Celestino Peregil

Celestino Peregil is Pencho Gavira’s bodyguard, assistant, and operational fixer, a small, nervous man whose carefully managed appearance contrasts with the rough work he arranges. In the struggle over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, he converts Gavira’s redevelopment aims into covert pressure: hiring men to obstruct the Thursday Mass by setting fire to the church. His story traces the gap between the polished world of banking and its hired instruments, with Peregil caught between an exacting employer and an increasingly unruly operation.

Identity and Introduction

Peregil first appears on his way to Casa Cuesta in Triana, reading Q+S and already in a sour mood. Three irritations press on him: a persistent ulcer, the delicate errand that has taken him across the Guadalquivir, and the magazine in his hands. The introduction makes his unease physical and occupational at once; even before the errand is disclosed, he is a man carrying a bodily complaint and a burden he would rather not have.

His appearance is presented as a daily construction. Short and stocky, he disguises premature baldness by combing his sparse hair upward from a part near his left ear and fixing it in place. His taste runs to white socks, loudly patterned silk ties, double-breasted jackets with gold buttons, and American-style bar girls. He is also drawn to the numerical patterns of casino tables, where he goes whenever he is still allowed entry. Vanity, appetite, gambling, and a taste for display make him comic, but they also establish a man attentive to surfaces and vulnerable to the pressures behind them.

Service to Gavira

Peregil works as Gavira’s escort and assistant, a position that places him physically close to the banker and practically responsible for carrying out his instructions. When Gavira’s dark, gleaming Mercedes arrives in central Seville, Peregil is already standing at the curb to hold the door. His bright floral tie and carefully arranged hair are set against the car’s massive, threatening presence: he serves power while making himself conspicuous beside it.

His errands can involve arranging violence. At Casa Cuesta he announces that he has a job for a group of men, then sells it as easy and clean, offering them a thousand per head. The breezy pitch conceals the coercive purpose that emerges later. When Gavira describes the church’s obstinate priest, he glances toward Peregil before adding that the man is only an old stubborn fellow. The dismissive label and the look toward his subordinate connect the church dispute to the machinery of Gavira’s orders, without making the violence that follows seem openly acknowledged by the banker.

Peregil also attends to Gavira’s everyday movements, waiting near a shoe-shop window while his employer deals with other business. In this arrangement he is both servant and watcher, close enough to respond but kept at a respectful distance. His position depends on proximity to power, yet that proximity does not make him secure: Gavira later threatens him over poor results and suspects that he has concealed a connection to the journalist Honorato Bonafé.

The Church Operation

The redevelopment conflict turns on an old privilege attached to Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Under its terms, the church retains its privileges so long as Mass is celebrated each Thursday for the soul of Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The service takes place at eight in the morning, and the obligation is linked to the benefactor’s death in 1709. The arrangement makes the weekly rite a practical obstacle to secularizing and demolishing the building. Each Thursday, an archbishop’s representative and a notary paid by Gavira watch for an irregularity or lapse.

Peregil’s contribution is to make that legal and religious obstacle vulnerable to force. He gives Don Ibrahim’s group instructions to damage the church enough to prevent the Thursday service, without insisting that the whole building be destroyed. The device they prepare uses a candle, matches, a wind-up alarm clock, two metres of twine, and a falling bottle to ignite the fire. The men are to be in a bar, visible to others, when it goes off, creating an alibi. The plan is modest in its stated aim but not in its stakes: even limited damage could interrupt the Mass that protects the church from demolition.

The hired men follow Lorenzo Quart and Macarena Bruner through the narrow, irregular streets of Santa Cruz, taking turns at a distance so as not to draw attention. When the pair enter a closed square and then retrace their steps, the three men panic and hurry back through the shadows. This is not merely surveillance as routine; the scene shows Peregil’s network operating through improvised coordination, with the men’s fear and the labyrinthine streets exposing how fragile their control is.

While the church operation remains unresolved, Peregil waits with Gavira at the Loco de la Colina bar. Gavira drinks whisky with a model on the terrace, and Peregil stays inside by the door, acting as bodyguard. He wonders where Don Ibrahim, Potro del Mantelete, and Niña Puñales are and whether they have made progress. The instruction, as he understands it, is to burn the church only enough to put it out of service and stop Thursday’s Mass; so far, there are no results. The contrast is sharp: while Peregil watches over his employer’s relaxed evening, the hired crew is meant to carry out a dangerous plan elsewhere.

Failure, Pressure, and Exposure

The operation’s lack of results brings Peregil under direct pressure. Gavira has given him six million for the job and sets Wednesday as the deadline: by Thursday, he does not want anyone entering the church. He also brings up Bonafé, telling Peregil that the journalist has been trying to get at him and demanding to know what Peregil has to do with him. The accusation gives the stalled operation a second danger: Peregil may be failing at the church assignment while also concealing a separate vulnerability from his employer.

Less than an hour after that reprimand, Peregil confronts the hired men in anger, telling them they are a disaster and making him look terrible. His appearance reflects the strain: his tie is crooked, his skin and scalp look greasy, and the carefully constructed hair from his left ear has collapsed. The disarray reverses the meticulous grooming of his introduction. Where his look once suggested effortful control, it now registers the failure of the operation and the pressure of Gavira’s deadline.

Even the group’s movements keep Peregil’s authority uncertain. A man with a flattened nose and an arm in a sling passes near him and looks briefly as if expecting a signal. Peregil gives none, and the man continues down the street. The moment suggests a channel of communication between employer and hired crew, but does not establish the reason for the signal or what the passerby intends. The operation’s details remain only partly visible, just as Peregil’s place in it is increasingly exposed to scrutiny.

Narrative Role

Peregil links the church’s old privilege and weekly ritual to the modern mechanics of coercion: money, a deadline, hired men, surveillance, and an improvised incendiary device. His comic traits do not cancel the danger he helps organize. Rather, his vanity and nervousness sharpen the contrast between his carefully maintained exterior and the consequences of his work. He is not presented as a commanding strategist; he is the pressured intermediary who translates Gavira’s objective into instructions, then faces blame when the men he has recruited fail to deliver.

The novel repeatedly places Peregil at thresholds of service: beside the Mercedes door, near Gavira at the bar, and in contact with men sent to act out of sight. His role makes the operation legible without granting him full control over it. The six-million payment and Wednesday deadline give that dependence a concrete measure, while Gavira’s questions about Bonafé make clear that the employer’s trust is conditional. Peregil’s comic self-presentation thus becomes part of a darker pattern: a subordinate’s carefully staged respectability cannot shield him from the consequences of serving a scheme built on intimidation.