Post-war poverty and scarcity in Barcelona

Postwar Barcelona’s poverty and scarcity are presented not as a single crisis but as a prolonged condition that reshapes work, housing, and the value of what people possess. For Nuria Monfort and Julian Carax, survival depends on makeshift arrangements and concealed identities; around them, the city’s cultural economy turns rare books into coveted property even as ordinary life remains precarious.

Poverty and Survival

After the war, Nuria and Julian had spent their savings and the money obtained through Laín Coubert’s nighttime thefts. There was nothing left in their home to sell. Nuria searched unsuccessfully for work as a translator, typist, or cleaner, but her past association with Cabestany made employers suspicious. Neighbors offered practical help—milk, cheese, bread, and sometimes food sent from relatives in the country—while accepting the explanation that she was caring for her invalid husband, Miquel.

When months of hardship made it clear that finding work would take time, Nuria devised another means of support. Using a fictitious lawyer’s identity, she wrote to Julian’s mother, Sophie Carax, about the unprobated estate of the deceased hatter Fortuny. The claimed inheritance included the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio and the shop in the same building. Nuria asked Sophie to authorize legal proceedings and arranged for money intended to cover the property expenses to reach a post-office box under the invented lawyer’s name.

The scheme produced a modest, continuing income. The building manager sent the monthly money order on as an open cheque; he kept an unauthorized share, and Nuria chose not to challenge him because his complicity helped preserve the arrangement. What remained was enough for Nuria and Julian to live on. She found occasional translation work, but the household continued under the threat that Javier Fumero might investigate the past again. Poverty was therefore bound to secrecy: the couple’s refuge depended on deception, neighbors’ discretion, and a fragile flow of money.

Scarcity, Disability, and Dependence

Julian’s condition intensified the household’s dependence on Nuria. After the fire, he remained in hospital for eleven months under Miquel Moliner’s name. Nuria visited every day, and the nurses taught her how to care for him. When his face bandages were removed, she understood that the man she had known had been profoundly changed, while others assumed that he had lost his mind. Their care continued after his release, with Julian largely confined to the home and Nuria responsible for keeping them both alive and hidden.

The narrative connects this private hardship to the larger scarcity of postwar life. In 1945, six years after the Civil War, its consequences were still present, though people rarely spoke about them openly; the Second World War had meanwhile brought further suffering into public consciousness. Nuria eventually found work as a copy-editor at Endymion, a publishing house run by Pedro Sanmartí. Its commercial output—catechisms, etiquette manuals, moralizing novels, and a popular soldiers’ comic—offered employment, but did not erase the broader atmosphere of want and misery.

Books, Money, and Unequal Fortunes

The contrast between ordinary poverty and the speculative value of rare books is especially sharp in the story of The Shadow of the Wind. When Daniel Sempere brought his copy to Gustavo Barceló, Barceló examined it closely and offered money for it. Daniel refused even after Barceló raised his offer to two hundred pesetas, a considerable sum at the time. The book’s market value did not determine Daniel’s decision: he regarded it as his own and would not sell.

Barceló later continued to make offers, telling Daniel that antiquarian booksellers believed a Carax novel could be worth a fortune, especially in Paris. The market’s interest grew after news spread among collectors that a surviving copy of The Shadow of the Wind had been found. Offers arrived from London, Paris, and Rome within two months. The story surrounding the book—Carax’s flight from Paris after a duel, his reported death during the Civil War, and the rumor of a faceless figure burning his works—helped make scarcity itself part of its price.

The book’s later publication shows the limits of that speculative promise. Barceló closed his bookshop, sold his stock, and started a company devoted to reissuing Carax’s works. Its first volume, containing three novels recovered from proofs stored in a Cabestany family furniture warehouse, sold 342 copies, far fewer than the year’s bestseller, an illustrated life of the bullfighter El Cordobés. A book could be treated as a collector’s treasure, yet its reappearance in print did not guarantee a broad readership or commercial success.

Work and the Uneven Return of Normality

Nuria’s occasional translation work and later copy-editing position mark a limited path back into employment, not an end to deprivation. Her connection to the publishing world was shaped by what the postwar economy would permit: she had first been shut out because of suspicion surrounding her past, then found a place at a firm whose safe, conventional titles suited its business. Meanwhile, the people who had helped her survive could not restore the years lost to fear and isolation.

A faint appearance of normality returned to the city, and old rivalries and grievances gradually became easier for people to set aside. But the surviving evidence of scarcity remains in the contrast between neighborly food gifts, Nuria’s improvised property scheme, and the precarious success of Carax’s reissued books. Postwar Barcelona emerges as a place where recovery is uneven: some people can turn cultural scarcity into a business, while others rely on concealed identities and small acts of assistance to make it through the month.