Holy Week

Holy Week is the recurring religious season in which Seville’s devotional life becomes visible in processions, music, and acts of loyalty. In the novel, its rituals also illuminate the quieter, repeated Masses at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas: both turn religious observance into a bond among people, while the church’s Thursday service carries a concrete legal consequence for the threatened building.

Processions and popular devotion

For Don Ibrahim, Holy Week is inseparable from the Niña Puñales’s saetas. He remembers her singing in the streets to the Virgin of Hope or the Cachorro of Triana, her voice capable of silencing the drums and stirring the crowd. He regards her not as a performer of tourist folklore but as the bearer of a painful, authentic Spanish memory: a people who sing their sorrows and give them a place in communal life.

The devotion takes another form in the Potro del Mantelete’s annual participation in the Good Friday procession. Though not notably religious, he puts on the old navy suit from his disastrous wedding, combs his hair with cologne, and accompanies the Niña through the candlelight and drumbeats behind the float of the Virgin of Hope. The Niña walks in a black mantilla and prays; the Potro silently gives her his arm. Their procession is at once a public ritual and a private expression of fidelity.

Don Ibrahim does not join such rites, which his free-thinking outlook keeps at a distance. Instead, he watches the pair pass in the early light. Their loyalty gives him a measure of what matters in a life otherwise marked by disappointment: he can take pride in the Potro’s friendship and in having heard the Niña sing.

The weekly rite at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas

The church’s precarious survival depends on a much less public recurrence. A privilege dating from 1687 stipulates that Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas retains its fueros so long as Mass is said there every Thursday for the soul of its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The observance is tied to the day of his death, in 1709, and to eight o’clock in the morning. Father Príamo Ferro goes well beyond the minimum: he celebrates Mass every day, and twice on Sundays and feast days.

The condition turns worship into a safeguard against secularization and demolition. The Archbishop of Seville has sought Ferro’s suspension from his duties, but the process is slow; meanwhile, the old privilege leaves the church’s status unresolved. The Banco Cartujano has a redevelopment operation ready and offers the diocese compensation, funding for a church in one of Seville’s poorest districts, and support for social work among the Roma community. Yet the Thursday Mass remains an obstacle to clearing the site.

The rule is watched over in person. Each Thursday, an envoy of the archbishop and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira sit at the back of the church, each alert for an irregularity or lapse. Macarena Bruner fears that, with Father Óscar removed from the parish, someone may try to catch Ferro out. A ritual that appears small and repetitive thus becomes a contested point where ecclesiastical discipline, a family’s inherited privilege, and commercial development meet.

Ritual, memory, and consolation

When Lorenzo Quart attends a morning Mass at the church, its traditional forms make the difference between inherited practice and modern regulation tangible. Ferro wears an amice, a vestment associated with the pre–Second Vatican Council liturgy, and an old guitar-shaped chasuble. He celebrates parts of the service in Latin, although church regulations since Paul VI call for Mass in each parish’s language to encourage understanding and participation. Ferro’s practice embodies his incomplete accommodation to ecclesiastical modernization.

Quart is initially a skeptical observer, but the ceremony unsettles his easy contempt for Ferro. The priest’s worn vestments and unpolished shoes do not diminish the authority he acquires at the altar. Around him, modest parishioners—older people, workers, and women on their way to shop—follow the gestures and words. Quart recognizes that the congregation’s need is not exhausted by certainty about divine reward or punishment: the rite offers warmth against cold, companionship in darkness, and consolation.

Holy Week’s processions and the church’s weekday liturgy differ in scale, but both make memory an action rather than an abstraction. The Niña sings the community’s grief; the Potro repeats his quiet act of accompaniment; Ferro returns day after day to a Mass whose words and gestures link the present congregation to generations before it. In a story where sacred spaces face institutional and commercial pressure, repetition becomes both a shelter for ordinary people and a stubborn defense of what might otherwise disappear.