Julian Digs Up Penelope and David's Coffins

Julian’s removal of Penelope and David’s coffins from the crypt at the abandoned Aldaya mansion turns grief into a physical return to the past. The act alarms Nuria Monfort, but her understanding of it changes: she comes to see it not as monstrous, but as tragic, part of Julian’s life among the dead and his inability to recover what he has lost.

Setting and Discovery

After Pedro Sanmartí’s murder, Nuria realizes that Laín Coubert remains alive within Julian’s burned body. She discovers that Julian has been entering and leaving his apartment through a window facing an inner courtyard, and that he has been moving through the city and visiting the old Aldaya mansion. In his return to the family crypt, he has broken the tombstones and removed the coffins of Penelope and their son, David.

The discovery revises Nuria’s understanding of Julian’s whereabouts and behavior. The mansion is no longer simply a place he visits: it has become the place where he stays, watching over Penelope and David’s remains. The ruined crypt and displaced coffins make visible a loss that Julian cannot leave behind.

Nuria’s Response

Nuria visits the mansion once a month to check whether Julian is all right, or at least alive. She crosses the collapsed wall at the back, out of sight from the street, and leaves food, money, and books for him. Sometimes he is there; at other times he has disappeared, and she waits for hours until dark. Her actions give the episode an aftermath of care: rather than treating the disturbed graves as the end of her concern, she keeps returning to the man who has disturbed them.

As Nuria explores the decaying house, she finds the broken tombstones and the coffins removed from the crypt. Her judgment shifts. She no longer thinks Julian mad, and she does not regard the desecration as monstrous; she sees it as tragic. That distinction does not undo the damage, but it locates the act within the continuing grief and isolation that shape his life.

Julian at the Mansion

When Nuria finds Julian, they speak for hours beside a fire. He tells her that he has tried to write again but cannot remember his books as his own; they seem like works by someone else that he happened to read. The effort to write is painful, and when Nuria is away he burns the pages he has produced. Once, she rescues a pile of those pages from the ashes, and discovers that they speak about Daniel Sempere.

The opened crypt and the burned pages echo one another as acts shaped by irretrievable loss. Julian has taken Penelope and David’s coffins from their resting place, while his attempts to make new writing are destroyed before they can endure. Nuria’s discovery of pages about Daniel suggests that Julian’s attention has turned toward the younger man, whom he watches grow and wonders about.

Significance

The episode connects Julian’s fixation on Penelope and David to the story he can no longer write. In Nuria’s account, he wonders whether Daniel might be the son he lost, and whether Daniel’s presence offers a chance to begin again with a story he cannot invent but can remember. This remains Nuria’s interpretation of Julian’s troubled logic, not a certainty about his intentions. The coffins make the loss concrete; the pages Nuria saves preserve a fragile possibility of connection beyond it.

Nuria’s repeated visits also resist the disappearance that surrounds Julian. She cannot restore the tombs, recover the family he lost, or make him write again, but she continues to bring provisions and books and to wait for him. The action therefore belongs both to Julian’s retreat into the past and to Nuria’s effort to keep him connected to the living.