Few things are more deceptive than memories

“Few things are more deceptive than memories” names a central tension in the novel: recollection can preserve a person, but it can also blur, distort, or conceal the past. Spoken by Fermín Romero de Torres during a conversation about family and Daniel Sempere’s mother, the phrase resonates beyond that intimate exchange, returning in the account of wartime silence and in Nuria Monfort’s final appeal to be remembered.

The Saying in Conversation

The phrase appears when Fermín reflects on family and turns the conversation toward Daniel’s mother. Daniel answers that he misses her; Fermín then recalls his own mother through a specific impression of her, while acknowledging that memory can be deceptive. The exchange sets two forms of remembrance beside each other: Daniel’s grief for someone he has lost and Fermín’s vivid but subjective portrait of someone whose life he recalls through personal details.

The saying does not dismiss memory as worthless. Rather, it cautions against treating recollection as a transparent account of the past. Fermín’s own memory is emotionally compelling, yet the conversation presents it as a remembered impression, not an objective measure of the person he describes.

Family Silence and Inherited Memory

The expression also speaks to the way family history is shaped by what remains unspoken. Daniel’s father tells him that, before her death, Daniel’s mother made him promise not to speak to Daniel about the war or allow him to remember what had happened. He admits that he sometimes thinks he was wrong to keep that promise. In this family, the past is not simply forgotten: it is deliberately withheld, leaving Daniel with an incomplete relation to events that preceded or shaped his life.

That withheld history makes memory a matter of transmission as well as private recollection. The father’s uncertainty shows the cost of protecting Daniel through silence, while the mother’s promise establishes how one generation can determine what another is allowed to know. The saying therefore carries an uneasy implication: memories may mislead, but the absence of testimony can mislead too.

War, Silence, and Testimony

Nuria’s account expands the phrase’s significance from family memory to collective experience. She describes war as nourishing forgetfulness: survivors fall silent, and what people witnessed or learned about themselves and others is treated as though it were an illusion. Her warning that wars have no memory describes a social process in which testimony fades until there are no voices left to explain what happened.

The account connects that silence to the aftermath of Barcelona’s fall. In Nuria’s recollection, the transition to peace does not restore open speech; it leaves a climate of secrecy and shame. The distinction between personal memory and public record becomes consequential: when survivors cannot or will not speak, later generations may inherit not a coherent history but fragments, rumors, and absences.

Remembering as an Act of Preservation

Nuria’s final appeal turns memory from a doubtful record into an act of care. Writing to Daniel, she asks him to remember her, even if only privately, and invokes the belief that people remain alive as long as they are remembered. Her pages are meant to reach him through her father if she can no longer say goodbye herself. The account thus presents writing as a means of carrying testimony across distance and anticipated loss.

The phrase’s force lies in this double view. Memory is vulnerable to distortion, secrecy, and forgetting, yet remembrance can also resist disappearance. Fermín’s caution, Daniel’s family’s silence, and Nuria’s written appeal together make remembering neither a guarantee of truth nor a futile gesture: it is an imperfect, necessary way of keeping the past—and the people bound to it—from vanishing altogether.