Francisco Javier Fumero

Francisco Javier Fumero is a police chief inspector who uses the authority of his office to threaten, punish, and suppress inquiry. His appearances connect the everyday coercion directed at Daniel Sempere and his father with the broader pattern of police violence and enforced silence surrounding the missing and the dead in Barcelona.

Identity and Introduction

Fumero identifies himself through a grimy police credential that Daniel recognizes on the shop counter. The photograph shows a somewhat younger man, and the card gives his rank and full name: Chief Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero. The official document settles the question of his authority, but what follows makes clear that he wields that authority less as a public duty than as a personal threat.

His manner is marked by an affected laugh and a taste for domination. In confronting Daniel’s father, he begins by invoking the people who visit the shop, using homophobic abuse to cast the watchmaker as disreputable and to make his association with the bookshop sound dangerous. His language turns prejudice into an accusation before any wrongdoing has been established.

Threats at the Bookshop

When Daniel’s father asks what business Fumero has in the matter, Fumero answers by displaying his police identification. He then warns that the father and son could face serious trouble for selling communist material. Daniel wants to reply, but fear leaves him unable to speak. The encounter makes the badge itself part of the intimidation: Fumero can threaten the family not merely with insult, but with the coercive reach of the police.

Fumero presents his visit as a friendly warning, claiming that anyone who takes in an undesirable person risks getting burned. When Daniel’s father begins to answer, the inspector abruptly escalates from feigned civility to a direct threat of beating and imprisonment. He gives the family an ultimatum—choose his side or be treated as an enemy—and declares that their silence has already placed them on the losing side. Daniel does not answer. Fumero accepts that silence with a giggle, then leaves the responsibility for the consequences with the shopkeeper.

His assertion that life requires people to take sides recasts coercion as a simple test of loyalty. The contrast between his claimed good mood and the violence he says he could inflict exposes the warning as a demonstration of power, not a genuine offer of protection. The scene also establishes that Fumero’s attention to the bookshop is bound up with its association with people he has already marked as undesirable.

Violence Against Don Federico

Fumero’s reputation is also tied to the arrest of Don Federico, the watchmaker. After Don Federico strikes him with a well-aimed bottle, two officers take the watchmaker to the police station on Via Layetana. The account suggests that, under different circumstances, the incident might have ended in jokes, slaps, and minor humiliations. Instead, Fumero is on duty, and the arrest becomes a pretext for a more serious punishment.

The narrator recounting the episode says that Fumero had been drinking heavily and that the mother of one of the missing boys, along with Pepet Guardiola, brought the incident to his attention. Fumero then treats what he calls the watchmaker’s homosexuality as grounds for a lesson. His intervention makes the distinction between arrest and abuse dangerously thin: the police station is not simply where Don Federico is taken, but where Fumero’s prejudice can be enforced under official cover.

Suppression of Inquiry

Fumero’s power reaches beyond the shop and the station into the investigation of Julián Carax’s disappearance. After learning that Carax had returned to Barcelona and died, a friend sought answers during the first months of the war, when many people were vanishing without trace and nameless graves were common. With help from the ailing Señor Cabestany, he filed a complaint with the police and pursued whatever connections he could.

The only result was a visit from a young inspector whom the witness remembers as arrogant and sinister: Fumero. Instead of providing information, he advised the questioner to stop asking and to adopt a more positive attitude because the country was engaged in a crusade. The investigator therefore receives no clarification about Carax; he receives a warning dressed in patriotic language. Fumero’s appearance links the unresolved death to the climate of wartime disappearance and to the institutional pressure that discourages anyone from naming what has happened.

Across these encounters, Fumero’s defining method is to make inquiry and association feel punishable before any charge is tested. He threatens a family over its customers, turns Don Federico’s arrest into an occasion for persecution, and discourages questions about Carax. The result is a portrait of police authority experienced as arbitrary personal force—and of silence not as an absence of knowledge, but as something actively imposed.