Pencho Gavira—Celestino Peregil

Pencho Gavira—Celestino Peregil is a relationship of employer and subordinate that converts private surveillance into a weapon in Gavira’s campaign against the church. Peregil is expected to gather intelligence and carry out orders, but mounting gambling losses and debts make him a compromised agent: he sells information to a magazine, considers selling more, and conceals his divided loyalties from Gavira. When Gavira orders violence, the relationship’s central imbalance becomes unmistakable: Gavira can command action, while Peregil’s need for money makes the information he gathers a commodity of his own.

Employer, operative, and surveillance

Gavira uses Peregil as an intermediary for monitoring the people around Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Peregil in turn employs Don Ibrahim and his two associates to track their movements, receiving frequent reports from them. The surveillance is meticulous but often trivial: Peregil is wearied by calls about which priest bought newspapers or sat in a bar. One report does stand out—the meeting between Macarena Bruner and the Roman envoy at Hotel Doña María—and Peregil recognizes that such personal information could have value beyond the original assignment.

Gavira’s expectations are clear. He asks Peregil whether his people can be trusted; Peregil answers with confidence, and Gavira tells him to set them in motion. He wants the disruption at the church stopped, and explicitly authorizes Peregil to burn it or do whatever seems appropriate. The order turns their arrangement from intelligence-gathering into a mandate for physical intimidation. Gavira treats Peregil’s crew as an instrument, and Peregil presents them as dependable, even as his own conduct is becoming less dependable.

Debt and the sale of information

Peregil’s disloyalty grows out of financial desperation rather than a single open break with Gavira. He advances Don Ibrahim and his associates one hundred thousand pesetas against the promised three million, then gambles the remaining two million nine hundred thousand in an attempt to repair his finances. He loses it. The money disappears alongside earlier losses, leaving him burdened by debt and exposed to the threats of his creditors, including the dangerous lender Rubén Molina.

The losses distort Peregil’s sense of duty. He considers leaking information discreetly while making sure Gavira never learns that his preferred bodyguard and fixer is playing both sides. The church affair, he reasons, can continue to produce money; the Roman priest is more photogenic than Curro Maestral. His immediate need is liquidity, and he persuades himself that betrayal is simply a matter of survival rather than a moral choice.

The information is already circulating by the time Peregil weighs the next sale. Honorato Bonafé, editor of Q+S, has paid him by bearer’s cheque for confidences about the Roman priest, Gavira’s estranged wife, and Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Peregil sees the prospect of selling details about Macarena and the priest as another potential front page. He understands that this would be more serious than selling information about clergy: it would mean putting his employer’s wife into the bargain again, crossing from ordinary opportunism into institutional treachery. The payment is tempting, but Bonafé is also unpredictable and dangerous.

Competing loyalties and concealed betrayal

Peregil does not simply transfer his allegiance from Gavira to the press. He would prefer the information to benefit his natural employer, who has both a banking interest in the church dispute and a personal stake as Macarena’s husband. Yet Peregil’s debts keep him from acting clearly or consistently. He continues directing the surveillance while privately considering how to profit from what it reveals. His position is therefore more unstable than that of a straightforward informant: he serves Gavira, sells intelligence to Bonafé, and tries to preserve enough options to survive either relationship.

That instability appears in a small but telling gesture. After finding Q+S’s number in his diary, Peregil shuts the book as if resisting his own intentions. He calls himself a sewer rat, but the self-reproach does not settle the matter; debt presses harder than conscience. He opens the diary again and searches for the number. In Peregil’s world, betrayal is not an abstract question of loyalty but a transaction driven by the clock: the next creditor may arrive before he can reconsider.

Command, complicity, and the limits of control

Gavira’s order to Peregil is blunt: put pressure on the church, by fire if necessary. Peregil’s assurances make him complicit in the violence that follows from the command, even though the evidence of their relationship also shows him pursuing private income through information sales. The two men’s interests overlap in the campaign against the church, but not securely. Gavira wants obedience and control; Peregil wants cash and room to maneuver. His double dealing threatens the secrecy on which Gavira’s plans depend.

The surveillance itself makes that conflict sharper. Peregil tells his people to keep watch so closely that the priest should not be able to go to the bathroom without his knowing. When asked about the woman, however, he hesitates: Macarena’s movements are more consequential and more dangerous to sell than ordinary intelligence about the clergy. The line he is approaching is not just a question of how much information to pass on, but whether he will expose the wife of the man who employs him.

Narrative significance

Their association shows how Gavira’s power reaches the church through delegated work rather than direct confrontation alone. Peregil organizes watchers, manages reports, and receives orders; information becomes the bridge between the banker's interests and the pressure applied to the parish. Yet the same system creates vulnerabilities. Because Peregil is indebted, the intelligence gathered for Gavira can be sold to someone else, turning surveillance into a competing source of income and compromising the employer’s control of events.

The relationship is consequently neither loyal service nor a clean rupture. Gavira can issue commands and expect action, while Peregil’s assurances conceal an increasingly divided practice. His financial collapse makes him useful and dangerous at once: he can extend Gavira’s reach, but he can also expose the people and plans he is supposed to protect. Their partnership rests on the assumption that Peregil’s crew is secure; Peregil’s repeated temptation to sell information quietly shows why that assumption cannot be trusted.