Statue of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas

The Statue of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas is at once the devotional focus of its church and a material archive of the Bruner family’s history. Its carved Virgin, the image’s twenty pearl tears, and the weekly Mass attached to the church’s founding privilege connect religious practice to dynastic memory and to the tragic separation of Carlota Bruner and Manuel Xaloc. The statue’s beauty is therefore inseparable from the story of what it commemorates and from the threatened institution that preserves it.

Image and Devotional Setting

The statue is a polychromed wooden carving nearly a meter high, attributed to Juan Martínez Montañés and made almost a century before the Baroque altarpiece that surrounds it. The Virgin wears a blue mantle and holds her hands open, palms outward; she stands on a crescent moon, pressing a serpent beneath her right foot. The church takes its name from the tears visible on the image. Seen from below, they glimmer across the Virgin’s face, crown, and mantle, at first appearing to Quart almost exaggerated in scale.

The image occupies the center of an elaborate gilded retablo made in 1711 by Pedro Duque Cornejo, who was paid two thousand pieces of eight. The altarpiece sets the Virgin amid carved figures and ornament, with kneeling images of Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija and his wife flanking her. The church’s family connection is built into this arrangement: Gaspar donated the land in 1687, and his son Guzmán paid for the retablo’s completion with the figures of his parents. The statue is thus not an isolated object of worship but the focal point of a memorial structure that makes the donors’ presence part of the church’s devotional space.

The Pearls and the Xaloc Story

The pearls now marking the Virgin’s face and clothing were not part of the image’s original appearance. Its tears had once been smaller glass beads; they were replaced by twenty perfect pearls brought from the Americas late in the nineteenth century. Their history reaches beyond the church and into the story of Carlota Bruner and Captain Manuel Xaloc. Xaloc assembled the pearls for a necklace that Carlota was to wear on their wedding day, a marriage she had hoped would take place in this very church.

The marriage never took place. Before returning to Havana, where he arrived in time to take part in the war, Xaloc left the dowry he had gathered for Carlota behind. The pearls were subsequently set on the Virgin as tears. The substitution gives the statue’s conventional devotional signs a sharply personal meaning: the jewels preserve the outline of a wedding that did not happen, transfiguring a bride’s expected adornment into a public memorial.

Carlota waited for twelve years at a window overlooking the Guadalquivir, watching the ships disappear as Seville’s port declined. She eventually disappeared from that window too. By then, the story of her and Xaloc had become legend, and songs had been made about them. Carlota was buried in the church where she had expected to marry. At the direction of Macarena Bruner’s grandfather Pedro, the pearls were mounted on the Virgin in honor of Carlota and of the man who might have become her brother-in-law. In Macarena’s account, the church is what remains of them, along with Carlota’s memories and papers; the pearls make that inheritance visible at the center of the sanctuary.

A Statue within Family Memory

The statue’s meaning is sustained by the church’s spaces and objects around it. The family crypt lies behind an entrance disguised to the right of the high altar. When Gris Marsala leads Quart down, a dim bulb reveals rows of tombs, damp-stained brick walls, and the Bruner heraldic motto, Oderint dum probent. Fourteen dukes lie there; the most recent grave bears the name Carlota Victoria Amelia. The statue above and the tombs below form linked parts of a family memorial: the Virgin wears the pearls associated with Carlota’s lost future, while her body rests among the generations whose history shaped the church.

The image also gathers religious symbols beyond the family narrative. During a later visit, Quart studies it beneath the retablo’s canopy and the church’s scaffolding. The Virgin’s upward-turned face, open empty hands, blue clothing, crescent, and serpent allow him to see a dense inheritance of sacred imagery. He reflects that the names of different mother figures—Isis, Ceres, Astarte, Tanit, or Mary—can mark recurring ideas of refuge, motherhood, protection, and fear before darkness and nothingness. In that reading, the statue’s iconography is not reducible to one historical episode: it places the specific memory of Carlota beside a much older repertoire of images of the mother and the sheltering sacred.

Ritual, Threat, and Preservation

The statue’s setting is also bound to a legal and ecclesiastical struggle over the church’s survival. An old privilege, granted in 1687 with papal sanction, stipulates that the church retains its fueros while a Mass is said there each Thursday for Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija’s soul. The archbishop explains that the requirement complicates the secularization needed before demolition; Macarena later specifies that the Mass must be celebrated at eight in the morning on the anniversary custom of every Thursday, the day Gaspar died in 1709. An archdiocesan representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch for any irregularity. The statue stands within a sanctuary where an inherited devotional image and a recurring ritual have become part of the practical contest over whether the building can be demolished.

The threat is not merely procedural. The archbishop considered removing the old, valuable image from the church. On the very day his secretary, Father Urbizu, was to raise that possibility, a piece of cornice fell and killed him. Later, Quart sees the statue beneath the altarpiece while scaffolding braces the damaged church; he also studies the cornice from which the fatal piece fell. The image’s presence is therefore associated both with the church’s valuable artistic inheritance and with the dangerous, deteriorating building around it. Its preservation is inseparable from the fate of the place that gives it meaning.

The statue recurs at moments when the novel makes memory tangible. During Mass, a modest congregation gathers in the partly dismantled nave, where the old parish priest celebrates beneath the image and the altarpiece’s lights. Later, Quart returns to the altar and sees the pearls gleam on the Virgin’s face, starry crown, and blue tunic, while the scaffolding cuts across the sanctuary. The contrast between the richly worked image and the church’s ruin gives the pearls a double charge: they recall a private tragedy, but they also stand for the fragile survival of a shared past. Macarena describes her own struggle as a battle against time and forgetting, and names both the church and Carlota’s memory among the things she means to defend. The statue makes that connection visible: an image of devotion bears a lost marriage, a family’s history, and the possibility that the place preserving them may disappear.