As he put his sunglasses away, he looked around the. room. Everything was immaculately clean and tidy. There was a sofa with crocheted antimacassars, a television, a small bookcase containing books and tapes, a desk with papers, folders and pots of pens. And a personal computer. Sensing Gris Marsala's eyes on him, he went to the PC: a 486 with a printer. Powerful enough to be Vespers', but it didn't have a modem, and the telephone was across the room. The telephone, also, had an old-fashioned fixed plug.

He ran an eye over the books and tapes. She had mainly baroque music, but there was also quite a lot of flamenco, both classical and modern, and all of Camaron's albums. The books were treatises on art and restoration, and studies of Seville. Two of them, The Baroque Architecture of Seville by Sancho Corbacho and Guide to the Art of Seville and Surrounding Provinces, were full of slips of paper covered with notes. The only religious work was a worn, leather-bound bible. On the wall hung a framed reproduction of The Chess Game by Pieter Van Huys.

"Guilty or innocent?" asked Gris Marsala.

"Innocent, for the moment," he answered. "Due to lack of evidence."

She laughed. As he turned to face her, smiling, he saw his reflection in a mirror on the wall opposite. With an old, beautiful frame of very dark wood, the mirror stood out in the modest apartment.

The nun followed the direction of his gaze. "Do you like it?" she asked.

"Very much."

"I lived on sandwiches for several months to save up for it." She looked at herself in the mirror, then went to the kitchen for two glasses of water.

"What's so special about it?" asked Quart when he'd drunk his water.

"The mirror?" Gris Marsala hesitated. "You could say it's a kind of personal revenge. A symbol. It's the only luxury I've allowed myself here." She gave Quart a sardonic look. "That, and letting a man into my apartment, even if he is a priest. I haven't weakened too many times in three years, have I? We nuns are very strict." She made a theatrical sigh, and they both grinned. She gestured around the room. "From the beginning, as a novice, you're taught that in a nun's cell mirrors are dangerous," she said. "According to the rules, your image can be reflected only in the rosary and in the prayer book. You own nothing: you receive your habit, your underwear, even your sanitary towels from the hands of the community. If you're to save your soul, there must be no show of individuality or personal choice."

She went over to the window and opened the blind a little. Sunlight flooded in, making Quart squint.

"I've followed the rules all my life," she said. "And I've continued to do so here in Seville, despite this minor infringement of my vow of poverty. I had a problem. Macarena said she told you. A disease of the spirit more than of the flesh. I was the director of a university college for girls. I never exchanged a word with the archbishop of my diocese about anything but professional matters. Yet I fell in love with him, or thought I did, which is the same thing… And the day I found myself, aged forty, applying makeup in front of the mirror because he was coming, I realised what had happened." She showed the scar on her wrist to Quart. "It wasn't attempted suicide, as my colleagues suspected, but a fit of rage. Of desperation. When I came out of hospital and asked my superiors for advice, all they recommended was prayer, discipline and the example of our sister Saint Therese of Lisieux."

She was silent a moment, rubbing her wrist as if trying to erase the scar. "Do you remember Saint Therese, Father?" she asked. The priest nodded. "She had tuberculosis and slept in a freezing cell but never complained and never asked for a blanket. The good Lord rewarded her for her suffering by taking her unto Him at the age of twenty-four!"

She laughed quietly, wrinkling up her eyes. She must have been attractive once, thought Quart. In a way she still was. He wondered how many members of a religious order, male or female, could have done what she did.

Gris Marsala took a seat in the armchair while Quart remained standing. She smiled at him bitterly. "Have you ever visited a nuns' cemetery, Father Quart? Rows of small, identical headstones. And engraved on them, their adopted names, not the ones they were baptised with. They were members of an order; nothing else counts before God. They're the saddest tombs you'll ever see. Like a war cemetery with thousands of crosses with the inscription 'unknown'. They are so unbearably lonely, and seem to ask, what was it all for?"

Quart spoke cautiously, a hunter trying not to scare his prey.' "Those are the rules. You knew them when you took your vows."

"When I took my vows, I didn't know the meaning of words like 'repression', 'intolerance', and 'ignorance'. Those are the true rules. It's like Orwell's 1984: Big Sister's watching you. And the younger and more attractive you are, the worse it is. The gossiping, the cliques, best friends, envy, jealousy… You know the old saying: they come together without knowing one another, they live without loving one another, they die without mourning one another… If I ever stop believing in God, I hope at least I'll go on believing in the Last Judgement. I'd love to find some of my fellow nuns and all my superiors there!"

"Why did you become a nun?"

"This is turning into a confession. I didn't bring you here to unload my conscience. Why did you become a priest? Was it the usual story: a repressive father and over-affectionate mother?"

Quart shook his head. This wasn't the way he wanted the conversation to go. "My father died when I was very young," he said.

"Right. Another case of oedipal transference, as dirty old Freud would have said."

"I don't think so. I also considered joining the army."

"How literary. The scarlet and black." She played with the antimacassar. "My father was a jealous, domineering man. I was afraid of disappointing him. If you take a close look at many women's vocations, especially those of pretty girls, you'll often find long-term anxiety caused by the continual warnings of their fathers: all men want only one thing, and so on. From childhood lots of nuns are taught, as I was, to be careful with men and not lose control in front of them. You'd be surprised how many nuns' sexual fantasies involve beauty and the beast."

They regarded each other in silence for some time. Quart felt there was now fellow feeling between them based on awareness that they were in the same job. The strange and painful solidarity that arose between clerics in a difficult world.

"What can a nun do when she realises, at the age of forty, that she's still that little girl dominated by her father?" Gris Marsala went on. "A child who, out of the intense desire not to displease him, not to commit any sin, has committed the even greater sin of not really living her own life. Is it wise, or is it stupid and irresponsible, at eighteen, to renounce worldly love, and with it trust, surrender, sex? What is a woman to do when these feelings come too late?"

"I don't know," Quart said. He was friendly, sincere now. "I'm only a low-ranking priest. I don't have many answers." He considered the room, the modest furniture and the computer. "Break a mirror, perhaps, and then buy another. That takes courage."

"Perhaps," replied Gris Marsala. "But the woman in the mirror isn't the same." There was pain in her eyes when she looked up at Quart. "There are few things in life as tragic as awakening to the truth too late."

They were waiting for him at the Casa Cuesta Bar, punctual as always, sitting at a table under the sign for the Seville-Sanlucar-Coast steam train, around a bottle of La Ina sherry.

"You're a disaster," said Celestino Peregil. "You're making me look really bad."

Don Ibrahim frowned at the embers of his cigar, which were about to drop on to his white waistcoat. He pulled nervously on the ends of his singed moustache while Peregil let rip. Beside him, El Potro del Mantelete stared intently at his left hand, still bandaged, resting on the table. La Nina Punales seemed to be the only one indifferent to their common shame, her vacant eyes fixed on a yellowed poster on the wall – LINARES BULLRING, 1947, GITANILLO DE TRIANA, DOMINGUIN AND MANOLETE. Her long, emaciated brown hands had nails as red as her lips and coral earrings, and her silver bracelets jangled every time she filled her glass. She'd drunk half the bottle herself.