Havana

Havana is the distant port that binds the story of Manuel Xaloc and Carlota Bruner to the present-day church investigation. Named in the address to Xaloc aboard the Manigua and recalled as the setting of both his seafaring life and Don Ibrahim’s imagined past, the city carries the lovers’ separation across the sea and into the church’s most visible relics: the twenty pearls on the Virgin of Tears.

The Address Across the Sea

A postcard found by Lorenzo Quart bears an intact twenty-five-centime stamp showing the young Alfonso XIII, but no postmark; moisture has blurred its handwritten date, leaving Quart to make out a 9 and perhaps a 7. Its address, by contrast, remains clear: Captain Manuel Xaloc, aboard the Manigua, Port of Havana, Cuba. The uncertain date and absent postmark make the card an incomplete trace, but its destination places Xaloc in a specific maritime world across the Atlantic.

The card’s sign-off is Carlota’s declaration of enduring love. Quart looks from her message to the address and tries to understand whether the postcard’s reverse carries a clue or whether its image of the church is what matters. He then recalls that the card had been placed in a Gideons’ Gospel and checks the open book: it lies at pages 168 and 169, the Gospel of John, chapter two. Havana thus appears not as a visited setting in the present action but as part of a chain of material evidence: address, card, church image, and biblical page.

Xaloc’s Maritime History

Gris Marsala identifies Manuel Xaloc as a Seville-born sailor who emigrated to America in the final decade of the nineteenth century. He spent time as a pirate in the Antilles before disappearing at sea during the Spanish–American War of 1898. Her account makes Havana part of a larger Caribbean life of migration and seafaring, while the postcard’s address anchors that life to a particular port.

Xaloc later returned to Havana in time to take part in the war. Before going back, however, he left behind the dowry he had gathered for Carlota: twenty pearls intended for the necklace she was to wear on their wedding day. The journey between Seville and Havana therefore carries both the possibility of reunion and the material sign of a marriage that never took place.

Havana in Memory and the Church’s Relics

The pearls Xaloc assembled for Carlota now adorn the Virgin of Tears in the church where she had always wished to marry. When Quart and Gris leave the crypt, Gris switches on the high altar’s lights so he can see the statue clearly. The image bears a heart pierced by seven daggers; Xaloc’s twenty pearls shine on its face, in its starry crown, and across the blue mantle. Havana’s distance is made present in the church through the objects left behind before Xaloc’s return to war.

The city also surfaces in Don Ibrahim’s recollection—or possibly his invention—of a youthful Caribbean past. Outside Casa del Postigo, after discreetly following a woman in dark glasses, he takes out a Montecristo cigar marked Havana and recalls a small knife supposedly given to him by Rita and Orson after he showed them the Partagás cigar factory in Old Havana. He remembers dancing with Rita at the Tropicana while Orson drank heavily and the group exchanged embraces. The narrative expressly leaves the status of this memory uncertain, allowing Havana and Seville to fuse in Don Ibrahim’s dreamlike account: the cigar’s smoke revives a supposedly glorious past in which he cannot distinguish what happened from what he has imagined.

Narrative Significance

Havana functions as both a destination preserved in documentary fragments and a memory whose truth can remain uncertain. The postcard gives it an exact address but an illegible date and no postmark; Gris’s account supplies Xaloc’s migration and return; the pearls preserve the wedding dowry in a transformed setting. Against these solid traces, Don Ibrahim’s cigar evokes a past that may be partly invented. The city consequently links the novel’s investigation of Carlota and Xaloc with its broader concern for how love, history, and memory survive through objects—and how little those objects can finally settle.