Julian Carax’s supposed return to Barcelona ends, in the first account, with his death and an anonymous burial; a later reconstruction reveals that the body was Miquel Moliner’s and that officials knowingly registered it under Carax’s name. The discrepancy makes the episode a turning point in the search for Carax: its few surviving documents appear to settle his fate, while the hidden history behind them demonstrates how an imposed identity can outlast the truth.

The Reported Death

Nuria Monfort tells Daniel Sempere that in the summer of 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the war, an employee at the municipal morgue contacted her publishing firm. The body, she says, had been found in an alley in the Raval, dressed in rags and carrying a gunshot wound near the heart. A copy of The Shadow of the Wind and a passport were found with it. The passport indicated that Carax had crossed the French border about a month earlier, but no one knew where he had been since.

The evidence seemed to establish a clear sequence: Carax had returned to Barcelona, died there, and been identified through his papers. His father refused to claim the body, saying he had no son. After two days without a claimant, Carax was buried in a common grave at Montjuic Cemetery. Nuria could not visit the grave because its location was unknown to her. The morgue employee had kept the book found in the dead man’s jacket; that surviving object prompted him to contact the publishers and brought the news to Nuria.

A Death Made Official

Years later, an inquiry into the morgue records complicates Nuria’s account without making her report unreasonable: the records had been manipulated. Don Manuel, an employee who had been present, recalled that the body arrived in September 1936, rather than the summer date Nuria remembered. The police said it had been found in the Raval shortly before dawn and brought to the morgue by midmorning. Its only possessions were a book and a passport identifying the dead man as Julian Fortuny Carax, born in Barcelona in 1900.

The passport bore a stamp from the border post at La Junquera, recording Carax’s entry into Spain about a month earlier. It also led the authorities to Fortuny, who came to identify the body that evening. Don Manuel believed the fatal gunshot had been fired at close range. He also remembered that, after Fortuny left, a third policeman approached the corpse, kept the passport, and ordered that the body be sent to Montjuic for burial in a common grave at daybreak.

The policeman’s authority overrode the identification rules. When Don Manuel protested that the dead man’s identity was uncertain and that the body had already been dead for at least a day, the officer threatened him. He declared that the man was whoever he said he was, signed the registration form, and closed the case. Don Manuel later encountered the same signature on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies. The incident thus connects Carax’s supposed death to a larger practice of turning uncertain wartime deaths into administratively fixed identities.

The Body Was Miquel Moliner

The later account reveals that the man buried as Carax was Miquel Moliner. After Miquel was killed, an unidentified van removed the bodies of the dead policemen and those present were warned to forget what had happened. Miquel’s body was left in an alley in the Raval twelve hours later, so that his death would not be connected to the police officers’ deaths. By the time it reached the morgue, it had been dead for two days.

Miquel had left his own papers at home. The only identification available was a disfigured passport in Carax’s name, together with a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The police therefore concluded that the dead man was Carax. When Fumero came to the morgue, Fortuny was summoned to identify the body. He had not seen Carax for two days and, on recognizing the dead man as someone who had visited him only a week earlier asking after Carax, began to scream and left. The police treated his reaction as confirmation. Fumero, who recognized Miquel, signed the forensic report identifying him as Carax and ordered immediate burial in a common grave at Montjuic.

Documents, Memory, and Consequence

The two accounts share the same material clues—the passport, the book, the journey across the border, and the burial at Montjuic—but assign them different meanings. In Nuria’s account, they are the remains of a mystery: the evidence that Carax came home and died, with no known grave for his friend to mourn. In the later reconstruction, the same objects are instruments of misidentification, and the official record is shown to have been signed by a man who knew it was false.

The episode’s truth emerges through records and testimony that survive unevenly: a morgue employee’s recollection, a passport, the book found on the body, and a report signed under coercive authority. The false registration conceals Miquel’s death and sustains the belief that Carax died in Barcelona. It also shows why the distinction between a person and the name on a document matters in the novel: the identity entered into the record governs what can be known, while the people who remember the dead must reconstruct what the record erased.