Julian Carax and Antoni Fortuny

Julian Carax and Antoni Fortuny are bound by a legal and domestic father-son relationship that neither can inhabit as a genuine bond. Antoni is Julian’s stepfather, not his biological father, and the household he creates turns that distinction into a lasting wound: he tries to claim authority over Julian while rejecting him as his own, and Julian grows up without respect for the man who occupies the role of father. Their estrangement shapes Julian’s departure from Barcelona and leaves a mark that, as Nuria later observes, persists beyond the immediate past.

Identity and Background

Antoni Fortuny inherits his father’s respected hat business in Ronda de San Antonio and marries Sophie, a young French music teacher. Sophie becomes pregnant by another man, whose identity she does not disclose. Antoni concludes that the child must be the devil’s, naming him a “son of sin,” and treats Julian’s birth as confirmation of his suspicion rather than the beginning of a family bond. He keeps Sophie in the household but confines her to a separate room and, after Julian is born, regards the boy as a child who is not his own.

Antoni’s own history helps explain the form, though not the consequence, of his conduct. He had watched his father repeatedly strike his mother and believed that he was doing what was right by stopping only when he feared another blow would kill her. In his marriage, however, he reproduces the violence he hoped to distinguish himself from. His religious practice and attempts to imagine himself a better man coexist with his treatment of Sophie and with the suspicion he projects onto Julian.

Life Under Antoni’s Authority

Antoni’s rejection of Julian is expressed in daily life as well as in the story of his birth. He hangs crucifixes throughout the apartment, including the room where Sophie is confined, and responds angrily when she questions what he is doing. He later tries, with the help of the Gospels, to kindle affection for Julian, but cannot feel that the boy is his flesh and blood or recognize himself in him. Julian, in turn, shows little interest in Antoni’s trade or religious instruction.

The boy’s imaginative pursuits sharpen their difference. At Christmas, he rearranges the figures in the Nativity scene and invents a story in which the Magi kidnap the infant Jesus. He draws angels with wolf’s teeth and imagines spirits emerging from walls. His school notebooks fill with monstrous beings, winged serpents, and living buildings that consume the unwary. Antoni sees these interests not as a different temperament but as evidence that Julian will never become a Fortuny.

Their ambitions diverge further as Julian grows older. At ten, he announces that he wants to be a painter like Velázquez; Sophie gives him piano lessons, and he prefers inventing compositions to following written scores. Antoni instead blames his son’s supposed intellectual failings on Sophie’s cooking and forbids her to use butter. At twelve, Julian turns away from painting and discovers the library on Calle del Carmen, where he reads fiction, poetry, and history whenever he can get away from the hat shop. Before his thirteenth birthday he says he wants to become Robert Louis Stevenson. Antoni answers with scorn and concludes that the boy is an idiot.

Rejection, Violence, and Estrangement

Antoni’s resentment toward Sophie and his refusal to accept Julian as his child become part of one household pattern. He believes he still loves them, but only on terms set by his own idea of what love should be. Sophie, isolated and unable to imagine leaving with her son, eventually begins to answer his insults with recriminations; their conflict often falls on Julian as well. Antoni later remembers his anger and shame more readily than the reasons for particular beatings, promising himself each time that it will not happen again. Yet the cycle resumes. He comes to feel that, if he cannot possess Sophie as a husband, he will possess her as a tyrant.

That domestic silence is one of the relationship’s consequences. Over the years, the family becomes a group of strangers living under one roof, unable to express what they feel. Antoni’s efforts to see himself as better than his own father do not prevent him from repeating the inheritance of violence. Julian grows up watching Sophie be insulted and beaten, while Antoni tells him that he is a son of sin, has inherited his mother’s weakness, and will be miserable and unsuccessful. These judgments do not create respect or affection; they poison the possibility of either.

Departure and the Relationship in Retrospect

Years later, Nuria recounts what Julian told her about his family. She says he and Antoni never got on, and that Julian went to Paris to avoid being conscripted into the army by his father. Sophie had promised to take him as far away from Antoni as she could rather than let that happen. The departure makes the household conflict consequential beyond childhood: leaving is also an escape from the authority Antoni claims over him.

Julian had told Nuria that Sophie’s husband was not his real father. Before her marriage, Sophie had an affair with a stranger whose name she never revealed to Julian; that man was Julian’s biological father. Julian called Antoni “the hatter,” a name that emphasizes Antoni’s occupation and distance from the filial role. Although Julian spoke of his childhood as if it belonged to a past he had left behind, Nuria argues that the words directed at a child remain branded in memory. She does not describe Julian as hating Antoni; rather, she believes he lost all respect for him. The distinction leaves the relationship marked less by an open reckoning than by a durable absence of trust and recognition.

Narrative Significance

The relationship gives Julian’s artistic independence a domestic cost. Antoni’s practical and religious expectations repeatedly meet a boy whose interests lie in invention, music, painting, and reading; the stepfather’s contempt turns that difference into rejection rather than guidance. Julian’s biological parentage intensifies the divide, but it does not account for the whole of their estrangement: Antoni’s treatment of Sophie, the condemnations addressed to Julian, and the household’s enforced silence all shape the boy’s understanding of him.

Nuria’s later account also complicates the apparent finality of escape. Julian may have left Antoni and spoken as though the past no longer mattered, but the remembered words continue to bear on him. In this way the relationship persists not through reconciliation or renewed contact, but through the lasting effects of a childhood in which fatherhood was asserted as authority and withheld as affection.