Francisco Javier Vemero y Julian Caracol

Francisco Javier Fumero and Julián Carax are bound by a conflict that outlasts their youth and becomes a defining pursuit in Fumero’s life. Fumero remembers Carax as the one person he had resolved to kill but failed to reach; years later, he uses Jorge Aldaya’s resentment and the history of Penélope to try to lure Carax back to Barcelona. The pursuit ends not with a confirmed confrontation between the two men, but with Carax’s identity erased from official records after Miquel Moliner dies under his name.

Early Conflict and Fumero’s Fixation

Fumero’s connection to Carax begins in their youth at San Gabriel’s school, where Fumero was known as a shy, troubled boy. By the time Jorge Aldaya returns to Barcelona, Fumero has passed through reformatories and state prisons, served in the army, and been expelled after a scandal. His reputation has grown beyond his rank: he is feared and rumored to kill for money. In this account of his rise, Carax stands out as the one person Fumero failed to kill after deciding to do so.

The renewed mention of Carax visibly changes Fumero’s attention. He recalls Carax kissing Penélope Aldaya in the mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo and claims Penélope as the love of his life. His attachment is framed through the romantic ideals he has absorbed from films, which he attends at least twice a week. That remembered kiss gives his pursuit a personal grievance alongside his violence: Carax is not simply a fugitive he has failed to capture, but the man Fumero believes took the woman he loved.

Jorge Aldaya as a Route to Carax

When Aldaya returns from Buenos Aires after losing his reputation and possessions, he blames Carax for his ruin. Fumero encounters him at the Novedades cafe and listens while Aldaya recounts the history between them. In March 1932, after Aldaya has begun to recover from an illness, he asks Fumero’s forgiveness for his conduct at school and tells him the whole story. Fumero considers killing him, but postpones the idea because Aldaya’s account interests him, especially where it concerns Carax.

Fumero already knows from information obtained at the publishing house that Carax lives in Paris, but he lacks an address. He believes that a woman named Monfort knows it and has followed her from work, including to her home in Plaza de San Felipe Neri, without obtaining the information. Aldaya’s confession offers a more useful opening. Fumero decides not to kill him; instead, he sees a chance to use Aldaya to bring the people connected to Carax within reach. He imagines them all eventually caught in his web.

The Planned Duel and Return

Fumero tells Aldaya that Carax is to marry in three days and presents the plan as something Aldaya, acting as a civilian, can undertake without involving the police. He instructs Aldaya to challenge Carax to a duel on the wedding day and gives him a weapon. The Paris police report later describes it as faulty and incapable of doing more than exploding in Aldaya’s hands. Fumero knows this when he hands it over at the platform of Estacion de Francia: whatever Aldaya’s intentions, the weapon makes Aldaya, not Carax, the likely victim.

The weapon is only part of the design. Fumero coaches Aldaya to tell Carax that Penélope’s old letter—announcing her marriage and asking Carax to forget her—was false. According to the planned revelation, Aldaya had forced his sister to write it while she protested her love for Carax, and she had been waiting for him ever since. Fumero expects this information to make Carax abandon his wedding plans and return to Barcelona in search of Penélope. Once there, Carax would enter the territory Fumero had prepared for him. The plot thus turns a concealed past and a love story into instruments of pursuit.

The False Death and Its Consequences

The plan’s wider context is the return of Carax to Barcelona, where Fumero hopes to find and kill him. But the identity that reaches the authorities is not Carax’s living identity. After Miquel Moliner is killed, his disfigured passport in Carax’s name and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind lead the police to conclude that the dead man is Carax. Fumero goes to the morgue, recognizes Miquel, and nevertheless signs the forensic report confirming the false identification. He orders the body removed to a common grave in Montjuic.

That decision gives Fumero an alibi and removes Carax from official existence. With the state recording Miquel as Carax, there is no official link between Fumero and the man he still hopes to find and kill; wartime circumstances make further inquiry unlikely. The pursuit therefore produces a paradoxical result: Carax remains alive, but is publicly rendered dead and nameless. Their relationship is shaped less by a final face-to-face encounter than by Fumero’s capacity to manipulate others and by the bureaucratic disappearance that makes his intended victim a shadow.