The apartment in Ronda de San Antonio is the former home of Fortuny the hatter and a crucial hiding place for Julian Carax. Its changing uses bind together Julian’s disappearance, Nuria Monfort’s resourcefulness, and the official misidentification that makes his friend Miquel Moliner’s death appear to be his own. More than a domestic setting, the apartment becomes both a shelter maintained through deception and a location whose address helps give that deception the appearance of fact.

Identity and History

The apartment stood in the same building as Fortuny’s hat shop. By the time Nuria knew him, Fortuny had stopped working downstairs, explaining that he no longer had the hands, sight, or customers for the trade. His son Julian had once shared the shop and home with him; Fortuny kept Julian’s room as carefully as a museum, preserving notebooks and ordinary objects from his childhood. For the old hatter, the apartment held a past he repeatedly revisited, sometimes retelling the same memories as though they had not already been shared.

Fortuny’s bond with the property outlasted his working life. After years of estrangement, he had renewed contact with Julian’s mother, Sophie, who lived in Bogota and wrote to ask after her son. Fortuny gave Nuria both his own address and Sophie’s, hoping that news of Julian might eventually reach his mother. Nuria, who had grown close to the old man and became his only friend, continued visiting him at the apartment after Julian’s disappearance from his life.

A Refuge for Julian and Nuria

After Fortuny’s death, Nuria and Julian lived in severe poverty. She could find only occasional work, and the couple’s neighbours believed she was caring for her invalid husband, Miquel, a story that helped conceal Julian’s identity. When their resources ran low, Nuria devised a way to draw money from the estate. Writing as a fictitious lawyer named Jose Maria Requejo, she told Sophie that Fortuny had died without a will and that the apartment and shop might pass to Julian, who was believed to be in exile in France. The invented lawyer sought Sophie’s authorization to manage the transfer and requested funds for expenses.

Nuria used a false office address and a post-office box to receive the money Sophie arranged for the building’s costs and the supposed legal fees. The building manager forwarded the payments, retaining an unauthorized share; Nuria chose not to challenge him, since the arrangement still left enough for her and Julian to survive. The scheme gave the apartment a practical role in their continued concealment: the property’s upkeep and the money routed through its manager helped sustain their hidden household.

A visit from a young man claiming to update a file about Miquel changed the balance. His questions about a possible pension and his manner convinced Nuria that someone had begun looking into the identity she had used to protect Julian. She decided that Julian could not safely remain in the apartment. At night, she took the keys the building manager had sent to the nonexistent Requejo and accompanied Julian to the home where he had grown up. She told him that Fumero was searching for him again, though Julian seemed barely to recognize the name.

For several weeks Nuria returned to the apartment after midnight. She and Julian spent the nights together there, while she locked the door when she left at daybreak. Julian had no copy of the key. Nuria kept him confined not as punishment but because she believed that the locked apartment was safer than allowing him to move freely while Fumero sought him. The rooms thus offered refuge at the cost of isolation, and the key marked the narrow boundary between protection and imprisonment.

Official Records and False Identity

The apartment’s address also entered the official account of Julian’s supposed death. In September 1936, a body identified by a passport as Julian Fortuny Carax was taken to the morgue. The passport showed that its bearer had crossed into Spain a month earlier, and it gave Fortuny’s address as the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio. That address helped the authorities locate Fortuny, who came to identify the body.

The identification process was manipulated. According to the morgue attendant’s later account, an unnamed third policeman overrode the rules, took the passport, and ordered the body buried in a common grave at Montjuic. The policeman signed the registration form and asserted that the deceased was whoever he said he was. His signature later appeared on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies, making the falsified identification part of a wider pattern of official control over the record of the dead.

The later account explains the deception. Miquel Moliner had been killed, and his body was left in an alley in the Raval quarter so that his death would not be connected to the deaths of two policemen. By the time it reached the morgue, it had been dead for two days. Miquel had left his own papers at home; the only identifying documents found on him were a damaged passport in Julian’s name, and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The police therefore recorded the dead man as Julian Carax, with Fortuny’s apartment still listed as his address.

Fumero reinforced the false record when he went to the morgue. Fortuny, summoned to identify the body, recognized Miquel as the man who had recently visited him asking after Julian, but the police interpreted his reaction as confirmation. Fumero himself recognized Miquel, yet signed the report declaring the body to be Julian and ordered its removal to a common grave in Montjuic. The address associated with the apartment thus remained attached to a death that was not Julian’s, while the actual Julian continued to live in hiding.

Abandonment and Narrative Significance

After Fumero’s men detained Nuria and searched her home, she made her way back to the apartment by a circuitous route, fearing she had been followed. The front door was still locked, but Julian was gone. She waited through the night and understood that he would not return. The apartment, once the site of their secret life and the centre of Nuria’s efforts to protect him, could no longer keep them together.

Nuria saw Julian again two months later, by chance in a cinema. Their reunion begins a new encounter away from the apartment, underscoring that the rooms had been a temporary shelter rather than a secure resolution to the danger around them. Across the story, the property’s repeated association with keys, legal fictions, a false address, and a forged certainty about death makes it a compact example of how private refuge and public record can diverge: Julian is hidden there, while the address helps the authorities make another man’s death stand for his.