Nuria Monfort and Julian Caracals

Nuria Monfort and Julián Carax are joined by books, friendship, and a love that becomes intimate without becoming mutual. Their two weeks together in Paris give Nuria a rare sense of being fully herself, but they also make plain that Julián’s heart remains with Penélope. The relationship’s defining gesture is therefore not a promise of a shared future, but Nuria’s purchase of a pen for the man she loves and her departure with his manuscript.

The relationship begins through Julián’s books

In autumn 1933, Nuria was working for the publisher Josep Cabestany when she met Julián, whose novels Cabestany had acquired for Spanish and Latin American publication. The arrangement included Julián translating his French originals into Spanish. The books sold disastrously: the first two Spanish editions moved barely a hundred copies apiece, despite Cabestany’s continuing to publish a new manuscript every two years. His defense of the arrangement was that profit was not everything and good literature deserved support.

Nuria initially approached Julián as part of her work. In August, he had written to say that he was nearly finished with a new novel, The Cathedral Thief. When Cabestany was incapacitated by gout, he sent Nuria to France to renew contracts with Gallimard and collect Julián’s manuscript. Julián offered her his modest apartment in the Saint-Germain quarter instead of making her pay for a hotel. The professional visit became the occasion for a friendship and intimacy neither had planned.

A friendship mediated by memory

Before Nuria travelled, she had grown close to Miquel Moliner, who spoke to her about books, Freud, music, and, above all, Julián. Miquel kept old photographs and stories from Julián’s adolescence at San Gabriel’s School. Through those memories, Nuria formed an image of Julián before encountering him in Paris. Miquel recognized her attachment before she did, telling her that she was in love with Julián.

In Paris, Julián’s life was organized around writing. He spent his nights at his desk, sometimes reviewing pages and sometimes staring at the distant cathedral towers, with his cat Kurtz on his lap. One rainy night, Nuria joined him in the sitting room; they sat silently together until she asked who P was. Julián answered that it was Penélope. When Nuria asked about her and his fourteen years of exile in Paris, he told her that Penélope was the only woman he had ever loved.

That admission established the limit of what Nuria and Julián could become to one another. Their closeness did not erase the absent woman at the center of his emotional life. For Nuria, Penélope was never an ordinary rival: she remained seventeen in Nuria’s imagination, an unseen presence who haunted her dreams and made Julián’s continuing devotion impossible to ignore.

Intimacy and its unequal meaning

When Nuria asked why Julián had never returned to Barcelona in search of Penélope, he fell into a long silence, and she saw tears on his face. She knelt beside him and embraced him. They remained together until dawn; Nuria later could not say who kissed whom first. During the remaining days of her stay, they made love on the floor without speaking. Their physical intimacy was real, but it did not alter the knowledge Nuria carried when she looked into Julián’s eyes: he still loved Penélope.

Nuria’s account gives this brief relationship an intensity that exceeds its duration. She invented reasons to cable Cabestany and prolong her stay, caring little whether she lost her job or the life she had left in Barcelona. She wondered whether she had fallen into Julián’s arms because her life had been empty, but held fast to what the two weeks meant to her: they were the only time she felt fully herself. She also understood that she would never love another man as she loved Julián, however long she lived.

The fountain pen and the separation

The relationship’s final days gather around a specific object: a fountain pen displayed for years in a pawnshop. Julián had shown it to Nuria, explaining that the pawnbroker said it had once belonged to Victor Hugo. He could never afford it, yet stopped to look at it every day. While Julián slept, Nuria went to buy it. The price was beyond her means, but the pawnbroker accepted a cheque drawn on a Spanish bank with a Paris branch. Nuria spent the money her late mother had promised to save for a wedding dress, veil and all, to buy Julián the pen.

Outside the shop, Nuria met Irene Marceau, Julián’s patron, who asked whether Nuria was the woman he had waited for all those years. Irene’s sympathetic response confirmed what Nuria already feared: Julián would never be hers. Nuria returned to the apartment with the pen concealed in her bag. After their last lovemaking, she told Julián that her tears were tears of joy. When he went out to buy food, she packed, left the pen in its case on his typewriter, and took the manuscript of his novel with her. The gift and the manuscript mark opposite movements: she leaves Julián something he had long desired, while carrying his work away from him.

After Paris: attachment without reconciliation

Months passed without news from Julián or Don Ricardo Aldaya. Nuria stayed at the publishing house, which remained one of the places where she felt closest to Julián. He sent a brief note saying that he was working on a new novel, The Shadow of the Wind, and hoped to finish it within months. It said nothing about what had happened between them in Paris. Its colder, more distant tone did not free Nuria from her feelings; attempts to hate Julián failed, and she began to think of him as an illness.

The relationship’s aftermath is thus not a reunion but an enduring imbalance. Julián’s love remains fixed on Penélope, while Nuria continues to love Julián and to find herself drawn toward him through his writing. Paris gives her a brief experience of mutual physical closeness, but the silence afterward returns her to the one-sidedness she had already recognized. Her enduring bond with Julián is carried less by promises than by memory, the manuscript, and the pen she left on his typewriter.