Fumero Persecutes Nuria and Ransacks Her Home

Fumero Persecutes Nuria and Ransacks Her Home is a turning point in Nuria’s relationship with Julian and in her struggle against the police. Summoned to answer questions about publisher Pedro Sanmartí’s death, she is threatened by Fumero, held for six hours, and released to find her home in ruins. The assault is not only an attempt to intimidate her: it destroys objects associated with Miquel and Julian and helps drive Nuria to the apartment where she has been sheltering Julian, only to discover that he is gone.

The Interrogation

After Nuria returns home, the police take her to headquarters to question her about Sanmartí’s death. She waits five hours in a dark office before Fumero arrives, dressed in black, and offers her a cigarette. The seemingly ordinary gesture gives way to an abrupt assault: he knocks her from her chair, then threatens to find Julian and kill them both. His threat makes clear that the questioning is also an effort to reach Julian through Nuria.

Fumero invokes another woman’s death to sharpen the threat, telling Nuria that he will make Julian understand that the woman he sent to her grave was his sister. The episode therefore brings the concealed family truth into the machinery of intimidation: Fumero intends to use it not simply as information, but as a weapon against Julian. Nuria is left to understand that both her own safety and Julian’s depend on secrets the police are willing to expose or exploit.

Detention and Destruction

After the threat, Fumero leaves Nuria in the interrogation room for six hours without water. When she is released at night, she returns to an apartment that his men have searched. Furniture has fallen, drawers and bookshelves have been emptied across the floor, her clothes have been torn, and Miquel’s books have been destroyed. The violation extends from Nuria’s body and privacy to the material traces of the life she has built with Miquel and the history she has tried to preserve.

The search is marked by a deliberately degrading message left in her bedroom: a pile of excrement on the bed and a word written on the wall. The home is made to carry the threat after the officers have gone. In that sense, the destruction is both practical and symbolic: it disrupts Nuria’s private world and communicates that the police can enter, search, and defile it at will.

The Wider Pattern of Police Violence

The episode echoes Fumero’s earlier violence against people he has sought to control. When Daniel encounters him at the bookshop, Fumero displays his police identification, which identifies him as Chief Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero, and threatens to take Daniel to headquarters and subject him to another interrogation with a welding torch. The menace is not limited to an isolated confrontation; the threat draws on a history of torture that Fumero treats as an instrument of police power.

Fermín later recounts that Fumero had him held in a dark cell at Montjuïc for two days and tortured him alongside a German-speaking accomplice in an effort to extract information about his political associates. Dr Baró, examining Fermín afterward, identifies the marks as burns caused by a soldering iron. These episodes place Nuria’s detention within a wider pattern: interrogation, physical intimidation, and threats against associates are used to force people into silence or disclosure. Her case also shows that coercion continues after release, through surveillance, invasion of the home, and the destruction of personal belongings.

Nuria’s Flight and Julian’s Absence

After leaving the ransacked apartment, Nuria makes her way to the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio where Julian has been staying. She takes a circuitous route to avoid being followed, crosses rain-flooded roof terraces, and enters cautiously. The apartment is locked but empty. She waits through the night in the dark dining room; by morning, she understands that Julian will not return and that she has lost him for good.

The failed search is the immediate consequence of Fumero’s campaign, though the episode does not establish that Julian left because of the raid. Its emotional force lies in the collision between Nuria’s urgent effort to reach him and the silence of the empty apartment. The police have devastated her home, but the deeper loss is relational: after years of protecting Julian and remaining bound to his fate, she can no longer find him.

Significance

Fumero’s persecution operates through a linked sequence of interrogation, threat, detention, and domestic intrusion. The police do not need to keep Nuria in custody to exert control; the ransacked rooms and destroyed books extend their presence into her private life. The material traces of the past—Miquel’s books, Nuria’s clothes, the ordered contents of her home—become vulnerable to the same power that manipulates testimony and pursues Julian.

The episode also contrasts official authority with Nuria’s private loyalties. Fumero invokes the hidden truth about Julian’s sister to threaten him, while Nuria’s response is to seek Julian and wait for him. Her eventual recognition that he will not return closes the scene on separation rather than rescue: the raid leaves her exposed to the police and alone with the consequences of a bond she has struggled to protect.