The Collected Novels of José Saramago (269 page)

The moment has arrived to explain that, even though he had to go the long way round in order to enter the Central Registry and to return home, Senhor José felt only satisfaction and relief when the communicating door was finally closed. He had never been one for receiving visits from his colleagues in the lunch hour, and on the few occasions when he had been ill enough to stay in bed, he, on his own initiative, had gone into work and presented himself before the deputy he worked under so that there would be no doubt about his honesty as an employee and so that they would not have to send the medical officer to his bedside. Now that the use of the door was forbidden to him, there was even less likelihood of an unexpected invasion of his domestic privacy, when, for example, he had accidentally left open on the table the project over which he had been labouring for many a long year, namely, his extensive collection of news items about those people in his country who, for good reasons and bad, had become famous. He was not interested in foreigners, however great their renown, for their papers were filed in far-off central registries, assuming that is what they call them there, and would be written in languages he would be unable to decipher, approved by laws he did not know, and he could never reach them, not even by using the longest of ladders. There are people like Senhor Jos´ everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

Now, since Senhor José’s obsession is clearly wholly innocent, it’s hard to understand why he takes such pains to prevent anyone’s ever suspecting that he collects clippings from newspapers and magazines containing news and photos of famous people purely because they are famous, since he doesn’t care whether they’re politicians or generals, actors or architects, musicians or football players, cyclists or writers, speculators or ballerinas, murderers or bankers, con men or beauty queens. Yet he was not always so secretive. It is true that he never chose to talk about this hobby to the few colleagues whom he trusted, but
that was due to his natural reserve, not to a conscious fear that they might ridicule him. His concern with the jealous defence of his privacy came about shortly after the demolition of the other houses in which Central Registry employees had lived, or, to be more exact, after being told that he could no longer use the communicating door. This might just be coincidence, there are, after all, so many coincidences in life, for one cannot see any close or immediate relationship between that fact and a sudden need for secrecy, but it is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again. Anyway, whether or not that is the explanation, late one night, while he was at home quietly working on updating his clippings about a bishop, Senhor José had an illumination that would transform his life. It is possible that a sudden, more disquieting awareness of the presence of the Central Registry on the other side of the thick wall, the enormous shelves laden with the living and the dead, the small, pale lamp hanging from the ceiling above the Registrars desk, which was lit day and night, the thick shadows filling the aisles between the shelves, the fathomless dark that reigned in the depths of the nave, the solitude, the silence, it may be that all this, in an instant, following the same uncertain mental paths already mentioned, had made him realise that something fundamental was missing from his collection, that is, the origin, the root, the source in other words, the actual birth certificate of these famous people, news of whose public doings he had devoted so much time to collecting. He did not know, for example, the names of the bishop’s parents, nor who his godparents had been at baptism nor where exactly he had been born on which street in which building, on which floor and, as for his date of birth, if indeed it happened to appear in one of his clippings, the official register in the Central Registry was the only one that could testify to the truth of that, rather than a random scrap of information in a newspaper, it might not even be right, the journalist might have misheard or copied it down wrongly, the copyeditor might have changed it back, it would not be the first time in the history of the
deleatur
that this had happened. The solution was within his grasp. The reason that the key to the communicating door was still in Senhor José’s possession lay in the Registrar’s unshakable belief in the absolute weight of his authority, in his certainty that any order uttered by him would be carried out with maximum rigour and scrupulousness, without the risk of capricious consequences or arbitrary digressions on the part of the subordinate who received it. Senhor José would never have thought of using it, he would never have taken it out of the drawer where he had placed it if he had not reached the conclusion that his efforts as a voluntary biographer would be of very little use, objectively speaking, without the inclusion of documentary proof, or a faithful copy, of the existence, not only real but official, of the subjects of those biographies.

Imagine now, if you can, the state of nerves, the excitement with which Senhor José opened the forbidden door for the first time, the shiver that made him pause before going in, as if he had placed his foot on the threshold of a room in which was buried a god whose power, contrary to tradition, came not from his resurrection, but from his having refused to be resurrected. Only dead gods are gods forever. The strange shapes of the shelves laden with papers seemed to burst through the invisible roof and rise up into the black sky, the feeble light above the Registrar’s desk was like a remote, stifled star. Although he was familiar with the territory through which he would have to move, Senhor José realised, once he had calmed down sufficiently, that he would need the help of a light if he was to avoid bumping into the furniture, and, more important, in order not to
waste too much time in finding the bishop’s papers, first the record card and then his personal file. There was a small flashlight in the drawer where he had put the key. He went to get it and then, as if having a light to carry had filled him with new courage, he advanced almost resolutely between the desks to the counter, below which was the extensive card index pertaining to the living. He quickly found the bishop’s card and, luckily, the shelf where the bishop’s file was kept was within arm’s reach. He therefore had no need to use the ladder, but he wondered fearfully what his life would be like when he had to ascend to the upper regions of the shelves, up there where the black sky began. He opened the cabinet containing the forms, took one of each sort and went back to his house, leaving the communicating door open. Then he sat down and, his hand still shaking, began to copy the identifying data about the bishop onto the blank forms, his name in full, with not a single family name or particular omitted, the date and place of birth, the names of his parents, the names of his godparents, the name of the priest who baptised him, the name of the employee at the Central Registry who had registered his birth, all the names. By the time he had completed this brief task, he was exhausted, his hands were sweating and shudders were running up and down his spine, he knew all too well that he had committed a sin against the esprit de corps of the civil service, indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction. By plundering those papers, he had committed an offence against discipline and ethics, perhaps even against the law. Not because the information contained in them was confidential or secret, they were not, since anyone could go to the Central Registry and ask for copies or certificates of the bishop’s documents without explaining why or for what purpose, but because he had broken the hierarchical chain by proceeding without the necessary order or authorisation from a superior. He considered turning back and correcting
the irregularity by tearing up or destroying these impertinent copies, handing over the key to the Registrar, Sir, I would not want to be held responsible if anything should go missing from the Central Registry, and, having done that, forget what can only be described as the sublime moments he had just lived through. However, what prevailed was the pride and satisfaction he felt at now knowing everything, that was the word he used, Everything, about the bishop’s life. He looked at the cupboard where he kept the boxes with his collections of clippings and smiled with inner delight, thinking of the work that lay ahead of him, the nighttime sallies, the orderly gathering of record cards and files, the copies made in his best handwriting, he felt so happy that he was not even cowed by the thought that he would have to climb the ladder. He returned to the Central Registry and restored the bishop’s papers to their rightful places. Then, with a feeling of confidence that he had never before experienced in his entire life, he shone the flashlight around him, as if finally taking possession of something that had always belonged to him but that he had only now been able to recognise as his. He stopped for a moment to look at the Registrar’s desk, haloed by the wan light falling from above, yes, that was what he should do, he should go and sit in that chair, and from now on, he would be the true master of the archives, and only he, if he wanted to, forced as he was to spend his days here, could also choose to spend his nights here, the sun and the moon turning tirelessly around the Central Registry both the world and the centre of the world When we announce the beginning of something, we always speak of the first day, when one should really speak of the first night, the night is a condition of the day, night would be eternal if there were no night. Senhor José is sitting in the Registrar’s chair and he will stay there until dawn, listening to the faint rustle of the papers of the living above the compact silence of the dead When the street lamps went off and the five windows above the main door turned the colour of dark ash, he got up from the chair and went into his house, closing the communicating door behind him. He washed, shaved, had some breakfast, filed away the bishop’s papers, put on his best suit, and when it was time, he went out through the other door, the street door, walked around the building and went into the Central Registry. None of his colleagues noticed who had arrived, they responded to his greeting as they always did, Good morning, Senhor José, they said and they did not know to whom they were speaking.

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.