The Fountains of Silence: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019

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Chapters 107-116Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 107 Summary

Puri goes to Julia for advice about when to keep a secret and when to tell the truth. Julia guesses that this has to do with Puri’s work at the Inclusa, and tells her to “give [her] best self to those children” (346). She tells Puri that mothers want their children cared for by someone like Puri: “Someone who cares enough to hold their children, to love them, to think of their future” (346). Puri wonders if Julia is hinting that Puri was once one of those children.

Chapter 108 Summary

At breakfast, Daniel is in a very awkward position. His parents are delighted that Laura Beth is there, but Daniel is not. Laura Beth admits that she broke up with Daniel and explains why. His mother is angry, and Laura Beth reveals that she really came to Madrid to get a designer dress for a ball she’s attending. Daniel explains that he’s seeing someone else, and Laura Beth tells him he has lipstick on his ear before telling Daniel’s father that her father will “reimburse [him] for the plane fare” (348).

Chapter 109 Summary

Daniel takes the press pass and goes to the slaughterhouse to take pictures. Rafa then takes him to the graveyard, and on their way, Daniel photographs a group of Guardia Civil. Once they arrive at the graveyard, Rafa explains that Fuga wants him to take pictures of the empty coffins. Fuga pries open one coffin, which contains nothing but bits of cloth. The second one, however, “holds an amputated adult hand, black and eaten with gangrene” (352).

Chapter 110 Summary

Rafa and Fuga explain that the clinic sends over the empty coffins and pays for their burial. Rafa begs him to take the pictures back to America, to “[s]how them to people. Ask their opinion. What is happening to the children of Spain?” (354). Daniel is unsure what to do. He asks to speak to Fuga alone, and Fuga reveals that he hates Daniel for his privilege. He believes Daniel only wants to profit from the misery of the people of Spain.

Daniel argues, telling Fuga he wants to show the cost of war and the difficulty of living under dictatorship. Fuga tells Daniel that he may feel powerful because he has money, but that while money “buys our wine and sunshine […] it doesn’t buy the right to our history” (355). He then warns Daniel not to hurt Ana, and Daniel promises that he will not. Daniel and Fuga shake hands.

Chapter 111 Summary

Daniel goes to get his film developed and asks Miguel to make “duplicate prints of every photo [he’s] taken” (356). He returns to the hotel, full of his plans for himself and for Ana, thinking he might “rent a car again and surprise Ana with a trip to Valencia” (357). However, when he asks Carlitos to request that Ana to come to him, Carlitos tells him that Ana has been fired.

Chapter 112 Summary

Daniel races to his room, hoping Ana will be there, remembering Ana’s desperate need to keep her job and all the people who have warned him about hurting Ana. Daniel decides to ask Shep to help him get Ana rehired, since Shep promised him a favor in return for protecting Nick during the fight.

Shep, however, refuses and tells Daniel that “Ana is a hustler and a thief” that she “stole a gold bracelet” from his home (360). Lorenza brings a drink to Shep, and Daniel realizes that Shep is not only lying but also having an affair with Lorenza.

Chapter 113 Summary

Carlitos gives Daniel a note from Ana asking him to meet her at the museum the next day. Daniel then asks Carlitos his opinion of Shep. Carlitos diplomatically says that he knows nothing about him but that the staff refers to him as Don Juan, “a disguised man who was able to manipulate language and seduce women” (363). Carlitos also compares Shep to what the older women said about the Spanish flu epidemic: “initially believed harmless” but eventually “proved deadly” (363). Daniel then decides to ask Ben for help.

Chapter 114 Summary

Rafa helps Fuga train for his next fight. Rafa knows that Fuga will be a great matador, that “[t]here is something special that lives inside Fuga” and that beside him Rafa will have “a big life, better than an education at a university” (365). When they decide it’s safe, they approach the pasture, where Rafa says a prayer before they crawl under the barbed wire and prepare to train.

Chapter 115 Summary

Fuga stands before the bull, but does not move. Although Rafa does not understand why Fuga doesn’t twirl the cape, or why Fuga stands so still, he does not “interrupt the exchange between Fuga and the bull. This is presence. The moment of complete stillness feels divine. Transcendent” (366).

At that moment, a shot rings out: Fuga is hit in the back. Fuga steps forward and then falls to his knees at the feet of the bull. Rafa runs to him, and Fuga manages to say, “Hermano […] El fin” (367); that is, “brother, this is the end.” Rafa tries to deny what’s happening, but Fuga dies in his arms.

Rafa is devastated, and he “sobs, clutching and rocking the body of his friend so tightly he feels nothing, nothing but Fuga’s warm blood pooling in his lap” (368). Rafa does not even notice the gun that is now pressed to the back of his own head.

Chapter 116 Summary

Puri plays with the older children. Some of them say they miss their families, but others are grateful for the food and shelter of the Inclusa and joke about how miserable their parents were. One little girl imitates her mother, who told her, “You ingrate. Do you know how lucky you are? You don’t have a cardboard father” (369). She defines a cardboard father as someone killed in the war, whose cardboard photo hangs on the wall but whom they cannot discuss because he’s a Republican.

Puri wonders if she had a cardboard father and notes her similarities to the orphans. She tries to remind herself that the children have a good life at the Inclusa, that Franco and other authorities have made Spain into the country she loves. Puri’s doubts are not so easily lifted, however; when one of the little girls notices that Puri is crying, Puri just shakes her head. She thinks again of her mother’s favorite saying: “Estamas más guapas con la boca cerrada,” that is, “We are prettier with our mouths shut” (371).

Chapters 107-116 Analysis

In a totalitarian society like Franco’s Spain, most ordinary citizens have little power to change their circumstances. Fuga’s death brings this sense of fatalism into stark relief. Fuga had no torero lineage and no means to learn bullfighting, save to sneak into a breeder’s pasture and to claw his way up through village-level capeas. The moment he starts to get traction from a sponsor who will help him train as a novillero, he is shot in the back.

Yet Fuga’s bullfighting was about more than just achieving fame and fortune. He sought to help the poor and downtrodden, particularly children who struggled as he and Rafa did, and he sought to bring the plight of Franco’s lost children to the world. Fuga sees the autonomy that wealth and American birth have given Daniel, and he resents it. He tells Daniel, “You’ve never been abandoned, ruined by the hands of adults, seen as trash, so hungry you’ve eaten grass, so poor that you have to steal” (354).

Daniel responds that his wish is to shine a light on Spain’s situation through his photography. Once again, he embodies what has often been the American “savior” attitude toward the world. Fuga accuses Daniel of using the suffering of Spain for his own personal gain; initially, Daniel doesn’t understand, because he’s on a mission to help. Then, recalling Miguel’s admonition once again, Daniel finally considers that he is doing more harm than good: “If there is a story here, whom does it belong to?” (355).

One person the story belongs to is Puri, who longs to hang onto the blissful ignorance that once defined her work at the Inclusa. She tries again to seek advice, this time from Julia, but the conversation does nothing to resolve Puri’s questions. Because they live under fascism, Puri is afraid to ask direct questions and to tell Julia explicitly what she has seen at the Inclusa and the clinic. Similarly, Julia is afraid to be direct with Puri and speaks only in generalities.

Puri believes that if the Inclusa and the clinic are stealing babies, it is a mistake, something unknown by those in power. She has not yet realized that the theft is happening at the explicit direction of both the government and the church. Unfortunately, Puri has seen too much to allow herself to fall back into her old, unquestioning form of belief. Instead, she is trapped in a web of doublespeak that both frustrates and frightens her.

Daniel and Ana’s story takes an ominous turn when Daniel hears that Ana has been fired. Sepetys has brought the story full circle: The first chapter began with Rafa in the slaughterhouse and the women lined up for blood; here, a return to the slaughterhouse signals that something momentous is about to occur. All that has changed since Daniel arrived in Madrid may be about to change once more. In an act of dramatic irony, Daniel asks Shep for help. Shep refuses, and Daniel realizes that Shep and Lorenza are involved.

The futility of Ana’s circumstances, and the obstacles in their path, have clearly foreshadowed complications in Daniel and Ana’s relationship. For Fuga and Rafa, however, circumstances went well, with little indication of trouble save the initial warning about the breeder’s pasture, when Rafa explicitly acknowledged that if they were caught, their “punishment will be immediate—and final” (146). Fuga’s death reenacts a scene that Rafa has revisited in his mind obsessively: the death of Rafa’s father. Rafa has tortured himself for years over his father’s death, over his own cowardice in hiding in the bushes while his father was executed.

In the throes of his grief for Fuga, Rafa does not realize that he has behaved differently this time. Rafa could have stayed hidden, but his love for Fuga propels him forward with no concern for his own safety. This act indicates a change in Rafa, an elimination of that fear he has carried with him for so long. Rafa has always believed that he was afraid of death, but his real fear was fear itself.