Insects

Insects are both literal specimens in Francisco Javier Fumero’s apartment and an emblem of the predatory discipline he admires. His fascination with them stands in stark contrast to his contempt for books, including the novels of Julián Carax that he keeps among his possessions.

Collection and Setting

Fumero keeps numerous insects in jars in his gloomy apartment on Calle Cadena in the Raval quarter. The collection shares the cramped space with half a dozen books, among them Carax’s novels, which Fumero detests despite preserving them. The insects are not merely an incidental hobby: they furnish a model through which he interprets order and power.

Fumero’s Insect Ideal

When Jorge Aldaya complains of a fever he blames on mosquitoes encountered in South American jungles, Fumero listens with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Aldaya curses the mosquitoes; Fumero, by contrast, reveres mosquitoes and insects generally. He admires their discipline, fortitude, and organization, and sees them as free of laziness and irreverence. His praise turns the creatures into a rebuke to the human qualities he despises.

Spiders are his favorite. Their patience as they weave a trap and wait for prey makes them, in his view, exemplary hunters: sooner or later, a victim succumbs through stupidity or negligence. Fumero concludes that society has much to learn from insects. The comparison reveals the cold logic behind his admiration: he values not companionship or beauty, but patient control over a prey that cannot escape its own vulnerability.

Contrast and Significance

The jars make Fumero’s worldview tangible. He preserves the creatures he venerates, while his few books—including Carax’s novels—represent a form of human expression he despises. The contrast is especially pointed because his apartment also becomes a place where he shelters Aldaya, whom he regards as physically and morally ruined, while arranging for two prostitutes who live opposite to care for him. Fumero’s insect ideal thus sits beside his capacity to manage other people as objects of use, without making his treatment of them any less coercive or calculating.

Insects recur as more than a private collection: Fumero’s regard for them exposes the predatory order he would impose on human society. The trap becomes an image of his own method, in which patience and power matter more than sympathy, and another person’s weakness is treated as the opening through which control can be secured.