Fermín's breakdown and torture scars mark the moment when his apparently miraculous return to respectable life is interrupted by the visible consequences of political violence. A midnight emergency at his boarding house reveals that the capable bookseller is still carrying a past his companions cannot yet fully know; after the crisis, the doctor identifies his scars as burns inflicted with a soldering iron. The episode joins private care to the novel’s wider concern with the injuries and silences left by war.

Causes and Background

Several months after Fermín began working at the bookshop, his landlady telephoned the Sempere household at two o’clock on a Sunday morning. She reported that he had shut himself in his room, was shouting and striking the walls, and had threatened to harm himself if anyone entered. His threat made the situation urgent, while the landlady’s request that they not call the police shaped the immediate response: Daniel’s father promised that they would come at once.

The emergency interrupts a period in which Fermín had seemed to transform himself. He had become an energetic bookseller, hunting down requested volumes, organizing stock, and polishing the shop. That visible competence had not erased the vulnerability signaled by his sudden crisis. The contrast makes the episode a reversal of the apparent recovery: the man who had made himself useful and dependable is revealed as someone still living with severe, unspoken harm.

The Night at the Pension

Daniel and his father hurried to the boarding house on Calle Joaquin Costa in the Raval. Inside, they heard Fermín’s cries from the end of a dark corridor, while other residents watched anxiously from their rooms. Daniel’s father approached Fermín’s door and called to him, but the sounds from within made clear that they could not settle the crisis through conversation alone.

When they returned to the pension, they found Fermín naked, crying and shaking, and the room in disarray. Daniel’s father held him while Dr Baro assessed him. The doctor checked his pulse and pupils, then prepared an injection and asked the others to hold Fermín still so that he could administer it. Daniel helped; after the injection, Fermín’s agitation subsided and he fell asleep. The episode is presented through the bewildered reactions of the people trying to help him: they can respond to the immediate danger, but they do not yet know its cause.

What the Scars Reveal

While Fermín slept, Dr Baro examined the scars covering his emaciated body. Daniel asked whether they came from cuts. The doctor corrected that assumption: they were burns, and the marks had been made with a soldering iron. His finding turns a frightening but initially unexplained breakdown into evidence that Fermín had been tortured. The scene does not supply a detailed account of the torture; its disclosure is confined to the doctor’s identification of the injuries and the response of those present.

That restraint gives the scars their narrative weight. They are not merely signs of past suffering but physical evidence of a history that Fermín has not explained to Daniel in this episode. His breakdown brings that history into the room before he can narrate it himself. The gap between what his companions see and what they understand anticipates the book’s broader treatment of traumatic experience as something that can persist in silence and return unexpectedly.

Recovery and Aftermath

Fermín slept for two days. When he awoke, he remembered nothing of the episode and believed only that he had woken in a dark cell. The confusion connects his present surroundings with the fear associated with confinement, without establishing that he consciously recalled the events behind his scars. Ashamed of what had happened, he went on his knees to ask the landlady’s forgiveness. He offered to paint the pension and, knowing of her devotion, promised to arrange ten masses at the Church of Belén.

His apology meets a practical, compassionate response. The landlady tells him to recover and not frighten her again; Daniel’s father pays for the damage and asks her to give Fermín another chance. She agrees, and her affection for him grows after the fright has passed. She also makes him promise to take the tablets Dr Baro prescribed. The ending therefore restores Fermín to the fragile community of the pension, not by explaining or erasing his past, but through accommodation, medical care, and a renewed place among people who are themselves poor and alone.

Narrative Significance

The episode is a small-scale encounter with the novel’s larger pattern of delayed disclosure. Elsewhere, Daniel’s father recalls that Daniel’s mother made him promise never to speak to their son about the war or let him remember what had happened. In a later account of the war, the narration describes how silence can make what people witnessed seem like an illusion, and how the truth may remain untold until those able to speak are gone. Fermín’s crisis gives this historical silence a bodily counterpart: those around him see the marks, but the episode offers no full testimony from him about their origin.

The event also establishes a form of witnessing grounded in care rather than interrogation. Daniel, his father, the doctor, and the landlady each respond to what is immediately before them: they summon help, keep Fermín safe, treat his injuries, and allow him to stay. The scars disclose the cost of violence, while the aftermath shows the limits and importance of ordinary support. Later, in a letter to Daniel, Nuria Monfort asks him to remember her and not let her go; her appeal echoes the novel’s concern that people and their histories remain vulnerable to disappearance when no one carries their stories forward.