Paloma Fernández, the influencer who is a 'star' of Holy Tuesday in Malaga: the video with her father went viral

In a world consumed by fleeting stories and bright screens, Paloma Fernández García has learned to inhabit two universes that, far from contradicting each other, complement each other. In one, the world of social networks, her voice reaches thousands of people; in the other, more intimate and silent, pulses a legacy that does not understand algorithms, but memory, family, and faith, which meet every Holy Tuesday at the doors of the Brotherhood of the Star in Málaga.

Where the noise ends, something else begins. It doesn't always have a name. Sometimes it's an emotion inherited without knowing exactly when it began. Paloma, who besides being a content creator and from Málaga, is a devoted member of her brotherhood and tries to explain it with the delicacy of praying a rosary while wearing black lace gloves: “I can't explain it with words. I feel peace, I feel something, I feel divinity, I feel love and devotion.” And in this not knowing how, but saying everything, there is more truth than in any complete speech.

Paloma Fernández and her father / Ana Jiménez

This story doesn't start with her or her viral video on social networks last year surprising her father dressed in a mantilla on Holy Tuesday itself. It comes from before that. Precisely from her father, who began serving as a throne man in 1983, not yet knowing that this repeated gesture would become a way of life. Juan Fernández has spent nearly forty years beneath the throne of the Virgin of the Star. Forty years of right shoulder, of worn hips, of streets learned by heart. "Feeling, emotion, and joy," he now says, as if that were enough to summarize a life spent as the feet of the Star.

But it's not enough. It never is. That's why he adds the only thing that, for him, supports everything else: “Faith. And you have to like it. If you don't like it, then no.” There's no middle ground. “Either you carry it or you don't.” The firmness of his statements contrasts with the sparkle in his eyes, which like two windows to the past, become an internal procession of memories that pass in less than a second.

From the outside it is watched. From inside it is lived. “It's not the same seeing it as being inside,” he comments with the experience of having done both. And this comes from someone who has seen everything: skies opening at the passage of the Virgin, bearers from other brotherhoods crying to get under the poles of the Virgin on a Holy Tuesday that only they dared to go out when other brotherhoods did not due to the risk of rain, or the streets like Carretería, Mármoles, that are unforgettable. He has also seen Holy Week change. Too many barriers, too many routes thought out almost “like a racetrack.” And a question that remains in the air: who can see it and who cannot.

Meanwhile, his daughter listens, feels, watches from another place. Or was watching. Until she decided to fully engage.

Last year, when the rain prevented the Star from going out, something broke. “My heart broke, I swear. I don't remember something as sad as last year.” She came out crying, she says, but not from emotion. From sadness. A clean sadness, almost childlike, like a girl still picking up her father's white gloves before he goes out as a throne man. This year she wants it to be different: “I'm going to come out crying from happiness.”

Between one thing and another, something very important happened: the gesture that people saw on social networks and that, for the most part, had a positive impact, although always with some comment about whether she was just showing off. Many did not understand that it was not just another gesture. It was a response. For years, he had repeated a phrase to her that remains: “the day I can't carry her, I will cry.” And now it is she who carries on this continuity without saying it out loud completely, but from the decorum and mourning of a mantilla: “being able to tell him 'dad, now I continue it' makes me proud.”