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Front
Above the door frame is a long, narrow plaque of enamelled metal. The black letters set against a white background say Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Here and there the enamel is cracked and chipped. The door is an old door, the most recent layer of brown paint is beginning to peel, and the exposed grain of the wood is reminiscent of a striped pelt. There are five windows along the facade. As soon as you cross the threshold, you notice the smell of old paper. It's true that not a day passes without new pieces of paper entering the Central Registry, papers referring to individuals of the male sex and of the female sex who continue to be born in the outside world, but the smell never changes, in the first place, because the fate of all paper, from the moment it leaves the factory, is to begin to grow old, in the second place, because on the older pieces of paper, but often on the new paper too, not a day passes without someone's inscribing it with the causes of death and the respective places and dates, each contributing its own particular smells, not always offensive to the olfactory mucous membrane, a case in point being the aromatic effluvia which, from time to time, waft lightly through the Central Registry, and which the more discriminating noses identify as a perfume that is half rose and half chrysanthemum.
Apart from his first name, José, Senhor José also has surnames, very ordinary ones, nothing extravagant, one from his father's side, another from his mother's, as is normal, names legitimately transmitted, as we could confirm in the Register of Births in the Central Registry if the matter justified our interest and if the results of that inquiry repaid the labour of merely confirming what we already know. However, for some unknown reason, assuming it is not simply a response to the very insignificance of the person, when people ask Senhor José what his name is, or when circumstances require him to introduce himself, I'm so-and-so, giving his full name has never got him anywhere, since the people he is talking to only ever retain the first part, José, to which they will later add, or not, depending on the degree of formality or politeness, a courteous or familiar form of address. For, and let us make this quite clear, the "Senhor" is not worth quite what it might at first seem to promise, at least not here in the Central Registry, where the fact that everyone addresses everyone else in the same way, from the Registrar down to the most recently recruited clerk, does not necessarily have the same meaning when applied to the different relationships within the hierarchy, for, in the varying ways that this one short word is spoken, and according to rank or to the mood of the moment, one can observe a whole range of modulations: condescension, irritation, irony, disdain, humility, flattery, a clear demonstration of the extent of expressive potentiality of two brief vocal emissions which, at first glance, in that particular combination, appeared to be saying only one thing. More or less the same happens with the two syllables of José, plus the two syllables of Senhor, when these precede the name. When someone addresses the above-named person either inside the Central Registry or outside it, one will always be able to detect a tone of disdain, irony, irritation or condescension. The caressing, melodious tones of humility and flattery never sang in the ears of the clerk Senhor José, these have never had a place in the chromatic scale of feelings normally shown to him. One should point out, however, that some of these feelings are far more complex than those listed above, which are rather basic and obvious, one-dimensional. When, for example, the Registrar gave the order, Senhor José, change those covers for me, will you, an attentive, finely tuned ear would have recognised in his voice something which, allowing for the apparent contradiction in terms, could be described as authoritarian indifference, that is, a power so sure of itself that it not only completely ignored the person it was speaking to, not even looking at him, but also made absolutely clear that it would not subsequently lower itself to ascertain that the order had been carried out. To reach the topmost shelves, the ones at ceiling height, Senhor José had to use an extremely long ladder and, because, unfortunately for him, he suffered from that troubling nervous imbalance which we commonly call fear of heights, and in order to avoid crashing to the ground, he had no option but to tie himself to the rungs with a strong belt. Down below, it did not occur to any of his colleagues of the same rank, much less his superiors, to look up and see if he was getting on all right. Assuming that he was all right was merely another way of justifying their indifference.
Fortunately, there are not that many famous people. As we have seen, even using such eclectic, generous criteria of selection and representation as those employed by Senhor José, it is not easy, especially when one is dealing with a small country, to come up with a good hundred truly famous people without falling into the familiar laxness of anthologies of the one hundred best love sonnets or the one hundred most touching elegies, which so often leave us feeling perfectly justified in suspecting that the last to be chosen are only there to make up the numbers. Considered in its entirety, Senhor José's collection far exceeded one hundred, but, for him, as for the compiler of anthologies of elegies and sonnets, the number one hundred was a frontier, a limit, a ne plus ultra, or, to put it in ordinary language, like a litre bottle which, however hard you try, will never hold more than a litre of liquid. According to this way of thinking, the relative nature of fame could, we believe, be best described as "dynamic," since Senhor José's collection, necessarily divided into two parts, on the one hand, the hundred most famous people, on the other, those who have not quite got that far, is in constant movement in that area which we normally refer to as the frontier. Fame, alas, is a breeze that both comes and goes, it is a weather vane that turns both to the north and to the south, and just as a person might pass from anonymity to celebrity without ever understanding why, it is equally common for that person, after preening himself in the warm public glow, to end up not even knowing his own name. If one applies these sad truths to Senhor José's collection, one will see that it, too, contains glorious rises and dramatic falls, one person will have left the group of substitutes and entered the ranks, another will no longer fit in the bottle and will have to be disposed of. Senhor José's collection is very much like life.
Senhor José's decision appeared two days later. Generally speaking, we don't talk about a decision appearing to us, people jealously guard both their identity, however vague it might be, and their authority, what little they may have, and prefer to give the impression that they reflected deeply before taking the final step, that they pondered the pros and cons, that they weighed up the possibilities and the alternatives, and that, after intense mental effort, they finally made a decision It has to be said that things never happen like that. Obviously it would not enter anyone's head to eat without feeling hungry, and hunger does not depend on our will, it comes into being of its own accord, the result of objective bodily needs, it is a physical and chemical problem whose solution, in a more or less satisfactory way, will be found in the contents of a plate. Even such a simple act as going down into the street to buy a newspaper presupposes not only a desire to receive news, which, since it is a desire, is necessarily an appetite, the effect of specific physico-chemical activities in the body, albeit of a different nature, that routine act also presupposes, for example, the unconscious certainty, belief or hope that the delivery van was not late or that the newspaper stand is not closed due to illness or to the voluntary absence of the proprietor. Moreover, if we persist in stating that we are the ones who make our decisions, then we would have to begin to explain, to discern, to distinguish, who it is in us who made the decision and who subsequently carried it out, impossible operations by anyone's standards. Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us. The proof can be found in the fact that, though life leads us to carry out the most diverse actions one after the other, we do not prelude each one with a period of reflection, evaluation and calculation, and only then declare ourselves able to decide if we will go out to lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman.
Alleging personal reasons of irresistible force majeure, which he begged leave not to have to explain, bearing in mind, anyway, that in twenty-five years of dutiful and always punctual service, this was the first time he had ever done so, Senhor José asked permission to leave an hour early. In accordance with the regulations governing the complex hierarchical relationships in the Central Registry, he began by making his request to the senior clerk in his wing of the Registry, on whose good or bad mood would depend the terms in which the request was transmitted to the corresponding deputy, who, in turn, by the omission or addition of words, by emphasising one syllable or muting another, could, up to a point, influence the final decision. On this matter, however, there are far more doubts than there are certainties, because the reasons that lead the Registrar to allow or refuse this or other authorisations are known only to him, and because there is no memory or record, in all the years of the Central Registry's existence, of a single report, either written or verbal, giving the necessary background information. It will never be known, therefore, why Senhor José was authorised to leave half an hour earlier instead of a whole hour earlier as he had requested. It is perfectly legitimate to imagine, although it is gratuitous, unverifiable speculation, that first the senior clerk or later the deputy, or both of them together, had pointed out that such a prolonged absence would have a deleterious effect on the service, it is much more likely that the boss had merely decided to take advantage of the occasion to humiliate his subordinates yet again with one of his displays of discretionary authority. Informed of the decision by the senior clerk, to whom it had been transmitted by the deputy, Senhor José calculated the time allowed and concluded that, if he was not to arrive late at his destination, if he did not want to come face-to-face with the man of the house, already back from work, he would have to take a taxi, a luxury almost unknown to him. No one was expecting him, there might not even be anyone home at that hour, but what he wanted to avoid was having to deal with the husbands impatience, it would be far more awkward trying to satisfy the suspicions of a person like that than replying to the questions of a woman with a child in her arms.
Such was the force of this blow that, once his disoriented feet were out in the street again, it took Senhor José a while to realise that a very fine, almost diaphanous rain was falling on him, the sort of rain that soaks you vertically and horizontally, and from every other angle as well. It might be a good idea to try looking her up in the phone book, the old girl had remarked slyly as they said goodbye, and each of those words, innocent in themselves, incapable of offending even the most susceptible of creatures, was transformed in an instant into an aggressive insult, a proof of insufferable stupidity, as if, throughout that conversation, so rich in emotions after a certain point, she had been observing him coldly and had come to the conclusion that this awkward official sent by the Central Registry to seek out things both distant and hidden was incapable of seeing what was right in front of his eyes and within reach of his hands. Having no hat or umbrella, Senhor José received the fine spray of water directly on his face, the swirling confusion of drops resembling the disagreeable thoughts coming and going inside his head, but all of them, he noticed, were circling round one central point, still barely discernible, but which, little by little, was becoming clearer. It was true that he hadn't even thought of doing something as simple and everyday as consulting the telephone book in order to find out both the telephone number and the address of the person whose name they were listed under. If he wanted to discover the unknown woman's whereabouts, that should have been his first action, in less than a minute he would have found out where she was, then, on the pretext of clearing up some imaginary query in her file at the Central Registry, he could arrange to meet her at her home, saying that he wanted to save her having to pay a bit of tax, for example, and then, immediately afterwards, risking everything with one bold gesture, or days later, when he had gained her confidence, saying to her, Tell me about your life. He hadn't done that, and although he was fairly ignorant of the arts of psychology and the secrets of the unconscious, he was beginning now, with considerable accuracy, to understand why he hadn't. Let's imagine a hunter, he was saying to himself, let's imagine a hunter who has lovingly gathered together his equipment, the rifle, the cartridge belt, the bag of provisions, the canteen of water, the net bag to collect his booty in, his walking shoes, let's imagine him setting out with his dogs, determined, confident, prepared, as one should be on these hunting expeditions, for a long day, and then, as he turns the next corner, he comes across a flock of partridges right by his house, ready and willing to be killed, and although they take flight, however many of them are brought down, they still don't actually fly away, to the delight and surprise of the dogs, who have never in their lives seen manna fall from heaven in such quantities. What interest could such an easy kill have for the hunter, with those partridges offering themselves up, so to speak, to his gun, wondered Senhor José, and he gave the obvious answer, None. That's what has happened to me, he added, inside my head, and probably inside everyone's head, there must be a kind of autonomous thought that thinks for itself, that decides things without the participation of any other thought it is the thought we have known for as Ions as we have known ourselves and which we address familiarly as "tu," the one that allows itself to be guided by us in order to take us where we think we consciously want to go, but that, in the end, might be being led along an entirely different path, in another direction, and not towards the nearest corner, where a flock of partridges is waiting for us all unknowing, although we know that it is the search that gives meaning to any find and that one often has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near. The clarity of this thought, whether the former or the latter, the special thought or the habitual one, the truth that, once you've arrived, it matters little how you arrived there, was so dazzling that Senhor José stopped, stunned, in the middle of the pavement, wrapped in the misty drizzle and in the light of a street lamp that happened to come on at that very moment. Then, from the depths of a contrite and grateful soul, he regretted the evil, unmerited thoughts, those all too conscious thoughts he had heaped upon the kind old lady in the ground-floor apartment, when in truth he was in her debt, not only for the address of the school and for the photo, but also for the full and perfect explanation of a process that apparently had no explanation. And since she had left hanging in the air that invitation to go back and see her, If you're ever passing this way again, those were her words, clear enough for her not to bother with the rest of the phrase, he promised himself that he would knock on her door again one of these days, both to tell her how his researches were going and to surprise her with the revelation of his real reason for not consulting the phone book. Obviously this would mean having to confess to her that the letter of authority was false, that the search had not been ordered by the Central Registry, but was his own idea and, inevitably, tell her about everything else too. Everything else was his collection of famous people, his fear of heights, the age-blackened documents, the spiders' webs, the monotonous shelves of the living, the chaos of the dead, the frowsty smell, the dust, the despair and finally the record card which for some reason had got stuck to the others, So that it and the name it bore would not be forgotten, The name of the little girl I have with me, he realised, and had not the powdery rain continued to fall from the skies, he would have taken the photo out of his pocket to look at it. If he was ever to describe to anyone what the Central Registry was like inside, it would be to that lady in the ground-floor apartment. Its a matter that only time can resolve, thought Senhor José. At that precise moment, time brought him the bus that would take him near to his house, it was full of drenched people, men and women of various ages and shapes, some young, some old, some younger, some older. The Central Registry knew them all, knew their names, where they had been born and who their parents were, it counted up and counted off their days one by one, that woman, for example, with her eyes closed, the one with her head resting on the window, must be what, thirty-five, thirty-six, that was all Senhor José needed for his imagination to take wing, And what if she's the woman I'm looking for, it wasn't, in fact, impossible, in this life we meet strangers all the time, and you just have to resign yourself to it, we can't go around asking everyone, What's your name, and then produce a record card from our pocket to see if that is the person we want. Two stops later, the woman got off, then she stood on the pavement waiting for the bus to continue its journey, she probably wanted to cross to the other side of the road and, since she wasn't carrying an umbrella, Senhor José could see her face full on despite the tiny raindrops clinging to the bus windows, there was a moment when, perhaps impatient because the bus was taking a while to draw away, she looked up, and that was when her eyes met his. Both he and she stayed like that until the bus set off again, they stayed like that for as long as they could see each other, Senhor José craning and turning his neck, the woman following his movements from where she was standing, perhaps asking herself, I wonder who that is, he saying to himself, It's her.
Contrary to what people might think when viewing these things from the outside, life is not necessarily easy in a government department, certainly not in this Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, where, since time which cannot be described as immemorial simply because the Registry contains a record of everything and everyone, thanks to the persistent efforts of an unbroken Une of great Registrars, all that is most sublime and most trivial about public office has been brought together, the qualities that make of the civil servant a creature apart, both usufructuary and dependent of the physical and mental space defined by the reach of his pen nib. Put simply, and with a view in this preamble to a more exact understanding of the general facts considered in the abstract, Senhor José has a problem to solve. Knowing how difficult it had been to squeeze out of the rule-bound reluctance of the hierarchy one miserable half hour off, which meant that he was not caught in flagrante by the husband of the young woman in the second-floor apartment, we can imagine his current distress as, night and day, he racks his brain for some convincing excuse that would allow him to ask for not one hour, but two, not two, but three hours, which is probably the amount of time he will need if he is to carry out a useful search of the schools archives. The effects of this constant, obsessive disquiet soon revealed themselves in mistakes at work, in lack of attention, in sudden bouts of drowsiness during the day due to insomnia, in short, Senhor José, until then considered by his various superiors to be a competent, methodical and dedicated civil servant, began to be the object of severe warnings, reprimands and calls to order that only served to confuse him all the more, and, needless to say, the way he was carrying on, he could be absolutely sure of a negative response if, at some point, he could actually bring himself to ask for the longed-for time off. Things reached such a pitch that, after fruitless analysis by senior clerks and deputies in turn, they had no option but to bring the matter to the notice of the Registrar, who, at first, found the whole business so absurd that he could not understand what all the fuss was about. The fact that a civil servant should have so grievously neglected his duties made any benevolent tendency towards reaching an exculpatory decision impossible, it constituted a grave offence against the working traditions of the Central Registry, something that could only be justified by some grave illness. When the delinquent was brought into his presence, that was exactly what the Registrar asked Senhor José, Are you ill, I don't think so, sir, Well, if you're not ill, how do you explain your recent poor standard of work, I don't know, sir, perhaps it's because I haven't been sleeping well, In that case, you are ill, No, it's just that I'm not sleeping very well, If you're not sleeping well, it's because you're ill, a healthy person always sleeps well, unless he has something weighing on his conscience, some reprehensible mistake, the sort that your conscience cannot forgive, for conscience is most important, Yes, sir, If your errors at work are caused by insomnia and if your insomnia is being caused by a guilty conscience, then we have to discover what your mistake was, I haven't made any mistakes, sir, Impossible, the only person here who doesn't make mistakes is me but what's wrong, why are you staring at the telephone book, Sorry, sir, I got distracted, A bad sign, you know perfectly well that you must always look at me when I'm talking to you, it's in the disciplinary regulations, I'm the only one who has the right to look away, Yes, sir, Now what was your mistake, I don't know, sir, That only makes matters worse, forgotten mistakes are always the worst ones, I've fulfilled all my duties, The information I have regarding your conduct is satisfactory, but that only serves to show that your recent poor professional performance was not the consequence of some forgotten mistake, but of a recent mistake, one you have only just made, My conscience is clear, Consciences keep silent more often than they should, that's why laws were created, Yes, sir, Now I have to make a decision, Yes, sir, Indeed, I already have, Yes, sir, I'm giving you a day's suspension, Is that just a suspension of salary, sir, or is it also a suspension from work, asked Senhor José, seeing a glimmer of hope, Of salary, of course, we can't have work being any more disrupted than it already has been, only a while ago I gave you half an hour off, you surely weren't expecting your bad behaviour to be rewarded with a whole day's leave, No sir, For your sake, I hope this serves as a lesson, and that, in the interests of the Central Registry, you soon go back to being the punctilious worker you always have been up until now, Yes, sir, That's all, you may go back to your desk.
Respect for the facts, and a simple moral obligation not to offend the credulity of anyone prepared to accept as plausible and coherent the difficulties of such an extraordinary exploit, demand immediate clarification of that last statement: Senhor José did not drop as lightly from the windowsill as a leaf falling from a bough. On the contrary, he fell very heavily, the way an entire tree would fall, when he could perfectly easily have lowered himself gradually down from his temporary seat until his feet touched the ground. The fall, given the thud with which he hit the ground and the subsequent succession of painful collisions, revealed to him, before bis eyes could confirm the fact, that the place he had landed in was like a prolongation of the porch outside, since both places were used as a storage space for things no longer needed, although it had probably happened the other way around, this place came first and, only later, when there was no more room here, did they resort to the porch outside. Senhor José sat there for a few moments, waiting for his breathing to return to normal and for his arms and legs to stop shaking. Then he turned on the flashlight, being careful to shine it only on the floor in front of him, and he saw that, between the piled-up furniture on either side, there was a path that led to the door. It troubled him to think that the door might be locked, in which case he would have to break it down despite having none of the necessary implements and despite the ensuing noise. Outside it was still raining, everyone must be asleep, but we can't be sure, there are people who sleep so lightly that even the whine of a mosquito is enough to wake them, then they get up, go to the kitchen for a glass of water, look casually out of the window and see a black rectangular hole in the wall of the school, and perhaps think, They're awfully careless at that school, imagine leaving a window open in weather like this, or, If I remember rightly, that window was closed, it must have been blown open by the wind, no one is going to think there's a thief inside, besides, they'd be quite wrong, because Senhor José, may we remind you once again, has not come here to steal. It has just occurred to him that he should close the window so that no one outside will notice the break-in, but then he has doubts, he wonders if it wouldn't be better to leave it as it is, They'll think it was the wind or carelessness on the part of some employee, if I close it they'll immediately notice that there's no glass in it, especially since the glass is opaque, almost white. Convinced that the rest of the world follows the same deductive paths as he does, he decided to leave the window open and then began to crawl past the furniture to the door. It wasn't locked. He gave a sigh of relief, from then on, there should be no further obstacles. Now what he needed was a comfortable chair, or, even better, a sofa, to spend what remained of the night resting, if his nerves would let him sleep. As an experienced chess player, he had calculated the moves, indeed, when you're reasonably sure of the immediate objective causes, it's not that difficult to think through the range of probable and possible effects and their transformation into causes, all in turn generating effects causes effects and causes effects causes, and so on into infinity, but we know that Senhor José has no need to go quite that far. To prudent people it will seem foolish for the clerk to have walked straight into the lion's den, and then, as if that were not audacious enough, to remain there calmly for what remained of the night and all of tomorrow, with the risk of being caught in flagrante by someone with far greater deductive powers than his in the matter of open windows. It must be recognised, however, that it would have been even less sensible to have gone walking from room to room putting on lights. The combination of an open window and a light, when everyone knows that the legitimate users of a house or a school are absent, is a mental leap that anyone can make, however trusting they may be, they usually call the police.
The next morning, almost as soon as the Central Registry had opened and when everyone else was at their desk, Senhor José half-opened the communicating door and said pst-pst to attract the attention of the nearest clerk. The man turned and saw a flushed face and blinking eyes, What do you want, he asked, in a low voice so as not to disturb anyone, but with a note of ironic recrimination in his words, as if the scandal of absence only confirmed the worst suspicions of one already scandalised by Senior José's lateness, I'm ill, said Senhor José, I can't come to work. Annoyed, his colleague got up, took three steps in the direction of the senior clerk in charge of his wing, and said, Excuse me, sir, Senhor José is over there saying he's ill. The senior clerk also got up, took four steps in the direction of the respective deputy and told him, Excuse me, sir, the clerk Senhor José is over there saying he's ill. Before taking the five steps that separated him from the Registrar's desk, the deputy went over to ascertain the nature of the illness, What's wrong with you, he asked, I've got a cold, said Senhor José, A cold has never been a reason not to come to work, I've got a fever, How do you know you've got a fever, I used a thermometer, What are you, a few degrees above normal, No sir, my temperature's well over 100, You never get a fever like that with an ordinary cold, Then maybe I've got flu, Or pneumonia, Thanks very much, It's just a possibility, I'm not saying you've actually got pneumonia, No, I know you're not, And how did you get in this state, Probably because I got caught in the rain, Imprudence always has its price, You're right, Any illness contracted for non-work-related reasons should simply not be considered, Well, I wasn't, in fact, at work when it happened, I'll tell the Registrar, Yes, sir, Don't shut the door, he might want to give you further instructions, Yes, sir. The Registrar did not give any instructions, he merely looked over the bent heads of the clerks and made a gesture with his hand, a brief gesture, as if dismissing the matter as insignificant or as if postponing any attention he might give it until later, at that distance, Senhor José could not tell, always supposing that his red, streaming eyes could see that far. Anyway, it seems that Senhor José, terrified by that look and not realising what he was doing, opened the. door wider, thus revealing himself full-length to the Central Registry, an old dressing gown over his pyjamas, his feet in a pair of down-at-heel slippers, the shrunken look of someone who has caught a terrible cold, or a malignant form of flu, or a fatal strain of bronchopneumonia, you never know, it happens often enough, a gentle breeze can so easily turn into a raging hurricane. The deputy came over to him to say that today or tomorrow he would be visited by the official doctor, but then, oh miracle, he uttered some words that no lowly clerk in the Central Registry, neither he nor anyone else, had ever had the joy of hearing before, The Registrar hopes that you will soon feel better, and the deputy himself didn't quite seem to believe what he was saying. Dumbstruck, Senhor José still had sufficient presence of mind to look across at the Registrar in order to thank him for his unexpected good wishes, but the Registrar had his head down, as if he were hard at work, which, knowing as we do the work habits of this particular Central Registry, is most unlikely. Slowly, Senhor José closed the door, and, trembling with excitement and fever, got back into bed.
It's flu, said the doctor, you'd better start by taking three days' sick leave. Head swimming, legs weak, Senhor José had got out of bed to open the door, Forgive me for keeping you waiting outside, Doctor, that's what happens when you live alone, the doctor came in grumbling, Terrible weather, closed his dripping umbrella and left it in the hall, What seems to be the problem, he asked when Senhor José, teeth chattering, had just got back between the sheets, and then, without waiting for him to reply, he said, It's flu. He took his pulse, told him to open his mouth, briskly applied his stethoscope to his chest and back, It's flu, he said again, you're very lucky, it could easily have turned into pneumonia, but it's flu, you'd better start by taking three days' sick leave, and then we'll see. He had just sat down at the table to write a prescription when the communicating door opened, it was only on the latch, and the Registrar appeared, Good afternoon, Doctor, You mean bad afternoon, don't you, sir, it would be a good afternoon if I were sitting nice and cosy in my consulting rooms rather than wandering the streets in this ghastly weather, How's our patient, asked the Registrar, and the doctor replied, I've given him three days' sick leave, it's just a bout of flu. At that moment, it wasn't just a bout of flu. With the bedclothes up to his nose, Senhor José was trembling as if he were suffering from malaria, so much so that the iron bedstead on which he was lying shook, however, that irrepressible trembling was not the result of fever, but of sheer panic, a complete disorientation of the mind, The Registrar, here, he was thinking, the Registrar in my house, the Registrar asking him, How are you feeling, Better, sir, Did you take the pills I sent you, Yes, sir, Did they help at all, Yes, sir, Well, now you can stop taking those and take the medicine the doctor has prescribed, Yes, sir, Unless they're the same ones, let me see now, yes, they are, plus a couple of injections, I'll take care of this. Senhor José could hardly believe that the person who, before his very eyes, was folding up the prescription and putting it carefully away in his pocket really was the Registrar. The boss whom he had grown to know only with great difficulty would never behave in this way, he would never come in person to ask about his health, and the idea of his wanting to take charge of buying the medicine of a mere clerk was simply absurd. And he'll need a nurse to give him the injections, said the doctor, leaving the problem to be resolved by someone who was ready or able to do so, not the poor, scrawny, flu-ridden devil with the beginnings of a greying stubble on his chin, as if the evident discomfort of the house were not enough, and that damp stain on the floor which looked very much like the result of bad plumbing, the sad tales a doctor could tell about life, if it were not all confidential, On no account must you go out in this state, he added, I'll take care of everything, Doctor, said the Registrar, I'll phone the Central Registry nurse, he'll buy the medicine and come here to give the injections, There aren't many bosses like you left, said the doctor. Senhor José nodded feebly, that was the most he could do, obedient and reliable, yes, he had always been that, and had taken a certain paradoxical pride in it, though without ever being fawning and subservient, he would never, for example, make imbecilic, flattering remarks like, He's the best Registrar there is, There isn't another one like him in the world, They broke the mould when they made him, For him, despite my vertigo, I even climb that wretched ladder. Senhor José is worried and anxious about something else now, he wants his boss to leave, to go before the doctor goes, he trembles to imagine himself alone with him, at the mercy of fatal questions, What's the meaning of that damp stain, What were those record cards on your bedside table, Where did you get them, Where did you hide them, Whose photo was on them. He closed his eyes, adopted an expression of unbearable suffering, Leave me in peace on my bed of pain, he seemed to be begging them, but he suddenly opened his eyes again, when, terrified, he heard the doctor say, Well, I'll be on my way, call me if he gets any worse, though I'm pretty sure he won't, it's definitely not pneumonia, I'll keep you posted, Doctor, said the Registrar while he accompanied him to the door. Senhor José closed his eyes again, heard the door close, Now, he thought. The Registrar's firm steps approached the bed, then stopped, He's probably looking at me now, Senhor José didn't know what to do, he could pretend he'd gone to sleep, that he had fallen gradually asleep the way a weary patient does, but his twitching eyelids betrayed him, he could also, for better or worse, give a pathetic moan, of the kind that pierces the heart, but that was a bit over the top for a mere bout of flu, only a fool would be deceived, certainly not this Registrar, who knows all there is to know about the kingdoms of the visible and the invisible. He opened his eyes and the Registrar was there, a few steps away from the bed, his face expressionless, simply looking at him. Then Senhor José came up with an idea that he thought might save him, he would thank the Central Registry for all their care he would thank them eloquently effusively, perhaps that way he would avoid the questions, but just as he was about to open his mouth to utter the familiar phrase, I don't know how to thank you his boss turned, his back at the same time saving four words Take care of yourself that was what he said in a tone that was at once deferential and imperative, only the best bosses can combine contrary feelings in such a harmonious way, which is why their subordinates venerate them. Senhor José tried, at least, to say Thank you, sir, but the Registrar had already left, delicately closing the door behind him, as one should when leaving an invalid's room. Senhor José has a headache, but the headache is almost nothing compared to the tumult going on inside him. Senhor José finds himself in such a state of confusion that his first action, when the Registrar has left, is to slip his hand under the mattress to make sure the record cards are still there. His second action offended even more against common sense, for he got out of bed and went and turned the key in the communicating door twice, like someone desperately barring the door after his house has been burgled. Lying down again was only the fourth action, the third had been when he turned back, thinking, What if the Registrar returns, in that case, it would be more prudent, in order to avoid arousing suspicion, to leave the door on the latch. Senhor José is caught between several devils and the deep blue sea.
It took not three days but a week for Senhor José's fever to subside and for his cough to get better. The nurse came every day to give him an injection and to bring him some food, the doctor came every other day, but this extraordinary assiduousness, on the doctor's part that is, should not lead us to any hasty conclusions about some imagined standard of efficiency among health officials and home visits, since it was quite simply the consequence of a clear-cut order from the head of the Central Registry, Doctor, treat that man as if you were treating me, he's important. The doctor did not understand the reasons behind this evidently favoured treatment that he was being asked to administer, still less the lack of objectivity of the value judgement expressed, he had occasionally visited the Registrar's own house for professional reasons, and he had seen his comfortable, civilised way of life, an inner world that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the rough hovel of this permanently ill-shaven Senhor José who appeared not even to have a change of sheets. Senhor José did have sheets, he wasn't that poor, but, for reasons known only to him, he rejected out of hand the nurse's offer to air the mattress for him and replace the sheets, for they stank of sweat and fever, It'll only take me five minutes and the bed will be like new, No, I'm fine as I am, don't worry, It's all part of my job you know, Like I said, I'm fine as I am. Senhor José could not reveal to anyone's eyes that he was hiding between the mattress and the base of the bed the school records of an unknown woman and a notebook containing the story of his break-in at the school where she had studied as both a child and a young girl. To put them somewhere else, amid the files he used for his clippings about famous people, for example, would immediately resolve the difficulty, but the sense of defending a secret with his own body was too strong, too thrilling even, for Senhor José to give it up. In order not to have to discuss the matter again with the nurse, or with the doctor, who, although he made no comment, had already cast a critical glance over the crumpled sheets and visibly wrinkled his nose at the smell, Senhor José got up one night and, making a supreme effort, he himself changed the sheets. And so as not to give either the doctor or the nurse the slightest excuse to reopen the matter and, who knows, go and report the clerks incorrigible lack of hygiene to the Registrar, he went to the bathroom, shaved and washed as best he could, then took an old but clean pair of pyjamas from a drawer and went back to bed. He felt so pleased with himself and so restored that, like someone playing a game with himself, he decided to set down in his notebook an explicit, detailed account of all the hygienic preparations and treatments he had just put himself through. His health was returning, as the doctor was quick to tell the Registrar The man is cured in another two days he can go back to work without any danger of a relapse. The Registrar said only Good but with distracted air as if he "were thinking about something else.
He went there the following morning, but he decided not to go up and ask the present occupants of the apartment and the buildings other tenants if they had known the girl in the photograph. It was more than likely that they would tell him they hadn't, that they had been living there only a short time, or that they didn't remember, You know how it is, people come and go, I really can't remember anything about the family, it's not worth puzzling your head about, and if someone did say yes and did seem to have a vague recollection, they would probably only go on to add that their relationship had been the usual one among the polite classes, So you never saw them again, Senhor José would ask, No, never, after they moved out, I never saw them again, That's a shame, I've told you everything I know, I'm sorry not to be of more use to the Central Registry. The good fortune of immediately finding the lady in the ground-floor apartment, so well informed, so close to the original sources, could not possibly happen twice, but only much later, when none of what is being related here was of any importance anymore, did Senhor José discover that here too the same good fortune had acted prodigiously in his favour, saving him from the most disastrous of consequences. Unbeknownst to him, by some diabolical coincidence, one of the deputies at the Central Registry lived in that building, you can imagine the terrible scene, our trusting Senhor José knocking at the door, showing the index card, possibly even the forged letter of authority, and the woman who came to the door saying treacherously, Come back later when my husbands at home, he always deals with matters like this, and Senhor José would go back, his heart full of hope, and would come face-to-face with a furious deputy, who would arrest him on the spot, literally not figuratively, for the Central Registry's regulations permit of neither precipitate actions nor improvisation, the worst thing being that we don't even know what all the regulations are. Having resolved this time, as if his guardian angel had been whispering the advice urgently in his ear, to turn his attention to the shops in the area, Senhor José had unwittingly saved himself from the worst disgrace in his long career as a civil servant. He contented himself, then, with looking up at the windows of the apartment where the unknown woman had lived when she was young, and in order to get properly inside the skin of a real investigator, he imagined her leaving for school, carrying her satchel, walking to the bus stop and waiting there, it wasn't worth following her, Senhor José knew perfectly well where she was going, he had the relevant proof hidden between the mattress and the base of his bed. A quarter of an hour later, her father left, he sets off in the opposite direction, that's why he doesn't leave with his daughter when she goes to school, unless it's simply that father and daughter don't like to walk along together and give this as an excuse or give no excuse at all, but there will be some kind of tacit agreement between the two, so that the neighbours won't notice their mutual indifference. Now Senhor José needs to be patient for a little while longer, until the mother goes out shopping, as usually happens in families, that way he will know where he should make his inquiries, the nearest commercial establishment three buildings along is that chemist's shop but Senhor José immediately doubts that he will obtain any useful information there, the assistant is a young man young in age and young as an employee, he himself says so, I don't know, I've only been here two years. But Senhor José won't be discouraged by that, he has read more than enough newspapers and magazines, not to mention the lessons life has been teaching him, to know that these investigations, carried out in the old way, take a lot of work, involve a lot of walking, pounding streets and pavements, going up stairs, knocking at doors, coming down stairs, the same questions asked a thousand times, identical replies, almost always in a reserved tone of voice, I don't know, I've never heard of such a person, only very rarely does it happen that from the back room there emerges an older pharmacist who has heard the conversation and is, by nature, extremely inquisitive, Can I help you, he asked, I'm looking for someone, replied Senhor José, at the same time raising his hand to his inside jacket pocket in order to show the letter of authority. He did not complete the movement, a sudden feeling of unease stopped him, this time it wasn't the work of any guardian angel, what made him slowly withdraw his hand was the look in the pharmacist's eye, a look that was more like a dagger, a perforating drill, no one would think it, with his lined face and his white hair, but the effect of that look is to put even the most ingenuous of creatures immediately on guard, which is probably why the pharmacist's curiosity is never satisfied, the more he wants to know the less people tell him. That is what happened with Senhor José. He did not even show him the letter of authority, he did not say that he had come on behalf of the Central Registry, he merely took from his other pocket the girl's most recent school record card, which, fortunately, he had remembered to bring with him, Our school needs to find this lady in order to give her a diploma that she failed to pick up from the secretary's office, Senhor José felt a pang of pleasure, almost enthusiasm, at the exercise of inventive abilities he had imagined he had, so sure of himself that he remained unperturbed by the pharmacist's question, And you're only looking for her now, all these years later, It's quite possible she won't be interested, he replied, but the school is under an obligation to do all it can to make sure the diploma is delivered, And you've waited all this time for her to appear, To tell you the truth, we didn't even notice, it was a lamentable lack of attention on our part, a bureaucratic error, if you like, but it's never too late to right a wrong, It will definitely be too late if the lady's already dead, We have reason to believe that she's still alive, Why, We began by consulting the records, Senhor José was careful not to mention the words Central Registry, that was what saved him, because, at least at that moment, it meant that the pharmacist did not suddenly recall that a deputy registrar from the said Central Registry was one of his customers and lived three buildings down. For the second time, Senhor José had escaped the ultimate punishment. It's true that the deputy only rarely went into the chemist's, such purchases, and indeed all other purchases, apart from condoms, which the deputy was morally scrupulous enough to go and buy elsewhere, were made by his wife, so it's not that easy to imagine a conversation between the pharmacist and him, although one can't exclude the possibility of another conversation, the pharmacist saying to the deputy's wife, There was some school administrator in here looking for someone who used to live in the building where you live, at one point he mentioned consulting the records it was only after he'd gone that I thought it strange that he should have said records rather than Central Registry, it seemed to me that he had something to hide, there was even a moment when he raised his hand to his inside jacket pocket as if he were about to show me something, but he had second thoughts and instead took a school record card from his other pocket, I've been racking my brains to think what it could all be about, I think you should talk to your husband, you never know, there are some funny people about, Perhaps it's the same man I noticed the day before yesterday, standing on the pavement looking up at our windows, A middle-aged chap, a bit younger than me, who looked as if he'd only recently recovered from an illness, That's the one, You know I've got an instinct for these things, it never fails, there aren't many people can pull the wool over my eyes, It's a shame he didn't knock at my door, I'd have told him to come back in the afternoon, when my husband was home, then we'd know who he was and what he wanted, I'm going to keep an eye out in case he shows up again, And I'll make a point of mentioning it to my husband. Which she did, but she didn't tell the whole story, she unwittingly left out the most important detail, perhaps the most important of all, she did not say that the man who had been hanging around the building looked as if he had only recendy recovered from an illness. Accustomed to making links between causes and effects, since that is essentially what underpins the system of forces which, from the beginning of time, has ruled in the Central Registry, where everything was, is and will continue to be forever linked to everything, what is still alive to what is already dead, what is dying to what is being born, all beings to all other beings, all things to all other things, even when the only thing they seem to have in common, both beings and things, is what at first sight appears to separate them, the wise deputy would immediately have thought of Senhor José, the clerk who, with the inexplicably benevolent compliance of the Registrar, had been behaving very strangely lately. Finding the end of the thread and then untangling the whole skein would be only a step. That will not happen, though, Senhor José will not be seen again in that area. Of the ten different shops he went into to ask questions, including the pharmacy, in only three of them did he find someone who claimed to remember the girl and her parents, the picture on the report card jogged their memories, unless, of course, it merely took the place of their memories, it's quite likely that the people questioned simply wanted to be nice and did not want to disappoint this man who looked as if he had just got over a nasty bout of flu and who spoke to them of a school diploma issued twenty years earlier and never delivered. When Senhor José got home, he felt exhausted and discouraged, this first stage in the new phase of his investigations had indicated no route along which to continue, quite the contrary, it seemed to have placed before him an unscalable wall. The poor man threw himself down on the bed wondering why he didn't do what the pharmacist, with ill-disguised sarcasm, had suggested, If I were you, I would already have solved the problem, How, asked Senhor José, I'd have looked in the phone book, that's the easiest way of finding someone these days, Thanks for the suggestion, but we've already done that, and the lady's name isn't there, replied Senhor José, thinking that would shut the man up, but the pharmacist returned to the charge, Go to the tax office then, they know everything about everyone. Senhor José stood staring at this spoilsport, struggling to disguise his embarrassment, the lady in the ground-floor apartment hadn't thought of that, then he managed to murmur a response, That's a good idea, I'll tell the head teacher. He left the pharmacy feeling furious with himself, as if, at the last moment, he had lacked the presence of mind to respond to an insult, he was all set to go back home without asking any more questions, but then, resigned, he thought, The wine has been poured, I must drink it, he did not, like someone else, say, Take this cup away from me, what you want is to kill me The second shop was a hardware store the third a butcher's, the fourth stationer's, the fifth an electrical goods shop the sixth a haberdasher's the usual routine suburban selection, and so on to the tenth shop, fortunately, his luck held, after the pharmacist no one else mentioned the tax office or the telephone directory: Now lying on his back, with his hands interlaced behind his head, Senhor José looks up at the ceiling and asks What am I going to do now and the ceiling replied, Nothing, your knowing her last address, I mean, the last address she lived at during her schooldays, gave you no clue as to how to continue your search, of course, you could go to earlier addresses, but that would be a waste of time, if the most recent shopkeepers couldn't help you, the others certainly won't be able to, So you think I should give up then, You've probably got no option, unless you go to the tax office, it shouldn't be difficult with that letter of authority you've got, besides they're civil servants like you, It's a forgery, Yes, you're right, you'd probably better not use it, I wouldn't like to be in your skin if one day they catch you redhanded, You couldn't be in my skin, you're just a plaster ceiling, I know, but what you're seeing of me is also a skin, besides, the skin is only what we want others to see of us, underneath it not even we know who we are, I'll hide the letter, If I were you, I'd tear it up or burn it, I'll put it with the bishop's papers, where I kept it before, Well, it's up to you, I don't like the tone you said that in, it doesn't augur at all well, The wisdom of ceilings is infinite, If you're such a wise ceiling, then give me an idea, Keep looking at me, sometimes it works.
That night, Senhor José returned to the Central Registry. He took with him the flashlight and a hundred-yard roll of strong string. He had put a new battery in his flashlight that would suffice for several hours of continual use, but, more than chastened by the difficulties he had been obliged to confront during the dangerous break-in and theft at the school, Senhor José had learned that in life you can never be too careful, especially when you abandon the straight paths of honest behaviour and wander off down the tortuous shortcuts of crime. What if the little bulb were to blow, what if the lens that protects and intensifies the light were to come loose from the casing, what if the flashlight, with the battery lens and bulb intact, were to fall down a hole so that he couldn't reach it with his arm or even with a hook, then, not daring to use the real Ariadne's thread, despite the fact that the drawer in the Registrar's Office where it was kept, along with a powerful flashlight, was never locked, Senhor José will instead use an ordinary, rustic ball of string bought at the hardware store, and that string will lead back to the world of the living the person who, at this very moment, is preparing to enter the kingdom of the dead. As a member of the Central Registry, Senhor José has legitimate access to any documents in the civil register, which are, need we repeat, the very substance of his work, so some may think it strange that, when he found the card missing, he did not simply say to the senior clerk he worked under, I'm going to look for the card of a woman who died. For it would not be enough just to say that, he would have to give a reason that was both administratively sound and bureaucratically logical, the senior clerk would be bound to ask, What do you want it for, and Senhor José could hardly reply, To be quite sure that she's really dead, what would happen to the Central Registry if everyone started satisfying the same or similar curiosities, which were not only morbid but unproductive too. The worst that could come of Senhor José's nocturnal expedition would be that he would be unable to find the unknown woman's papers in the chaos that is the archive of the dead. Of course, at first, since we're dealing with a recent death, the papers should be at what was commonly termed the entrance, which is immediately problematic because of the impossibility of knowing exactly where the entrance to the archive of the dead is. It would be too simple to say, as do some stubborn optimists, that the space designated for the dead obviously begins where the space for the living ends, and vice versa, perhaps adding that, in the outside world, things are arranged in a similar fashion, given that, apart from exceptional events, albeit not that exceptional, such as natural disasters or wars, you don't normally see the dead mingling in the street with the living. Now, for both structural and non-structural reasons, this can in fact happen in the Central Registry. It and it does. As we have already explained from time to time when the congestion caused by the continual and irresistible accumulation of the dead begins to block the path of staff along the corridors and consequently to obstruct any documentary research they have no option but to demolish the wall at the rear and rebuild it a few yards farther back However through an involuntary oversight on our part we failed to mention the two perverse effects of this congestion. First while the wall is being built it is inevitable that for lack of a space of their own at the back of the building the cards and files of the recently dead come dangerously close to, and, on the near side, even touch the files of the living, which are to be found on the far end of their respective shelves, giving rise to an embarrassing fringe of confusion between those who are still living and those who are now dead. Second, once the wall has been built and the roof extended, and the filing away of the dead can at last return to normality, that same border conflict, as it were, will prevent, or, at the very least, prove extremely prejudicial to, the transport into the outer darkness of the dead intruders, if you'll pardon the expression. Added to these far from minor inconveniences is the fact that, without the knowledge of the Registrar or their colleagues, the two youngest clerks have no qualms, either because they have not been properly trained or because of a grave deficiency in their personal ethics, about simply sticking a dead person anywhere, without going to the trouble of seeing if there might be space inside the archive of the dead. If luck were not on Senhor José's side this time, if chance did not favour him, the adventure of breaking into the school, however risky, will have been child's play compared to what awaits him here.
The fact that psychological time is not the same as mathematical time was something that Senhor José had learned in exactly the same way as, over a lifetime, he had acquired other types of useful knowledge, drawing first of all, of course, on his own experiences, for, despite never having risen higher than the post of clerk, he does not merely follow where others go, but drawing too on the formative influence of a few books and magazines of a scientific nature in which one can put one's trust or faith, depending on the feeling of the moment, and also, why not, a number of popular works of fiction of an introspective type, which also tackled the subject, though employing different methods and with an added dash of imagination. However, on no other occasion had he had a real objective sense, as physical as a sudden muscular contraction, of the effective impossibility of measuring the time that we might call the time of the soul, as when, back in his house again, looking once more at the unknown woman's date of death, he struggled, vaguely, to place it in the time that had passed since he first set out to find her. To the question, What were you doing on that day, he could give an almost immediate response, he would just have to go and look at the calendar and, thinking simply as plain Senhor José, the Central Registry clerk who had been away from work sick, he would say, That day I was in bed with flu, I didn't go to work, but if they went on to ask him, Now relate it to your activities as a researcher and tell me when it was, then he would have to go and consult the notebook that he kept beneath the mattress, It was two days after I broke into the school, he would reply. Assuming the date of death written on the card was correct, the unknown woman had indeed died two days after the deplorable episode that had transformed a hitherto honest Senhor José into a criminal, but these intersecting statements, that of the clerk cutting across that of the researcher, that of the researcher cutting across that of the clerk, apparently more than enough to match the psychological time of one with the mathematical time of the other, did not remove from either statement a feeling of dizzying disorientation. Senhor José is not standing on the top rungs of a very high ladder, looking down and seeing how the rungs grow ever narrower until they become one point touching the ground, but it is as if his body, instead of seeing itself as an integral unit existing in each passing moment, found itself fragmented during those last few days, during that period not of real or mathematical time, but of psychological or subjective time, as if it were contracting and dilating along with time itself. I am utterly absurd, Senhor José told himself sternly, the day already contained twenty-four hours when it was determined how many hours it should have, an hour has and always has had sixty minutes, the sixty seconds of the minute have been there since eternity, if a clock starts to go fast or slow it is a defect in the machine not in time, Perhaps one of my springs has gone. The idea brought a faint smile to his lips, Since, as far as I know, the fault does not lie in the mechanism of real time, but in the psychological mechanism that measures it, what I should do is look for a psychologist who could repair my escape wheel. He smiled again, then grew serious, The matter can be resolved more easily than that, besides, nature has already done so, the woman is dead, there's nothing more to do, I'll keep the file and the card in case I want to have some palpable souvenir of this adventure, for the Central Registry it will be as if that person had never been born, I doubt that anyone will ever need these papers, otherwise I could just leave them in some part of the archive of the dead, at the entrance, along with the oldest ones, here or there it doesn't matter, they all share the same history, they were born, they died, who now is going to be interested in who she was, her parents, if they loved her, will weep for her for a time, then they will weep less, then they will stop weeping, that's how it usually is, it will make no difference to the man she divorced, it's true she might have some current romantic relationship, she might be living with someone, or about to marry again, but that will be the history of a future that cannot now be lived, there is no one else in the world interested in the strange case of the unknown woman. He had before him the file and the card, he also had the thirteen school reports, the same name repeated thirteen times, twelve different images of the same face, one of them repeated, but each and every one of them dead in the past, already dead before the woman they later became had died, old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him- or herself in us, Who's that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say. Then, suddenly, Senhor José remembered that there was another picture, the one the lady in the ground-floor apartment had given him. He had unexpectedly just found the answer to the question of who else would be interested in the strange case of the unknown woman.
When I'd finished talking, she asked me, And what do you think you'll do now, Nothing, I said, Are you going to go back to your collections of famous people, I don't know, possibly, I'll have to fill my time somehow, I fell silent, thinking, and then said, No, I don't think I will, Why, Well, when you think about it, their lives are always the same, they never change, they appear, they talk, they show themselves off, they smile for the photographers, they're always arriving or departing, Just like us, Not like me, Like you and me and everyone, we all show ourselves off in various places, we talk, we leave our homes and come back, sometimes we even smile, the difference is that no one takes any notice of us, We can't all be famous, Just as well, imagine if your collection were as big as the Central Registry, It would have to be even bigger, the Central Registry only wants to know when we're born and when we die, and that's about it, Whether we marry, get divorced, widowed or remarried, the Central Registry has absolutely no interest in finding out if we were happy or unhappy while all that was going on, Happiness and unhappiness are just like famous people, they come and they go, the worst thing about the Central Registry is that they're not interested in what we're like, for them we're just a piece of paper with a few names and dates on it, Like my goddaughter's card, Or yours, or mine, What would you have done if you'd actually met her, I don't know, perhaps I'd have spoken to her, perhaps not, I never really thought about it, And did it occur to you that, at the moment when she was actually there before you, you would know as much about her as you did on the day you first decided to look for her, that is, nothing, and that if you wanted to know who she was, you would have to begin looking again and that, from then on, it would be much more difficult, if, unlike famous people, who like showing themselves off, she preferred not to be found, You're right, But, since she's dead, you can go on looking for her, she won't mind now, I don't understand, Up until now, despite all your efforts, the only thing you've found out is that she went to a school, in fact, the very one I told you about, I've got photographs, Photographs are just bits of paper too, We could share them, And we would imagine that we were sharing her out between us, one bit for you, one bit for me, There's nothing more to be done, that's what I said at the time, assuming that she considered the matter closed, but she asked me, Why don't you go and talk to her parents, to her ex-husband, What for, To try and learn something more about her, how she lived, what she did, Her husband probably wouldn't want to talk about her, it's all water under the bridge, But her parents are bound to, parents never let slip a chance to talk about their children, even if they're dead, at least that's been my experience, I didn't go and see them before and I'm certainly not going to now, before, I could have said that I'd been sent by the Central Registry, What did my goddaughter die of, I don't know, How is that possible, her death must be registered at the Central Registry, On the card we just put the date of death, not the cause, But there must be a certificate, doctors are obliged by law to certify a death, when she died, they wouldn't just write She's dead, The death certificate wasn't with the papers I found in the archive of the dead, Why, I don't know, they must have dropped it when they were taking her file to be put away, or else I dropped it, anyway, it's lost, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, you can't imagine what it's like in there, From what you've told me I can, You can't, it's impossible, you'd have to actually be there, In that case you've got a perfect reason to go and talk to her parents, tell them that, unfortunately, her death certificate has got lost in the Central Registry, that you have to complete the file otherwise your boss will punish you, show them how humble and anxious you are, ask the name of the doctor who came, where she died, and what of, if it happened at home or in the hospital, ask everything, you've still got your letter of authority, I suppose, Yes, but don't forget it's a false one, It fooled me, it'll probably fool them too, no life is without its lies, perhaps there's some deceit involved in this death as well, If you worked at the Central Registry, you'd know that there is no deceiving death. She must have thought the remark didn't merit a response, and she was perfectly right, because what I'd said was just for effect really, one of those essentially empty expressions that appear to be deep but have nothing inside. We were silent for about two minutes, she was looking at me reproachfully, as if I had made her a solemn promise which I had broken at the last moment. I didn't know where to put myself, I just wanted to say goodnight and leave, but that would have been both stupid and rude, a lack of consideration which the poor lady certainly didn't deserve, it's just not in my nature to do something like that, that's the way I was brought up, it's true I can't remember ever having gone to tea at someone's house when I was small, but it comes to the same thing. I was thinking that it would be best to take up her idea and begin searching again, only from the opposite direction this time, that is, from death into life, when she said, Take no notice, I get these ridiculous ideas now and then, when you're old and realise that time is running out, you start imagining that you have the cure for all the ills of the world in your hand, and get frustrated because no one pays you any attention, I've never had ideas like that, You will, in time, you're still very young, Me, young, I'm nearly fifty-one, You're in the prime of life, Don't make fun of me, You only become wise after seventy, and then it's no use to you anyway, not to you or anyone else. Since I still have a long way to go before I reach that age, I didn't know whether to agree or not, so I thought it best to say nothing. It was time I said goodbye, so I said, I won't trouble you any more, thank you for all your patience and kindness, and forgive me, it was that mad idea of mine that got me into this, it's all absolutely absurd, there you were, sitting contentedly in your home, and along I come with my lies, my deceitful stories, I blush to think of some of the questions I asked you, Contrary to what you've just said, I wasn't sitting here contentedly, I was lonely, being able to tell you some of the sad things that have happened in my life was like getting rid of a great weight, Well, if that's how you feel, then I'm glad, It is and I don't want you to leave without asking you something, Ask anything you like, as long as it's within my power to help, You're the only person who can help, what I have to ask you is very simple, come and see me now and then, when you remember or feel like visiting, even if it's not to talk about my goddaughter, Why I'd be delighted to come and visit you, There'll always be a cup of coffee or tea waiting for you, That would be reason enough to come, but there are plenty of others, Thank you and, look, don't take any notice of that idea of mine, it's as mad as yours was, I'll think about it. I kissed her hand as I had on the first occasion, but then something unexpected happened, she kept hold of my hand and raised it to her lips. No woman had ever done that to me, I felt something like a shock in my soul, a tremor in my heart, and even now, now that it's morning, and many hours have passed, while I finish writing up the events of the day in my notebook, I look at my right hand and it seems different to me, although I can't quite say how, it must be an internal rather than an external matter. Senhor José stopped writing, put down his pen, put the unknown woman's school record cards carefully away in the notebook, he had, in fact, left them on top of the table, and went and hid them away again between the mattress and the base of the bed. Then he heated up the stew left over from lunch and sat down to eat. There was an almost absolute silence, you could scarcely hear the noise made by the few cars still out and about in the city. What you could hear most clearly was a muffled sound that rose and fell, like a distant bellows, but Senhor José was used to that, it was the Central Registry breathing. Senhor José went to bed, but he wasn't sleepy. He remembered the events of the day, the unpleasant surprise of seeing his boss go into the Central Registry out of hours, and his troubling conversation with the lady in the ground-floor apartment, which he had set down in his notebook, faithful as to the meaning, less so as regards form, which is both understandable and forgivable, since memory, which is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it has only a vague recollection, like what remains after the passing of a shadow. It seemed to Senhor José that he had still not reached a logical conclusion about what had happened, that he still had to make a decision, otherwise his last words to the lady in the ground-floor apartment, I'll think about it, would be no more than a vain promise, of the sort that is always cropping up in conversation and that no one expects will be kept. Senhor José was desperate to get to sleep when, suddenly, from unknown depths, the longed-for solution welled up within him, like the end of a new Ariadne's thread, On Saturday, I'll go to the cemetery, he said out loud. The excitement made him sit up in bed, but the calm voice of good sense stepped in with some advice, Now that you've decided what you're going to do, lie down and go to sleep, don't be such a child, you don't really want to go there at this time of night, do you, and jump over the cemetery wall, although that's just a manner of speaking, of course. Obediently, Senhor José slipped down between the sheets, pulled them up to his nose and lay for a minute, his eyes open, thinking, I'm not going to be able to get to sleep. A minute later he was sleeping.
One enters the cemetery via an old building with a façade which is the twin sister of the Central Registry façade. There are the same three black stone steps, the same ancient door in the middle, the same five narrow windows above. Apart from the great two-leaved door alongside the façade, the only observable difference would be the sign above the entrance, in the same enamelled lettering, that says General Cemetery. The large door was closed many years ago, when it was clear that access through there had become impracticable, that it had ceased satisfactorily to fulfil the end for which it had been intended, that is, to allow easy passage not only for the dead and their companions, but also for those who would visit the dead afterwards. Like all cemeteries in this or any other world, it was tiny when it started, a small patch of land on the outskirts of what was still the embryo of a city, turned to face the open air of the fields, but later, alas, with the passing of time, the inevitable happened, it kept growing and growing and growing, until it became the immense necropolis that it is today. At first, it was surrounded by a wall and, for generations, whenever the pressure inside began to hinder both the orderly accommodation of the dead and the free circulation of the living, they did the same as in the Central Registry, they would demolish the walls and rebuild them a little farther on. One day, it must be close to four centuries ago, the then keeper of the cemetery had the idea of leaving it open on all sides, apart from the area facing onto the street, alleging that this was the only way to rekindle the sentimental relationship between those inside and those outside, much diminished at the time, as anyone could see just by looking at the neglected state of the graves, especially the oldest ones. He believed that, although walls served the positive aims of hygiene and decorum, ultimately, they had the perverse effect of aiding forgetfulness, which is hardly surprising, given the popular wisdom which has declared, since time began, that what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over. We have many reasons to think that the motives behind the Registrar's decision to break with tradition and routine and to unify the archives of the dead and of the living, thus reintegrating human society in the specific documentary area under his jurisdiction, were purely internal. It is, therefore, all the more difficult for us to understand why no one immediately applied the earlier lesson provided by a humble, primitive cemetery keeper, who, as was only natural in his line of work and bearing in mind the times he lived in, was doubtless not particularly well educated, but was, nevertheless, a man of revolutionary instincts, and who, sad to say, has not even been given a decent gravestone to point out the fact to future generations. On the contrary, for four centuries now, curses, insults, calumnies and humiliations have been heaped upon the memory of the unfortunate innovator, for he is held to be the person historically responsible for the present state of the necropolis, which is described as disastrous and chaotic, mostly because not only does the General Cemetery still have no walls about it but it could never possibly be walled in again. Allow us to explain. We said earlier that the cemetery grew, not, of course, because of some intrinsic reproductive powers of its own, as though, if you will permit us a somewhat macabre example, the dead had engendered more dead, but simply because the city's population grew and so therefore did its size. Even when the General Cemetery was still surrounded by walls, something occurred which, in the language of municipal bureaucracy, is called an urban demographic explosion, and this happened more than once and in successive ages. Little by little, people came to live in the wide fields behind the cemetery, small groups of houses appeared, villages, hamlets, second homes, which grew in turn, occasionally contiguous, but still leaving between them large empty spaces, which were used as farmland or woods or pasture or areas of scrub. Those were the areas into which the General Cemetery advanced when its walls were demolished. Like floodwaters that begin by encroaching on the low-lying land, snaking along valleys and then, slowly, creeping up hillsides, so the graves gained ground, often to the detriment of agriculture, for the besieged owners had no alternative but to sell off strips of land, at other times, the graves skirted orchards, wheat fields, threshing floors and cattle pens, always within sight of the houses, and, often, if you like, right next door. Seen from the air, the General Cemetery looks like an enormous felled tree, with a short, fat trunk, made up of the nucleus of original graves, from which four stout branches reach out, all from the same growing point, but which, later, in successive bifurcations, extend as far as you can see, forming, in the words of an inspired poet, a leafy crown in which life and death are mingled, just as in real trees birds and foliage mingle. That is why the main door of the General Cemetery ceased to serve as a passageway for funeral processions. It is opened only very infrequently, when a researcher into old stones, having studied one of the very early funerary markers in the place, asks permission to make a mould of it, with the consequent deployment of raw materials, such as plaster, tow and wires, and, a not unusual complement, delicate, precise photographs, the sort that require spotlights, reflectors, batteries, light meters, umbrellas and other artifacts, none of which are allowed through the small door that leads from the building into the cemetery because it would disturb the administrative work carried on inside.
Senhor José got cold during the night. After having uttered those redundant, useless words, Here she is, he wasn't sure what else he should do. It was true that, after long and arduous labours, he had managed, at last, to find the unknown woman, or rather, the place where she lay, a good six feet beneath an earth that still sustained him, but, he thought to himself, the normal response would be to feel afraid, fearful of the place, the hour, the rustling trees, the mysterious moonlight, and, in particular, of the strange cemetery surrounding him, an assembly of suicides, a gathering of silences that, from one moment to the next, might begin to scream, We came before our time was due, our own will brought us here, but what he felt inside him seemed more like indecision, doubt, as if, just when he thought he had reached the end of everything, he realised that his search was not yet finished, as if having come here were merely another point on the journey, of no more importance than the ground-floor apartment belonging to the elderly lady, or the school, or the chemist's where he had gone to ask questions, or the archive in the Central Registry where they kept the papers of the dead. He was so overcome by this feeling that he even muttered, as if trying to convince himself, She's dead, there's nothing more I can do, there's nothing anyone can do about death. For long hours he had walked through the General Cemetery, he had passed through epochs, eras, dynasties, through kingdoms, empires and republics, through wars and epidemics, through infinite numbers of disparate deaths, beginning with the first sorrow felt by humanity and ending with this woman who had committed suicide only a few days ago, Senhor José, therefore, knows all too well that there is nothing anyone can do about death. On that walk made up of so many dead, not one of them got up when they heard him pass, not one begged him to help them reunite the scattered dust of their flesh with the bones fallen from their sockets, not one asked him, Come and breathe into my eyes the breath of life, they know all too well that there is nothing anyone can do about death, they know it, we all know it, but, in that case, where does it come from, this feeling of angst that grips Senhor José's throat, this unease of mind, as if he had cravenly abandoned a half-completed task and now did not know how to return to it with any dignity. On the other side of the stream, not far off, one can see a few houses with the windows lit, the moribund lights of the street lamps in the suburbs, the fleeting beam of a car passing on the road. And immediately ahead, only thirty paces away, as sooner or later had to happen, a small bridge joins the two banks of the stream, so Senhor José won't have to take off his shoes and roll up his trouser legs when he wants to cross to the other side. In normal circumstances he would have done so a long time ago, especially since we know he is not a person of great courage, courage he is going to need if he is to survive a whole night in a cemetery unscathed, with a dead person lying beneath his feet and a moonlight capable of making shadows walk. The circumstances, however, are these and no others, here it is not a question of courage or cowardice, here it is a matter of life and death, which is why Senhor José, despite knowing that he will often feel afraid during the night, despite knowing that the sighing of the wind will terrify him that at dawn the cold fallen from the sky will join forces with the cold rising from the earth, Senhor José is going to sit down beneath a tree, huddled up in the shelter of a providential hollow trunk. He turns up his jacket collar, makes himself as small as possible in order to retain the warmth of his body, folds his arms so that his hands are in his armpits, and prepares to wait for day. He can feel his stomach asking him for food, but he takes no notice, no one ever died from going for a while without eating between meals, except when the second meal was so long in being served that it did not appear in time to be served at all. Senhor José wants to know if it really is all over, or if, on the contrary, there is still something he has forgotten to do, or, more important, something that he had never even considered before and that might turn out to be, after all, the essence of the strange adventure into which chance had plunged him. He had looked for the unknown woman everywhere, and had found her here, beneath that little mound of earth which will soon be overgrown by weeds, if the stonemason doesn't come first to level it out and place on it the marble stone with the usual inscription of dates, the first and the last, and the name, though the family might be the sort who prefer a simple rectangular frame, in the middle of which they will later sow a decorative lawn, a solution that offers the double advantage of being less expensive and providing a home for the insects that live above ground. The woman is there then, all the roads in the world have closed for her, she walked that part of the road she had to walk and stopped where she wanted to, end of story, but Senhor José cannot rid himself of an obsessive thought, that he is the only person who can move the final piece on the board, the definitive piece, the one which, if moved in the right direction, will give real meaning to the game, at the risk, if he does not do so, of leaving the game at stalemate for all eternity. He has no idea what magical move that will be, but his decision to spend the night here was not made in the hope that the silence would come and whisper it in his ear or that the moonlight would kindly sketch it out for him among the shadows of the trees, he is simply like someone who, having climbed a mountain to reach the landscapes beyond, resists going back down into the valley until his astonished eyes have taken their fill of vast horizons.
Determined to catch up on his lost sleep, Senhor José got into bed as soon as he arrived home, but only two hours later, he was awake again. He had had a strange, enigmatic dream in which he saw himself in the middle of the cemetery, amid a multitude of sheep so numerous that he could barely see the mounds of the graves, and each sheep had a number on its head that kept changing continually, but, because the sheep were all the same, you couldn't tell if it was the sheep that were changing numbers or if the numbers were changing sheep. He heard a voice shouting, I'm here, I'm here, it couldn't come from the sheep because they stopped talking a long time ago, nor could it be the graves because there is no record of a grave ever having spoken, and yet the voice kept calling insistently, I'm here, I'm here, Senhor José looked in that direction and saw only the raised snouts of the animals, then the same words rang out behind him, or to the right, or to the left, I'm here, I'm here, and he would turn swiftly, but he couldn't tell where it was coming from. Senhor José began to grow desperate, he wanted to wake up and he couldn't, the dream was continuing, now the shepherd was there with his dog, and Senhor José thought, There's nothing this shepherd doesn't know, he'll tell me whose voice it is, but the shepherd didn't speak, he just made a gesture with his crook above his head, the dog went to round up the sheep, herding them towards a bridge which was crossed by silent cars with signs made of lightbulbs that flickered on and off, saying Follow me, Follow me, Follow me, in a moment the flock disappeared, the dog disappeared, the shepherd disappeared, all that remained was the cemetery floor strewn with numbers, the ones that before had been on the heads of the sheep, but, because they were now all together, all attached end to end in an uninterrupted spiral of which he himself was the centre, he couldn't tell where one began and the other finished. Anxious, drenched in sweat, Senhor José woke up saying, I'm here. His eyes were closed, he was half-conscious, but he said, I'm here, I'm here, twice out loud, then opened his eyes to the mean little space where he had lived for so many years, he saw the low ceiling, the cracked plaster, the floor with its warped floorboards, the table and the two chairs in the middle of the living room, if such a term has meaning in a place like this, the cupboard where he kept the clippings and photos of his celebrities, the corner beyond which lay the kitchen, the narrow recess that served as a bathroom, that was when he said, I must find a way of freeing myself from this madness, he meant, obviously, the woman who would now forever be unknown, the house, poor thing, was not to blame, it was just a sad house. Fearful that the dream would return, Senhor José did not attempt to fall asleep again. He was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling, waiting for it to ask him, Why are you looking at me, but the ceiling ignored him, it merely observed him, expressionless. Senhor José gave up any hope of help coming from there, he would have to resolve the problem on his own, and the best way would still be to persuade himself that there was no problem, When the beast dies, the poison dies with it, was the rather disrespectful proverb that came to his lips, calling the unknown woman a poisonous beast, forgetting for a moment there are poisons so slow-acting that they produce an effect only when we have long since forgotten their origin. Then the penny dropped, he muttered, Careful, death is often a slow poison, then he wondered, When and why did she begin to die. It was at that point that the ceiling, without there being any apparent connection, direct or indirect, with what it had just heard, emerged from its indifference to remind him, There are at least three people you haven't spoken to yet, Who, asked SenhorJosé, Her parents and her ex-husband, It wouldn't be a bad idea to go and talk to her parents, I thought of doing that earlier on, but I decided to leave it for another occasion, If you don't do it now, you never will, meanwhile you can divert yourself by going a little farther down this road, before you finally bump your nose against the wall, If you weren't a ceiling, stuck up there all the time, you would know that it has not been a diverting experience, But it has been a diversion, What's the difference, Go and look it up in the dictionary, that's what they're there for, I was just asking, everyone knows that a diversion is not the same as something being diverting, What about the other one, What other one, The ex-husband, he would probably be the person who could tell you most about your unknown woman, I imagine that married life, a life lived in common, must be like a sort of magnifying glass, I can't imagine any reserve or secret that could resist the microscope of continual observation, On the other hand, there are those who say that the more you look the less you see, but whatever the truth of the matter, I don't think it's worth going to talk to him, You're afraid he'll start talking about the reasons for the divorce, you don't want to hear anything bad about her, People on the whole are rarely fair, not to themselves or to other people, and he would more than likely tell me the story so that it looked as if he had been in the right all along, An intelligent analysis, I'm not stupid, No, you're not, it's just that you take a long time to understand things, especially simple things, For example, That there was no reason why you should go looking for this woman, unless, Unless what, Unless you were doing it out of love, Only a ceiling would come up with such an absurd idea, I believe I've told you on another occasion that the ceilings of houses are the multiple eye of God, I don't remember, I may not have said it in those precise words, but I'm saying it now, Tell me then how I could possibly love a woman I didn't even know and whom I'd never even seen, That's a good question, there's no doubt about it, but only you can answer it, The idea doesn't have a leg to stand on, It doesn't matter whether it's got legs or not, I'm talking about quite another part of the anatomy, the heart, the thing that people say is the engine and seat of affections, I repeat that I could not possibly love a woman I didn't know, whom I never saw, except in some old photos, You wanted to see her, you wanted to know her, and that, whether you like it or not, is love, These are the imaginings of a ceiling, They're your imaginings, a man's imaginings, not mine, You're so arrogant, you think you know everything about me, I don't know everything, but I must have learned a thing or two after all these years of living together, I bet you've never considered that you and I live together, the great difference between us is that you only notice me when you need advice and cast your eyes upwards, while I spend all my time looking at you, The eye of God, You can take my metaphors seriously if you like, but don't repeat them as if they were yours. After this, the ceiling decided to remain silent, it had realised that Senhor José's thoughts were already turned to the visit he was going to make to the unknown woman's parents, the last step before bumping his nose against the wall, an equally metaphorical expression which means, You've reached the end.
Senhor José slept like a log. After returning from his dangerous but successful visit to the unknown woman's parents, he wanted to set down the weekend's extraordinary events in his notebook, but he was so tired that he didn't get any further than his conversation with the clerk at the General Cemetery. He went to bed without any supper, fell asleep in less than two minutes and when he opened his eyes, at the first light of dawn, he discovered that, without knowing how or when, he had made the decision not to go in to work. It was Monday, the very worst day to miss work, especially if you were a clerk Whatever the alleged reason, and however convincing it might have been on any other occasion, it was always suspected of being merely an excuse, a way of justifying prolonging the indolence of Sunday into a day that was legally and customarily devoted to work. After the repeated and increasingly serious irregularities in his behaviour since he had started looking for the unknown woman, Senhor José is aware that not going to work could be the last straw as far as his boss's patience was concerned. This frightening prospect, however, was not enough to shake the firmness of his decision. There are two important reasons why Senhor José cannot postpone what he has to do until he has an afternoon off. The first of these is that, one day, the mother of the unknown woman will come to the Central Registry in order to recover the keys, the second is that the school, as Senhor José knows all too well, from harsh experience, is closed on the weekend.
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