The day of the service was dear and warm. The Limeans, their black eyes wide with awe, poured through the streets into their Cathedral and stood gazing at the mound of black velvet and silver. The Archbishop, enclosed in his wonderful and almost wooden vestments, perspired upon his throne, lending from time to time a connoisseur’s ear to the felicities of Vittoria’s counterpoint. The choir had restudied the pages that, as his farewell to music, Tomás Luis had composed for his friend and patron, the Empress of Austria, and all that grief and sweetness, all that Spanish realism filtering through an Italian mode, rose and fell above the sea of mantillas. Don Andrés, under the colours and feathered hangings of his office, knelt, ill and troubled. He knew that the crowd was furtively glancing at him, expecting him to play the father who has lost his only son. He wondered whether the Perichole was present. He had never been obliged to go so long without smoking. The Captain Alvarado pushed in from the sunny square for a moment. He looked across the fields of black hair and lace at the trooping of the candles and the ropes of incense. “How false, how unreal,” he said and pushed his way out. He descended to the sea and sat on the edge of his boat, gazing down into the clear water. “Happy are the drowned, Esteban,” he said.
Behind the screen the Abbess sat among her girls. The night before she had torn an idol from her heart, and the experience had left her pale but firm. She had accepted the fact that it was of no importance whether her work went on or not; it was enough to work. She was the nurse who tends the sick who never recover; she was the priest who perpetually renews the office before an altar to which no worshippers come. There would be no Pepita to enlarge her work; it would relapse into the indolence and the indifference of her colleagues. It seemed to be sufficient for Heaven that for a while in Peru a disinterested love had flowered and faded. She leaned her forehead upon her hand, following the long tender curve that the soprano lifts in the Kyrie. “My affection should have had more of that colour, Pepita. My whole life should have had more of that quality. I have been too busy,” she added ruefully and her mind drifted into prayer.
Camila had started from the farm to attend the service. Her heart was filled with consternation and amazement. Here was another comment from the skies; that was the third time she had been spoken to. Her smallpox, Jaime’s illness, and now the fall of the bridge—oh, these were not accidents. She was as ashamed as though letters had appeared on her forehead. An order from the Palace announced that the Viceroy was sending her two daughters to a convent-school in Spain. That was right. She was alone. She gathered a few things together mechanically and started to the city for the service. But she fell to thinking of the crowds gaping over her Uncle Pio and over her son; she thought of the vast ritual of the church, like a chasm into which the beloved falls, and of the storm of the dies irae where the individual is lost among the millions of the dead, features grow dim and traits fade. At a little more than half the journey, at the mud church of San Luis Rey she slipped in and knelt against a pillar to rest. She wandered through her memory, searching for the faces of her two. She waited for some emotion to appear. “But I feel nothing,” she whispered to herself. “I have no heart. I am a poor meaningless woman, that’s all. I am shut out. I have no heart. Look, I won’t try and think of anything; let me just rest here.” And scarcely had she paused when again that terrible incommunicable pain swept through her, the pain that could not speak once to Uncle Pio and tell him of her love and just once offer her courage to Jaime in his sufferings. She started up wildly. “I fail everybody,” she cried. “They love me and I fail them.” She returned to the farm and carried for a year the mood of her self-despair. One day she casually heard that the wonderful Abbess had lost in the same accident two persons whom she loved. Her sewing fell from her hand: then she would know, she would explain. “But no, what would she say to me? She would not even believe that such a person as I could love or could lose.” Camila decided to go to Lima and look at the Abbess from a distance. “If her face tells me that she would not despise me, I will speak to her,” she said.
Camila lurked about the convent church and fell humbly in love with the homely old face, though it frightened her a little. At last she called upon her.
“Mother,” she said, “I … I …”
“Do I know you, my daughter?”
“I was the actress, I was the Perichole.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, I have wished to know you for a long while, but they told me you did not wish to be seen. You too, I know, lost in the fall of the bridge of San …”
Camila rose and swayed. There! again that access of pain, the hands of the dead she could not reach. Her lips were white. Her head brushed the Abbess’s knee: “Mother, what shall I do? I am all alone. I have nothing in the world. I love them. What shall I do?”
The Abbess looked at her closely. “My daughter, it is warm here. Let us go into the garden. You can rest there.” She made
