What can the son of a civil guard hear behind the door in a village in Jaén in 1947?
Nino, the son of a civil guard, is nine years old, lives in the barracks house of a village in the Sierra Sur of Jaén, and will never forget the summer of 1947. Pepe el Portugués, the mysterious, fascinating stranger who has just settled in a remote mill, becomes his friend and role model, the man he would like to become someday. As they spend afternoons together by the river, Nino vows to himself that he will never be a civil guard like his father, and he begins taking typing lessons at the Rubias farmhouse, where a family of lone women, widows, and orphans, resist on the border between the mountains and the plains. As he discovers a new world thanks to adventure novels that will change him, Nino understands a truth no one had wanted to tell him. A war is being fought in the Sierra Sur, but his father’s enemies are not his. After that summer, he will start to see the guerrillas led by Cencerro with different eyes and understand why his father wants him to learn typing.
