Aurelio’s murder in Havana on February 10, 2016, turns his search for a renewed Christian faith into a sudden act of violence and leaves Rodrigo Lerbier facing both grief and danger. The killing takes place after Aurelio leaves an Ash Wednesday service, in the arcades behind a Baroque church. Rodrigo, who has already begun to question his own place in Santería under Aurelio’s influence, discovers the aftermath rather than witnessing the attack. The assailant escapes, and the suspected connection to the Satanist Sect remains unconfirmed.

Rodrigo and the Religious Context

Years before the murder, Rodrigo was introduced as a babalao, a Yoruba priest and respected religious figure in Cuba. He was called to a house after an old woman cried that a stone was the devil’s eye. Rodrigo sensed something malign in the disturbance and asked the Catholic priest guarding the house to let him enter. The priest was wary of African-derived rites, but his own Cuban upbringing left him respectful of old beliefs; people in the crowd, too, treated Rodrigo’s presence as nearly as important as the priest’s. Their exchange shows the social standing Rodrigo’s vocation carried: he was not simply a private believer, but a public authority in a religious world where Catholicism and Afro-Cuban practice met uneasily.

Rodrigo also interpreted the stone through Santería as a concentration point for harmful forces moving through the air that year, likening its function to a lightning rod. He proposed isolating it, and the priest answered with a blessing that Rodrigo received. This earlier episode establishes the spiritual framework from which Rodrigo later has to reconsider his work. His subsequent doubts are not presented as a casual change of opinion: he has held important positions, and a babalao in Cuba is an institution, surrounded by respect and fear. Abandoning that role would therefore mean more than changing a private conviction; it could place him outside the community that had granted him authority.

Aurelio’s Influence on Rodrigo

Rodrigo eventually tells Loïc and Laurence that his conversations with Aurelio have unsettled and transformed him. Aurelio became, in Rodrigo’s account, a revealer and guide: his own ordeal and suffering, the grace he had found, his recovered joy, and his love of Christ led Rodrigo to question the direction of his life and his adherence to Santería. Rodrigo came to believe that what he had taken for Yoruba oracles was instead the voice of Satan, and that he had unknowingly served the devil. The novel presents this as Rodrigo’s painful recognition, not as a neutral description of Santería.

That recognition leaves him caught between spiritual conviction and social consequence. He knows the respect, almost sacred in its intensity, that Santería commands in Cuba, and he cannot simply discard a long-established public identity without risking exclusion. When he confesses his doubts, he appears close to tears and still uncertain whether he can resolve the dilemma. Aurelio’s murder follows this moment of spiritual influence in the story: the man who helped Rodrigo reconsider his religious allegiance is suddenly removed, while Rodrigo is left to interpret the loss through the beliefs he is struggling to leave behind.

The Attack Outside the Cathedral

On the night of February 10, Aurelio leaves the cathedral absorbed in thoughts of a fervent faith like that of the earliest Christian communities under Roman persecution. He imagines believers taking refuge in new catacombs, and longs for a renewed commitment to Christ that would not depend on the rigid rites of a compromised religious hierarchy. As he walks beneath the arcades, he notices silent presences moving in the darkness and feels that danger is near. He turns back toward the illuminated square, but shadows rise behind him; a powerful arm seizes him, and a thin blade cuts his throat. He falls without a cry. His attacker vanishes into the dark maze of streets behind the church.

The scene joins Aurelio’s inward religious hope to an abrupt, bodily death, without explaining who ordered or carried out the attack. The preceding sense of being watched had affected both Aurelio and Rodrigo for some time, making the assault feel connected to a threat already surrounding them. But neither suspicion nor foreboding identifies the killer. The narrative leaves the identity of the assailant unresolved, even as it makes the attack’s method and setting starkly precise.

Rodrigo’s Discovery and the Aftermath

When Aurelio does not return, Rodrigo grows anxious. He knows Aurelio had gone to the Ash Wednesday service, and a dark premonition weighs on him; the two men had recently felt observed and even followed. Hearing police sirens in the distance intensifies his fear, so he goes down toward the cathedral. The streets are unusually crowded, and officers from the Securidad are trying to push onlookers away from the square. Rodrigo catches fragments of what people are saying: a young man has been killed, his throat cut, and he is dead.

Rodrigo presses through the crowd toward the police cordon beneath the arcades. At first the old stone paving merely looks glossy; then he sees that it is red with blood. He tells an officer, invoking his standing as a babalao even though he no longer practices as he once did, that he fears the victim is his friend. The police direct him to identify the body at the hospital morgue. The discovery is therefore a sequence of partial recognitions: the sirens, the broken phrases, the blood, and finally the possibility that the dead man is Aurelio.

Rodrigo later informs Loïc of the murder by email. Rodrigo is nearly certain that it was revenge by the Satanist Sect, and fears for his own life. Loïc, who had not known Aurelio personally, mourns him as another victim in the growing trail associated with the malevolent stone; he also prays that Rodrigo, his distant cousin, will not suffer the same fate. Rodrigo had already lost the sight of one eye in the caméo’s wake, a detail that makes Loïc’s fear more immediate without proving the stone caused either attack. The murder thus carries forward the novel’s uncertain pattern of violence around the object: characters connect deaths and injuries to its influence, while the circumstances of Aurelio’s killing leave that connection, and the identity of the killer, unresolved.