This Morning at the Lighthouse (Pérez-Reverte, Part II)

This morning, as is my Sunday morning habit, I took my book and a some coffee and toast out to Eastern Point Lighthouse. I love the parking lot at Eastern Point Light. Even when it is cold it is beautiful and I can sit in my car and read the paper or a book and enjoy the words on the page in the presence of a beautiful lighthouse, two castles on the far shore and many, many species of birds. It is a wonderful place and, at this time of year, nearly abandoned.

I had only the final couple of chapters to go in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Seville Communion and I was utterly, utterly entranced. This is my new “favorite book” — at least in the last year or two. Partly because he writes beautifully and his descriptions of Seville are just transportive. Partly because he has concocted some of the craziest characters — an aging flamenco singer and the buffoon who loves her, a broken-down bullfighter/boxer whose taken a few too many to the head, the crankiest priest in creation in conflict with the sexiest priest (at least since Fr. Emilio Sandoz in The Sparrow), and a nun-to-be-reckoned-with. Oh, and the slut who is trying to seduce my beloved Fr. Quart. Did I mention she’s a slut?

So I am deep in my book totally transported when a car pulls up beside me honking and waving and out pops Carleen — a friend and artist whom I like very much. She had two foreign students with her whom she was taking on a tour of Gloucester. It’s always fun to see Carleen — she has more joie de vivre than seems possible. So we are chatting and she is introducing me to her friends and I am trying to resist the urge to say “go away, I want to read my book”. And one of her friends mentions she is here from Spain. Well, didn’t I just perk right up!

“Spain,” I said, “have you ever been to Seville? I’m reading a book about it.”

Oh, yes, she said, I live near there and love Seville, I go there all the time. What are you reading? I held up my book and she lit up like the Giralda Tower. “Arturo Pérez-Reverte!” she exclaimed, rolling her “r”s with such Andalusian aplomb that I could have hugged her, “he is wonderful! In my country, he is very important!” Well. Instant friends.

So we had a great talk about Arturo Pérez-Reverte and she, a bit of an Andalusian beauty herself, agreed with me that he is both brilliant, creative and damn hot-looking to boot. What are the chances of running into a Pérez-Reverte fan from Seville in the parking lot of Eastern Point Lighthouse on a Sunday morning? How would you even start to calculate something like that.

Eventually they went off to walk the breakwater and I settled back down into my book. I won’t give the story away but it was everything and more than I expected it to be and not until the very, very, very last sentence did Pérez-Reverte solve the final mystery. I had a feeling that little slut would have her way — priest or no priest, he’s a man (and what a man!), and I knew he’d save that little church the way he did, I saw that coming. But the final surprise was really a surprise. Excellent.

So Fr. Lorenzo Quart joins Fr. Emilio Sanchez and Julian Cash and Henry Winter and a few other rare characters in my pantheon of characters I wish I had created. And he has given me a fresh perspective on my own Jesuit, Fr. Peter Abelard Black. And I am ready to get back to the page and that is a gift. A gift from Spain... at a Gloucester lighthouse, of all places.

Thanks for reading.