Bonafé steals a pearl from the Virgin statue

Bonafé steals a pearl from the Virgin statue while alone in the dim, scaffold-filled Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, carefully detaching one of the Captain Xaloc pearls and concealing it in his jacket. The act turns his investigation of the church’s treasured ornament into a physical intrusion, and immediately precedes the struggle from which he will not survive.

The church at dusk

At evening, Bonafé enters the cool, shadowed atrium, sweating heavily as he wipes his face with a handkerchief. He looks over the ex-votos, displaced pews and scaffolding erected against the walls and above the main altar. The last light, filtering through incomplete stained-glass windows, gives the chipped, dusty carvings a reddish-gold cast. The praying figures of the dukes in the altarpiece seem to crouch in the shadows, while two angels gaze into emptiness.

He checks the empty church room by room: the open confessional, the sacristy, and the steps descending into the crypt. He then turns to the Virgin, set in her niche among the scaffolding and platforms. The statue stands roughly five metres above the floor, its heart pierced by daggers and its sorrowful eyes lifted heavenward. Pearls attributed to Captain Xaloc gleam on its cheeks, blue mantle and starry crown.

The theft

Bonafé climbs the scaffolding to the image. He first wipes dust from the pearls with his handkerchief and studies them closely, pausing to look back at the deserted nave. He takes out a small pocketknife, lightly scrapes one pearl, and examines it. After a moment’s hesitation, he carefully works the knife point into its setting until the pearl comes loose.

The pearl is large, about the size of a chickpea. Bonafé holds it in his palm before slipping it into his jacket pocket, smiling with satisfaction. The sequence is deliberate: he checks that he is alone, tests the pearl, and then removes it rather than merely examining it. His private inspection becomes theft.

The interrupted scene

As the red light falls through a broken window depicting a disembodied Christ, Bonafé wipes his face again. He hears a faint sound behind him, and the scaffolding shivers slightly. The narrative cuts away at that moment; the disturbance is not explained in the theft scene itself. Later, investigators reconstruct a confrontation on the altar scaffolding, where Bonafé falls or is pushed from a height of five metres. He catches at a scaffolding screw and cuts his hand, then, badly injured but still alive, crawls to the confessional and dies there.

The pearls and the investigation

The investigation later establishes that someone had replaced the statue’s original pearls months earlier with twenty identical imitations. Police inquiries suggest that the Madrid dealer Francisco Montegrifo put Captain Xaloc’s pearls into circulation; he had previously been connected to Father Ferro in the irregular sale of an altarpiece from Cillas de Ansó. The police could not prove Montegrifo’s suspected role, but the evidence pointed toward him. The date associated with the pearls’ circulation also matched a resumption of church repairs, whose building supplies and rented machinery exceeded what the parish priest’s salary and the church’s alms could cover.

Subcomisario Simeón Navajo proposes that Bonafé discovered the substitutions, came to the church to confirm that the pearls were false, and then tried to blackmail the parish priest—or was surprised by him before he could do so. This is an investigative hypothesis, not a fully established account of the killing. Bonafé’s theft scene makes his attention to the pearls concrete: he scrutinizes one, tests its surface and removes it, while the later police reconstruction connects his presence at the statue to the fatal encounter. The pearl thus links the church’s hidden financial dealings to the violence in its sanctuary.