April 1918

April 1918 is the turning point at which the secrecy surrounding Julian Carax and Penelope Aldaya is exposed to Francisco Javier Fumero, and a staged birthday celebration at the Aldaya mansion leads to an attempted killing at San Gabriel's School. The episode also reveals the social humiliation behind Fumero's sudden arrival with a rifle and Miquel Moliner's decisive intervention to save Julian.

The Aldaya birthday celebration

Jorge Aldaya was about to turn eighteen, and Don Ricardo Aldaya ordered a grand party at the family house on Avenida del Tibidabo, though Jorge did not want the celebration and his father planned to be elsewhere. While Don Ricardo used the pretext of business to arrange a meeting with a woman newly arrived from St Petersburg at the blue suite of the Hotel Colon, the gardens were dressed with hundreds of lanterns, pennants, and stalls for the guests.

Nearly all of Jorge's companions from San Gabriel's School were invited. At Julian's suggestion, Jorge included Fumero, the school caretaker's son. Miquel warned that the boy would feel out of place amid the display of wealth. Fumero himself anticipated the discomfort and meant to decline, but his mother, Yvonne, saw the invitation as a chance for the family to rise socially. She spent savings taken from her husband's pay on a sailor suit for her son and went with him to the mansion.

The invitation had been left on Yvonne's sewing table while the suit was being altered. Unable to produce it when the servants asked to see it, Fumero tried to explain, but stammered; the servants' laughter compounded the misunderstanding. They ordered mother and son to leave, and when Yvonne protested that they did not know who they were dealing with, the servants answered that the position of floor cleaner had already been filled. The scene made the party's social boundaries brutally explicit: Yvonne had treated the invitation as a promise of acceptance, while the household treated her as an intruder.

The secret witnessed

From her bedroom window, Jacinta Coronado watched Fumero turn to leave. As his mother shouted at the servants, he caught sight of Julian and Penelope kissing beside the large library window. They were absorbed in one another and unaware that anyone was watching. The vision placed the couple's concealed relationship before Fumero at the same moment that he and his mother were being expelled from the house.

The next day, at the midday break, Fumero appeared unexpectedly at school carrying his father's gun. His classmates already knew about the previous day's scene and greeted him with laughter and questions about the sailor suit. Their mockery stopped when they saw the weapon; the boys moved away, while Jorge, Miquel, Fernando Ramos, and Julian turned to stare, not understanding what Fumero intended.

The shooting and Miquel's intervention

Fumero gave no warning. He raised the rifle and aimed. Witnesses later recalled that his expression showed neither irritation nor anger: he handled the attack with the same automatic composure with which he carried out his garden-cleaning duties. The first bullet passed close to Julian's head. The second would have gone through his throat, but Miquel threw himself onto Fumero, punched him, and wrenched the gun away.

Julian watched, astonished and paralyzed. Those present initially assumed Fumero had meant to shoot Jorge in revenge for the humiliation at the party. Only after the Civil Guards took Fumero away, and the caretakers were effectively driven from their home, did Miquel tell Julian that he had saved his life. He said so without pride, but his intervention had changed the meaning of the attack: Julian, not Jorge, had been Fumero's target.

Consequences and significance

The shooting occurred in the last year Julian and his companions spent at San Gabriel's. Their futures were already taking shape: Jorge expected to be sent to study in England, Miquel assumed he would attend Barcelona University, and Fernando had considered entering the seminary of the Society of Jesus. Fumero's immediate future was decided through Don Ricardo's intervention: he was sent to a reformatory school in a remote Pyrenean valley, where a long winter awaited him.

The episode binds together two humiliations that the boys initially mistake for one. Fumero's exclusion from the Aldayas' wealthy world is public and comic to the schoolboys; his glimpse of Julian and Penelope's intimacy is private but becomes the direct prelude to violence. Miquel's rescue interrupts that violence, while Fumero's removal and the caretakers' expulsion mark the consequences of the attack beyond the schoolyard. For Julian, the day makes visible how precarious the future he imagines with Penelope has become: their secret has been seen by someone whose next action is to aim a gun at him.