The Femina Cinema is a movie theatre in Barcelona where Daniel Sempere and Fermín Romero de Torres develop a Sunday routine of films, snacks, and company. At first, it offers Fermín a place to belong after a frightening episode in his life; later, an encounter with Laín Coubert makes the auditorium a space of suspense. The cinema’s importance lies in that shift: its ordinary darkness can shelter friendship, but it can also conceal a threat that Daniel recognizes before anyone else does.

Setting and Routine

After Daniel’s father pays for damage caused by Fermín and secures him another chance at his lodging, the family makes a point of not leaving him alone. Almost every Sunday, they take him for a snack at the Novedades Cafe and then walk to the Femina Cinema, at the corner of Calle Diputacion and Paseo de Gracia. A friend of Daniel’s father works as an usher and lets them enter through a ground-floor fire exit during the newsreel. The arrangement turns the cinema into part of a protective routine rather than a place Daniel and his father visit for its own sake.

Daniel’s father prefers to stay home and read, while Fermín becomes a regular moviegoer who rarely misses a double feature. He buys a pile of chocolates and sits in row seventeen, waiting for the star of the film; to him, the plot is secondary. The precise ritual—Sunday screenings, a familiar seat, sweets, and the anticipation of a particular performer—gives the cinema a social life beyond the films themselves. It is where Fermín can settle into a habit and where Daniel accompanies him.

Fermín and the Movies

Fermín initially dismisses cinema as a way of entertaining people without improving them, judging it even less worthwhile than football or bullfights. That scorn does not survive his discovery of Carole Lombard. His sudden enthusiasm is comic in its force, and his conduct in the auditorium becomes part of the group’s shared experience of going to the movies. The theatre thus records a change in Fermín: the declared critic becomes a devoted spectator, though his interest is highly selective.

After Veronica Lake appears in a later screening, Fermín leaves during a reel in which she is absent to replenish his sweets. Daniel stays behind, distracted and alone with his thoughts. The same cinema that has been a place of companionship now gives each man a separate experience: Fermín follows his routine of film and snacks, while Daniel’s attention turns inward and then outward, toward a stranger in the stalls.

Coubert in the Auditorium

Six rows in front of Daniel, a spectator turns to look at him. In the flickering light, Daniel immediately recognizes Laín Coubert, the faceless man. The identification makes the cinema’s darkness threatening: Daniel sees enough to know who is there, but the room’s intermittent light and darkness prevent him from understanding what Coubert will do. When a scene change plunges the hall into darkness, Coubert disappears. Daniel’s fear is visible to Fermín, who returns from the foyer and asks whether he is all right, handing him a chocolate praline.

The encounter is brief, but it changes the meaning of the cinema for Daniel. The auditorium is no longer only the setting of a weekly outing or Fermín’s enthusiasm for movie stars; it becomes one of the places where Coubert can appear and vanish among ordinary spectators. The threat is not resolved there. Instead, the episode makes the cinema’s familiar darkness part of the suspense surrounding Daniel’s pursuit of the mystery.

Narrative Significance

The Femina Cinema connects two strands of the story without making them equivalent. Its Sunday visits show Daniel and his father extending care to Fermín through repeated, modest acts of companionship. The later encounter with Coubert interrupts that everyday pattern, placing Daniel’s private danger inside a public leisure space. The cinema’s double function—routine and concealment—comes from the same setting: a dark room shared by many people, where one can watch the screen or be watched from the rows ahead.

The theatre is not merely a backdrop for film references. Its recurring use gives Fermín’s transformation and friendship with Daniel a concrete location, while the Coubert scene uses the conditions of a screening—flickering light, a sudden blackout, and spectators facing the screen—to make recognition uncertain and fear immediate. Within the novel’s Barcelona, the Femina Cinema is consequently both a refuge from isolation and a place where the danger surrounding Daniel briefly enters the open.