Quart visits the duchess's family

Quart visits the family of the Duchess of the New Extremity at the Casa del Postigo, where a seemingly courteous call becomes an encounter with the endangered parish church’s layered history. Amid the remnants of aristocratic grandeur, a family’s devotion to its church and its memory of Carlota Bruner complicate Quart’s role as Rome’s investigator: the threatened building is not merely a disputed property but part of a world its inhabitants are trying to keep from disappearing.

The Duchess’s House and a Fading Inheritance

Cruz Bruner receives Quart in the Casa del Postigo, the family home in which she grew up. Her ancestry reaches back to the Granada campaign and the conquest of the Americas, and the houses of Alba and Medina-Sidonia alone outrank the Bruner family in aristocratic antiquity. Yet the titles have long since lost practical substance. Time and history have consumed the family’s land and wealth, leaving an impressive genealogy and heraldic display that resemble empty shells washed up on a shore.

The house makes that decline tangible without erasing its former distinction. A Roman mosaic brought from Itálica, a gallery of Mudéjar arches, Alpujarran carpets, sixteenth-century bargueños rescued by the banker Octavio Machuca, a Plateresque grille, a garden, Roman marble busts, and old paintings preserve traces of its past. The household that once had twenty servants now depends on a maid, a gardener, and a cook. Cruz, nearly seventy, sits among these inherited objects with white hair and a pearl necklace, fanning herself with a worn fan painted and personally dedicated by Julio Romero de Torres. The old house is neither an untouched monument nor simply a ruin: its surviving objects register what has been lost and what its remaining occupants still cherish.

Cruz’s family history also links aristocratic prestige to instability. Her husband, the duke consort, squandered the family’s position through failed ventures, horse breeding, and a life of excess; Machuca repeatedly helped him avoid financial and legal ruin. He eventually died without money, and his elaborate funeral drew both local society and creditors. Against that history of depleted inheritance, the family’s attachment to the church and to Carlota’s story gives the past an active claim on the present.

A Formal Call Becomes a Dispute

The visit begins in carefully managed politeness. Cruz offers Quart and Father Príamo Ferro chocolate, and she mentions that she once received an audience with the Pope; Macarena Bruner, her daughter, had also been received on the occasion of her marriage, more than a third of a century later. Ferro has long visited the duchess at five each afternoon, except on Wednesdays, to pray the rosary and share refreshments. His established place in the household contrasts with Quart’s temporary presence as an emissary from Rome.

When Cruz asks what Quart thought of their church, he calls it endearing, a tactful answer that commits him to neither side. Macarena pointedly observes that the family had believed Quart came to Seville to see the church demolished. Quart replies that his superiors want an accurate picture of the situation and that nobody intends to remove Ferro from his parish. Ferro immediately challenges that reassurance. The archbishop, Banco Cartujano, the duchess’s son-in-law, and Rome itself, he says, all give him reasons to distrust it. His suspicion makes explicit the institutional and financial pressures surrounding the parish, even as Quart tries to present his inquiry as neutral.

Cruz explains why the church matters to her family: beyond its personal meaning, as Ferro has said, a destroyed church is a piece of heaven that disappears. She also speaks of the place she hopes to reach after death, trusting their parish priest to bring her there in due course. Ferro answers with a solemn promise. Her words make preservation more than a question of real estate or family pride: the church belongs to her understanding of home, faith, and the destination awaiting her.

Carlota’s Story and the Postcard

Quart asks whether Cruz’s father was Carlota Bruner’s brother. Cruz confirms that Carlota was her aunt, her father’s elder sister, and describes the letters that never reached their intended recipient. As a child, Macarena was absorbed in the story: she spent hours beside Carlota’s trunk reading the letters, trying on old dresses, and sitting at the window where Carlota was said to have watched for the man she loved. The objects and room make a family tragedy into a repeated, intimate practice of remembrance.

Macarena tells her mother that Quart possesses one of Carlota’s postcards. Cruz is astonished: the cards are supposed to be inside the trunk in the tower known as el palomar, yet this one was placed in Quart’s room at Hotel Doña María. Macarena treats the postcard’s arrival as a mystery and jokes that it cannot simply be attributed to Ferro. The unexplained passage of a family keepsake into Quart’s hotel room gives the old story a present-tense connection to his investigation.

Cruz explains the tower’s changing use. Her father, Luis Bruner, was interested in astronomy and installed an observatory there; later, the room became the place where Carlota was confined during the last years of her life. Ferro now works in the observatory with its outdated instruments, which he nevertheless keeps clean and usable. Cruz allows him to use it and listens to his observations. Macarena sometimes goes there too, not because she is an astronomer but because, near the stars, she finds peace. A room associated with confinement and a vanished woman has become, in altered circumstances, a workspace and refuge.

Astronomy, Memory, and the Vanishing View

The family’s account of Carlota gives the postcard its full weight. She fell in love with Manuel Xaloc, a sailor without fortune. When he emigrated to America, she wrote to him almost every week for years. Her father, Luis Bruner, wanted to prevent the correspondence and bribed the city’s postal officials. In six years Carlota received no letter, and the family believes Xaloc received none from her either. When he returned to find her, she had lost her reason, spent her days at the window looking toward the river, and could no longer recognize him. The separation was not the lovers’ choice but the result of a family authority that intercepted the words on which their hope depended.

The postcard and the letters give this history a material form: messages existed, but the people for whom they were intended were kept from receiving them. In one of Carlota’s letters, she imagines a white sail bringing Xaloc upriver and returns each day to the tower to watch for him. The old promise of return is echoed by the modern view from the observatory, but the landscape has changed. The Giralda, the Tower of Gold, the Guadalquivir, and flowering jacarandas remain visible amid television aerials and circling pigeons; the view where Carlota once watched is now crowded with buildings of concrete, steel, and glass. No white sail appears. The Archivo General de Indias stands over the old Lonja as a keeper of paper and memory, while the scene itself suggests how much of the world Carlota knew has vanished.

As the conversation turns to astronomy, the guarded company briefly relaxes. Quart’s remark about what people no longer do draws laughter from everyone, including Ferro, at first reluctantly and then with the same genial skepticism he had shown before. Macarena notices that the shared interest has brought Quart and the priest closer and suggests that Ferro show him the tower. There the brass telescope gleams beneath the Mudéjar arches. The observatory’s old instruments do not promise discoveries; their importance lies in the quiet work and companionship they make possible.

Macarena’s Personal Battle

Later, Macarena defines her own struggle not as Ferro’s battle but as a fight against time and forgetting. She knows that her social caste is dying out and sees no future place for people like her family, or for memories like hers. The legend of Carlota and Xaloc, the church, and the things she loves are bound together in what she calls her personal war. She intends to keep defending her space until she has spent her last cartridge, then accept the end with a clear conscience. Her stated purpose makes the visit’s different strands—family history, the threatened parish, the postcard, and the surviving house—parts of one act of resistance to erasure.

Macarena also reveals the intimate cost of her marriage to Pencho Gavira. She tells Quart that she became pregnant and that Gavira considered the pregnancy too soon and an additional problem. He pressured her to have an abortion, pressing her more forcefully than anyone had before. The disclosure adds a private dimension to the conflict between inherited duty and present life: Macarena’s defense of memory and place exists alongside the pressures exerted on her own body and choices. The visit thus gathers the family’s past and the parish’s uncertain future into a single setting without resolving either. What it establishes is the human scale of the threatened loss: a church may be part of a property scheme, but for Cruz and Macarena its disappearance would also mean the destruction of a place of faith, family memory, and refuge.