Spanish–American War

The Spanish–American War is the historical rupture that turns Carlota Bruner and Manuel Xaloc’s separation into an enduring family tragedy. Xaloc returns to the Caribbean conflict after leaving the twenty pearls intended for Carlota’s wedding; he disappears at sea, while the pearls remain at the Church of Our Lady of Tears as a material record of the future they never shared.

The War and the Lovers’ Separation

Manuel Xaloc, a Sevillian sailor who emigrated to the Americas in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had worked as a pirate in the Antilles before disappearing at sea during the Spanish–American War of 1898. The war is not narrated as a campaign of battles. Its significance in the story is personal: it draws Xaloc back to the Caribbean just as the long separation from Carlota reaches its final, irreparable turn.

In 1898, shortly before the outbreak of the Cuban conflict, Carlota and Xaloc encountered one another again. Carlota, by then, was unable to recognize anyone. Their reunion therefore offers no restoration of the relationship: Xaloc returns to the war, and the woman he had hoped to marry cannot know him.

The Pearls He Left Behind

Before going back to Havana, Xaloc left the dowry he had brought for Carlota: twenty pearls he had gathered for the necklace she was to wear on their wedding day. Carlota had always wanted to marry at the Church of Our Lady of Tears. The pearls instead became part of the Virgin’s image there, shining on its face, starry crown, and blue mantle.

Their placement in the church turns a private promise into a lasting object of collective memory. The pearls do not reunite the lovers, and they cannot disclose what Xaloc himself wrote or felt; they preserve only the fact of his intended gift and the marriage that never took place. The war thus leaves behind not a victory or a resolved farewell, but a relic that outlasts the man who brought it.

Historical Rupture and Inherited Memory

The war’s effects reach the present through the family’s surviving spaces and objects. In the Bruner crypt, Carlota’s name occupies a tomb among generations of dukes, while her story is recalled alongside the pearls in the church. The contrast is pointed: Xaloc disappears at sea, but his gift remains visible in the sanctuary where Carlota had hoped to marry.

For Macarena Bruner, remembering Carlota and Xaloc belongs to a larger struggle against time and forgetting. The story of their thwarted marriage is bound to the endangered church and to the family history Macarena is trying to defend. The Spanish–American War is therefore both a historical setting and the decisive break in a private history: it takes Xaloc away, leaves Carlota’s recognition lost, and gives their unrealized future a fragile afterlife in twenty pearls.