Nuria Writes Her Story and Entrusts It to Her Father

Nuria’s memoir is both a testimony about the lives the war and its aftermath have obscured and a last appeal to Daniel. Written with the expectation that Fumero may kill her, it records her years with Julian, the danger closing around her, and her hope that Daniel will understand what happened and carry the story beyond the silence that has contained it.

Why Nuria Writes

Nuria’s decision to write is bound to the danger she describes. Fumero has watched her for years, she believes he will eventually kill her, and she understands that he is waiting for an opportunity to avenge himself. She also believes he knows that Daniel and his friends will lead him to Julian. With her strength and resources exhausted after nearly fifteen years, she sees the threat as approaching its endgame rather than as a remote possibility.

She therefore gives the pages to her father and asks him to make sure they reach Daniel if anything happens to her. The manuscript is meant to cross a gap that Nuria may not survive: she hopes Daniel will never need to read it, but senses that handing on the story is her fate and that setting it free will become his. Her writing is at once a record, a safeguard for Julian, and a request for a future witness.

What the Memoir Recovers

The pages make sense against the larger pattern of silence in which Nuria’s account is set. Her father, Sempere, once told Daniel that Daniel’s mother had made him promise never to speak to her son about the war or let him remember what had happened. The promise turns silence into a form of protection, but also leaves Daniel without the knowledge that might help him understand the past. In the memoir, Nuria confronts a related silence from the other side: she writes because the people who saw and endured the war risk disappearing before they can tell what it meant.

Nuria had already learned to turn writing into a practical means of survival. After Señor Fortuny died, she adopted the invented identity of José María Requejo, a lawyer supposedly consulted by the deceased hatter, and wrote to Julian’s mother, Sophie, in Bogotá. Her letter claimed that Fortuny had died intestate and that his estate—the apartment and shop in Ronda de San Antonio—might pass to Julian, then believed to be living in exile in France. Nuria requested authorization to handle the transfer and temporarily assumed control of the properties and a measure of financial compensation. She opened a post-office box under a false address in a disused garage near the ruins of the Aldaya mansion.

Sophie agreed to the arrangement, and the building manager began sending monthly money orders for the property expenses and the supposed lawyer’s fees. The manager forwarded the money as an open cheque to Nuria’s post-office box, keeping an unauthorized percentage. Nuria tolerated this convenient arrangement; what remained helped her and Julian survive. The episode gives the memoir a concrete history of concealment: Nuria uses a fictitious legal identity and carefully managed correspondence not simply to deceive, but to secure the means of keeping Julian alive.

Julian, the War, and the Ruins of Silence

Nuria’s account places Julian’s later life inside the damage left by war. Señor Fortuny had died before the war ended, found in his armchair looking at old photographs of Sophie and Julian. By the time the fighting ceased, Julian had almost no books left to burn. His father’s death, which they never discussed, had left him an invalid, while the anger that had once possessed him had ebbed. The end of combat did not bring an uncomplicated peace: Nuria describes the weeks after Barcelona fell as a period of further bloodshed, followed by a silence marked by shame and the knowledge that those who had been there would carry the secret to their graves.

Nuria’s testimony also connects private silence to public forgetting. She describes a postwar world in which survivors were encouraged to treat what they had seen, done, and learned about themselves and others as an illusion. In her account, war does not retain its own memory; its meanings are obscured until the voices able to explain them are gone, allowing violence to return under a different name. This perspective explains the memoir’s urgency: to write is to preserve an account against both personal disappearance and the wider erasure that follows conflict.

The years of deprivation that followed sharpened Nuria’s reliance on concealment. She and Julian had spent their savings and the money from Laín Coubert’s nighttime escapades, and there was nothing left in the house to sell. Her association with Cabestany made employers suspicious, thwarting her attempts to find work as a translator, typist, or cleaner. Neighbors believed that she was caring for her poor husband, Miquel, who had become an invalid and was disfigured by the war; they brought milk, cheese, bread, and sometimes food sent from the countryside. Nuria’s invented identity and her neighbors’ mistaken understanding helped sustain the fragile life she shared with Julian, while her occasional translation work offered only intermittent relief.

Daniel as Witness and Heir

Nuria’s reason for addressing Daniel is not merely that he is investigating the past. She reports that Julian watched him grow and spoke of his friends, his father, Clara, Fermín, and Bea. Julian’s tenderness when he spoke of Daniel surprised her; she understood that he had begun to see Daniel almost as a son and to hope that the young man’s innocence might help him recover something of the boy he had been. Nuria interprets Daniel as the lost son’s possible substitute and as a new beginning for a story Julian could no longer create for himself. She presents this connection as Julian’s belief and her own interpretation, not as an established fact about Daniel’s identity.

That belief makes Daniel both a person Nuria fears and the person she trusts. When he first came to her apartment, she feigned distrust because she feared what he might discover, and because she worried that he would lead Fumero to Julian. She hoped Daniel might lose the trail or that his own life would take him somewhere safe. Yet she also knew that he and Julian would eventually meet. Her hope is therefore divided: she wants Daniel spared the danger, but recognizes that his search may be the means by which the concealed history reaches him.

The Handoff and Its Meaning

Nuria’s final appeal turns the manuscript into an entrusted act. She knows that if Daniel is reading, she has been unable to say goodbye or ask his forgiveness in person, especially on Julian’s behalf. She asks him to take care of Julian after she is gone, while also telling him to save himself. The requests sit in tension: Daniel is asked to inherit a responsibility, but not to mistake that responsibility for an obligation to sacrifice his own safety.

The memoir ends by asking Daniel to remember Nuria, even if only privately, and by making remembrance a form of continued life. Its final movement is therefore more than the delivery of information about the past. Nuria entrusts Daniel with the possibility of release: he can make the story known rather than allow it to remain imprisoned in the memories of those who lived it. In a novel where war, family promises, and fear have repeatedly produced silence, her pages create a fragile passage from one generation to another.