Tang Anaklito Ormo

Don Anacleto Olmo is a secondary-school teacher and a learned, theatrical presence in the neighborhood around the Sempere bookshop. His public role as an unofficial spokesman for the Royal Academy of Language is inseparable from his taste for grand rhetoric: when Don Federico is arrested and returned in a brutalized state, Anacleto narrates the incident as both a personal calamity and evidence of a wider, recurring social cruelty.

Identity and Background

Anacleto lives in the same block as the bookshop and shares a first-floor apartment with seven cats. He teaches Spanish literature and other humanities at a secondary school. Alongside teaching, he writes promotional copy for a prestigious publishing firm; people also speculate that he publishes erotic verse under the alias Humberto Peacock. His cultural credentials give him a recognizable place in neighborhood life, but it is his manner of speech that makes him memorable.

Among friends, Anacleto is unassuming and genial. In public, he believes he must perform the part of a declamatory poet. His ornate, affected prose has earned him the nickname “the Victorian.” The contrast between the amiable neighbor and the grandiloquent public speaker is part of his characterization: his eloquence is at once comic performance and a way of giving communal alarm a formal voice.

The Arrest of Don Federico

An uproar in the street interrupts the bookshop’s ordinary activity. Shopkeepers pass by in visible discomfort, swearing under their breath, and Anacleto soon arrives carrying an ivory cane. He is distressed and struggling to keep his composure. When asked what has happened, he gathers himself and unfolds his account with the ceremonial gravity expected of his public persona.

He reports that Don Federico Flavia i Pujades, a beloved neighbor and watchmaker whose premises are only three doors from the bookshop, was arrested by the State Police during the small hours of the previous night. Anacleto’s speech places the arrest against the city’s peaceful sleep, making the contrast between domestic security and state action central to his account. The news immediately unsettles the listeners; Daniel’s father is present, and Merceditas reacts with alarm.

Anacleto’s narration does not leave the arrest as an unresolved report. Later that morning, a grey police van deposits Don Federico at his own doorstep. He is in a badly abused and disheveled condition, has lost his wig and collection of costume jewelry, and is found by the baker’s son huddled in the doorway, shaking and crying. Anacleto’s theatrical invitation to imagine the scene gives way to the plain consequence: a neighbor who had been taken away by the police has returned visibly traumatized.

Public Violence and Private Sympathy

The bookshop’s response is marked by grief and care. A heavy silence follows the account; Merceditas sobs, and Fermín tries to comfort her, though she moves away from him. Later, she defends Don Federico as kind and unobtrusive, objecting to the mistreatment of someone whose harmless public self-expression had made him a target. Her response gives the incident a human measure beyond Anacleto’s formal denunciation: the victim is not an abstraction but a familiar neighbor whose ordinary kindness is remembered by those around him.

Anacleto remains after the commotion, but his public flourish falls away. When Merceditas leaves and the shop regains some quiet, he slumps beside Daniel’s father, pale and saddened. His remark that the country has gone to the dogs is met with an attempt at reassurance: Daniel’s father argues that hard times come and pass, and that Don Federico may prove stronger than expected. Their exchange sets individual hope against Anacleto’s deeper fear that the violence is not an isolated low point.

Education, Repetition, and Significance

Anacleto describes savagery as something like a tide: it recedes, allowing people to feel safe, but inevitably returns and overwhelms them. The image connects Don Federico’s arrest and assault to the teacher’s daily experience in the classroom. He complains that he must contend with pupils who seem unable to reason, contrasting them with the few who can. His exasperation is expressed through comic hyperbole, but it also reveals how broadly he perceives the surrounding social crisis: brutality is not confined to the police encounter but appears, to him, in the habits of the next generation as well.

The episode uses Anacleto’s elaborate speech to hold two registers together. His classical, performative eloquence can seem absurd beside the direct evidence of Don Federico’s suffering, yet it also makes the event legible as a public warning rather than a private misfortune. Anacleto’s changing manner—from shaken witness, to ceremonious narrator, to weary neighbor—shows rhetoric trying to contain an experience that his final image refuses to contain. The tide always returns; the comfort offered by Daniel’s father cannot persuade him otherwise.