Morgue regulations on identification and burial

Morgue regulations on identification and burial are the procedures meant to establish who a dead person is and when that person may be buried. Their decisive significance in the novel lies in the gap between the rules and their enforcement: Manuel Gutierrez Fonseca treats procedure as a moral obligation, but Francisco Javier Fumero uses his authority to dictate an identity and close a case. The resulting official records do not merely describe the dead; they help determine who, in the eyes of the state, has existed.

Purpose and Custodian

Manuel Gutierrez Fonseca, a city employee at the Barcelona municipal morgue since 1924, tells Gustavo Barceló that the essential thing in his work is to follow the rules. Their provisions, he says, are especially important when staff do not know what to do. His account makes procedure a practical guide for uncertainty, but also a safeguard against arbitrary decisions. Manuel has worked at the threshold between life and death for thirty years, and his experience includes occasions when strict observance carries an emotional cost.

The story presents him as courteous and conscientious, not as a doctor or investigator. His knowledge comes from years of service and attention to what arrives at the morgue. In the case of a body identified as Julián Carax, he notices that the circumstances reported by the police do not fit the evidence before him. His concern is not simply that a detail has been missed: if the body cannot be reliably identified, the regulations do not permit the police to settle its identity by fiat.

A Body Assigned Carax’s Name

The police report that a body was found in an alley in the Raval shortly before dawn and brought to the morgue by midmorning. It carries only a book and a passport identifying the dead man as Julian Fortuny Carax, born in Barcelona in 1900. The passport bears a border stamp from La Junquera, indicating that Carax had entered Spain a month earlier. The reported cause of death is a gunshot wound, and Manuel judges from his experience that it was inflicted at close range. These are the details available to him; the passport supplies an identity, but does not by itself resolve the doubts raised by the body and the timeline.

The body appears to have been dead for more than twenty-four hours when it reaches the morgue, rather than having died at dawn that day as the police claim. Manuel therefore hesitates to let the dead man be shown to the elderly Antoni Fortuny, who has been summoned to identify his son. Fortuny says that his Julian cannot be dead. When the shroud is removed, he looks at the body for almost a minute, then turns and leaves without confirming that it is his son. The formal identification the police seek has not been given.

Procedure Overruled

A third policeman, present while the other officers prepare Fortuny, remains silent during the attempted identification. After Fortuny leaves, he approaches the body, spits on its face, keeps the passport, and orders that it be sent to Montjuic for burial in a common grave at daybreak. Manuel protests that the regulations do not allow burial when the dead person’s identity is unknown. He also points out that the body has been dead for at least a day, contradicting the police account. His objections express the rule’s basic function: neither an uncertain passport nor an unsupported police statement should substitute for identification.

The policeman answers that the dead man is whoever he says he is, signs the registration form, and closes the case. The signature turns an order into an official record, while the common grave makes the imposed identity difficult to challenge. Manuel is threatened when he persists, and he does not prevent the burial. The procedure is thus not simply overlooked; its authority is deliberately displaced by a police officer who can compel compliance and control the paperwork.

The Record Repeated and Exposed

The man who overrides the rules is Francisco Javier Fumero. Manuel later recognizes his signature on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies brought in during the war and for years afterward. The repeated signature shows how the intervention in Carax’s case belongs to a broader pattern: official registration can give the appearance of certainty even when the underlying identity is unknown. The regulations remain legible as a standard, but the records produced under Fumero’s authority conceal their breach.

Years later, the same conflict between procedure and power resurfaces when Miquel Moliner is killed. His body reaches the morgue after being left in the Raval; it has been dead for two days, and the only identifying documents are a damaged passport in Carax’s name and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. Manuel suspects the police have been lax, compares the passport with the book’s author, and considers it his moral duty to inform the publishers. His call helps bring the discrepancy to light, even though the official record again identifies the body as Carax’s.

Fumero inspects Miquel’s body, recognizes him, signs the forensic report confirming the false identification, and orders immediate burial in a common grave at Montjuic. The earlier case supplies the pattern by which this later one becomes possible: a passport and a signature can make a false identity administratively final, especially in wartime, when few are likely to demand explanations. The morgue rules therefore mark the boundary between accountable identification and state-imposed anonymity. Manuel’s limited acts of resistance—questioning the first registration and later passing on what he has learned—preserve evidence that the paperwork itself tries to erase.