Gavira orders his men to use violence against the church

Pencho Gavira’s order to use violence against Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas marks the shift from a redevelopment dispute to an intended assault on the church and its defenders. Driven by anger over his estranged wife, Macarena Bruner, and the obstruction posed by the parish, he tells his subordinate Celestino Peregil to act against the building, leaving the choice of method to him.

The obstacle to redevelopment

The church’s continued existence is bound to an old privilege granted in 1687: it retains its rights so long as Mass is celebrated there each Thursday for the soul of its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The condition is unusually specific: the service must be held at eight in the morning on the day of Gaspar’s death. This arrangement gives the parish a practical defense against secularization, a necessary preliminary to demolition, and complicates the plan to redevelop the site.

The weekly service is closely watched. Each Thursday, an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Gavira sit at the back of the church, alert for an error or lapse that might invalidate the condition. The legal and ecclesiastical procedure therefore creates a slow, contested route to demolition rather than an immediate resolution. Gavira’s eventual order for violence represents a turn away from waiting for the dispute to be settled through formal channels.

Gavira’s personal grievance

The order comes amid Gavira’s anger about his marriage. Macarena has left him and refused to see him for six months. He recalls the end of their relationship as a silent departure: she packed her suitcase without an argument, and her look left him no opening to change her mind. His grievance over the church thus becomes entangled with the loss of his wife and with his sense that Seville has rejected him as an outsider.

In his private outburst, Gavira groups the priest, a nun, and the church’s defenders with the city that has humiliated him. He imagines making them all pay for the shame and uncertainty he has endured, and reduces the church dispute to a wider claim of dispossession: he believes that his wife has already been taken from him and that now the church and his future are also being taken away. The passage presents this as his aggrieved perception, not as an established account of what others have done to him.

From threat to instruction

Gavira gives his anger an immediate target in his declaration that he will sweep them all aside. He makes the threat while shutting down his computer, then considers what action against the priests might cost him. The thought that some clergy might be put out of circulation does not, in his reckoning, amount to a serious moral deterrent. This reflection connects the broad threat to a willingness to accept violence as a means of clearing the way.

He then calls Peregil and asks whether his men are reliable. After receiving assurance, Gavira orders him to bring pressure to bear on the church, explicitly naming setting it on fire as one possible course while leaving the choice to Peregil. The instruction is both clear in its violent intent and open-ended in its execution: Gavira demands action, but delegates the means. His nickname in Andalusian banking, El Marrajo del Arenal, accompanies the scene’s presentation of him as a man moving from hostile speech to an operational command.

Consequences and narrative significance

The episode establishes that the church’s danger is not only the result of administrative maneuvering over secularization and demolition. Gavira is willing to enlist a trusted subordinate’s men to use force when the parish’s continued existence frustrates his plans. His command makes the development conflict personal and coercive, with the church and those associated with it placed at risk.

The order also exposes the instability beneath Gavira’s outward position as a powerful banker. His response to the church combines a threatened commercial project with marital estrangement and wounded pride; rather than separating those grievances, he directs them toward the same target. The scene’s decisive movement is from private resentment to delegated action, making his threat more than an angry figure of speech while not specifying what form Peregil’s men’s intervention ultimately takes.