Príamo Ferro—Pencho Gavira

The relation between Príamo Ferro and Pencho Gavira is an indirect but consequential antagonism, organized around the threatened survival of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Ferro’s parish is a place of worship and consolation for people who still need it; Gavira appears among those whom Ferro suspects of wanting him and the church out of the way. The struggle turns on more than competing claims about a damaged building: it pits the priest’s duty to preserve a source of hope against a political and financial effort that could make the church disappear.

Opposing Claims on the Church

Ferro identifies Pencho Gavira as one of the people who may seek to displace him. When Lorenzo Quart assures the priest that no one intends to remove him from his parish, Ferro challenges the reassurance and names several possible threats: the archbishop, Banco Cartujano, the duchess’s son-in-law, and Rome. Gavira is thus not presented as acting alone; he belongs to a wider constellation of ecclesiastical, banking, and personal interests that Ferro believes could converge against the parish.

The conflict has a material setting as well as a personal one. Gris Marsala, the restoration architect, says the building is old and neglected but structurally sound: she reports no irreversible cracks in its walls or vault. Much of its damage is to the plaster and other finishes, caused by moisture entering through the roofs. She describes repairs made with lime, cement, and sand, nearly ten tons of material carried fifteen metres upward. Her account sharply contrasts with the public justification for demolition, which, she says, is advanced by the city council, the bank, and the archbishopric. In this contested account, the church’s visible deterioration is not proof that it must be destroyed.

The Weekly Mass and Gavira’s Pressure

The church’s protection depends on a specific inherited condition. Macarena Bruner tells Quart that Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas remains untouchable as long as a Mass is said for the soul of her ancestor Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija every Thursday, the day of his death in 1709, at eight in the morning. The clause gives the conflict a ritual clock: the building’s future is bound to the repetition of a memorial service, not simply to its physical condition or the wishes of its present occupants.

That safeguard is watched. Macarena describes an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Gavira waiting in the church’s last row each Thursday, alert for an irregularity or oversight. Their presence makes the Mass a point of pressure as well as devotion. If a priest failed to celebrate it, or neglected the required formula, the church could be condemned to demolition, allowing the archbishop and Banco Cartujano to prevail. Macarena fears that, with Father Óscar away, someone may try something against Ferro. The account makes clear why the priest’s continued presence matters: his service sustains the condition on which the church’s protection depends.

Ferro’s Defense and Its Human Stakes

Ferro’s resistance is rooted in pastoral experience rather than confidence in doctrine. At sixty-four, he recalls having read ancient philosophy as a young priest and then losing nearly all of it, retaining only a taste of melancholy and disillusionment. He says that what he has learned of human beings is that they remember, fear, and die. For a quarter of a century, he sat beside the dying, who clung to his hands because he was their sole consolation; he prayed and spoke in one direction, without receiving an answer. The memory explains the severity of his doubt, but also the practical form of his commitment.

He asks how life’s message can be preserved in a world marked by death, where ordinary people may leave no memory behind. Faith, in this account, becomes a form of hope and consolation. Ferro defends the church even if his own belief is uncertain, because the people who come to him do believe. Their need is enough, he insists, to justify the existence of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The church’s elaborate Baroque art, with its gilding, images, and emotional force, matters to him as an instrument of consolation: it gives visitors something to behold and a refuge from despair. Quart objects that this approach risks alienating people rather than freeing them, but the exchange clarifies what Ferro thinks is at stake in the conflict with Gavira: not the priest’s prestige, but the continued availability of comfort to a vulnerable congregation.

A Warning About Involvement

Gris Marsala warns Quart that there are places and people one cannot pass through without consequence. She names the city, the church, Ferro, and Macarena, then tells him to understand what he is entering. Her warning places the struggle around the parish within a broader network of personal and civic entanglements. The dispute over the church cannot be isolated from the people whose lives and loyalties are bound to it.

The relationship’s defining tension is therefore asymmetrical but consequential: Gavira is associated with the pressure that threatens the parish, while Ferro is its priestly defender, maintaining the ritual that protects its claim to remain. Their conflict brings together real-estate and institutional interests, a family memorial obligation, the practical work of restoration, and the pastoral purpose Ferro finds in serving believers. The threat is not resolved by his doubts; they sharpen the terms of his defense. Even in a world where prayer has brought him no answer, he continues to protect the place where others seek consolation.