July 3, 1898

July 3, 1898, the date of the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, joins two strands of the novel through a contrast between what can be known and what remains conjecture. It is the day Captain Manuel Xaloc chose to leave the harbor aboard the Manigua and meet destruction head-on; decades later, material from that battle helps Lorenzo Quart identify the gaze in Xaloc’s portrait. The same date appears in the investigation of deaths at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, where physical evidence and police reconstruction sharpen suspicion without resolving every uncertainty.

Xaloc and the Battle of Santiago

Macarena Bruner recounts Xaloc’s final sortie with pride. In 1898, after the Maine exploded in Havana harbor, the Spanish government authorized privateering against the United States. Xaloc obtained a commission and commanded the fast armed yacht Manigua, whose crew had been recruited in the Antilles. In June the yacht attacked and sank two merchant ships in the Gulf of Mexico, then fought a nighttime engagement with the gunboat Sheridan; neither vessel emerged unscathed.

The decisive action came on July 3, as Admiral Cervera’s fleet attempted to leave Santiago. Xaloc had already used the Manigua to break the blockade at night, carrying messages and supplies into the port. Because he was a merchant captain rather than an officer under the fleet’s orders, he could have stayed behind. Instead, he chose to sail with the Spanish ships, whose old machinery and inferior armament made their defeat against the American battleships and cruisers appear inevitable.

The Manigua was among the light vessels that left after the larger Spanish ships had been destroyed or driven ashore. It came out last, when the coast was already lined with burning and wrecked ships. Xaloc raised a black flag alongside Spain’s national flag, rounded the Diamante shoal under enemy fire, and steered toward the nearest American vessel, the Indiana. The yacht zigzagged toward the battleship for three miles under intense fire. It sank at 1:20 p.m., burning from bow to stern, while Xaloc was still trying to ram the enemy. No one aboard survived.

The record and the remembered man

Macarena’s account is supplemented by a folder of old newspapers and illustrated magazines that Lorenzo Quart finds among the family papers. The material concerns the Cuban War and the naval disaster of July 3, including a map of the coast at Santiago and an illustrated reconstruction of Cervera’s fleet being destroyed. One printed account places the Manigua’s last sortie among the final departures from the harbor and records that its commander refused the safety of shelter when capture seemed likely.

The accompanying portrait identifies him as Captain Manuel Xaloc Ortega, commander of the Manigua. Unlike the other men depicted among the dead officers, Xaloc wears civilian clothes: his jacket is buttoned high over a white scarf, and his short hair, broad moustache, and full side-whiskers distinguish his face. The illustrator’s caption says the likeness was made from reliable testimony. Quart understands the otherwise indifferent direction of Xaloc’s eyes as a look toward the Indiana, the adversary he was still trying to strike as the yacht went down.

The date therefore reaches the present not simply as a military chronology but as the ending of a private history. Macarena connects Xaloc’s death with the family’s blindness that had prevented him from becoming her great-great-uncle in the way she imagines he might have been. The printed account preserves the ship’s movements and the hour it sank; the portrait gives Quart a face to connect with that final act. Together, the family narrative and the archival record turn the battle into the long-delayed endpoint of Xaloc’s voyage.

Deaths at the church

July 3 also belongs to a separate plotline in which investigators test apparent explanations for deaths at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The archbishop tells Quart that Peñuelas, a municipal architect assigned by the city to prepare a report declaring the church structurally ruined, died in a fall from the roof. Peñuelas had clashed with Father Príamo Ferro, but the archbishop attributes the death to an accident: a wooden scaffold railing gave way, and Peñuelas fell onto a metal tube. Another official and Father Óscar were present; the vicar administered the last rites. The account acknowledges the contentious history but offers no evidence of foul play.

The death of Father Urbizu is likewise explained as accidental, though with no eyewitnesses. The deputy inspector says police searched the church and concluded that Urbizu may have leaned on, or accidentally moved, a scaffold. Its upper end struck a large piece of plaster cornice, already insecure and apparently held in place by the metalwork. When the scaffold shifted, more than ten kilograms of plaster fell onto Urbizu’s head. This account supplies a physical sequence and a plausible hazard, but the absence of witnesses leaves it a reconstruction rather than a directly observed event.

Bonafé’s death and the limits of reconstruction

A third body is found in the church, at the confessional. Lorenzo Quart notices feet protruding from its open door; beneath a blue tarpaulin lies a body in beige trousers, with a wax-yellow hand and a wound running from the wrist toward the index finger. The setting makes the discovery especially charged: the dead man has ended up in a place associated with confession, but the wound and his position are clues to a physical struggle, not proof of what occurred.

Later, the deputy inspector reconstructs a probable sequence. Honorato Bonafé was apparently on the altar scaffold beside the Virgin’s image when Father Ferro climbed up as well. The two may have argued or fought. Bonafé fell, or was pushed, from a height of five metres; he injured his hand trying to catch a scaffold screw. Though badly hurt and initially alive, he dragged himself to the nearest place he could reach, the confessional, collapsed inside, and died there. The reconstruction accounts for the wound and the body’s location, but the inspector’s alternatives—whether Bonafé fell or was pushed, and what exactly passed between the two men—remain unresolved.

The police connect that suspected confrontation to the Virgin’s pearls. Their inquiry establishes that the original pearls had been replaced months earlier with twenty identical imitations. The trail points toward Francisco Montegrifo, a Madrid dealer who had previously been a contact in Father Ferro’s irregular sale of a church altarpiece, though the investigators admit they cannot prove his involvement. A police informant’s account of pearls entering circulation coincides with renewed church repairs, including the purchase of building supplies and the rental of machinery. Suppliers say the costs exceeded what the parish priest’s salary and the church’s donations could cover.

On that basis, the inspector proposes a motive: Bonafé may have discovered that the pearls were fake and confronted or tried to blackmail the parish priest; Ferro may have surprised him at work and killed him. The inspector further supposes that Ferro locked the sacristy door, spent a couple of hours in the tower of Casa del Postigo reflecting, and then disappeared for a day. These are linked inferences, not a witnessed account. Ferro refuses to explain his disappearance, and Quart does not fill the gaps for the police. July 3 thus resonates across the novel as a date associated with the finality of Xaloc’s documented sacrifice and, in the church investigation, with the more difficult boundary between a plausible explanation and established fact.