The discovery of the Fortuny photograph gives Daniel Sempere his first unmistakable visual link between Julián Carax and the hatmaking family whose name Carax had not used. Found on the counter after an unexplained disturbance in the bookshop, the scorched portrait turns a shadowy name into a young face and points Daniel toward the history of the Fortuny shop.

The disturbance in the bookshop

Daniel is alone in the shop, leafing through the order book, when he hears slow footsteps. He calls out, wondering whether his father or Fermín is there, but gets no answer. A stifled laugh seems to reach him; then several books fall from the shelves. The sequence leaves him unsure whether an ordinary client has ignored the closed sign or whether something more unsettling is happening.

He takes a letter opener and moves cautiously toward the back-room door. The footsteps sound again, this time retreating. The bell rings, a draft comes in from the street, and Daniel peers into the shop to find no one. He double-locks the front door, then recognizes that he feels ridiculous and cowardly. Returning toward the back room, he notices a piece of paper on the counter. It is not a note but an old photograph, left behind in the empty shop.

A portrait marked by fire

The photograph is a studio portrait printed on thick cardboard, its edges burned and its smoky image marked by charcoal-like fingerprints. It shows a smiling young couple: the man, about seventeen or eighteen, has light hair and delicate, aristocratic features; the woman, perhaps a year or two younger, has pale skin, a finely chiselled face, and short black hair. Her expression suggests happiness, and her teasing closeness to the man gives the image an intimacy that reaches Daniel before he knows who the pair are.

The setting in the portrait supplies a more concrete clue. Behind the couple is an ornate shop window filled with old-fashioned hats. Daniel estimates from their clothes that the photograph is at least twenty-five or thirty years old. Fire has destroyed nearly all the area around the surviving image, but a stern face can still be discerned behind the old-style counter, with a ghostly figure suggested behind lettering on the glass. The damage does not simply age the photograph: it makes the remnant of the scene appear to have survived a surrounding destruction.

Identifying Carax and the Fortuny name

The lettering in the photograph reads “Sons of ANTONIO FORTUNY” and gives an establishment date of 1888. Daniel recognizes its relevance because, on his visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Isaac had told him that Carax used his mother’s surname rather than his father’s, which was Fortuny. Carax’s father had owned a hat shop in Ronda de San Antonio. The portrait’s shop window and its printed name therefore connect a specific family business to the history Daniel has been investigating.

Looking again at the couple, Daniel becomes certain that the young man is Carax. The identification changes the photograph from an evocative relic into evidence: the boyish face belongs to the author whose identity and past have remained difficult to grasp. The photograph also places him in the Fortuny setting associated with his father, revealing a family connection behind the name Carax used.

The image’s double meaning

Daniel reads the couple’s expressions as an image of light and hope, the promise of youth still visible in their faces. Yet the photograph’s scorched edges place that promise beside the destruction that has nearly erased the surrounding scene. The contrast becomes sharper when Daniel imagines that the smiling young Carax cannot see the flames closing in on him. That image foreshadows danger without explaining its cause: the surviving portrait preserves a moment of happiness, while its damage makes the future seem already present at its margins.

The scene is shaped by a shift from uncertainty to recognition. At first, Daniel can account for the noises only as a possible intrusion, and the empty shop makes the disturbance difficult to interpret. The photograph then supplies what the vanished visitor does not: a physical object whose lettering and faces can be examined. Its arrival brings Carax’s past into the bookshop not as a full account but as a trace—burned, partially legible, and specific enough to redirect Daniel’s investigation. The discovery thus joins suspense to historical evidence: the shop’s brief apparent haunting yields a portrait, and the portrait links Carax to Fortuny, his father’s surname, and Ronda de San Antonio.