Julian Carax—Fortuny

The relationship between Julian Carax and Fortuny is shaped by separation, belated sympathy, and a painful choice to preserve an imagined son rather than meet the man he has become. Fortuny seeks news of Julian and hopes for his return, while Julian secretly watches his aging father from across a square; neither can bring himself to close the distance between them before Fortuny dies during the war.

Identity and Background

Fortuny is Julian’s father, an aging hatter whose relationship with his son has been fractured by years of estrangement. When Nuria encounters him in the cathedral cloister, he admits that he does not really know the man Julian has become. He asks Nuria, an old friend of his son, to tell him about Julian, making plain that the family bond has survived more strongly in longing than in shared knowledge.

The estrangement is not presented as a single quarrel but as accumulated distance. Fortuny describes himself and Sophie as having returned to contact after many years of misunderstandings. Sophie, now living in Bogota with a doctor and running her own music school, often writes to ask after Julian. Fortuny says that memories are what still connect them. His words place Julian at the center of a family held together by recollection and regret even when its members live apart.

Fortuny’s Search for His Son

Fortuny searches Barcelona’s bookshops for Julian’s novels, but cannot find them. He has heard that a madman is searching for the books and burning them, and believes Fumero is responsible. Nuria does not correct him. Instead, moved by pity or spite, she tells Fortuny that Julian has returned to Paris, is well, and is fond of his father; she promises that he will come back when circumstances permit. The reassurance is a deliberate lie, offered to an old man who wants to believe his son is safe and may yet return.

Fortuny’s hope has a practical and devotional shape. He no longer works in the shop below his apartment, explaining that he lacks the hands, sight, and customers for the trade. He spends time visiting saints in the cathedral chapels, hoping, as Nuria understands it, for the recovery of lost time. She had once imagined him as an ogre, resentful and despicable, but comes to see a kind man, confused and blind to the truth. Because he reminds her of her own father and shares her hope of recovering Julian, she grows attached to him and becomes his only friend, visiting him at his apartment in Ronda de San Antonio without Julian’s knowledge.

Julian’s Distant Attention

Julian, too, visits Fortuny, but keeps his visits secret. He watches his father from afar at dusk, seated at the other end of a square as Fortuny grows old. When Nuria urges Julian to see his father before it is too late, he explains that he would rather Fortuny retain the image of the son he had created in his mind during their years apart than encounter the person Julian has become. The choice turns their estrangement into a conscious, if painful, form of protection: Julian does not merely fail to return; he fears that his presence would destroy the version of him that sustains his father.

Nuria’s words, urging Julian to keep that remembered image for her, are followed by his silence. For a moment, he seems able to think clearly and recognize the hell into which they have descended. The exchange does not resolve their separation. Instead, it exposes the cost of leaving Fortuny’s hope intact: both father and son remain bound to Julian’s imagined return, while the living man stays beyond reach.

Death and Significance

Fortuny does not live to see the end of the war. He is found sitting in his armchair, looking at old photographs of Sophie and Julian. The photographs give his final scene its defining contrast: the people who once formed his family are present as images, while the reunion he hoped for never occurs. His death closes the possibility of a meeting and leaves Julian with the knowledge that he watched his father age without revealing himself.

Their relationship gives the novel’s larger concerns with memory and loss an intimate family form. Fortuny’s hope depends on a son preserved in recollection; Julian protects that remembered figure by withholding the truth of his changed life. The lie Nuria tells and the distance Julian maintains each keep the possibility of comfort alive, but neither can restore the time their separation has consumed. Fortuny’s death makes that delay irreversible: the father is left with photographs, and the son with a meeting that never took place.