Spanish National Guard

The Civil Guard functions in the novel as both a public institution and a measure of how far official authority can be bent by violence and personal power. Its officers appear in accounts of Francisco Javier Fumero’s childhood and school years, while later testimony connects the force’s world to political purges, torture, and manipulated identity records. The contrast is stark: procedures are invoked, but they do not reliably protect those subject to them.

Institutional Presence and Fumero’s Childhood

When the Civil Guard responds to the death of Fumero’s mother, Maria Craponcia, the boy is found holding a shotgun near her body. Ramon Oneball is also found nearby, distressed and unable to explain what happened. After deliberation, a lieutenant records the death as a tragic accident. The official account thus closes the matter without resolving the circumstances described in the narrative; the decision is presented as a reportable conclusion, not as a finding that settles the truth.

The force also appears after Fumero tries to shoot Julian Carax at San Gabriel’s school. Miquel Moliner intervenes and disarms him before he can fire again. The Civil Guards take Fumero away, and his family is expelled from the place where they had lived. These actions contain an immediate threat, but they do not end Fumero’s trajectory: he is subsequently sent to a reformatory school, and later becomes a police inspector. The episode places state intervention at the beginning of a life marked by violence without suggesting that intervention reforms him.

From Public Authority to Personal Power

Years later, Fumero’s police authority is encountered directly at the Sempere bookshop. He displays his police identification and uses his position to threaten Daniel and his father over alleged communist material and a customer he stigmatizes. The scene makes official power immediate and domestic: the threat reaches into a family business and turns ordinary commerce into a potential political offense.

Fumero’s authority is also invoked against Fermín. At the Hospice of Santa Lucia, he threatens him with another session of torture and uses the prospect of violence to demand an explanation for his visit. In Fermín’s later account of his arrest during the war, he describes being detained at Montjuic, interrogated about his superiors, and tortured by Fumero and a German-speaking accomplice. The force’s coercive reach in these episodes is not limited to arrest or questioning; it extends into the use of personal terror to compel information.

Records, Identity, and the Limits of Procedure

The novel repeatedly places official records beside testimony that unsettles them. In the account of Julian Carax’s reported death, a morgue employee recalls that the police said the body had been found in the Raval and identified it through a passport as Julian Fortuny Carax. The same witness says a third policeman later took the passport, ordered the body sent to Montjuic for burial in a common grave, and threatened him when he objected that the identification and burial did not follow regulations.

The witness later recognizes the signature on the registration form as Fumero’s and associates it with other death certificates for unidentified bodies. The document is therefore more than a record of one death: within the testimony, it becomes evidence of a repeated practice in which a police official can impose an identity and close a case despite procedural objections. The distinction between the Civil Guard and the later police authority remains important, but the novel links both to a broader world in which official processes can be overridden by men wielding state power.

Narrative Significance

The Civil Guard’s episodes establish an early pattern of authority that names events without necessarily clarifying them. A death is entered as an accident; a school shooting leads to Fumero’s removal but not to a lasting break with violence; later, police records are described as instruments capable of obscuring who has died. Against these official accounts, the novel sets personal recollection, physical documents, and the testimony of people who witnessed or endured the events.

That structure makes institutional power part of the book’s struggle over memory. The Civil Guard is not developed as a detailed portrait of the organization’s internal structure or general policy. Instead, its limited but consequential appearances show how a uniformed institution can confer authority on a judgment—and how that judgment may leave unanswered the very facts it appears to settle.