Barcelona municipal morgue

The Barcelona municipal morgue is both a place of official identification and a vulnerable point in the machinery of state recordkeeping. Its regulations are presented as safeguards for the dead, but the story shows how a powerful policeman can bend them: the morgue’s files and death certificates first appear to confirm Julián Carax’s death, then become evidence that the identification was deliberately falsified.

Institution and Procedures

The account of the morgue comes through Don Gustavo Barceló, who has spoken with Manuel Gutierrez Fonseca, a city employee there since 1924. At fifty-nine, Fonseca has spent three decades working at what he calls the threshold of darkness. Barceló describes him as courteous and old-fashioned, a man who believes that the important thing in his work is to follow the rules. In Fonseca’s view, the regulations make provision for every circumstance, especially the uncertain ones in which employees do not know what to do.

That faith in procedure is not merely abstract. Fifteen years before the events Barceló recounts, Fonseca opened a canvas bag brought in by the police and recognized his childhood best friend inside; the remainder of the body had arrived separately. He held back his feelings and followed the rules. The episode establishes both the emotional cost of his work and the institutional discipline by which he tries to manage it. It also sets up the difference between following a rule in distressing circumstances and watching officers disregard rules to impose a false identity.

The Reported Death of Carax

In September 1936, Fonseca was on duty when a body identified as Julián Carax’s arrived at the morgue. The police said it had been found in an alley in the Raval shortly before dawn, and it reached the morgue by midmorning. It carried only a book and a passport naming the deceased as Julian Fortuny Carax, born in Barcelona in 1900. The passport bore a border stamp from La Junquera, indicating that Carax had entered the country a month earlier.

The apparent cause of death was a bullet wound. Fonseca was not a doctor, but his years at the morgue had taught him what to look for; he judged that the shot, just above the heart, had been fired at close range. The passport enabled the authorities to locate Señor Fortuny, Carax’s father, who came to identify the body that evening. At this point the institutional record seemed to match the account Nuria Monfort had given, giving the supposed death an official setting and a seemingly traceable chain of identification.

When the Rules Are Overruled

Fonseca’s recollection, however, includes a third policeman who had entered the room quietly while two others prepared Señor Fortuny. The officer watched without speaking. When Fonseca objected that smoking was forbidden in the morgue, one of the other policemen signalled him to be quiet. After Señor Fortuny left, the third officer approached the body, looked at it, and spat on its face. He kept the passport and ordered the body sent to Montjuïc for burial in a common grave at daybreak.

Fonseca protested that the regulations did not permit burial before the dead person’s identity had been established. The body, he also insisted, had been dead for at least a day. The policeman answered that the deceased was whoever he said he was, signed the registration form, and closed the case. When Fonseca objected, the officer threatened him. The morgue’s rules still existed on paper, but the official signature made them powerless in this case: a coerced employee, a retained passport, and an imposed name turned administrative procedure into a means of concealment.

Fonseca later encountered the same signature on dozens of death certificates for unidentified bodies that arrived during the war and long afterward. The pattern connects one falsified record to a wider practice of official misidentification. The morgue’s files, which should preserve evidence of the dead, instead register the reach of a policeman able to decide whose identity would be recognized and whose would disappear.

Miquel’s Death and the False Record

The later account reveals the body’s actual identity. Miquel Moliner was killed by a policeman; that night, an unidentified van carried away the two dead policemen, and the bar’s manager was warned to forget what had happened. Twelve hours later, Miquel’s body was left in an alley in the Raval, separated from the deaths that had preceded its arrival. It reached the morgue two days after he had died. Miquel had left his own papers at home, so the employees found only a disfigured passport in Julián Carax’s name and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind.

The police consequently concluded that the dead man was Carax. Fumero went to the morgue, where Señor Fortuny had been brought to identify the body. Fortuny had not seen Julián for two days; on recognizing the deceased as the man who had visited him a week earlier asking after Julián, he screamed and left. The police treated his reaction as confirmation of the identification. Fumero, who had not seen Julián for seventeen years, recognized Miquel but nevertheless signed the forensic report declaring the body to be Carax and ordered its immediate removal to a common grave in Montjuïc.

This episode explains why the morgue’s earlier identification cannot be taken as reliable proof that Julián was dead. Miquel’s papers were absent, while the passport and book associated with Carax supplied a ready-made official identity. Fumero’s recognition of Miquel, followed by his false signature, reveals that the error was not an innocent confusion: Miquel’s death under Carax’s name gave Fumero an alibi and severed the official connection to the living Julián, whom he still hoped to find and kill. In a time when few people would demand explanations about an unnamed dead man, the morgue record made Carax appear not merely dead but administratively nonexistent.

Records, Testimony, and Memory

The morgue’s place in the narrative is defined by the conflict between its documents and the people who remember how those documents were made. A passport, a book, a registration form, and a forensic report provide the appearance of certainty; Fonseca’s recollection supplies the circumstances that the written record suppresses. His account also shows how an individual worker’s conscience can persist within an institution whose rules have been overridden. After the police carried out the false identification, Fonseca later contacted the publishing firm because he believed it was his moral duty to report what had happened.

The institution therefore serves as more than a backdrop to the mystery of Carax’s fate. Its routines organize the recognition, burial, and public disappearance of the dead, while the story’s changing accounts expose the difference between an official name and a person’s actual identity. The morgue preserves traces—papers, signatures, and testimony—but those traces do not speak with equal force. Under Fumero, the record can bury the truth; through Fonseca’s remembered account, the same record becomes evidence against the lie.