Cardoso’s spontaneous combustion in Cárdenas is recalled as an unexplained event that deepens the novel’s chain of mysteries around the cameo. Rodrigo Lerbier treats it as a possible clue to the theft of the jewel, while Loïc later places it beside other apparently supernatural occurrences; neither reflection proves what caused it.

Circumstances and Uncertainty

While trying to understand who had taken the cameo from a modest Yoruba temple, Rodrigo considers whether the thief knew him well and had followed his movements. His suspicion rests in part on the possibility that the person knew what had happened since Cardoso’s strange combustion in Cárdenas. The event thus enters Rodrigo’s reasoning as background to the theft, but the passage does not establish that the combustion and the disappearance were caused by the same person or force.

Loïc’s Interpretation

Loïc associates Cardoso’s combustion with the mysterious traces in the snow that he had heard about from the day the cameo emerged from the ground at Touladi. He treats the two occurrences as phenomena of a similar order, extending a pattern that appears to exceed ordinary explanation. This is Loïc’s interpretation rather than a verified account of the combustion’s cause.

Narrative Significance

The event serves as a point of comparison in the novel’s unsettled movement between natural and supernatural explanations. Rodrigo approaches it as a possible human clue in an investigation; Loïc reads it as part of a wider pattern surrounding the cursed stone. The accounts leave the event’s mechanism unresolved, allowing it to function both as a suspicious circumstance and as evidence, in Loïc’s view, of forces beyond rational understanding.