The murder of Clara's father is both a personal loss and an instance of wartime violence obscured by official power. He was a prominent lawyer with ties to the Catalan president's cabinet; after anticipating danger and sending his wife and daughter across the border, he continued writing to them from secret confinement in Montjuic Castle, where he was killed. Years later, Clara's search for the truth yielded a broken wristwatch and the name of the man responsible, while a separate account of a body identified as Julian Carax exposed how the police could dictate who a dead person was and where he would be buried.

Background and Separation

At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Clara's father sent his wife and daughter out of Spain. Others thought his fear excessive, trusting that violence would not reach Barcelona. He instead read the danger in the streets, factories, and barracks, and understood that a nation could fail to recognize itself when war clouded its judgment. His foresight did not save him: remaining near his friends out of loyalty left him vulnerable to people who would eventually betray him.

For months, he wrote to his wife and daughter once a week. At first the letters came from his office on Calle Diputacion; later they carried no return address. Eventually he wrote secretly from a cell in Montjuic Castle, to which he had been taken without anyone seeing him enter. His correspondence provided a fragile thread between the separated family and the father held beyond their reach. Then the letters stopped.

Clara's Account of the Loss

Clara's mother read the letters aloud, skipping passages her daughter could sense were too painful to hear. Later, when her mother slept, Clara asked her cousin Claudette to read them through from beginning to end. Blind, Clara received her father's words through other people's eyes; the loss was therefore conveyed through a family ritual of reading as well as through silence. She did not cry in front of others, even when the letters ceased and the family's fears deepened.

When Clara recounted the past to Daniel, she described her father's death as the consequence of loyalty to people who betrayed him. Her warning against trusting even those one admires grew out of this history. The statement gives the murder a lasting personal consequence: it becomes the origin of Clara's guardedness, not merely a fact about the war.

The Search and Its Results

After the family returned to Barcelona, Clara's mother found a city changed by the war, with her husband's absence felt throughout it. She hired a detective to establish what had happened. Months of investigation recovered only a broken wristwatch and the name of the man who had killed him in the moat of Montjuic Castle: Javier Fumero. The detective's limited findings left the family with a name and an object, but no fuller account of the killing.

Clara described Fumero as a man who had shifted among political factions and sold his services to whoever paid most. After Barcelona fell, he joined the police and became a decorated inspector. The change from hired gunman to celebrated officer sharpens the disparity between the fate of Clara's father and the authority of his killer. The father disappeared from public memory, while the man Clara named as his murderer acquired an official position and public recognition.

Conflicting Records and False Identification

A later investigation into the supposed death of Julian Carax offers a disturbing parallel. A morgue worker recalled a body brought in during September 1936, said by police to have been found in a Raval alley. It carried a book and a passport identifying the dead man as Julian Fortuny Carax, born in Barcelona in 1900. The passport showed that he had entered the country through La Junquera a month earlier, and the body appeared to have died from a close-range gunshot wound. Carax's father, Antoni Fortuny, was summoned to identify it.

The morgue worker also remembered a third policeman who watched the proceedings, then spat on the body's face, kept the passport, and ordered the corpse sent to Montjuic for burial in a common grave. When the worker protested that the regulations required proper identification before burial, the officer threatened him, declared that the dead man was whoever he said he was, and signed the registration form. The same signature later appeared on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies. This record shows how murder and bureaucratic procedure could converge: an official could close a case not by establishing identity, but by imposing one.

Aftermath and Significance

The later account complicates the apparent certainty of Clara's family history without undoing its central loss. Her father was killed in Montjuic Castle and left behind a broken watch, letters, and a daughter who had to reconstruct his fate from partial testimony. In the Carax case, a passport, a morgue register, and a witness's memory disclose how readily state records could be made to support a false identity and erase the actual circumstances of death.

The murder thus belongs to a larger pattern in which the war's victims are not only killed but also obscured by silence, misidentification, and burial without public recognition. Clara's story preserves what official memory suppresses: her father's foresight, his correspondence, his loyalty, and the name of the man she held responsible. Her testimony turns a fragmentary private archive into a counter-record of the violence that the city and its institutions failed to acknowledge.