The Love Letters Read online

  Joaquina tightened her lips. The happiness of the other sisters seemed to choke her. “I didn’t think our lives were supposed to be spent in the pursuit of pleasure.”

  Mariana spoke earnestly and with joy. “Surely, Sister, we aren’t meant to deny the wonderful things around us that are just asking to be marveled at.”

  Sister Maria da Assunção shook her head in disapproval of the four young nuns, and of the old one who ranked so far above her in the Order. “Perhaps you understand better after all this why we have the Rule of Silence during this kind of work? I think it indeed a pity that her Grace saw fit to relax it today.”

  Mother Escolastica looked away, and Mariana remembered once overhearing her say, “I would no doubt be edgy and unreasonable, too, if I were continually in physical discomfort. Sister Maria da Assunção suffers constantly and not in the least amusingly from her digestion. She has a great deal more patience about it than I would in her place.”

  Now Mother Escolastica said, thoughtfully, directing the warmth of her smile first to Sister Maria da Assunção, then to Joaquina, “The devil tempts us most subtly with the things that are in themselves good and pure and true. We can see that the bad and sinful things are bad and sinful, and, although because we are human and fallen and miserable sinners we do the bad and sinful things over and over again, they are not the real temptations. The real temptations are the good things, and not only the more obvious ones, like icon to idol, sacrament to superstition, but the less tangible ones. We cannot be too serious about our vocations,” here she held Joaquina’s sullen hazel eyes, “but if we let our seriousness preclude joy, then indeed we err. One of the requisites for sainthood is joyfulness, you know. I really find it hard to understand how St. Jerome ever became a saint.”

  Her smile bathed Joaquina again; then the old nun continued, turning to Beatriz. “Intellect. Using the brain God has given us. It would be sinful not to, but pride of intellect is a grave danger.” Beatriz bowed her head submissively and Mother Escolastica nodded approval, then looked directly at Mariana. “Love. Loving. This is probably the most insidious and terrible temptation of all. You, child, do love a great many people, and most joyfully, but your very love sometimes clouds your judgment. I do not mean, as St. John of the Cross sometimes tells us, that you must stop loving people in order not to have your love of people come between you and your love of God. What I’m asking of you is far more difficult than that. There are always in our lives, even in the lives of Religious, a few people who are deepest and dearest in our hearts. And we must love God so much that even when these people are taken from us, by death or daemon, our love remains unchanged, because we love them only in and through God. I am not denying grief, for that would be sacreligious. Nor am I even suggesting that we remove human love, for if we removed human love we would be completely safe, and we would have no need ever to grieve, and we would, I fear, forget to love our Lord. No, it is not a removal, but a different way of affirmation. To love so deeply that we are always in God, in Love, no matter what happens.” Her smile moved over the whole group. “I still think of you as my children, and in a sense you will always be my children. Do you have anything to add, Sister?”

  Sister Maria da Assunção said, “I think you have given us all a great deal of food for meditation, Mother,” and sniffed. “Therefore, although I cannot impose silence on you when Most Reverend Mother Abbess Brites has seen fit to relax it, I can ask all of you seriously to consider before you speak again.”

  Joaquina nodded tightly. “I consider myself in silence, Sister.”

  Mariana turned to Mother Escolastica and spread out her hands in a gesture of supplication and apology. “Mother—I didn’t mean to let anything spoil this day—please let it not be spoiled.”

  “Then think before you speak. All four of you.”

  The bell for Compline rang. They turned and hurried towards the chapel. “It’s so hot,” Joaquina murmured to herself. “I feel as though I had fever—” She put her hands up to her burning cheeks.

  … It was strange to feel her face flushed and hot this way when her hands and feet were so cold.

  The doctor stopped in the middle of a sentence. “Mrs. Napier, you have fever.”

  “Yes. I think I must have taken cold.”

  “Then you mustn’t stand around in this wet place any more.” He pulled out his heavy, old-fashioned gold watch, appeared to consult it, then looked at her again. “Four o’clock. If you have fever you really should be in bed.”

  Charlotte felt a surge of panic. In that terrible room at the pensão she would die. “I must see my mother-in-law tonight. It is imperative.”

  Dr. Ferreira looked at her gravely. “I understand. But she will not take it kindly of me if I let you come down with pneumonia. Is there a heater in your room?”

  “No,” Antonio said. “The only heaters are in the dining room and the lounge.”

  “Let us go back to the pensão and see what is best to be done, then, until Dame Violet returns. I imagine she will want you to stay with her?”

  “No,” Charlotte said frantically. “Not if I’m not well. I can’t bother her. It was bad enough my coming at all.”

  “But you have come. And since you are here she will want to see that you are properly cared for.”

  —Do you really know Violet? Charlotte wondered.—She won’t give a damn. This is not the kind of thing Violet gives a damn about.

  “I will take care of her at the pensão,” Antonio said.

  Dr. Ferreira brushed this aside. “Let us make no plans until Dame Violet returns. Meanwhile take Mrs. Napier back to her room, Tonio, and I will stop off and get my bag.”

  He held his hand out to Charlotte and she rose from the broken column, her hem ripping as it caught on a jagged piece of stone. The cloister swirled for a moment and she was suddenly more than willing to let the doctor do anything he wanted with her.

  He hurried off, bent under his umbrella, as Antonio closed and locked the heavy door to the convent—no, museum, but it seemed still to be a convent to Charlotte; she still half expected to see the dark figures, almost indistinguishable one from the other, moving across the plaza, rosaries clicking. Oh, the safety of it, the comfort of the familiar pattern …

  “Who was Peregrina?” she asked.

  Antonio looked at her in surprise. “Were we talking about Peregrina? She was Mariana’s younger sister. The mother probably died when she was born. We don’t know very much about her. Of course we don’t know much about any of them. It’s mostly setting what one thinks might have happened in the context of the period. There’s some documentation that indicates that Peregrina became a nun. And I am assuming that the convent would have been reformed, or being reformed, by Dona Brites, the abbess, in somewhat the same way that St. Theresa reformed the convents in Spain a hundred years earlier. We have to face the fact that Portugal was at least a hundred years behind Spain in most ways, but that, of course, was Spain’s deliberate doing. She wanted us that way. It’s easier to keep a backwards people in submission. Even if we accept this—and it does hurt our pride—it’s still difficult for us to realize how different things were then. Nuns wore habits, for instance, very much like the ones they wear today, but before St. Theresa came along and cleaned things up generally they loaded them down with brooches and necklaces and all kinds of jewelry, all their family jewels that they’d have had if they’d married. Sounds weird, a nun’s habit festooned with necklaces and brooches, doesn’t it? And they were encouraged to go off on visits to secular friends—St. Theresa was away once for three years—because it was one less mouth to feed.”

  “Why wasn’t there enough food?” she asked. Her voice sounded tight and croaky.

  “There’s never enough food during wartimes,” Antonio said. “Don’t you remember that?”

  Under his big dark umbrella she nodded.

  “The convents felt the pinch more than most places because they were crowded. Fathers couldn’t marry off their
daughters because there weren’t enough men. We’d lost them first in our explorations and settling of the colonies, then in the wars. So what was there to do with the poor girls but make nuns of them? They say they came with all their family jewels that they’d have had if they’d married, and dressed up their habits with them. Sounds weird, a nun’s habit festooned with necklaces and brooches, doesn’t it?”

  “Un-hunh,” she murmured, only half listening. Antonio was protecting her from the rain with his huge black umbrella, but beneath it his words fell on her like a shower, and slid off her as easily. She thought only of putting one foot in the ugly shoes in front of the other, in getting back to the cold comfort of the damp bed in the pensão.

  “But it’s insupportable in here,” he said as he helped her into her room. “We’re not used to this kind of weather, you understand, we’re unprepared for it. It’s the first bulletin on the radio now, this cold wave. We’ve forgotten world crises.”

  She sat hunched over on the edge of the bed. “I think I do have fever.”

  He listened, finally, to her instead of himself. “Wait. I’ll bring you some hot coffee with brandy. That will help. And you can trust Ferreira. His reputation reaches all Europe …” His voice trailed down the corridor.

  Hot coffee with brandy. Yes. That might help.

  She sat there, humped like an old woman, feeling suffocatingly hot, and yet shivering so that she huddled more deeply into her fur coat, and he did not return. He had gone to South America for the coffee beans, or Africa, he was in a vineyard growing the grapes, he had forgotten, because there was not enough food, and the nuns went visiting, and danced to the music of the orchestra

  … which wafted up the stairs of the Alcoforado villa where Peregrina sat on the landing waiting for Baltazar.

  As he climbed the stairs with a plate of food and a glass sof wine in his hands she whispered down to him, “I thought you’d never come. I thought you’d forgotten.”

  “I promised, didn’t I?” Baltazar asked. “But I got trapped a couple of times. Why couldn’t Mariana come home with you tonight?”

  “Ever since she was professed, Aunt Brites hasn’t wanted her to leave. Not only Mariana. All of them. Me, she knows I have no vocation. She couldn’t care less.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Oh, she cares about me, Peregrina. But not whether I come home or not.” She led him down a long gallery hung with portraits, up a narrower, longer flight of stairs, down a hall lighted dimly by a smoky torch and into her room. It was a large room, as large as her dormitory at the convent that slept twenty. She jumped like a small child up onto her high, huge bed. The tall windows were open, the heavy drapes pulled back to let in all the air possible. “I’m so glad you’re in one piece and nobody killed you. Did you kill lots of Spaniards?”

  Baltazar handed her the plate and the wine. “Thousands. Seven with my musket, three with my sword, fourteen I stabbed with a knife, twenty-nine I strangled with my bare hands, eleven I decapitated with my Turkish scimitar, over thirty-two I poured boiling oil, and the rest I simply talked to death.”

  Peregrina laughed with such abandon that she almost knocked her plate onto the floor. Baltazar rescued it, and she said, “Note that it’s before I’ve had my wine,” took a generous draught, and began to eat avidly.

  “Don’t they feed you at that convent of yours?”

  “Oh, they feed us all right. Better than in most convents, they keep telling us as we sit down to another dinner of codfish. Aunt’s always after papa to send food. But nobody ever seems to give us anything but codfish. Dom Alipio is always sending enormous quantities of codfish.” She giggled. “Maybe that’s why Sister Joaquina looks like one. In the spring we have lots of vegetables from the garden. But it’s hardly what you’d call cuisine qui peut me plonger dans l’estase!” She rolled her eyes at him. “Did I say it right?”

  “Superbly. So you are learning something.”

  “Mariana teaches us French. And our aunt, the most august abbess herself, taught Mariana. I suppose it will be a useful language if I ever have a chance to talk about any kind of food except codfish.”

  “You’re getting something besides codfish tonight.”

  “One of the best reasons I know for coming home. May I have some more wine later? I come whenever papa can be bothered with me. He always seems to be dashing off to court. But when he’s home he likes to have me around. I amuse him. I do manage to get lots of gossip out of him. It makes me very popular with the other girls. Aunt would die if she knew some of the things we know about the sisters.”

  “Papa has no business to—”

  “Oh, Baltazar, we have to have something to make life bearable. Don’t you start treating me like a child.”

  “Which is exactly what you—”

  She interrupted him again. “I’m centuries older than Mariana, if you want to know! She practically never comes home and she doesn’t know anything about life.”

  “And you do, I suppose?”

  “One can’t be around papa, or my dear sister Ana and her husband for long, and not pick up some information. And I think I’m old enough to be told now whether or not papa intends to have me marry.”

  The door to the bedroom was pushed ajar and the wrinkled, impudent face of a monkey peered in, and the little beast, on all fours, scurried over to the bed and leaped up onto it. With a soulful look he gazed at the plate of food and Peregrina popped a tidbit into his greedy mouth. “Papa tells him things he won’t tell me—or Ana or Rui, for that matter. How I wish Pinto could talk! I’m sure papa has told him what he intends to do about me.”

  “Why don’t you ask papa yourself?” Baltazar suggested.

  “I have. And he says there’s time enough to think about it. But I know papa, and I know he’s already made up his mind, and if he won’t tell me if I’m afraid it means he wants me to stay in the convent and be a nun, like Mariana. Baltazar, I don’t want to be a nun.”

  “Have you told him that?”

  “Of course. But you know perfectly well that what I think isn’t even going to enter into it. He had to give Ana a big dowry when she married Rui, and he doesn’t want to break up the property, you know that, he wants to keep it together so it can all go to you, and I just know he’s not going to want to—”

  “Now, look here, Peregrina, I don’t come into it.”

  “In papa’s mind you do.”

  “You overestimate his affection for me.”

  “Oh, it’s not out of affection for anybody except himself. You’re an extension of papa, and he only wants you to have all the property because it’s all his and in that way he manages, somehow or other, to keep it.”

  Baltazar looked at her unhappily. She sat there on the bed, the monkey curled up like a baby in her lap, reaching his little fingers out to her for food which she absent-mindedly put into his mouth. She looked at her brother with candid, wide-open brown eyes, but about her lips there was an expression of tension and almost of cynicism that was out of place with her openness. The monkey, in thanks for a bit of food, reached up and stroked her cheek that was still childishly rounded.

  “You shouldn’t—” Baltazar started, then sighed. His dark eyes, his full lips, slightly florid complexion, his very helplessness before her made him seem younger than she. He finished, inadequately, “I don’t want papa’s property. I can take care of myself, and who knows, I may be killed.”

  “Stop!” Peregrina shoved plate and monkey aside, and flung herself into Baltazar’s arms, almost strangling him with the intensity of her hug. The monkey grabbed the plate and began stuffing food into his mouth.

  Baltazar extricated himself, saying with a half smile, “But that would make everything fine for you. There wouldn’t be any problem about your dowry, and—”

  Peregrina clapped her hand over his mouth, shaking her head violently.

  “What, then?” he asked.

  “Everybody knows you’re the only person papa listens to—�
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  “All right. I’ll try. God knows I wouldn’t want you there against your will, and especially because of me. Let me go, now, and I’ll bring you some more to eat—Pinto’s had most of it—and one more glass of wine.”

  “Don’t be long,” she called after him. “And don’t forget the wine.”

  He paused in the doorway. “Is it that important?”

  “After convent food? It’s desperately important. It’s the only thing I have to remind me that there’s a real world.”

  “But which is the real world?” Baltazar asked the empty corridor as he left Peregrina’s room. “And don’t look for reality in wine. Or importance.”

  “Why not?” Peregrina called after him, her face wrinkling up with a kind of anguish so that she looked like Pinto.

  Is anything important?

  If we could get the different worlds into their relative places, into proportion

  then we would know what is important

  if anything

  and then perhaps Mariana would never

  then perhaps Charlotte

  No, Cotty, don’t flatter yourself, you are not like Mariana, you are like Peregrina, the way you went to Patrick’s that first night (that almost only night) and drank so wildly, so (in Peregrina’s sense) innocently. It could never be that innocent again.

  … After Patrick had left her to go back to Bleeker Street, after she had climbed the steps to the brownstone on East Seventy-fourth and let herself in, she stood leaning against the door for a moment, trying to acclimate herself. Reuben and Essie must already have gone to bed, because only the night light was on in the hall, and the stairs leading down to the kitchen and dining room were pitch dark. But her father was still up because a thin line of light was coming from under the double doors that led to the library. She knew that he was waiting up for her, and that he had told Reuben and Essie to go to bed. Someone always waited up for her, but it was usually her father, because Reuben and Essie were getting old and needed their rest.