Father Quart is real!
And he's taken a turn for the worse!
"I could hear my heart beat in ecstasy before the beauty of the body offered before me. I smothered the body with the sweat of my skin,"Yep. Other than the gay sex bit, and the promiscuity, this sounds just like the main character in The Seville Communion to me. What the hell! In case you haven't read his work before, Perez-Reverte's characters are fascinated with women's skin. Consistently. He spent most of The Nautical Chart counting of his female protagonist's freckles.
Sounds like him. hmmmm.
Perhaps Father Quart is real. Perhaps Arturo ran into him somewhere in
Spain while the old priest was there for a conference, wheedled his
story out of him over a few bottles of wine and then based Father Quart
on him???
{insert running to bookcase to look it up}
Ah, hell. Quart ended up in Bogota, not Buenos Aires. I'm consistently
confusing my South American capitols. Pardon moi.
See? This is why I write fiction. I'm good at making
things up out of nothing. My day isn't generally complete if I don't
(at the very least) think up something like this. Whether I write it up
is another story entirely. (Just in case you were wondering, Arturo
Perez-Reverte is one of my favorite authors. He's a wonderful writer,
but he kills me because he only writes in Spanish and I have to wait
years for the translations because I'm an idiot who can't read Spanish.
Check him out if you get the chance.)