Macarena takes Quart on a night tour of Seville and tells him Carlota and Xaloc's story

Macarena takes Quart on a night tour of Seville and tells him Carlota and Xaloc's story in a scene where family history, the threatened church, and present-day attraction converge. Moving from the illuminated cathedral through Santa Cruz to the old river port, she explains how Carlota Bruner and Captain Manuel Xaloc were separated, how their failed reunion became legend, and why their memory is inseparable from Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The account also gives Quart a more personal understanding of what Macarena is defending: not only a church, but the remains of a family world she knows is disappearing.

The walk and the investigation

The encounter begins in the plaza beneath the floodlit cathedral. The contrast between the dark sky and the lit architecture makes the familiar city seem almost like a constructed stage; yet this setting is real, built from centuries of history. Macarena stands beneath the central lamp, and the two continue their walk toward the Royal Alcázar. Her invitation follows Quart’s visit to the church, and their conversation moves between the investigation he has been sent to conduct and the personal history she wants him to understand.

Macarena thanks Quart for getting close enough to Príamo Ferro to understand him. Quart concedes that he can recognize Ferro’s stance toward the church and his uncompromising sense of its purpose, but stresses that understanding is not the whole assignment. He must report on the broader situation, identify Vísperas if possible, review police and archdiocesan inquiries into the deaths at the church, and pursue the unexplained postcard found among Carlota Bruner’s belongings. The tour takes place against this unresolved investigative work rather than replacing it.

Quart suspects that Vísperas is someone among the people defending the church, and that the hacker’s message was intended to draw Rome’s attention and help Ferro preserve it. In his view, the sender expects the truth to serve a just cause, while the truth sought by his own Roman superiors may not be the same. Macarena suggests that the point may not be to help Quart, but to make him understand what is happening. He resists the idea that understanding is his function: he describes himself as a soldier, charged with reporting facts and finding those responsible, while others must decide what to do with them.

That difference in purpose becomes personal as the walk continues. Quart asks Macarena to tell him what she knows; she says she knows little, may be able to guess, but will not supply the answers for him. He must do his work while others do theirs. Later, when Quart asks to see Carlota’s trunk, Macarena agrees. She believes that its contents will help him understand what Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas means to her, and that the family story and the present investigation cannot be separated.

The church and the Thursday condition

Macarena explains that the parish is poor: the church cannot fund the continuation of its restoration, Ferro’s salary is small, and the Sunday collection does not even cover the candles. Its continued existence instead depends on a condition attached to the church: a Mass must be celebrated every Thursday at eight in the morning for the soul of her ancestor Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. Thursday was the day he died, in 1709.

The condition makes each Thursday a quiet contest over the church’s survival. An archbishop’s representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira sit at the back, watching for an irregularity or a missed part of the service. If a priest failed to say the Mass or omitted its prescribed form, the church could be demolished; in Macarena’s view, both the Archbishop of Seville and Banco Cartujano would then have won. She fears that, once Óscar Lobato leaves, those opposed to the church may try something against Ferro. What sounds like a narrow ritual obligation therefore carries immediate institutional and personal stakes.

Macarena also corrects Quart’s understanding of the pearls associated with the Virgin statue. They are not merely valuable objects: she calls them Carlota’s tears and connects them to Captain Xaloc’s testament. Their meaning unfolds as she guides Quart from the old streets toward the Guadalquivir River, where she begins to tell him how the family’s story came to be attached to the church.

Carlota and Xaloc at the old port

At the river, Macarena identifies the place where Manuel Xaloc departed. She recalls Seville’s former port as a center of Atlantic commerce, when sailing vessels and steamships moved along the Guadalquivir toward Sanlúcar and Cádiz before crossing the ocean. By the time she tells the story, the old shipping world has faded, making the waterfront an apt setting for a tale about a love and a city that survive chiefly in memory.

Xaloc was a poor, thirty-year-old second officer on a steamer making the Seville–Sanlúcar route when he met Carlota during a journey she made with her parents. After Macarena’s great-grandfather Luis caught him near the gates of Casa del Postigo, he had Xaloc dismissed and used his influence to prevent him from finding work elsewhere. Xaloc left for the Americas to make his fortune; Carlota promised to wait. He sailed from this port aboard the schooner Nausicaa, while Carlota watched from the pigeon loft. She later insisted that she could see him waving a handkerchief from the stern, though the distance made that impossible.

Xaloc succeeded at sea. He became a ship’s captain and spent six years trading—and, according to the story, sometimes engaging in piracy—around Mexico, Florida, and Cuba. American authorities placed a price on his head. He eventually returned to Seville with bank drafts and gold coins, as well as a velvet bag holding twenty pearls intended for his wedding to Carlota. He had received no news from her, but believed that Luis had kept them apart and trusted that she had meant her promise to wait.

By then Carlota had lost her reason and was still waiting at the tower, two years after her illness began. Macarena recounts the eventual meeting: Luis, initially still opposed, allowed Xaloc to visit after doctors advised it and his wife pleaded with him. Xaloc arrived in his merchant-marine uniform, but Carlota did not recognize him. After ten minutes, she left to return to the tower, saying that he might come back at any moment. Xaloc did not speak. He went to the church where they had hoped to marry and gave the priest Carlota’s twenty pearls. At dawn he left on the first sailing vessel to depart; this time, no one saw him wave a handkerchief.

From private loss to family memory

Macarena places the lovers’ parting within the larger history of 1898. As Xaloc was returning, the Maine exploded in Havana harbor, and Spain authorized privateering against the United States. Xaloc took out a commission and sailed the fast armed yacht Manigua, forcing the blockade. In June he attacked and sank two merchant ships in the Gulf of Mexico and encountered the gunboat Sheridan at night. Macarena says that Quart can find the rest in contemporary newspapers; she has kept press clippings about the battle in Carlota’s trunk.

Carlota never learned what happened to Xaloc. She waited at her window for twelve more years, watching the Guadalquivir as the ships gradually disappeared and the port declined. In time, she too disappeared from the window. The lovers’ story had become a legend, with songs made about them. Carlota was buried in the crypt of the church where she had expected to marry, and Macarena’s grandfather Pedro ordered the twenty pearls set into the Virgin’s image as tears. He intended the gift as a tribute to his sister and to the man who might have become his brother-in-law.

The church is now, Macarena says, almost all that remains of Carlota and Xaloc, alongside the memories and documents kept in the trunk—including the postcard Quart is investigating. The pearls, the Thursday Mass, and the old family records are not separate curiosities: together they preserve the connection between the family’s loss and the threatened parish. The trunk is thus both a source of evidence for Quart and a repository through which Macarena keeps that history present.

Macarena’s battle and Quart’s restraint

The story leads Macarena to describe the purpose of her own resistance. She knows that her family’s social world is vanishing and believes there is no longer a place for people like her ancestors, or for memories and tragic stories such as Carlota’s. She calls her struggle a battle against time and forgetting, distinct from Ferro’s fight for the church. She intends to defend the space and the things she loves, including Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas and Carlota’s memory, and to accept their eventual loss only after doing what she can for the family name and its inheritance.

Quart asks why everything must end that way and suggests that she could have children. Macarena rejects the future he imagines, saying that she does not want descendants for whom Xaloc’s name would have no meaning. Her response makes her resistance more than an effort to protect a building: she refuses to treat the past as something that can be preserved simply by passing a name on to a future she cannot recognize.

Their conversation then sharpens into an exchange about her marriage to Pencho Gavira, her conflict with Seville, and Quart himself. Macarena suggests that a relationship with Quart could be an act of revenge against Gavira and against the city. Quart does not accept the invitation. When she asks him to go with her to the garden and wait for Carlota to appear at her window, as Macarena did as a child, he refuses. Her offer invokes the possibility of a ghost, but Quart’s decision keeps the scene grounded in the painful record she has just recounted.

The restraint is difficult for him. When Macarena takes his hand and confirms that it is trembling, he gently withdraws and says it is time to return. They walk back without touching. His refusal does not erase their attraction; it makes the conflict between desire, vocation, and judgment physically legible. The night tour ends with no resolution to Quart’s investigation and no promise that Macarena’s battle can succeed. Instead, it has made the stakes clearer: the church’s fate is bound to a fragile ritual, and Macarena’s defense of it is also a defense of the memory embodied in Carlota’s story.