Fate and chance

Fate and chance are the novel’s competing explanations for a world in which people remember, fear, and die, while prayers may go unanswered and apparently accidental deaths can acquire the force of judgment. The concept is not settled by a revelation: it remains a question that binds Lorenzo Quart and Príamo Ferro, shadows the deaths surrounding Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, and exposes why faith may matter even when certainty has failed.

The question behind suffering

Ferro’s account begins with a life spent looking for an answer. As a young priest he read ancient philosophy, from Socrates to Saint Augustine, but says that little remained except a bittersweet taste of melancholy and disillusionment. At sixty-four, his knowledge of humanity has narrowed to three facts: people remember, they are afraid, and they die. The movement from philosophy to this stark inventory makes mortality not an abstract doctrine but the hard-won measure by which he judges what can be known.

For years, Ferro searched for God and wanted a direct reckoning with Him. Instead, he describes being forgotten by his bishop and the people around him, leaving his isolation only to celebrate Mass in a small, nearly empty church or to carry the last rites through snow, rain, and mud. For a quarter of a century, he sat beside the dying, whose hands clung to his because he was their only comfort. He spoke toward God, but received no answer. His experience leaves open whether silence means absence, a plan beyond human comprehension, or simply a universe that does not answer.

Quart puts the dilemma into a compact alternative: people are born and die either according to a plan or by accident. The old theological formulation is neither a declaration of belief nor a solution. It is an invitation to continue the interrupted reasoning, and the moment brings a new recognition between the two men: Quart begins, for the first time, to understand Ferro, while the old priest recognizes that understanding in Quart’s response.

Faith as consolation

Ferro extends the question from individual mortality to memory and meaning. Human beings know that they will disappear, and unlike kings, popes, and generals, most will leave no memory behind. If there is nothing more than this extinction, he argues, the universe becomes a cruel joke, a chaos without meaning. In that predicament, faith becomes hope and consolation—not necessarily proof that a divine plan exists, but a way of enduring the possibility that it does not.

This distinction explains Ferro’s fierce defense of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas despite his uncertainty about his own faith. What matters to him is that the people who come to the church do believe, and that their need is enough to justify its existence. He describes the church’s Baroque setting—the sculptures, faded gold, and lavish altars—as a form of religious address grounded in spectacle and emotion. The Counter-Reformation style asks worshippers to contemplate rather than leave every question to theologians; too much analysis, he says, can rob people of hope. The church is a refuge from the torrent of uncertainty, even if that refuge rests on consolation rather than demonstrated certainty.

Quart challenges the cost of this shelter, calling it alienation and comparing the church, as Ferro presents it, to seventeenth-century television. Their disagreement sharpens the concept: the issue is not merely whether fate or chance is true, but whether people should be protected from that uncertainty by religious forms. Ferro’s answer is pastoral. Whatever he believes privately, the consolation others receive remains real and, to him, morally consequential.

Deaths, accident, and the limits of proof

The church’s deaths bring the abstract alternative into the physical space of the investigation. Quart examines the place where a fatal piece of plaster fell from the cornice onto Father Urbizu. The scaffold is now braced and steady; about ten kilograms of stucco falling from nearly ten metres would have been deadly. There was room on the scaffold’s walkway for someone to have dislodged it, but the police report rejected that possibility. The municipal architect’s fall from the roof, this time witnessed, also appears to point away from human intervention.

That apparent absence of a human cause does not establish divine agency. It leaves a gap in which competing interpretations gather: the anger of God, as Vísperas and Ferro suggest; Fate, which Quart imagines as the whim of a cruel cosmic watchmaker; or sheer chance, figured as bumbling, half-asleep gods whose dropped breakfast toast always lands butter-side down. The comic image does not make the deaths less serious. It gives form to the disturbing possibility that suffering may have no moral design and that the human desire for a cause can survive even when evidence supplies none.

Quart’s examination therefore preserves uncertainty rather than resolving it. The physical evidence seems to rule out deliberate action in both deaths, but it cannot distinguish a providential plan from accident. In that sense, investigation and theology meet at a boundary: each can examine what happened, but neither can extract a final meaning from mortality alone.

A small life in a vast universe

The same tension returns in Ferro’s reflections on astronomy. When Quart says that astronomy borders on despair, Ferro answers that it gives him serenity. Only what is grave, valuable, and transcendent can hurt when lost; awareness of humanity’s minuteness—a drop of seawater in the universe’s red sunset—makes that loss visible. Against the scale and indifference of the cosmos, he offers no proof of providence. He offers instead the possibility of a friendly hand, giving resignation and consolation before the stars go out and everything is finished.

The exchange brings the concept to its most intimate scale. Whether human lives belong to a plan or arise by accident remains unresolved, and Ferro’s own faith cannot be reduced to certainty. What he can defend is companionship for those facing death: the presence of someone who stays beside the dying when no answer comes. Fate and chance thus name not only rival explanations for events, but the uncertainty against which memory, ritual, and human care acquire their value.