Julian Calax and Penelope Aldaya's romance

The romance between Julián Carax and Penélope Aldaya is a clandestine love affair whose planned escape ends in forced separation. What begins as a current of recognition between two young people becomes a dangerous secret sustained by Jacinta Coronado, then is broken by the Aldaya family’s intervention. Julián reaches Paris believing an escape has been arranged; Penélope is imprisoned at home and never reaches the station. The resulting silence shapes the lovers’ separate lives and becomes one of the central mysteries Daniel Sempere must piece together.

Origins and Secret Courtship

Julián and Penélope are drawn together at the Aldaya house, where the young Julián has already formed a close friendship with Penélope’s brother, Jorge Aldaya. The attraction is apparent from his first visit: Jacinta sees a bond between them that resembles the intimacy she shares with Penélope, but feels more intense and dangerous. Though she initially expects to dislike the boy, Jacinta finds herself swept into Penélope’s attachment and comes to want what Penélope wants. The romance thus begins inside a household whose apparent arrangements conceal the loyalties and desires that will overturn them.

For months, their intimacy consists of furtive looks, chance meetings in corridors, and silent encounters across the dining table. They feel one another’s absence before they have the privacy to speak. Their first words pass in the library of the house on Avenida del Tibidabo on a stormy afternoon, in candlelight; Julián reads in Penélope’s eyes the certainty that their feelings are mutual. Jacinta watches the exchange and grows anxious, aware that the lovers’ secret is unfolding under the Aldayas’ very noses.

Julián writes stories for Penélope from midnight until dawn. He carries the pages to Jacinta’s room, trusting her to pass them on, and sometimes receives Penélope’s notes in return, which he rereads for days. Jacinta acts as their intermediary because she wants Penélope’s happiness and hopes to preserve the light she sees in her. To remain near Penélope, Julián deceives Don Ricardo Aldaya about his ambitions: he pretends enthusiasm for banking and finance and performs an affection for Jorge that he does not feel. He understands these accommodations as a sacrifice of his honesty and fears that, by the time he is worthy of Penélope, he may have lost the self she first loved.

Escape Planned for Paris

The lovers’ future is constrained by the power of Penélope’s family and by Julián’s lack of money. His friend Miquel Moliner offers to help, and the two men plan the escape with Paris as their destination. Miquel considers the city large enough to disappear in but small enough to offer opportunities; Penélope speaks some French, and Julián learned the language from his mother. Miquel assembles a small fortune from his own savings and money extracted from his father on pretexts only he knows. He intends to say nothing once the couple boards the train.

After settling the arrangements, Julián goes to the house on Avenida del Tibidabo to tell Penélope. The plan is designed to minimize the chance of detection: Miquel will buy the tickets under a false name and have someone else collect them, while Julián and Penélope will meet aboard the train rather than wait together on the platform. They are to leave on Sunday at noon from the Estacion de Francia, with Miquel waiting there with tickets and money. Julián tells Penélope to keep the plan secret even from Jacinta, the very person who has been helping them communicate.

Miquel advises Julián not to see Penélope during the six days before their departure, lest their behavior raise suspicion. For Julián, the proposed interval without seeing or touching her seems interminable. They seal their promise with a kiss, a private pledge of marriage that stands in sharp contrast to the dangers still surrounding them. Before they part, Julián takes Penélope to Jacinta’s bedroom on the third floor, among the servants’ quarters, believing the room will keep them undiscovered. Their physical intimacy makes the impending separation immediate rather than abstract: Julián knows he must leave, but the encounter is interrupted before he can say goodbye.

Discovery and Forced Separation

Señora Aldaya opens the bedroom door and finds the lovers together. She asks where Jacinta is, then leaves without confronting them further. Penélope crouches on the floor in anguish, while Julián feels the world collapse. Penélope urges him to go before her father arrives. The discovery transforms their secret courtship into a family crisis, but it does not give Julián the information he needs to understand what follows.

The next day, Señora Aldaya orders Jacinta to keep Penélope locked in her room until permission is given for her to leave. When Don Ricardo returns from Madrid early on Friday, his wife tells him what she witnessed. He reacts with violence, slapping her so hard that she falls, then drags Penélope from bed by her hair. Jacinta tries to intervene, but he kicks her aside. Don Ricardo calls the family doctor, who examines Penélope; afterward, the family locks her away, and Señora Aldaya orders Jacinta to collect her belongings. The household’s response makes the power imbalance unmistakable: the lovers’ future is not decided by their promise or their plan, but by the Aldayas’ ability to imprison Penélope and silence those who might help her.

Jacinta is expelled after eighteen years of uninterrupted service, without being allowed to say goodbye to Penélope. Don Ricardo threatens to report her to the police if she tells anyone what happened. Two days later, Miquel finds Jacinta in a pension on Calle Muntaner and asks why Penélope failed to appear at the station; he has learned that Julián went to Paris, but not what prevented the escape. Jacinta repeatedly returns to the Aldaya house and waits across the street, hoping to see Penélope, but the young woman never comes out. The planned meeting on the train never takes place, and Julián departs without knowing that Penélope has been confined rather than freely left behind.

The Separation’s Afterlife

Julián’s later account of his life in Paris makes the separation a defining absence. He declares that he does not feel worthy of love, and no romance is recorded during his Paris years. A marriage to his protectress is eventually announced, but Jorge Aldaya re-enters the story: he contacts Julián’s Barcelona publisher to discover where the novelist is. On the morning of the wedding, Julián fights a duel with an unknown opponent in Père Lachaise cemetery and disappears; the wedding never takes place. The earlier rupture between the lovers therefore remains entangled with the Aldaya family conflict, even after Julián has left Barcelona.

Miquel’s role in the separation extends beyond arranging the escape. Years later, as a publisher’s employee, he discovers that Miquel Moliner is paying the full printing costs for Julián’s novels, though the books sell poorly in Spain. He also notices that someone repeatedly calls the publisher asking for Julián’s address under different names. To protect the novelist, Miquel deletes the address from the company files and keeps it in his own memory; when he eventually tells Miquel that the publisher is swindling him, Miquel already knows. These acts show the continuing network of loyalty and concealment around Julián, a network built partly in the aftermath of the failed escape.

That history has consequences for later generations as well. In her account to Daniel, Nuria Monfort explains that Julián watched Daniel’s progress and spoke of him as if he were the son he had lost, seeing in him a chance to begin again and recover the boy he had been. Julián hoped Daniel’s innocence might save him from himself, while Nuria feared that Daniel’s investigation would lead him to Julián and bring the past into the present. Their love story is therefore not only a hidden episode in Julián’s biography: its unresolved loss helps shape his withdrawal, his attachment to Daniel, and the chain of discovery that eventually releases the story from silence.