Xaloc Pearls on the Virgin Statue

The Xaloc Pearls on the Virgin Statue are the pearls Manuel Xaloc placed at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas after his separation from Carlota Bruner. Set into the Virgin’s image, they turn an unfinished love story into a visible offering and a piece of the church’s inherited memory. When Honorato Bonafé climbs the scaffolding to scrape and remove one pearl, that devotional relic becomes a vulnerable physical object—and the past it signifies is exposed to interference.

Origin and Meaning

The pearls belong to the story of Carlota Bruner and Manuel Xaloc, whose separation meant that Carlota never wore the wedding dress. Manuel’s last journey from Casa del Postigo was to the church, where he deposited the pearls from that unworn dress. Their placement made a lost marriage legible within a sacred setting: personal grief was carried into the church and preserved there as an offering.

The pearls also connect private remembrance with the Bruner family’s attachment to Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Macarena Bruner describes her own struggle as a battle against time and forgetting, one that includes both the church and Carlota’s memory. The pearls give that struggle a material focus: what might otherwise survive only as a family legend is embodied in an object that can still be seen, touched, and taken away.

The Pearls in the Church

In the church’s dim, unfinished interior, Bonafé sees the Virgin surrounded by scaffolding and work platforms. The statue stands in its niche, its heart pierced by daggers and its sorrowful eyes lifted toward heaven. The captain’s pearls shine on the Virgin’s cheeks, blue mantle, and crown of stars. Their brilliance places the story of Xaloc and Carlota directly on the devotional image, joining the historical love story to the church’s sacred iconography.

That setting contrasts the pearls’ enduring presence with the church’s physical deterioration and incomplete restoration. They remain on the statue amid dust, construction equipment, and broken stained glass. Their location gives the old offering a continuing place in the church, but it also makes them accessible to anyone able to reach the image.

Bonafé’s Removal of a Pearl

Bonafé approaches the statue when the church is empty. After climbing roughly five metres up the scaffolding, he wipes dust from the pearls with his handkerchief and examines them closely. He then uses a small pocketknife to scrape one pearl lightly and study it. After hesitating, he works the knife carefully into its setting until the pearl comes free.

The pearl is large, about the size of a chickpea. Bonafé holds it in his palm before slipping it into his jacket pocket with a satisfied smile. The deliberate sequence—inspection, testing, removal—changes the pearls from an apparently secure part of the Virgin’s adornment into an object of scrutiny and possession. A soft sound behind him and a slight vibration in the scaffolding interrupt the scene immediately after the theft, leaving the consequences of his act unresolved in that moment.

Memory, Vulnerability, and Loss

The pearls carry meaning because they are not merely decoration: they preserve the trace of a dress never worn and a union that never took place. Yet that very material presence makes the memory fragile. Bonafé can detach a single pearl from the image; the historical meaning attached to it cannot protect it from being handled as a valuable thing.

Elsewhere, the church’s tombs, Carlota’s letters, and her belongings likewise preserve fragments of family history. The letters show what Carlota wrote to Xaloc, while the replies are absent because her great-grandfather burned them as they arrived. Against that pattern of partial survival, the pearls are a surviving physical link between the separated lovers—but one that can be disturbed, diminished, or removed. Their significance lies in this tension between remembrance and loss: an intimate story has been entrusted to the church, yet its relic remains exposed to the passing of time and to human hands.