Nuria Monfort

Nuria Monfort is a former secretary at Cabestany’s publishing house and one of the few people Daniel Sempere can approach for information about Julian Carax. She first enters the story through the evidence she keeps and the recollections she shares: she knew Carax in Paris, learned of his reported death in Barcelona, and later encountered a visitor using the name Laín Coubert. Her account offers Daniel a personal history of Carax, but its claims must be read alongside the altered records that later expose how his identity was falsified.

Identity and Background

When Daniel visits her, Nuria is guarded about why he has come. He explains that her father gave him her address and said she might be able to talk about Carax; the mention of her father appears to make her wary. The exchange establishes her as a reluctant witness rather than an eager source, and makes her family connection part of the circumstances under which Daniel seeks her testimony.

Nuria says that she met Carax in Paris more than twenty years earlier, while she was working for Cabestany’s publishing house. Cabestany had acquired the rights to Carax’s novels for very little. Nuria began in the accounts department, but her knowledge of French, Italian, and some German led to her transfer to purchasing, where she became Cabestany’s personal secretary. Correspondence with foreign authors and publishers was among her duties, and that professional contact was how she came to know Carax.

Daniel has heard from her father that she and Carax were close. Nuria rejects the way that account casts her, suggesting that her father would have described their relationship as a fling and represented her as indiscriminately pursuing men. Her correction reveals a dispute not only over the nature of her connection to Carax, but also over who gets to define her character. The exchange leaves the precise terms of their relationship unstated.

Her Account of Carax’s Reported Death

Nuria tells Daniel that in the summer of 1936, soon after the outbreak of the war, an employee at the municipal morgue contacted Cabestany’s firm. The employee said that Carax’s body had been brought in three days earlier, reportedly found in an alley in the Raval quarter, dressed in rags and carrying a bullet wound. The items said to have been found with him were a copy of The Shadow of the Wind and a passport stamped to show that he had crossed the French border a month before.

According to the account Nuria received, nobody knew where Carax had been during the intervening month. The police contacted his father, who denied having a son and refused to claim the body. After two days without anyone coming forward, the body was buried in a common grave at Montjuïc Cemetery. Nuria says she could not take him flowers because nobody could tell her where he had been buried. This detail gives her recollection a personal cost: the story she recounts is not merely a publisher’s report but the account of someone left without even a known grave to visit.

The morgue employee had kept the book found in Carax’s jacket and contacted Cabestany’s office a few days later. Nuria says that was how she learned what had happened. She could not understand why Carax had not sought her or Cabestany if he had returned to Barcelona, since she considered them his only friends there. As she tells it, they knew of his return only after his death. Her certainty that he had come back is therefore based on the report relayed by the morgue employee, not on having seen him herself.

Coubert and the Continuing Mystery

Nuria’s story does not end with the reported burial. She recounts that, after Carax’s disappearance, a visitor came to Cabestany’s firm and offered to buy the remaining stock of his novels. By that time Cabestany could no longer work, and his eldest son was running the business. The visitor called himself Laín Coubert, a name Nuria recognized as belonging to a character in The Shadow of the Wind. She initially took the offer for a joke in poor taste.

The visitor’s appearance links Carax’s fictional world to the practical fate of his books: someone sought to acquire the remaining copies while using the name of a character from one of them. Nuria’s recognition makes the name a clue, but at this point her account does not establish who the visitor really was or what he intended to do with the novels. It shows instead how Carax’s books, and the identities within them, remain entangled with the search for the missing author.

Testimony, Documents, and Conflicting Identities

Nuria’s account is later set against a different reconstruction of the morgue episode. Daniel learns that the body had been identified through a passport as Julian Fortuny Carax, born in Barcelona in 1900, and that the passport bore a border stamp consistent with a return from France a month earlier. The morgue attendant’s recollection places Carax’s father at the morgue that evening to identify the body. These details overlap with the story Nuria heard, but do not settle the body’s identity.

The attendant also remembers a third policeman who entered the room, watched the proceedings, and, after Carax’s father had left, approached the body and spat on it. He then kept the passport and ordered the body sent for burial in a common grave at Montjuïc. When the attendant objected that the identification rules had not been followed, the policeman threatened him, declared that the dead man was whoever he said he was, and signed the registration form. The same signature later appeared on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies. The official record Nuria’s report seemed to confirm was thus produced under intimidation and by an officer who controlled the identity assigned to the corpse.

The later revelation resolves the central contradiction: the body identified as Carax’s was actually Miquel Moliner’s. After Miquel was killed, his body was left in an alley in the Raval; because he had left his papers at home, the morgue found only a damaged passport in Carax’s name and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The police concluded that the dead man was Carax. The account explains why the morgue report and the official registration could support a false identification, while Nuria’s earlier story records how that false version reached Cabestany’s firm and shaped what she believed.

Nuria’s place in the mystery is therefore that of a witness whose information is indispensable but mediated: she recounts what a morgue employee told the publisher, while the reader later encounters testimony about the coercion behind the paperwork and the substitution of one man’s identity for another’s. Her account preserves the route by which the false report circulated; the later evidence exposes the official machinery that made it appear true.