Isaac Monfort and Nulia Monfort

Isaac Monfort and Nuria Monfort share a father-daughter bond marked by love, distance, and belated regret. Nuria repeatedly made the effort to see Isaac, but he did not visit her home in more than fifteen years; after her death, he understands that they had lived almost as strangers. Her entrusted envelope, which he passes to Daniel, turns their strained relationship into the means by which Nuria’s account survives and reaches someone she trusted.

Identity and Background

Isaac is Nuria’s father, but their kinship did not translate into familiarity. He later recalls her as a quiet child who watched the world pensively, learned to read very young, and loved stories. Nuria wanted to write books, including encyclopedias and works on history and philosophy. Her mother attributed this ambition to Nuria’s desire to win Isaac’s affection: believing that her father loved only books, she hoped that writing them might make him love her. This remembered childhood places the later distance within a relationship in which books were not merely Isaac’s interest but part of how Nuria imagined she might reach him.

The same pattern of separation appears in Daniel’s earlier experience with Isaac. During a conversation about the war, Isaac 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. Isaac had tried to honor that promise, but admitted that he sometimes thought he had been wrong to do so. This is not evidence that Isaac treated Nuria in the same way; rather, it shows how promises and silence shape the family’s handling of painful knowledge, a concern that becomes central when Nuria’s own story is finally entrusted to another person.

A Relationship Lived at a Distance

For over fifteen years, Isaac did not enter Nuria’s home. When they met, she came to him, telling him that the stairs were easier for her to climb than for him to come up. Isaac answered that if she did not want to invite him, he would not come; Nuria replied that she did not need to invite her father and that he could come whenever he liked. Her words made the invitation plain, yet Isaac continued to stay away.

He disapproved of the neighborhood and building, describing them as lacking light and being old. He also judged the life Nuria had chosen as offering little future, particularly because her husband had no job. Nuria, Isaac remembers, simply nodded in agreement. In mourning, he recognizes that these judgments had helped him avoid knowing the life she was actually living. His regret is not just that he missed a particular visit: he sees that he repeatedly treated her choices as reasons to keep his distance.

Grief and Recognition

After Nuria’s funeral, Daniel finds Isaac in her apartment, seated by the window with a candle. Isaac is in tears and says Nuria was not at her own funeral. The line gives grief a bitterly literal form: the person whose absence has drawn everyone together cannot attend the ceremony that marks it. Isaac looks as though he still imagines his daughter nearby, but his memories cannot restore the adult Nuria he did not know.

Isaac describes their lives as those of two strangers who saw each other every day and exchanged greetings out of politeness. He wonders whether Nuria died without forgiving him, and whether she had loved him in her own way while he loved her in his. The uncertainty matters: he does not claim that affection repaired the distance, or that he can know what Nuria felt at the end. He instead acknowledges that he may never have allowed her to know him, and may never have taken steps to know her. His silent tears persist even as he smiles, leaving the relationship’s tenderness and failure present at once.

Daniel tells Isaac that Nuria loved him and knew herself to be loved. Isaac cannot accept that reassurance without reservation. He believes she trusted Daniel more, although she had met him only a couple of times, and Daniel’s efforts to console him do not erase his sense of having failed her. The contrast between Isaac’s long family tie and Nuria’s brief acquaintance with Daniel exposes the emotional cost of the distance: trust did not necessarily follow blood or years.

The Envelope and Nuria’s Story

Isaac explains that on their last afternoon together, Nuria brought him an envelope and asked him to keep it. She was worried but did not tell him what troubled her. Isaac suggested that they go to the police together; Nuria replied that the police station was the last place she could seek help. She then asked him to give the envelope to Daniel if she did not return within a couple of days, and told him not to open it. Isaac respected that instruction and preserved the pages for their intended recipient.

After reading them, Isaac identifies the pages as the story Daniel had been seeking: the story of a woman he had never known, despite sharing her name and blood. He gives the envelope to Daniel and says that it now belongs to him. The handover makes Isaac a necessary intermediary between daughter and reader. Nuria had not trusted him with the explanation of her immediate danger, but she had trusted him to keep the pages safe and deliver them. His fulfillment of that request is a concrete act of care, even as it arrives too late to restore their relationship.

Isaac’s account of Nuria’s childhood deepens the significance of the pages. He remembers her wish to become an author, and her mother’s belief that she wanted to write because she thought Isaac loved books more than her. At the apartment, Isaac asks Daniel to leave him alone with the memory of his daughter as he was reading her pages. The manuscript allows him a kind of encounter with the woman he admits he never knew, but it also makes the absence unmistakable: memory can approach Nuria, not bring her back.

Silence, Memory, and What Remains

The relationship sits within a wider pattern in which painful histories are kept silent and disclosed only later. Isaac’s promise to Daniel’s mother had restrained him from speaking about the war; Nuria, by contrast, leaves written testimony that Isaac must eventually pass on. The two acts of withholding are distinct, but together they show how family bonds can be shaped by what one generation is asked not to tell and what another manages to leave behind.

Nuria’s pages also connect the private history between father and daughter to the novel’s concern with memory after war. In the account Isaac gives Daniel, war is described as feeding forgetfulness: people fall silent, and the experiences of those who lived through it are treated as if they were an illusion. Nuria’s narrative resists that erasure by surviving her death and reaching a reader. Isaac’s part is limited but decisive: the father who regrets not knowing his daughter becomes the keeper of the story that can make her known.

The ending does not offer reconciliation in the form of a final conversation. Isaac believes Nuria may have died without forgiving him, and the book does not resolve that uncertainty. Instead, the relationship’s last exchange is mediated by an envelope, a promise, and Daniel’s receipt of the pages. Their significance lies in the tension between a love both father and daughter seem to have held and the years in which they failed to make that love into mutual understanding.