“Aún es adverbio de tiempo”

“Aún es adverbio de tiempo” is Father Príamo Ferro’s oblique answer when Lorenzo Quart asks whether he still believes in God. Literally a remark about the word “still,” the phrase refuses a simple yes or no: it makes time itself the measure of what remains possible, while Ferro’s account of suffering, unanswered prayer, and pastoral care leaves his own belief unresolved.

The question and the answer

Quart’s question is pointedly personal, and he knows the irony of asking it: his assignment is to attend to facts, not probe another man’s heart. Nevertheless, after a long silence, he waits for Ferro’s reply. The priest moves beside a telescope, his dark silhouette sliding along its polished brass tube, before offering the terse grammatical observation. He then falls quiet again, as if following a private line of thought.

The answer does not establish that Ferro believes, nor does it declare that he has ceased to believe. By calling “still” an adverb of time, he shifts the question from a fixed confession to a condition that can change: belief, like disbelief, belongs to a history still unfolding. His later explanation that he forgives sins and helps people die in peace sounds like a practical account of priesthood rather than a doctrinal answer. Quart counters that forgiveness belongs to God alone, but Ferro’s phrase has already left the central question open.

Time, memory, and unanswered prayer

Ferro recalls that, as a young priest, he read ancient philosophy from Socrates to Saint Augustine, only to forget it all except an aftertaste of melancholy and disappointment. At sixty-four, he says, what he knows of people is that they remember, fear, and die. That stark knowledge gives the word “still” its weight: it marks not confidence untouched by suffering but the persistence of a question in the face of mortality.

For many years Ferro searched for God above, wanting a private reckoning with Him. He had watched people suffer and die while feeling forgotten by his bishop and the people around him. His ministry took him out from a small, nearly empty church on Sundays and through snow, rain, and mud to administer last rites to the old. For a quarter of a century, he sat beside the dying, whose hands clung to his because he was their only consolation, speaking in one direction and receiving no answer. His remembered silence makes his present reply more than a clever turn of grammar: it registers a life in which the possibility of an answer has never quite been closed, even though none came.

Faith as consolation and defense of the church

Ferro frames the human condition as a choice between birth and death according to a plan and birth and death by accident. He asks how life’s message can be preserved in a world marked by death, when ordinary people know they will disappear without lasting remembrance. Without something beyond that extinction, he argues, the universe becomes meaningless chaos; faith then functions as hope and consolation. He even suggests that the Pope may no longer believe in God, widening the gap between institutional authority and the need for belief.

Quart laughs, startling the pigeons, and recognizes that this outlook helps explain Ferro’s fierce defense of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Ferro replies that his own possession or absence of faith matters less than the faith of those who come to him; their need, in his view, fully justifies the church’s existence. He describes its Baroque splendour—the gilding, carved figures, sumptuous altars, and passions—as an art of the Counter-Reformation that moves people through spectacle rather than theological analysis. To Ferro, the church offers firm ground and hope against life’s tumult; to Quart, the same strategy risks alienation, a seventeenth-century equivalent of television. The phrase’s uncertainty thus belongs to a larger contrast: Ferro may doubt, yet he continues to defend the consolation others find there.

A motif carried into the observatory

The wording returns in the novel’s wider meditation on time and belief. In a later conversation about astronomy, Quart says that it borders on despair. Ferro answers that contemplating the universe can instead bring serenity: only what is grave, valuable, and transcendent hurts to lose, and human beings are tiny in the immensity of the cosmos. Perhaps, he adds, a friendly hand can still offer resignation and consolation before the stars go out and everything is finished.

That later image echoes the earlier adverb. “Still” does not promise rescue or prove that God will answer; it leaves room for companionship and consolation before the end. Ferro’s phrase is therefore both grammatical precision and a small act of theological restraint. It does not resolve his faith into certainty or denial, but keeps the question alive alongside the people whose fear, memory, and approaching deaths give his ministry its purpose.