Nuria Monfort Masdedeu

Nuria Monfort Masdedeu is both a witness to Julián Carax’s history and one of its guarded custodians. Her concealed role in collecting correspondence, her evasions when Daniel Sempere confronts her, and the manuscript she leaves behind place her between the official account of Carax’s death and the private record that makes the truth recoverable.

Identity and Hidden Work

Nuria’s connection to the Carax story emerges through a paper trail. A letter addressed to Carax bears the return address of Penélope Aldaya at Avenida del Tibidabo, 32, Barcelona, and a postmark dated 18 October 1919. Its physical signs—the old paper, serrated edges, and reddish stain where the seal had been—make it a surviving object from the past rather than a merely reported recollection. Daniel has taken it from Doña Aurora and examines it before reading the letter. The evidence establishes the importance of this correspondence, while Nuria’s later confrontation with Daniel exposes a separate, more recent channel through which letters connected with the old Fortuny-Carax apartment were handled.

Daniel tells Nuria that a friend discovered the property manager had been directing correspondence to a post-office box under the name of a seemingly nonexistent firm of solicitors. The person collecting the mail for years, Daniel says, had been using Nuria’s name. Her immediate response is to order him to stop speaking, then retreat into the shadows. The scene identifies her as a concealed intermediary, but does not establish every detail of what she did with the mail or why she chose this method. What it does show is that the name attached to the correspondence is part of a deliberate secrecy surrounding the apartment and Carax’s history.

Confrontation with Daniel

When Daniel presses Nuria about Carax, he accuses her of lying to protect the man he believes killed Carax, concealing a crime, and helping erase Carax’s existence by allowing his books to be burned. He also challenges her account of her husband, saying that the man is neither in prison nor present. These are Daniel’s conclusions in the confrontation, not a neutral account of every underlying fact; the distinction matters because the novel’s mystery is built from records and testimony that do not initially agree.

Nuria does not answer the accusation with an explanation. She tells Daniel to leave and not return, saying he has done enough. He finds her sitting on the floor against the wall, her concern for appearances abandoned. The encounter therefore changes the tone of the investigation without resolving it: Daniel has uncovered enough to recognize that she has withheld information, but his angry interpretation does not yet supply the full history behind her silence.

The Official Record of Carax’s Death

The account of Carax’s supposed death reaches Daniel through a former morgue employee, Don Manuel, whose memory is refreshed by an archival search and a hundred-peseta contribution to his retirement fund. In September 1936, Don Manuel was on duty when a body identified as Julian Fortuny Carax arrived at the morgue. Police said it had been found in an alley in the Raval quarter shortly before dawn and brought in by midmorning. The man carried only a book and a passport; the passport identified him as Julian Fortuny Carax, born in Barcelona in 1900, and bore a border stamp showing that he had entered the country a month earlier. The recorded cause of death was a gunshot wound. Don Manuel believed the shot, just above the heart, had been fired at close range.

The passport led the authorities to Señor Fortuny, Carax’s father, who came that evening to identify the body. But Don Manuel remembered a third policeman in the room, a silent observer who approached the body after Fortuny left, spat on it, kept the passport, and ordered that it be buried in a common grave at Montjuïc. When Don Manuel objected that the rules forbade burial before identification, the officer threatened him and insisted that the dead man was whoever he said he was. He then signed the registration form, closing the case. The officer was Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero. Don Manuel later recognized the same signature on numerous death certificates for bodies that had arrived unidentified during the war and for years afterward.

This testimony exposes how a government record could be made to settle identity by force rather than by reliable identification. It also complicates Daniel’s understanding of Nuria’s concealment: the official story was not simply a mistaken record but one shaped by an officer who controlled the passport, the burial order, and the name entered on the form. The account does not make every part of Nuria’s conduct transparent, but it reveals the political conditions in which a truthful private record could be dangerous and an official document could be deliberately false.

Death and the Public Account

A newspaper report announces Nuria’s death as a street murder. It names her as Nuria Monfort Masdedeu, says she lived in Barcelona, and reports that she was attacked in midafternoon in the San Gervasio neighborhood. The report attributes the killing to Antonio Jose Gutierrez Alcayete, a fugitive who had escaped La Modelo Prison six years earlier and was said to have assumed different identities. It describes him as a dangerous man with a history of mental illness and says investigators had not established whether he knew the victim or why he had followed her.

The newspaper gives the public an apparent perpetrator and a sequence of police statements, but not an explanation that connects the killing to Nuria’s concealed history. Its emphasis on the fugitive’s identity and record leaves the central question of motive unresolved. Set beside the hidden correspondence and Don Manuel’s account of falsified identification, the report belongs to the book’s wider contrast between information that is officially circulated and knowledge preserved through personal testimony.

Manuscript and Aftermath

After Nuria’s death, Isaac gives Daniel an envelope and tells him that he believes Daniel is telling the truth. He recalls that Nuria visited him the afternoon before she died, as she had done years earlier. When she was a child, he used to take her to a café on Calle Guardia; they talked about books, and she sometimes shared small details about her work. He remembers her telling him that she thought she had disappointed him. Looking back, Isaac recognizes that he may have failed to understand her in return, and that he had treated her as though she were meant to fulfill his expectations.

Isaac describes Nuria as a quiet, thoughtful child who loved stories, learned to read unusually young, and wanted to write encyclopedias and works on history and philosophy. Her mother had told him that Nuria wanted to become a writer because she believed her father loved only books and hoped writing would make him love her. Isaac’s recollection gives her literary ambition an intimate family context: books were not only her subject but also a hoped-for means of reaching a father she felt distant from.

Isaac entrusts the manuscript to Daniel as the story of a woman he never truly knew, despite sharing her name and blood. When Daniel begins reading it, the title identifies the document as “NURIA MONFORT: REMEMBRANCE OF THE LOST,” covering 1933–1955. The manuscript becomes a counter-record to the public report of her murder and to the manipulated documents surrounding Carax. The surviving evidence does not reproduce the full contents of her account here, but establishes its provenance, its dates, and its transfer from a daughter to her father and then to Daniel.

Nuria’s significance lies in this passage of evidence across private and public hands. A letter, a post-office box, a passport, a morgue registration, a newspaper report, and finally a manuscript each preserve a different version of identity. The official paperwork can be controlled by Fumero; the personal account survives because Isaac gives it to Daniel. Nuria’s story thus links secrecy not merely to concealment, but also to the fragile work of preserving what power has tried to make disappear.