Julian Carax and Nuria Monfort

Julian Carax and Nuria Monfort are linked by a relationship that begins in professional correspondence, briefly enters physical proximity in Paris, and is later defined by the silence surrounding Julian’s presumed death. Nuria never claims an intimacy she did not have: she knew him through his manuscripts and letters, found him difficult to reach, and became one of the few people in Barcelona who tried to establish what had happened to him. Her account makes their connection at once personal and literary, bound to the books through which Julian could be known and the memories that outlasted his disappearance.

A connection made through publishing

Nuria says she first came into contact with Julian while working for Cabestany’s publishing house. Cabestany had acquired the rights to Julian’s novels for very little, and Nuria’s own changing responsibilities brought her into the correspondence. She began in the accounts department; after Cabestany learned that she spoke French, Italian, and some German, he transferred her to purchasing and made her his personal secretary. One of her duties was to write to foreign authors and publishers with whom the firm did business. Julian entered her life through that work, as an author whose books and publishing affairs were mediated by letters.

That professional beginning shapes the limits of what Nuria can later say about him. Before meeting him, she knew him through the manuscripts he sent and their written exchanges about copyright, proofs, and editorial matters. She had not built an intimate personal history with him; she had read the work and corresponded about its production. Her testimony therefore offers access to Julian without pretending to solve him. The distance in their relationship is not an omission to be filled in, but one of its defining features.

Paris and the limits of intimacy

In 1933, Nuria travelled to Paris to resolve business matters between Cabestany and Gallimard. She spent a week in the city and stayed in Julian’s apartment because Cabestany preferred to save the cost of a hotel. The practical reason for the arrangement contrasts with the romantic interpretation her father placed on it. Nuria rejects the suggestion that she and Julian had an affair, recalling that their relationship had until then been conducted through letters and that her Paris visit was a work assignment, not a romantic expedition.

The week together did not dissolve Julian’s reserve. Nuria says he did not like talking about his books or about himself, and she never got to know him well because he would not allow it. She sensed that he was unhappy in Paris, though perhaps the unhappiness belonged less to the city than to a general inability to feel at home anywhere. Cabestany considered him shy and possibly a little mad; Nuria’s impression was more inward and more melancholy. Julian seemed to live in the past, enclosed in his memories, and to inhabit his books as a kind of self-made refuge. In her image, writing offered him a comfortable prison, one he had designed for himself.

Nuria’s recollection turns the brief stay in Paris into a measure of both closeness and separation. She had shared his apartment, but proximity did not grant her entry into his private life. Even her knowledge of him remained partly interpretive: she could read the manuscripts and observe his reticence, but could not make him explain himself. The relationship’s intimacy is consequently shown through its boundary. Julian’s withdrawal is not merely an obstacle to romance; it determines the form in which Nuria can remember and describe him.

News of the presumed death

In the summer of 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the war, an employee at the municipal morgue contacted Cabestany’s firm with news that Julian’s body had been received three days earlier. He had been found dead in an alley in the Raval quarter, dressed in rags and shot through the heart. A copy of The Shadow of the Wind and his passport were found on him. The passport showed that he had crossed the French border a month before, but no one knew where he had been in the intervening time.

The authorities contacted Julian’s father, who refused responsibility for the body and said he had no son. After two days without anyone claiming him, Julian was buried in a common grave in Montjuic Cemetery. Nuria could not even take flowers to his grave because she was not told where he had been buried. The morgue employee had kept the book found in Julian’s jacket and, a couple of days later, thought to telephone Cabestany’s publishing house. That call was how Nuria learned that Julian had returned to Barcelona—and that he had died there. The book carried on his body thus becomes the means by which news of his death reaches the people who had known him through his work.

Nuria stresses the painful strangeness of learning only after his death that Julian had come back. If there was anyone in Barcelona he might have turned to, she says, it was her or, at a pinch, Cabestany; she regards them as his only friends. Yet Julian never told them he had returned. The news makes their bond consequential without making it reciprocal in the ordinary sense: Nuria had remained available as a possible point of contact, but he did not seek her out, and she could only reconstruct the return from the circumstances of the corpse and the objects it carried.

The search, the silence, and the books

Nuria did not accept the morgue’s report as a sufficient explanation. With Cabestany’s help, she made a complaint to the police and used every connection she could to investigate. The effort yielded no clarification. These were the first months of the war, and Julian was not the only person to disappear without a trace. Nuria recalls many nameless graves and a public silence that had gathered around them; asking questions, she says, was like striking one’s head against a brick wall.

The warning she received made that silence personal. A young inspector visited her, arrogant and sinister in her recollection, and told her it would be better to stop asking questions and instead adopt a more positive attitude because the country was on a crusade. Nuria remembers his name as Fumero and recognizes that he later became an important public figure. The encounter turned her search for Julian into a confrontation with the intimidation surrounding wartime disappearances. Her inability to recover his grave or establish the truth was not simply the result of a missing clue: the authorities themselves discouraged inquiry.

For Nuria, Julian’s identity cannot be reduced to the body entered at the morgue. She says that the body was only part of him, because his soul remained in his stories. When she once asked who had inspired his characters, Julian answered that no one had: all of them were himself. This belief connects her understanding of his writing to her understanding of his death. To destroy Julian would mean attacking the stories and characters in which he had left himself; to remember those works, in turn, was to keep something of him alive.

She tells Daniel that Julian died alone, convinced that nobody would remember him or his books and that his life had meant nothing. He would have wanted to know that someone wished to keep him alive through memory. Nuria recalls his belief that people continue to exist as long as someone remembers them. Her account therefore gives their relationship an afterlife that their limited contact could not provide during Julian’s life: she could not break through his reserve, prevent his disappearance, or locate his grave, but she can testify that he was remembered. In the novel’s movement from correspondence and manuscripts to the recovered story of a presumed death, Nuria’s memory becomes a counterweight to both Julian’s isolation and the public erasure of the dead.