Oderint dum probent

Oderint dum probent is the Bruner family motto, displayed on the shield at Casa del Postigo and carved in the family crypt. Its recurrence joins the family’s public heraldry to its buried history, while the differing translations attached to it expose both the comic uncertainty and the hard demand for respect encoded in the phrase.

The motto on the family shield

When Don Ibrahim discreetly follows a woman into Casa del Postigo, the old palace of the Dukes of Nuevo Extremo, he pauses to inspect the entrance. Beneath its balcony, the heraldic shield bears a helmet topped with a lion, a border decorated with anchors and heads, a band containing a pomegranate, and the motto. Don Ibrahim tentatively renders it to himself as something like a command to smell what one tastes, and approves of its apparent common sense. His mistaken interpretation gives the maxim a wry, earthy turn: a formal mark of aristocratic identity is filtered through the instincts of an observant former lawyer.

The scene places the words within the visual language of inherited rank. The shield presides over the entrance to a prominent sixteenth-century Sevillian palace, its heraldic imagery announcing a lineage whose history is still materially present in the building. Don Ibrahim’s improvised translation, however, makes that authority seem less fixed than its stone and iron setting suggests.

The inscription in the crypt

The motto reappears when Lorenzo Quart descends with Gris Marsala into a small, damp burial chamber beneath the church. A dusty bulb reveals walls lined with memorial slabs in three tiers; on one wall, a marble family shield bears the same words beneath a black cross. Quart translates them as a demand that the family be hated so long as it is respected.

Gris explains that fourteen dukes lie in the crypt. Its inscriptions extend from Rodrigo Bruner de Lebrija, identified as the first Duke of Nuevo Extremo and dated 1472–1511, to the more recent memorial bearing the name Carlota Victoria Amelia, the only woman named in a chamber otherwise reserved for explorers, politicians, and warriors. The motto thus stands between two versions of family history: the public claim to authority carved into heraldry and the private record of lives and losses enclosed below ground.

Pride, memory, and loss

The phrase’s repeated appearance accompanies a wider preoccupation with the survival of the Bruner name and the fading world attached to it. Macarena describes her personal struggle as a battle against time and forgetting, undertaken for the family name, the church, and Carlota’s memory. In that context, the motto’s insistence on respect resonates as an inheritance that can outlast the people who first claimed it, even as the family’s older social world is disappearing.

The story of Carlota gives that inheritance a more intimate and painful dimension. Macarena recounts that Carlota’s father bribed Seville’s postal officials to intercept her letters to Manuel Xaloc; after years without receiving a letter, Carlota lost her reason and waited by the river, unable to recognize Xaloc when he returned. A surviving letter evokes her vigil from the tower, watching for the white sails that might bring him home. Set against that story, a motto promising respect cannot undo the damage done by family authority: the name endures, but the people whose lives it governs are left with separation, silence, and memory.