Civil Guard

The Civil Guard is a state force whose presence in the novel reaches from family expectations into the machinery of political intimidation. It is first evoked as a respectable career that a father demanded of his son, then appears in the widow’s household and in the police authority claimed by Francisco Javier Fumero. Through Fermín Romero de Torres’s account of persecution and torture, the force’s association with authority becomes part of a wider portrait of violence that survives political change.

Family Expectation and Public Authority

Fermín recounts that his father wanted one of his children to join the Civil Guard. Since none of his seven sisters could fulfill that wish, his father made Fermín promise on his deathbed that, if he could not wear the force’s three-cornered hat, he would at least become a civil servant and give up his literary ambitions. Fermín presents the promise as an old-fashioned obligation to a father, even one he considers lacking in judgment. The episode places the Civil Guard within an intimate family story: it represents the career and status his father valued, in opposition to the poetry and classical literature Fermín says had once called to him.

The Force in Everyday Life

The force is also present in the ordinary social world around the bookshop. When Daniel and his father go to the pension where Fermín is staying, they are met by Doña Encarna, the landlady and widow of a Civil Guard corporal. Her connection to the institution is part of her household identity, not an account of her own service. Elsewhere, Fumero invokes his position as a police inspector to threaten Daniel and his father, using the prospect of trouble over books as a means of silencing them. The force’s authority thus enters daily life through both personal association and the threat of official power.

Fermín's Persecution and Fumero's Violence

After Barcelona falls during the war, Fermín says he is treated as a criminal by the victorious authorities. He describes Fumero as already in charge of the purge, which involved shootings in the streets and at Montjuïc Castle. Fermín is arrested at the port while trying to secure passage to France for some of his superiors, then taken to the castle and held in a dark cell. There, Fumero and a German-speaking accomplice torture him in an effort to make him disclose where his superiors are hiding. Fermín eventually gives them names and other identifying details; his account makes clear that he does so under duress, not as a willing collaborator.

The consequences continue after his release. Fermín says he is abandoned, injured and without clothing in an alley in Pueblo Seco, where a woman takes him in and cares for him for two months. Later, Daniel and his father encounter the lasting effects of that violence. A doctor identifies Fermín’s scars as burns inflicted with a soldering iron and confirms that he has been tortured. His experience links the state purge to the vulnerable, precarious life in which Daniel first finds him.

Political Continuity and Narrative Significance

Fumero’s later threats make clear that Fermín’s account is not merely a record of past violence. At the Hospice of Santa Lucia, Fumero refers to subjecting him to another session with a welding torch, threatening both Fermín and the young Daniel accompanying him. In a separate confrontation, Fumero threatens Nuria Monfort while searching for Julian Carax, extending intimidation to people connected with the past he is trying to control. These episodes do not establish that every act is carried out by the Civil Guard as an institution; rather, they show Fumero wielding police power and personal violence within the novel’s repressive political order.

The Civil Guard consequently has a divided significance. In Fermín’s family history, it is the conventional public career his father held up as an alternative to literature. In the surrounding political narrative, state and police authority become means of surveillance, threat, and persecution. That contrast connects private obedience to public coercion, while Fermín’s survival and eventual care by others reveal the human cost concealed beneath official power.