Manuel Gutierrez Fonseca

Manuel Gutierrez Fonseca is a longtime employee of the Barcelona municipal morgue whose procedural conscientiousness makes him an unusually important witness to Inspector Fumero’s falsification of Julian Carax’s death. Through his memories, a record built to establish identity and disposition instead reveals how official authority can erase a person and leave the truth to depend on private recollection.

Identity and Background

Manuel was fifty-nine when Gustavo Barceló described him to Daniel Sempere, and had worked for the city at the morgue since 1924. He called his thirty years of service time spent on the threshold of darkness, a phrase that captures both the routine proximity of his job to death and the emotional restraint it required. Barceló presents him as courteous, obliging, and committed to procedure rather than as a detective or investigator.

His life away from work is described in similarly concrete, unassuming details. For fifteen years he had rented a room on Calle Ceniza, sharing it with a dozen parakeets that had learned to hum the funeral march. He held a season ticket at the Liceo and liked Verdi and Donizetti. The domestic music and the funeral sounds associated with his birds sit beside his professional experience, where he had repeatedly confronted the demands of death and official routine.

Work and the Rules

Manuel regards following the rules as the essential part of his work. In his view, regulations provide for everything, especially situations in which a person does not know what to do. The story tests that conviction against cases in which procedure collides with personal grief and, later, with deliberate abuse of authority.

Fifteen years before Barceló recounts the Carax case, police delivered a canvas bag to the morgue. Manuel found the remains of his childhood best friend inside, with the rest of the body arriving separately. He held back his feelings and followed the rules. That earlier episode establishes the cost of his professional discipline: the regulations do not spare him from recognizing the dead, but they give him a way to continue working when private loss enters the morgue.

The Carax Identification

Manuel was on duty in September 1936 when the police brought in a body they said had been found shortly before dawn in an alley in the Raval quarter. The corpse arrived at the morgue by midmorning with a book and a passport as its only identifying possessions. The passport named the man Julian Fortuny Carax, gave Barcelona as his birthplace, and recorded his birth year as 1900. Its border stamp showed that he had entered the country a month earlier. The apparent cause of death was a gunshot wound.

Although Manuel was not a doctor, experience had taught him what to look for. He believed the wound just above the heart had been inflicted at close range, and he noticed that the body seemed to have been dead for more than twenty-four hours—longer than the police account allowed. These observations made the official timeline suspect before the identification was complete.

The passport enabled the authorities to summon Carax’s father, Antoni Fortuny, to identify the body. Manuel remembered Fortuny arriving with two policemen, distressed and unable to stand steadily. He repeated that Julian could not be dead. Concerned that viewing the corpse would overwhelm him, Manuel considered asking the officers to set aside the normal procedure—the only time, he recalled, that he had thought to question the rules on that basis. He nevertheless removed the shroud when the formal identification was requested. Fortuny stared at the body for almost a minute, then turned and left without identifying it as his son.

Records, Resistance, and Consequences

The identification was not the only part of the case that departed from procedure. A third policeman had entered the room without speaking. After Fortuny left, this officer approached the body, looked at it, and ordered that the passport be kept and the corpse sent to Montjuic for burial in a common grave at daybreak. When Manuel objected that they did not know who the man was and that the body had been dead for at least a day, the officer threatened him and insisted that the dead man was whoever he said he was. He then signed the registration form, closing the case.

Manuel remembered that signature long afterward. During the war and for years after it, he encountered it on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies brought to the morgue. The signature thus connected the one apparently misidentified corpse to a wider practice: official paperwork did not merely preserve information but could impose an identity while suppressing the circumstances that might challenge it. Manuel’s memory supplies what the forms conceal—the mismatch between the police account, the body’s condition, Fortuny’s refusal to identify it, and the officer’s decision to close the record.

Manuel also acted outside his usual reliance on procedure. Because the police seemed uninterested and the book found with the corpse bore the deceased man’s name, he called the publishing house on the same day the body arrived, while Fortuny was still expected. His account differed from the version Nuria Monfort had given Daniel, which placed the call three days later, after burial in a common grave. Manuel remembered speaking to a young woman who thanked him; her response struck him as though she already knew what had happened. This discrepancy leaves the call as both a practical attempt to alert those connected to the book and a troubling fragment of a larger, incompletely known story.

Years afterward, Manuel again contacted the publishing house when a body identified as Julian Carax arrived at the morgue. He compared the passport with the name of the author on the book found on the body and suspected that the police had been lax in their observance of the rules. He considered it his moral duty to inform the publishers. The call reaches Nuria Monfort, who reacts with tears and fear that it might be a trap set by Fumero; it also brings her to the point of returning home, where she finds Julian alive. In this way Manuel’s notice does not settle the identity of the corpse, but helps expose how precarious that identity has become.

Narrative Role and Significance

Manuel enters Daniel’s investigation through a chain of accounts rather than through a direct meeting with him. Barceló reports what Manuel has told him about the 1936 identification, while Nuria’s later recollection offers a different timing for the earlier call. Much later, in Nuria’s account, Manuel’s direct call to the publishing house becomes the signal that a body carrying Carax’s papers has been received. His evidence is therefore valuable but not all-knowing: he can describe the morgue, the body, the passport, the book, the officials, and the record, while the contradictions among witnesses remain part of the mystery.

The object that most clearly carries his memory forward is the registration signature. A rule-bound employee who once accepted procedure even when his childhood friend was brought to the morgue becomes a witness to the point at which procedure is commandeered by power. He does not solve the case by force or authority; he preserves details, recognizes irregularities, and makes a call. In a story where a passport and an official certificate can make Julian Carax disappear on paper, Manuel’s careful recollection helps keep the distinction between a person and the identity assigned to a body from vanishing altogether.