Barcelona Central Police Headquarters

Barcelona Central Police Headquarters is the city’s official police authority, but its power in the novel is inseparable from the conduct of Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero. Through threats, political persecution, and the manipulation of death records, the institution’s public procedures become instruments for concealing violence and controlling what can be known about the past.

Institutional Presence and Public Authority

The institution appears both as a recognizable civic authority and as a source of personal danger. When Fumero visits the Sempere bookshop, he establishes his authority by displaying police identification that names him Chief Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero. He then threatens Daniel Sempere and his father over alleged communist material and demands that they treat him with respect. The encounter makes clear that his badge is not merely a credential: it lends institutional force to intimidation in an ordinary place of business.

The novel also invokes the headquarters through its public statements. After Nuria Monfort Masdedeu is murdered, a newspaper report attributes an account of the crime to Central Police Headquarters. It presents the accused man as a dangerous fugitive with a history of mental illness and says that police are investigating whether he knew the victim and what motive he may have had. The report supplies an official version before the full circumstances are known, showing how the institution shapes public understanding through the information it releases.

Fumero’s Use of Police Power

Fumero’s conduct connects the headquarters to political repression across periods of conflict and supposed peace. He threatens to take a man to headquarters and subject him to another session of torture, using the prospect of institutional custody to pressure him into answering questions. In his account of the wartime purge, Fermín Romero de Torres describes Fumero directing a cleanup operation after Barcelona fell. Fermín says that he was detained while trying to arrange passage to France for his superiors, held at Montjuïc, and tortured by Fumero and a German-speaking accomplice for information. The assault left lasting scars, while the account also records that Fermín eventually disclosed information under torture and was abandoned in an alley.

The threat does not end with formal detention. Fumero later warns Nuria that he intends to find and kill both her and the man she is protecting, tying his pursuit of Julian Carax to a threat against her life. His words present police power as something that can reach beyond a station or interrogation room and into private relationships. The institution’s authority is therefore felt not only through arrests but through the fear that its senior officer can impose on people who conceal information or resist him.

Records, Identification, and Concealment

The morgue investigation exposes how official paperwork can be made to ratify a false identity. Records describe a body brought in during September 1936 as Julian Fortuny Carax, identified through a passport and carrying a book. The passport indicated that Carax had returned to Spain about a month earlier; the recorded cause of death was a gunshot wound. Don Manuel, who was on duty, remembered that the circumstances did not fit the regulations: the body had reportedly been found in the Raval shortly before dawn, and he believed it had already been dead for at least a day.

Don Manuel’s recollection reveals the decisive intervention. A third policeman threatened him when he questioned whether the body could be identified and buried without proper confirmation. The officer declared that the deceased was whoever he said he was, signed the registration form, and ordered burial in a common grave at Montjuïc. Don Manuel later encountered the same signature on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies. The episode shows how an administrative record can turn an assertion backed by force into an official identity, while the ordinary rules meant to establish who has died are silenced.

The same mechanism shapes the later fate of Miquel Moliner. After Miquel is killed, his body is left in the Raval and reaches the morgue with papers that identify the deceased as Julian Carax, along with a copy of Carax’s novel. Miquel had left his own papers at home. Fumero recognizes him, nevertheless signs the forensic report confirming that the body is Carax, and orders its removal to a common grave at Montjuïc. The false identification is not a clerical mistake: it repeats the earlier substitution and makes the state record serve Fumero’s purpose.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The headquarters’ power depends on both violence and the production of official accounts. Public police statements frame a suspect; threats discourage questioning; and signatures transform contested identities into accepted records. Against these official versions, the novel places testimony, memory, and surviving documents: Don Manuel’s recollection challenges the morgue’s paperwork, while Daniel’s investigation assembles evidence that the records cannot explain on their own.

This contrast gives the institution a significance beyond its formal role in law enforcement. Its procedures might ordinarily be expected to identify the dead and preserve reliable information, but under Fumero they can conceal a killing, erase a person’s identity, and consign a body to an unmarked grave. The headquarters thus becomes a central expression of the novel’s account of political fear and collective forgetting: the state’s archive does not simply preserve history when those who control it can dictate what the record says.