Spanish Civil War (39bc2e1c)

The Spanish Civil War is the decisive historical rupture behind the novel’s private mysteries and public silences. In Barcelona, the conflict brings political violence into family life, displaces people across borders, and leaves survivors to reconstruct what happened from letters, memories, and official records that may have been manipulated. Its ending does not restore ordinary life: the aftermath extends the war’s damage through poverty, fear, and a collective refusal to speak.

Background and the City at War

The conflict enters the narrative first through the histories of families who understood that danger was approaching. Clara Barceló recalls that her father, a lawyer connected to the Catalan president’s cabinet, sent his wife and daughter across the border early in the war. He had read the political climate more clearly than those who assumed that violence could not reach Barcelona. From his office, and later from a cell in Montjuïc Castle, he wrote to them every week. The letters became a narrow channel of contact with a man who would not return: he was killed in the castle’s moat, and the family eventually learned that Javier Fumero was responsible.

Clara’s account makes the war’s history legible through the loss and handling of documents. Her mother read the letters aloud, leaving out passages that Clara could sense were painful; later, Clara asked her cousin to read the complete letters to her. When the letters stopped, the family had no direct explanation for her father’s fate. After returning to Barcelona, Clara’s mother hired a detective, whose investigation recovered a broken wristwatch and the name of the killer, but could not undo the years of uncertainty. Clara’s father became one of the many people whose disappearance and death were obscured by the city’s political violence.

The war also alters Daniel Sempere’s childhood through a silence imposed at home. His mother died of cholera shortly after the Civil War, and Daniel’s father later tells him that she had made him promise never to discuss the war or let Daniel remember what had happened. Daniel grows up with the effects of loss but without its historical context. His father’s uncertainty about whether he was right to honor the promise shows how family silence can protect a child while also withholding the knowledge needed to understand the past.

The Opening of the Conflict

The first days of fighting in Barcelona are recounted through Miquel Moliner’s memories. As the atmosphere of fear deepened, Miquel was already ill and increasingly unable to work. News of the uprising in Morocco reached the city by radio; soon afterward, a colleague reported that an editor had been killed near the Canaletas café. When General Goded’s troops moved along the Diagonal and Paseo de Gracia toward the center, gunfire began on a Sunday when many residents had expected an ordinary outing beyond the city.

The immediate struggle ended when Goded’s troops surrendered, but control of the city did not settle into a simple restoration of order. Barcelona passed into the hands of anarchist unions, and rumors spread that four rebel generals had been executed at Montjuïc. One account, relayed by a British journalist who was present, described a firing squad joined at the last moment by militiamen. The episode conveys the speed with which military conflict gave way to unstable, competing forms of authority, as well as the difficulty of separating witnessed fact from rumor in a city transformed by violence.

Julián Carax’s return to Barcelona intersects with this upheaval. He had crossed the French border shortly before the war began, after killing Jorge Aldaya in a duel at Père Lachaise cemetery. An anonymous caller alerted the police, forcing Julián to flee Paris, and his friends feared that his return would expose him not only to Fumero but also to the truth about Penélope Aldaya. The war therefore forms the setting for a personal crisis already shaped by concealment: those who care for Julián decide to withhold what they believe he cannot bear to learn.

Violence, Records, and Uncertain Identity

The war’s disruption of public institutions becomes especially clear in the account of the body officially identified as Julián’s. In September 1936, a body arrived at the morgue with a book and a passport naming the dead man as Julián Fortuny Carax, born in Barcelona in 1900. The passport bore a border stamp showing that he had entered Spain about a month earlier. A gunshot wound was recorded as the apparent cause of death, and Antoni Fortuny came to identify the body.

The morgue attendant’s recollection complicates that official account. A third policeman, who had entered without explanation, later approached the body, spat on its face, kept the passport, and ordered it sent to Montjuïc for burial in a common grave. When the attendant objected that the body had not been properly identified, the policeman asserted that the dead man was whoever he said he was, then signed the registration form. The same signature later appeared on numerous certificates for unidentified bodies. The scene reveals how official paperwork could create a fixed identity while concealing the circumstances of death; the record does not simply preserve history but can be used to close off inquiry.

This fabricated certainty also clarifies the broader pattern surrounding Fumero. Clara’s family history identifies him as her father’s killer, while the morgue testimony connects him to the false registration of Julián’s supposed death. In each case, a document or an absence of documentation shapes what survivors can establish. The war’s confusion makes such interventions possible, and the authority that follows can keep the consequences in place long after the immediate fighting.

The Aftermath and the Work of Memory

The final phase of the war arrives in Barcelona after years of distant combat, hunger, skirmishes, and bombardments. Many residents had treated the conflict as a storm that might pass them by; the wait only made its eventual arrival more devastating. The narration describes the postwar settlement not as a clean break but as a silence that pressures survivors to doubt what they saw, did, and learned. Once the weapons stop, violence continues in less visible forms, and the weeks after Barcelona’s fall bring further bloodshed.

That aftermath reaches into daily life. By 1945, only six years after the Civil War ended, its wounds remain present even though few people speak of it openly. The Second World War has displaced it in public conversation, while poverty and deprivation continue around the city. For Nuria Monfort and Julián, the end of combat does not bring security: they live in poverty, and Nuria’s search for work is obstructed by suspicion about her past association with Cabestany. Their neighbors believe that she is caring for her invalid husband, Miquel, a protective fiction that helps them survive but also makes concealment part of ordinary life.

The novel presents this silence as a mechanism through which the past can recur. Nuria warns Daniel that war nourishes forgetting: survivors are encouraged to treat what they witnessed as an illusion, and the conflict returns in altered forms when no voices remain to explain it. Her warning links private testimony to public memory. Daniel’s eventual access to her manuscript depends on the preservation and transfer of a personal account that official histories and family reticence have not supplied. The story thus sets the wartime loss of voices against the fragile persistence of written testimony.

Narrative Significance

The Civil War’s role in the novel is temporal as well as political: it divides remembered life from the postwar world and determines which histories can be told, by whom, and when. Daniel’s father’s promise keeps the war outside his childhood understanding; Clara’s letters preserve a family’s evidence of loss; the morgue record demonstrates how an official account can be deliberately falsified; and Nuria’s memoir carries knowledge forward to a later reader. These different forms of remembering do not produce a single, effortless truth. They show how the truth survives in fragments that must be compared and entrusted to others.

The war’s city is also a changing physical world. Barcelona’s avenues and public spaces are marked by troop movements, street fighting, executions, and the dangers of returning after exile. Years later, the city’s ordinary routines coexist with private bereavement and public evasion. In this structure, the conflict is not background that disappears when the fighting ends: it is the source of unresolved identities, guarded family histories, and the need for later generations to listen. The narrative’s answer to collective forgetting is not to claim that memory is complete, but to preserve testimony before the people who carry it are gone.