him. “How did you know I was here last night?”

  He sat down beside her. “Last night I did follow you. I was working late, and I heard you leave. And we have made a bargain to forget it, have we not?”

  She looked at him bleakly. “I wish things could be forgotten.”

  He put his hand down near hers on the bench, but did not touch her. “You are so strange, Mrs. Napier,” he said. “Not like an American at all.”

  She sighed. “I’m tired of this American business. I got it all the time when I was a child. Oh, what a nice little girl. Not at all like an American child. I am an American, and I’m exactly like an American, because that’s what I am.”

  He said, gently, “But there is no need to get so excited. You are yourself. And you are a lady. That is obvious. One always knows what to expect from the bourgeoisie, but not from either the lower or the upper classes.”

  At this snobbery she smiled. “Another generalization, Mr. de Tieve.”

  “Please call me Tonio. All my friends do.”

  “All right,” she said, but called him nothing. “What was the music I heard?”

  “It disturbed you?”

  “No. Not at all. I enjoyed it. But I couldn’t tell what the instrument was. At first I thought it was a harpsichord. Then I realized it couldn’t be that, but must be more like a guitar.”

  “It is a guitar. A Portuguese guitar. It is usually played with the Spanish guitar as accompaniment. For once Portugal has the melody and Spain is in the background. Joaquim—the little Vieira—and I play together. I the Spanish guitar, and he the Portuguese. He is the musician. Some time we will play for you. Your mother-in-law likes to hear us. She has even made arrangements for us of some of the Alentejo—that is Beja’s province—folk songs, and then she has arranged our pièce de rèsistance, a Bach Two Part Invention. She does it for Joaquim, you understand, because she says he is a born musician.” He made a face. “I am jealous of my little friend.” Then he smiled, looking away from Charlotte and towards the white arches, the ornamented terraces and towers of the convent. “It is in its own way very beautiful, is it not?”

  She nodded, following his gaze. “What were your wicked Sister Mariana’s dates?”

  “She was a young woman in the mid-seventeenth century. At the time of her story she would have been about your age, if I guess correctly.” He looked at her, somehow avoiding insolence. “The mid to upper twenties. And do not call her wicked until you know more about her. We should not judge—”

  She cut him off. “I would not presume to judge anybody.” And, more vehemently, “Not anybody.” Then, realizing the disproportion of her reponse, she asked, “It isn’t a convent now?”

  “No. Nor has it been for a long time. What we see is only a small part of what was here in Soror Mariana’s time. The street has cut through it, is paved with its stones. But there were two hundred nuns here once.”

  “And now?”

  “Now is it a national monument. A regional museum.”

  Charlotte shifted her position on the cold marble of the bench. Her legs ached. She was irrationally sad that there were no nuns in the convent, that there was no one there to recite the Divine Office, that the lovely white building was dark and desolate.

  “Odd,” Antonio said, “t
hat she seems so alive, that despite the decay I can feel her here. I can sense her presence, through my pores, as it were, even more than in the letters. There are only five of them, you know; at least there are only five that are considered authentic. I’m inclined to think that the others are without question a fraud, some literary hack trying to batten on the success of the first and legitimate ones. Everything we need is in those five wild letters. I say wild. But I imagine that there were times when she, too, could have been marble,” he looked over at the statue, “times when her life, too, was suspended. Your Thoreau—you know him?”

  She did not smile. “Yes.”

  “He said,” Antonio closed his eyes, wrinkling his face in an effort of memory, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”

  He switched back to French. “What I would really like to do is write about Mariana in eternity, in her fullest meaning, instead of having to pin her like a butterfly against the finiteness of history.” He broke off. “You have made your plans for the day?”

  Again she felt trapped. She spoke carefully. “I have no plans until I have seen my mother-in-law. I’m still very tired so I’ll spend the day quietly. I thought I’d walk around a little and look at the town and buy a pair of shoes. Who is Dr. Ferreira?”

  His smile held spontaneous and genuine affection. “He is the best doctor in Beja. A very important man here. And he is the intimate of your mother-in-law.”

  But Charlotte did not want to discuss Violet for fear her need for Violet would become too acute. Violet would not be back until evening, and evening was lost in the far reaches of time. Evening, not having been yet, was further away than the three hundred years past when Sister Mariana and the other nuns had filled this convent with life. She looked about her at the whiteness of the building, these walls meant to hold a community but which now gleamed emptily in the thin light that filtered through the clouds. She, too, would fish in the strange river. “So what about your nun?” she asked.

  He sighed, not the deep unconscious sigh that can be so expressive, but a deliberate, slightly theatrical sigh. “She is not my nun. She should not, of course, have been anybody’s nun, except her supernatural bridegroom’s. What an extraordinary study in love she is proving to be for me. Profane love, you understand. Eros. I am not interested in theological implications.”

  “Even profane love is rather an enormous subject.”

  “Yes, but with Sister Mariana as the focus I may speak specifically rather than generally.”

  “With a nun as the focus of a study on profane love I don’t see how you can avoid the theological implications.”

  He put his hand lightly over her gloved one. “I’ve managed to avoid them for over a quarter of a century.”

  Quietly she moved her hand. “What hours is the museum open?”

  This was a mistake. He said, too quickly, “You would like to visit it?”

  “Yes. Why not? I’m here, and your nun rather intrigues me.” She kept her voice light, impersonal.

  He turned on the bench so that he could face her. “How charming this is! Mariana and her Frenchman must have spoken together just as we are doing. She was educated. She would have spoken French easily. It is obvious from the letters that she and her lover had no trouble communicating with each other. How quickly she understood him, as you, too, so quickly understand me.”

  She gave him no response, so he said, “You won’t find much of her in the museum officially, you know. It is chiefly a regional museum. Pottery. Examples of our beautiful tile, going back to the very early centuries. Roman remains. Things like that. However, for me there is still a feeling to the cloister; I am aware of her presence when I am there. It is very strong. And the chapel is in good repair and must be very much as it was in her day. I could arrange for you to pay a visit this afternoon.”

  “But isn’t it open? I mean, aren’t there regular hours?”

  “Technically at the moment the museum is closed for repair and renovation. But I can procure the key. The present curator is a retired professor of mine from Coimbra. He has already written one of the definitive books on Soror Mariana and is giving me much help. And I will tell him that you are Dame Violet Napier’s daughter-in-law; he is a great lover of music, particularly ancient music. As well, of course, of Dame Violet herself. We could perhaps plan to come directly after lunch, if that would be convenient to you.”

  She sighed, the deep, unconscious sigh—she had let herself in for this one—and said, “Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.”

  The smile lit his face again, the Portuguese smile that was so piercing in the small Joaquim, but that in Antonio was faintly demonic. “Then I will be off to get the key. Professor Nunez is not always easy to find. He is now on what you would call a ‘jag’ about the Roman ruins, so he may be off anywhere, though with his arthritis he should not be wandering about in this weather. Never fear, I will run him to earth and will see you at the midday meal.”

  She remained seated on the bench until she was sure that he would be safely away. Then she walked to a shoe store she remembered passing the evening before and bought a pair of shoes. They were quite hideous, of stiff orangey leather, but they had thick soles and were, she hoped, waterproof. The proprietor of the store spoke just enough French to make the transaction possible, though in the end she had no idea how much she had paid for her purchase, whether the shoes were a bargain or an extravagance.

  When she left the store a watery sunlight was sliding through the clouds. She looked at her watch. Not quite ten o’clock. In New York it would not be daylight.

  She went from the shoe store back to the convent (why? because it was the only place she knew except the pensão?) and sat on the bench near the statue of Queen Leonora, hoping that the sunlight would strengthen, for it felt warmer out here on the convent plaza than in her room at the pensão, and if it did not rain she could stay until time for lunch.

  In her first convent, the one in England (there had been one in France and two in the United States), there had been a terrace too, but of flagstones instead of mosaic, and the convent buildings were of grey stone instead of this brilliant expanse of whitewash. But that was only a superficial difference, and even the passing of centuries should make no more than surface changes. She had been to Roman Catholic convent schools and Anglican convent schools and despite differences in language and rules and regulations they had not been unalike. There were still too many females herded together, living without privacy, and under enforced rules.

  It was in the earliest of her convent experiences, the convent where she had stayed longest, the convent she had in the end loved best, that she had first witnessed violence outside herself, outside the rhythm of her own small experience. Strange to see violence in a convent where habit and rule clothed and curbed passionate emotion. She had seen anger in which her father had shaken her mother, though never struck her; she had seen the excitement in which her mother would hit out at her father, would scream strange, incoherent words. There were tears and then great laughters of reconciliation, but this storminess was the familiar weather in which the child Charlotte moved. Its very changeableness was predictable, and therefore part of her security. She had been a happy child, full of laughter and gaiety, and old Essie’s great lap was always there for her to climb on, and Reuben’s thin and wiry shoulders.

  But after her mother’s unpredictable death, met alone in an open car on one of the winding mountain roads above Monte Carlo, the security was snatched away. Charlotte had a stunned feeling of walking on thin air, that the ground had gone from under her feet as it must have for her mother when the car skidded off the narrow road and hurtled into empty space.

  In the convent school Charlotte held with anxious desperation to the reliability of regulations. The strictness of the Rule under
which the sisters lived made a structure to which she could cling. She knew when they would be in chapel, in the classrooms, in the refectory. Their very silence could be counted on. As the violence of her parents’ behavior had made it calculable, so, conversely, did the control of the sisters. Therefore, to see them break from the beauty of their ordered pattern was to the child an almost unendurable shock.

  She had been in the convent garden, as far away from the children’s dormitories as possible, for she had been squabbling with her roommates and had run to the lily pond to nurse and to enjoy hurt feelings. Her mother without warning had gone to wherever death thrusts people and her father was wandering about the continent with his typewriter and his charm, and he no longer played lion to Charlotte’s unicorn, down on all fours and roaring fearfully at her, and therefore it was unutterably unfair that Perry should shout at Charlotte for fumbling the ball when it was Perry herself …

  Two of the novices, their white veils like clouds against the blue of the English sky, had come down the path towards the lily pond. They did not see her. The children were all supposed to be back in their quarters changing for tea. Charlotte sat still, looking at them confidently, waiting for them to notice her, to ask her, perhaps, what was wrong.

  But they were isolated in a frightening fragment of anger. “No!” one of them cried out in violent protest, and a hand flashed out and slapped against a white face.

  The novice who had been slapped was the one to turn and run. She brushed by the child, not even seeing her, and Charlotte heard her whisper, half sobbing, “Through my fault, Lord, through my most grievous fault …”

  … She ran, white veil flying, along the mosaic path from the lily pond, back towards the white buildings of the convent blazing in the sun. Nerves and tempers were at the breaking point. Even the abbess was short with them. If it were not for the violence of the sun, Sister Joaquina would not have been angered, would not, could not have struck her …