What can the son of a civil guard hear behind the door in a village in Jaén in 1947?
Nino, 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 his role model, the man he would like to become someday. As they spend afternoons together by the riverbank, Nino vows to himself that he will never be a civil guard like his father, and he begins to take typing lessons at the Rubias farmhouse, where a family of lone women, widows and orphans, resist on the border between the mountain and the plain. As he discovers a new world thanks to the adventure novels that will turn him into another person, Nino understands a truth that no one had wanted to tell him. In the Sierra Sur a war is being fought, but his father’s enemies are not his. After that summer, he will begin to look with different eyes at the guerrillas led by Cencerro, and to understand why his father wants him to learn typing.
