Perejil sells church-related information to Q+S

Celestino Peregil’s sale of church-related information to Q+S turns private surveillance into a precarious business, entangling the church investigation with Pencho Gavira’s financial ambitions and marriage. Driven by debts and gambling losses, Peregil feeds the scandal magazine material about the Roman envoy, Macarena Bruner, and Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, then arranges for Don Ibrahim’s crew to photograph the people under observation. What begins as a way to buy himself time becomes a risky betrayal whose most valuable commodity is not simply information, but the possibility of a public story.

Peregil’s information trade

Peregil is Gavira’s escort and assistant, but his loyalty is compromised by financial desperation. At Casa Cuesta in Triana, he reads Q+S with a sour expression: the magazine has published a photograph of Gavira’s wife with the bullfighter Curro Maestral, and Peregil knows he himself supplied the information that made the photograph possible. He is not merely a bystander to the exposure. The magazine’s cover is already evidence of his work and of the personal consequences it can carry.

His predicament worsens after he pays Don Ibrahim and his associates an advance of 100,000 pesetas for a job promised at three million. Instead of reserving the remaining 2.9 million, he gambles it in the hope of repairing his finances; the money disappears too. With creditors closing in, Peregil decides that information can keep him afloat. He considers selling Q+S material about the church and the people around it, telling himself that he is surviving rather than betraying anyone. That rationalization does not remove the danger: he recognizes that if he overuses the contacts and secrets available to him, the remedy may be as destructive as the debts.

Surveillance turned into a commodity

Peregil uses Don Ibrahim and the crew to follow the figures involved in the church affair. Their reports are so frequent and trivial that Peregil tires of hearing which priest bought a newspaper or sat in a café. One report, however, catches his attention: Macarena has met the envoy from Rome at the Doña María Hotel. He first doubts the information, then sees its potential as material for a magazine story.

Q+S’s editor, Honorato Bonafé, has already paid Peregil by cheque for confidences about the Roman priest, Macarena, and Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The deal makes the church dispute and its participants saleable copy. Peregil’s next temptation is to turn the meeting between Macarena and the envoy into another front-page opportunity. He imagines the dinner at La Albahaca and whatever might follow as a cash register ringing in his mind, but hesitates: selling information about priests is one thing; selling the wife of his own employer again would cross into institutional betrayal. The hesitation marks a limit he understands, even as his need for money threatens to erase it.

From leaks to staged evidence

Peregil does not leave the matter at passing along confidences. He tells his associates to concentrate on the priests, then buys a second-hand Canon camera with an 80–200 millimetre zoom lens, another expense imposed on his depleted finances. He supplies two rolls of high-sensitivity film and orders the crew to photograph the envoy and Macarena whenever they meet, discreetly and without using flash. Surveillance thus becomes an organized effort to create images that can support a public narrative, not merely a stream of observations passed on after the fact.

The instruction also exposes Peregil’s practical calculation. He has already seen how a blurred photograph of Macarena with Curro Maestral can command attention; now he seeks images of her with the envoy, whose presence connects her private life to the church controversy. His associates’ assignments are to watch the priests, but the camera order extends that operation toward the more sensational pairing. The distinction between gathering evidence and manufacturing a scandalous frame grows thin.

The scandal’s wider stakes

The church story Peregil sells is not isolated from the bank’s business. Gavira describes the redevelopment of a 3,000-square-metre site in Santa Cruz alongside a proposed sale of Puerto Targa to Saudi buyers, a transaction valued at roughly $180–200 million. The church property is part of the larger plan: the archbishop is prepared to accept secularization, the displacement of the parish priest, and demolition in exchange for compensation, a new church in a poor Seville district, and support for social work. The arrangement is presented as a benefit to the diocese, while also serving the bank’s commercial interests.

The bank’s internal investigation reveals why the deal matters so much to Gavira. Puerto Targa’s proposed luxury development near Doñana is tied to hidden exposures, misleading accounts, and a circular financing structure; the expected sale is supposed to help repair a hole exceeding 10 billion pesetas. The church redevelopment, in turn, functions as bait in the wider transaction. The report warns that failure could place the Cartujano in grave difficulty and that public knowledge of both the church dealings and Puerto Targa could damage its standing with conservative, often Catholic clients. Information Peregil sells to Q+S therefore has potential consequences beyond private embarrassment: it can connect a lurid personal story to a vulnerable financial operation.

Exposure as leverage

Bonafé’s later approach to Gavira shows how the material can be packaged as pressure. He sketches the elements for a prospective story: the Cartujano, the church and its redevelopment, the parish priest’s conflict with the archbishop, two deaths described as accidents or something less certain, the envoy from Rome, and Macarena’s association with the Roman priest. He then makes clear that Gavira’s own words could matter to the coverage. The story is no longer just gossip about a photograph; it threatens to assemble church, finance, death, and marriage into one public account.

The novel’s treatment of Peregil’s trade is sharply transactional. He converts access and observation into payments from a scandal magazine, while the people he follows become material to be selected, photographed, and sold. Yet his choices are not presented as a cleanly calculated scheme: each new leak follows financial pressure, and each attempt to secure liquidity deepens his exposure to others’ interests. His information brokering links the private machinery of surveillance to the public machinery of scandal, making Q+S not a distant observer of the church crisis but one of the instruments through which it can become dangerous.