Lorenzo Quart and Macarena sleep together

Lorenzo Quart and Macarena sleep together in a single night of intimacy that briefly suspends their restraint without resolving the forces dividing them. The encounter is remembered at dawn as both peace and combat: its intensity is inseparable from Quart’s awareness that it must end, and the morning leaves him alone, uncertain whether the act has condemned his soul or saved it.

The encounter and its limits

The novel presents the night through Quart’s memory, triggered later when Gris Marsala asks whether he has spoken with Macarena. He tries to keep her name out of his thoughts, but remembering it brings back their closeness in a rush of bodily impressions. The narrative lingers on their embrace and on the tension between resistance and desire: Macarena seems to struggle to escape while also wanting to remain. Their intimacy is not described as a settled union, but as a charged, difficult passage in which opposing impulses coexist.

Quart experiences the hours as at once peaceful and combative. Even within the closeness, he knows the encounter has a limit and an ending. The dawn arrives over Casa del Postigo, and the separation is immediate: he finds himself alone again in the empty streets of Santa Cruz. The transition from shared intimacy to solitude makes the ending part of the event itself, rather than a mere aftermath.

Macarena's private history

The encounter occurs against the background of Macarena’s own history of frustrated love and family constraint. She tells Quart that Carlota, her great-aunt, loved Manuel Xaloc, a sailor without fortune. After Xaloc emigrated to America, Carlota wrote to him almost weekly for years, but her father, Luis Bruner, bribed Seville’s postal officials to intercept the correspondence. In six years Carlota received no letters, and the family believes Xaloc received none either. When he returned, Carlota had lost her reason and could not recognize him; she spent her days watching the river from a window.

Macarena understands her struggle to preserve the family church and Carlota’s memory as a personal battle against time and forgetting. She speaks of belonging to an extinguishing caste, and of accepting its end only after fulfilling her duty to her family name and to what she loves. The tragic story of Carlota and Xaloc therefore gives emotional weight to Macarena’s own intimacy with Quart: love exists alongside forces of inheritance, loss, and limits that private desire cannot simply undo.

Pregnancy and pressure

Macarena later tells Quart that she became pregnant and that Pencho Gavira reacted as though the world had fallen on him. He insisted that the pregnancy came too soon and brought too many problems, and pressed her to end it with an intensity she had never experienced from anyone else. Her disclosure gives the relationship a context of painful pressure and personal consequence beyond the night itself.

The novel does not present Quart and Macarena’s encounter as a solution to that history or as a promise of a shared future. Instead, it places their intimacy beside the constraints already shaping Macarena’s life and Quart’s clerical vocation, leaving its meaning unsettled.

Memory, guilt, and return to duty

When Gris’s question recalls the night, Quart experiences the memory as a threat to his composure. He shakes his head to dispel it and names his state as desperation. Rather than yield to that feeling, he turns his attention to the church, its scaffolding, the illuminated Virgin on the altarpiece, and the police gathered beside Honorato Bonafé’s corpse. The proximity of the tragedy becomes a means of control: he tells himself that he may return to the memory later, while concentrating on the investigation brings relief close to forgetting.

That recoil does not settle the moral question. Quart is left unable to decide whether the encounter has condemned his soul or saved it. The novel makes the uncertainty central: the night offers a moment of closeness, but dawn restores solitude, clerical self-scrutiny, and the urgent work of the church and the murder. Their intimacy remains powerful precisely because it cannot be separated from its ending.