Quart celebrates Mass at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas

Lorenzo Quart celebrates Mass at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas after an all-night vigil, entering the place where Honorato Bonafé died and where Príamo Ferro’s future is shadowed by imprisonment. Quart does not claim renewed certainty in God: he cannot pray because he does not know to whom he would pray. He nevertheless prepares the altar and performs the old ritual, finding in its ordered gestures a quiet consolation—and accepting, through the act, a responsibility that belief alone cannot resolve.

The church and the obligation of the Mass

Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas is threatened with demolition, but an old privilege ties its survival to the observance of a Thursday Mass for the soul of its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The condition dates to 1687; the benefactor died on a Thursday in 1709, and the required service is at eight in the morning. The rule is not merely commemorative. It gives the parish a practical defense against secularization and demolition, while also making the weekly service a point of surveillance: an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira attend, each watching for a failure or irregularity that could unsettle the church’s protection.

Ferro does not limit himself to the one service the privilege requires. He says Mass every day, twice on Sundays and feast days, and observes the Thursday obligation amid the damaged church and its scaffolding. His liturgical conservatism is visible in his vestments: at a morning Mass Quart notices the amice, a pre-Vatican II garment, and an old guitar-shaped chasuble. These details make ritual tangible as both a personal discipline and an institutional fact. In the struggle over the building, the repeated service sustains a legal condition; in the church itself, the inherited forms endure despite neglect and the threat of removal.

A night among the church’s dead and living

Before celebrating Mass, Quart spends the night in the plaza, watching the old church as the hours pass. The bell sounds, pigeons and swifts startle and settle beneath the eaves, and dawn gradually defines the bell gable, roof, and surrounding plaza. When the light comes, he rises as if returning from a long sleep. He unlocks the entrance and walks through the church, past piled benches and scaffolding, the open confessional, worn paving stones, and the dark mouth of the crypt where Carlota Bruner lies buried.

The church is not an abstract sanctuary. It holds the consequences of the investigation in the very spaces through which Quart moves. Honorato Bonafé died in the confessional after falling from the altar scaffolding; the police reconstruction suggests that he had confronted Ferro over the substituted pearls on the Virgin’s image and may have tried to blackmail him. Quart knows that Ferro has not explained his disappearance, and that he is expected to go to prison. The church also holds the grave of Carlota Bruner, whose story has become part of Quart’s understanding of the place. At daybreak, he remains with these material traces rather than resolving them into prayer or a verdict.

Preparing to celebrate

Quart kneels on a bench until the sun rises. He does not pray: he does not know before whom he could do so, and professional discipline alone seems inadequate to the moment. Instead, he waits beneath a ceiling darkened by candle smoke, fire, and damp, where faded paintings emerge uncertainly in the growing light. The sun enters through the leaded outline of a vanished Christ; the gilded altarpiece brightens, and the Virgin’s foot appears to crush the serpent. Quart supposes that this image is what matters. The passage gives him no conversion or settled theology. It shows him remaining with the church’s symbols while keeping his doubt intact.

He climbs to the choir and rings the bell, waits fifteen minutes on the floor beneath its thickly knotted rope, then gives two final, spaced strokes. With fifteen minutes left before the eight o’clock Mass, he lights the altarpiece and six candles, arranges the books and cruets, and washes his hands and face in the sacristy. He opens the cupboards and drawers, lays out the liturgical objects, and chooses vestments suited to the day. The service’s preparation is exact and physical; each item and action carries him from the stillness of the vigil into the public duty of the altar.

The inherited gestures and their cost

Quart dresses in a sequence learned at the seminary: first the white linen amice, which he kisses at the cross before laying it over his shoulders and fastening its crossed ties; then an alb long enough for him, the cincture, and the white stole, also kissed at its central cross. He takes the old white silk chasuble, its faded gold thread bearing Christ’s emblem, and settles it over himself. The clothes are not simply borrowed costume. Their order reconnects him to a discipline that, like the church’s weekly observance, has been handed from one lonely celebrant to another across generations.

In the sacristy, Quart feels the same clarity and peace that had come to him while waiting in the plaza. The familiar motions temper his solitude: the temple may be cracked, the belfry propped by scaffolding, and the ceiling paintings fading, while the stars seen through Ferro’s old telescope seem to mock human concerns. None of that is repaired by the ritual. Its effect is smaller and more immediate: the repeated actions make Quart’s loneliness matter less, because he is performing gestures others have performed in the same way for nearly two thousand years.

A service in Ferro’s place

Quart’s celebration carries a cost beyond his private uncertainty. Ferro is about to face prison, and the story makes clear that Quart has no right to disclose the secret he keeps from the parishioners. Bonafé’s death is associated with the church and with the Virgin’s veil; Ferro is implicated in the death and has refused to explain his disappearance. Rather than reveal what he knows, Quart prepares to meet the people already gathering outside the sacristy. Their coughs, footsteps, and the creak of a kneeling bench reach him through the door. The Mass will be for them, in the same damaged church where the dead and the unresolved remain present.

The episode thus joins ritual’s two forms of force. The Thursday observance protects the church through an old privilege, but Quart’s service is not presented as a legal maneuver or a declaration of restored faith. It is an act of pastoral care and a temporary answer to isolation: he assumes the public work of the Mass at the hour when Ferro’s absence becomes consequential, without pretending that the ceremony explains the universe, absolves the secrets, or saves the building. He looks at the clock. It is time.