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be something unique to Julian, or at least some gift he’d used uniquely.
    But what?
    I didn’t know, and so I let my mind drift toward other aspects of my remarks.
    I’d need to mention the Russian book, of course. Harry had been right about that. I knew that people liked anecdotes at memorial services, and this realization allowed my mind to range without limit or direction over the years of my friendship with Julian. But soon I realized that to have such liberty was not altogether helpful in terms of organizing a eulogy, so I began to divide his life into the usual chronological segments: boyhood, early manhood, and the like. This was not helpful either, and in the end I found myself dividing Julian’s life into the parts represented by his books. To prepare my talk, I decided to peruse them in hopes of finding something cogent to say about each one. This would allow me to end my talk by giving a plug to the Russian book, Julian’s last and as yet unpublished work.
    Later that evening, after I’d let time calm my mood a little more, I sat down in my favorite chair and again drew down the first of Julian’s books.
    The Tortures of Cuenca .
    The facts of the crime had been well known long before Julian had written his book, but I’d forgotten most of them, so I took a few minutes to familiarize myself with them again:
    On August 21, 1911, a man by the name of José Maria Lopez Grimaldos, twenty-eight, was seen walking alone on the road between Osa de la Vega, a small town, and the nearby village of Tresjuncos in the Spanish province of Cuenca. Grimaldos was known as “El Cepa,” which means “the strain,” an odd nickname, all but untranslatable, as Julian had noted, but it evidently referred to the fact that Grimaldos was short and something of a dullard, thus, presumably, a “strain” on those who knew him.
    On that day in August, Grimaldos had been seen on the road that led from the farm of Francisco Ruiz, where he sometimes worked, to his small house. He never got home, however, and the following day, his sister reported his disappearance to the authorities. Her brother had sold a few sheep on the day of his disappearance, she told them, and at least two men would have been aware that he was in possession of the proceeds from that sale. Their names were Valero and Sanchez, and it just so happened that they had often treated Grimaldos quite badly, ridiculing and bullying him. Was it not possible that they had robbed and killed him, too?
    An investigation ensued, with other witnesses also focusing the investigators’ attention on Valero and Sanchez, but in the absence of Grimaldos’s body or any actual proof of his murder, the case had been closed in September of 1911.
    There is no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime.
    Thus Julian had declared in the first line of his first book, and thus it had proved for the Grimaldos family.
    Julian’s account of their relentless struggle for justice was the best part of the book, and as I read it again, I realized that it was there that Julian had found the beating heart of his narrative. It had not been in the aerial view of Spain with which he’d begun, suggestive though it was of his later sweep. Nor had it been in his meticulous rendering of the Spanish legal system, for that had been overelaborated and had at last grown rather tedious. It had not even been in Julian’s rendering of the fierce emotions that had seethed beneath Cuenca’s monochromatic landscape.
    According to Julian, those emotions had been unearthed not only by the haunting nature of an unsolved crime, but because, for the people of Cuenca, all mysteries had to be solved, else demons would rule the world.
    Armed by their unwavering faith, the Grimaldos family had refused to forget poor, lowly El Cepa. Holding him in their memory and seeking justice for his murder became their sole obsession, a work of the soul carried out in countless acts of remembrance, El Cepa the persistent