Captain Xaloc

Captain Xaloc is linked in the novel to two surviving traces of a past life: a set of pearls circulated through an illicit market and a postcard from Carlota Bruner. Neither trace fully restores his story, but together they connect his name to the church’s financial needs, an earlier art-dealing scandal, and Carlota’s remembered love.

Identity and Traces

The available evidence identifies Captain Xaloc as the former owner of pearls whose description matched a batch later detected in the hands of a police informant, a Catalan jeweler specializing in laundering illegally acquired goods. The investigation suggests that Francisco Montegrifo, a Madrid art dealer, put the pearls into circulation. Montegrifo was already associated with Father Ferro: ten years earlier he had served as a contact in the irregular sale of the altarpiece from Cillas. The evidence does not establish that Montegrifo mediated the pearl transaction, but investigators regard the circumstantial indications as substantial.

A separate, intimate trace is a postcard addressed to Captain Xaloc by Carlota Bruner. Lorenzo Quart had found it in his hotel room, and it later reached him again among the few things sent after Cruz Bruner’s death. The postcard’s return gives the captain’s name a place in the family’s surviving record, even as the story of the relationship behind it remains largely known through fragments.

The Pearls and the Church

Investigators concluded that, months before their inquiry, the pearls on the Virgin’s image had been replaced with twenty identical imitations. The timing of the money associated with the original pearls coincided with renewed construction work at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas: building materials were purchased and machinery was rented. Suppliers questioned by Simeón Navajo’s men said the cost of those deliveries exceeded what the parish priest could have afforded from his salary and the church’s alms box.

Navajo used the financial mismatch to propose a motive in the investigation into Honorato Bonafé’s death. Bonafé, he reasoned, had followed the pearl trail, gone to the church, and confirmed that the pearls were false. He may have tried to blackmail the parish priest, or the priest may have killed him before he could do so. This was Navajo’s reconstruction, not a demonstrated account of the killing; the evidence about the pearls supplied a plausible financial connection but did not by itself prove who arranged their sale or what happened in the church.

Carlota’s Postcard and the Aftermath

Cruz Bruner died at the beginning of winter while Quart was serving as third secretary at the Apostolic Nunciature in Santa Fe de Bogotá. He first learned of her death through a short notice in the international edition of ABC, accompanied by a formal obituary listing her extensive noble titles and asking for prayers for her soul. A couple of weeks later, a Sevilla-postmarked envelope brought a small black-bordered memorial card repeating much of the notice. There was no letter, only the postcard from Carlota to Captain Xaloc, a personal remnant returned without explanation.

Other later news reached Quart piecemeal. A letter from Óscar Lobato, forwarded through Rome to Bogotá, reported that Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas remained open for worship and continued to function as a parish. A business-page notice in the American edition of El País reported Octavio Machuca’s retirement as head of Banco Cartujano and Pencho Gavira’s resignation from the bank’s executive posts. Against these public updates, the postcard remained a quieter form of evidence: it carried Carlota’s address to Xaloc across the years, but did not resolve the separation or supply a complete account of the captain’s fate.

Narrative Significance

Captain Xaloc is present chiefly through objects rather than scenes of his own. The pearls have a public afterlife: they are traded, imitated, and implicated in the financing of church repairs and in Navajo’s theory of Bonafé’s murder. The postcard has a private one: it survives as a message from Carlota, resurfacing after her family’s losses. Their contrast makes the captain’s role legible in two registers—material circulation and personal memory—while preserving the gaps in what the investigation and the surviving correspondence can establish.