The Collected Novels of José Saramago (284 page)

One might ask why Senhor José needs a hundred-yard-long piece of string if the length of the Central Registry, despite successive extensions, is no more than eighty. That is the question of a person who imagines that one can do everything in life simply by following a straight line, that it is always possible to proceed from one place to another by the shortest route, perhaps some people in the outside world believe that they have done so, but here, where the living and the dead share the same space, sometimes, in order to find one of them, you have to make a lot of twists and turns, you have to skirt round mountains of bundles, columns of files, piles of cards, thickets of ancient remains, you have to walk down dark gulleys, between walls of grubby paper which, up above, actually touch, yards and yards of string will have to be unravelled, left behind, like a sinuous, subtle trail traced in the dust, there is no other way of knowing where you have to go next, there is no other way of finding your way back. Senhor José tied one end of the string to the leg of the Registrar’s desk, not out of any lack of respect, but merely to gain a few yards, then tied the other end to his ankle, and, placing on the floor the ball of string, which unravelled with each step he took, he set off along one of the central corridors filled by the files of the living. His plan is to start his search at the far end, where the unknown woman’s file and card should be, even though, for reasons already explained, it is highly unlikely that they will have been filed away correctly. As Senhor José is a civil servant from another age, trained in the old methods and disciplines, his strict character would be repelled by any collusion with the irresponsible habits of the new generation, by beginning the search in a place where a dead person would have been deposited only by a deliberate and scandalous infraction of basic archivistic rules. He knows that the main difficulty he is going to have to do battle with is the lack of light. Apart from the Registrar’s desk, above which hangs the inevitable lamp giving off its usual dull light, the whole of the Central Registry is plunged in darkness, in dense shadows. Turning on other fights in the building, however dim they might be, would be too risky, a keen policeman doing his rounds of the area, or a good citizen, the sort who is concerned about the safety of the community, might spot the diffuse light through the high windows and immediately sound the alarm. Senhor José will, therefore, have only the feeble circle of light, which wavers before him in time to the rhythm of his steps, but also because the hand holding the flashlight is trembling. There is an enormous difference between visiting the archive of the dead in normal working hours, with the presence behind you of your colleagues who although not particularly supportive as we have seen, would always come running
if
there were any real danger or if your nerve suddenly, irresistibly failed, especially if the Registrar said, Go and see what’s happened to him, between that and venturing alone, in the middle of a black night, into the heart of those catacombs of humanity, surrounded by names, hearing the whisper of the papers, or a murmur of voices, for those who have ears to hear.

Senhor José has gone as far as the end of the shelves of the living, he is now looking for a passage along which he can reach the far end of the Central Registry, in theory, and in accordance with the way the space was laid out, it should follow the Dissecting longitudinal line on the plan, the imaginary Une that divides the rectangular design of the building into two equal parts, but the avalanches of files, which are always happening however firmly the masses of paper are held in place, have made something that was intended to provide direct, rapid access into a complex network of passages and paths, where you are constandy confronted by obstacles and cul-de-sacs. During the day and with all the lights on, it is still relatively easy for the researcher to keep a straight course, you just have to pay attention, be vigilant, take care to Mow the least dusty roads, a sign that they are the most frequented, and up until now, apart from a few scares and some worrying delays, there has not been a single instance of a staff member failing to return from an expedition. But the light from a pocket flashlight does not fill one with confidence, it seems to create its own shadows, what Senhor José should have done, since he did not dare to use the Registrar’s flashlight, was to have bought one of those really powerful modern ones, the sort that can light everything to the farthest ends of the earth. It’s true that the fear of getting lost doesn’t trouble him too much, to a certain extent the constant tension of the string tied round his ankle comforts him, but if he starts wandering about, going in circles, getting caught up in the cocoon, he will eventually be unable to take another step, and will have to go back and start again. He has already had to do so for another reason, when the
fine string, too fine really, got caught up among the bundles of paper and snagged on the corners, and then there could be no going backwards or forwards. Given all these problems and entanglements, it is understandable that any progress will be slow, and that Senhor José’s knowledge of the topography of the place will be of little use to him, especially since a huge pile of files, the height of a man, has just blocked what had every appearance of being a straight path, throwing up a thick cloud of dust, in the midst of which fluttered terrified moths, almost transparent in the beam of the flashlight. Senhor José hates these creatures, which, at first sight, one would have said had been placed in the world as ornaments, just as he hates the silverfish that proliferate here too, they are all voracious eaters, blamed for the destruction of so many memories, for so many parentless children, for so many legacies fallen into the eager hands of the State owing to lack of legal proof, however vehemently one swears that the relevant document was eaten, sullied, chewed up and devoured by the beasts that infest the Central Registry, and which, as a matter of common humanity, should be taken into account, no one, alas, can convince the lawyer working for the widows and orphans, who should be on their side but isn’t, Either the paper turns up, or there’s no legacy. As for the mice, one need hardly mention how destructive they are. Nevertheless, despite the extensive damage they cause, these rodents also have their positive side, if they didn’t exist the Central Registry would have burst at the seams, or would be twice the length it is. An unwary observer might be surprised that the colonies of mice have not increased so in numbers that they have devoured every single one of the files, especially considering the obvious impossibility of a hundred-percent-efficient deinfestation programme The explanation although there are those who harbour certain doubts as to its real relevance, must He in the lack of water or the insufficient moisture in the atmosphere, in the dry diet of the creatures who find themselves trapped in the place where they have chosen to live or where ill luck has brought them, which would have resulted in a marked atrophy of the genital musculature with extremely negative consequences for their copulatory performance. Others disagree with this attempt at an explanation and insist that muscles have nothing to do with it, and so the controversy rages on.

Meanwhile, covered in dust, with the heavy tatters of spiders’ webs clinging to his hair and shoulders, Senhor José finally reached a clearing between the most recent papers to be filed away and the wall at the back, still separated by about three yards and forming an irregular corridor, narrower with each day that passed, that joins the two side walls. The darkness here is absolute. The feeble daylight that manages to penetrate the layer of filth covering the windows inside and out, especially the last windows on either side, which are nearest to him, does not reach this far because of the soaring piles of bundled documents that almost touch the ceiling. As for the rear wall, it is entirely and inexplicably blank, that is, there isn’t even a simple bull’s-eye window to aid the frail beam from the flashlight. No one has ever been able to understand why the board of architects, resorting to a rather unconvincing aesthetic excuse, have stubbornly refused to modify the historic plan and authorise the creation of windows in the wall when it proves necessary to move it back yet again, despite the fact that from a layman’s point of view, it would simply be satisfying a practical need. They should be here now, muttered Senhor José, then they’d know how difficult it is. The piles of paper on either side of the central passage are of different heights, the file and card of the unknown woman could be in either of them, although it’s more Likely to be in one of the lower piles, if the law of least effort was that preferred by the clerk charged with filing them away. Unfortunately, in our disoriented society, there is no shortage of twisted minds, and it would come as no surprise if the clerk who came to put away the unknown woman’s file and card, if indeed it was here that he came, had had the mischievous idea, born of sheer malice, of placing the enormous stepladder used for this purpose next to the highest pile of papers and climbing up it to place file and card right on the top. That is how things are in this world.

In a methodical, unhurried way, almost as if he were remembering the gestures and movements of the night he had spent in the school attic, when the unknown woman was probably still alive, Senhor José began his search. There was far less dust covering the papers here, which is easy enough to understand when you bear in mind that not a day passes without the files and cards of the deceased being brought here, which, imaginatively speaking, but in evident bad taste, would be the same as saying that in the depths of the Central Registry the dead are always clean. Only up high, where, as we have already said, the papers almost touch the ceiling, the dust sieved by time settles tranquilly on the dust already sieved by time, so much so that with the files you find up there, you have to clap the covers together to remove the dust, if you want to know who they belong to. If Senhor José fails to find what he’s looking for on the lower levels, he will again have to sacrifice himself and climb the stepladder, but this time he will only have to be perched up there for a minute, he won’t even have time to get dizzy, the flashlight beam will show him, at a glance, if a file was placed there recently. If the death of the unknown woman could be placed with a considerable degree of probability within the extremely short period of time corresponding, give or take a day, according to Senhor José, to one of the two periods in which he was absent from work, the week when he had flu and during his briefest of holidays, checking the documents in each of the piles can be done quite quickly, and even if the woman had died before, immediately after the memorable day on which the card fell into Senhor José’s hands, not so much time
had elapsed that the documents would now be filed away beneath an excessive number of other files. This repeated examination of situations as they arise, these persistent reflections, these meticulous ponderings on the light and the dark, on the straight and the labyrinthine, on the clean and the dirty, are all going on, just as we describe them, in Senhor José’s head. But the apparently exaggerated amount of time it takes to explain them, or, strictly speaking, to reproduce them, is the inevitable consequence not only of the complexity, in both form and content, of the above-mentioned factors, but also of the very special nature of the mental circuitry of our particular clerk, who is now about to be tested to the limit. Advancing step by step along the narrow corridor formed, as we said, by the piles of documents and by the back wall, Senhor José has gradually been moving closer to one of the side walls. In principle, and speaking purely abstractly, no one would think of describing such a corridor, with its comfortable width of almost three yards, as narrow, but if you consider it in relation to the actual length of the corridor, which, we repeat, stretches from wall to wall, then we should really ask how it is that Senhor José, whom we know to be subject to serious perturbations of a psychological nature, for example, vertigo and insomnia, has not until now suffered a violent attack of claustrophobia in this enclosed and suffocating space. The explanation can perhaps be found precisely in the fact that the darkness does not allow him to perceive the limits of this space, which could be here or there, and that all he can see before him is the familiar, calming mass of papers. Senhor José has never spent so much time here, usually you just go there, file away the documents of a finished life and return to the safety of your desk, and if it’s true that, on this occasion, from the moment he set off into the archive of the dead, he has been unable to shrug off a disquieting feeling of a presence surrounding him, he has attributed it to the diffuse terror of the hidden and the unknown to which even the
most courageous of people have an all too human right. Senhor José had not felt fear, what you could really call fear, until he reached the end of the corridor and came face-to-face with the wall. He bent down to examine some papers fallen on the floor and that could well have been those of the unknown woman scattered here at random by the indifferent clerk, and suddenly, before he even had time to examine them, he stopped being Senhor José, clerk at the Central Registry, he stopped being fifty years old, now he is a very young José who has just started going to school, he is the child who hated going to sleep because every night he had the same obsessive nightmare, a massive stone wall, a blind wall, a prison, and over there, at the far end of the corridor, hidden in the darkness, there is just a small stone. A small stone that was slowly growing, that he could not see now with his eyes, but which the memory of the dreams he had dreamed told him was there, a stone that was increasing in size and moving as if it were alive, a stone that was expanding sideways and upwards, that was climbing the walls, and dragging itself towards him, curled in upon itself, as if it were not stone but mud, as if it were not mud but thick blood. The child emerged screaming from the nightmare when the filthy mass was touching his feet, when the tightening garrote of fear was almost strangling him, but poor Senhor José cannot wake from a dream which is no longer his. Cowering against the wall like a frightened dog, he points the flashlight with tremulous hand towards the other end of the corridor, but the beam doesn’t reach that far, it stops halfway, more or less where the path to the archive of the living is to be found. He thinks that if he runs fast he’ll be able to escape the advancing stone, but fear tells him, Be careful, how do you know it isn’t there waiting for you you’ll walk straight into the lion’s den. In the dream the advance of the stone was accompanied by a strange music that seemed to be born out of the air, but here the silence is absolute, total, so dense that it swallows up Senhor
José’s breathing, just as the darkness swallows the beam from the flashlight, and which it has just swallowed completely. It was as if the darkness had suddenly advanced and covered Senhor José’s face like a sucker. The child’s nightmare was over though. For the child, ah, who can understand the human heart, the fact that he could not see the walls of the prison, both near and far, was tantamount to their having ceased to be there, it was as if the space around him had suddenly grown larger, freer, stretching out to infinity, as if the stones were just the inert mineral of which they are made, as if water were simply the basic ingredient of mud, as if blood flowed only in his veins, not outside them. Now it is not a childhood nightmare that is frightening Senhor José, what paralyses him with fear is once more the thought that he might die in this place, just as, all that time ago, he imagined that he might fall from that other ladder and lie dead here, undocumented in the midst of all the documents of the dead, crushed by the darkness, by the avalanche that would soon unleash itself from above, and that tomorrow they would come and find him, Senhor José hasn’t come in to work, I wonder where he is, He’ll turn up, and when a colleague came to transfer other files and other cards, he would find him there, exposed to the light of a far superior flashlight than this one which had served him so badly when he needed it most. The minutes passed that had to pass before Senhor José could gradually begin to hear inside himself a voice saying, Look, apart from being afraid, nothing really bad has happened to you yet, you’re sitting here quite unharmed, it’s true the flashlight went out on you, but what do you need a flashlight for, you’ve got the string tied round your ankle, with the other end tied to the leg of the Registrar’s desk, you’re safe, like an unborn child attached by the umbilical cord to its mother’s womb, not that the Registrar is your mother, or your father, but relationships between people here are complicated, what you must remember is that childhood nightmares never come true, far less dreams, that business with the stone really was pretty horrible, but it’s probably got a scientific explanation, like when you used to dream you were flying over houses and gardens, rising, falling, hovering with your arms outstretched, do you remember, it was a sign that you were growing, probably the stone had a function too, if you have to experience terror, then rather sooner than later, besides, you should know better than anyone that the dead people here aren’t really dead, it’s a macabre exaggeration to call this the archive of the dead, if the papers you have in your hand are those of the unknown woman, they are just paper, not bones, they’re paper, not putrefying flesh, that was the miracle worked by your Central Registry, transforming life and death into mere paper, it’s true that you wanted to find that woman, but you didn’t manage it in time, you couldn’t even do that, or, rather, you wanted it and didn’t want it, you hesitated between desire and fear, it happens to lots of people, you probably should have just gone to the tax office after all, as someone told you to, it’s over, it’s best just to leave it, her time has run out and the end of your time isn’t far off either.