The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  After a few moments, still lying facedown, because he was not so foolish as to attempt to stand up in the midst of the darkness, running the risk of taking a false step and plunging back into the abyss from which he had come, Senhor José managed, with difficulty, to turn around and to remove the flashlight he had put in his back trouser pocket. He switched it on and shone it over the floor immediately ahead of him. There were scattered papers, cardboard boxes, some of them burst, all of them thick with dust. A few yards ahead he could see what seemed to be the legs of a chair. He raised the beam slightly, it was a chair. It seemed in good condition, the seat, the back, and above it, hanging from the low ceiling, was a bare lightbulb, Just like in the Central Registry, thought Senhor José. He directed the beam around the room and saw the fleeting shapes of shelves that seemed to cover every wall. They were not high shelves, nor could they be, given the steepness of the roof, and they were weighted down with boxes and shapeless bundles of paper. I wonder where the light switch is, thought Senhor José, and the reply was as expected, It's downstairs and it doesn't work, I don't think I can find the record cards with only this flashlight, besides I'm beginning to think the battery might be getting low, You should have thought of that before, Perhaps there's another switch in here, Even if there is, we already know that the bulb's burned out, We don't know that, It would have come on otherwise, The only thing we know is that we tried the switch and the light didn't come on, Exactly, It could mean something else, What, That there's no bulb downstairs, So I'm right, the bulb here has burned out too, But there's nothing to say that there aren't two switches and two bulbs, one on the stairs and the other in the attic, now the one downstairs has burned out, but we still don't know about the one upstairs, If you're clever enough to deduce that, then find the switch. Senhor José abandoned the awkward position in which he was still lying and sat up, My clothes will be in a dreadful state by the time I leave here, he thought, and pointed the beam at the wall nearest the opening onto the stairs, If there is a switch, then it will be here. He found it at the precise moment when he was reaching the discouraging conclusion that the only switch was indeed downstairs. As he shifted his free hand on the floor in order to get more comfortable, the light went on, the switch, one of those button switches, had been installed in the floor, so that it would be within immediate reach of anyone coming up the stairs. The yellowish light from the bulb barely reached the wall at the back, there was no sign of footprints on the floor. Remembering the record cards that he had seen on the floor below, Senhor José said out loud, It's at least six years since anyone came in here. When the echo of his words had faded, Senhor José noticed that there was a vast silence in the attic, as if the silence that had been there before contained a larger silence, the woodworms must have stopped their excavating work. From the ceiling hung spiders' webs black with dust, their owners must have died long ago from lack of food, there was nothing here that would attract a stray fly, especially not with the door shut downstairs, and the moths, the silverfish and the woodworms in the beams had no reason to exchange the galleries of cellulose, where they lived, for the outside world. Senhor José got up, vainly trying to brush the dust from his trousers and shirt, his face looked like the face of some eccentric clown, with a great stain on one side only. He went and sat down on the chair, underneath the bulb, and started talking to himself, Let's look at this rationally, he said, if the old record cards are here, and everything indicates that they are, it is highly unlikely that they are going to be grouped student by student, that is, that the record cards of each student will be all together, so that you can see at a glance the whole of their scholastic career, its more likely that, at the end of each school year, the secretary bundled up all the record cards corresponding to that year and placed them here, I doubt she would even have gone to the trouble of putting them in boxes, or perhaps she did, we'll have to see, I hope, if she did, she at least thought to write the relevant year on them, but one way or another, it will just be a question of time and patience. This conclusion had not added greatly to his initial premise, from the very beginning of his life, Senhor José has known that he only needs time in order to use patience, and from the very beginning he has been hoping that patience will not run out of time. He got up, and faithful to the rule that, in all searches, the best plan is to start at one point and proceed from there on with method and discipline, he set to work at the end of one of the rows of shelves, determined to leave no piece of paper unturned, always checking that there wasn't another piece of paper hidden between top and bottom sheets. Each movement he made, opening a box, untying a bundle, raised a cloud of dust, so much so that in order not to be asphyxiated, he had to tie his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, a preventive measure that the clerks were advised to follow each time they went into the archive of the dead in the Central Registry. In a matter of moments his hands were black and the handkerchief had lost any remaining trace of whiteness, Senhor José had become a coal miner hoping to find in the depths of the mine the pure carbon of a diamond.

  He found the first file after half an hour. The girl no longer had bangs, but, in this photograph taken at fifteen, her eyes had the same air of wounded gravity. Senhor José placed it carefully on the chair and continued his search. He was working in a kind of dream state, meticulous, feverish, moths fluttered out from beneath his fingers, terrified by the light, and little by little, as if he were rummaging in the remains of a tomb, the dust became grafted onto his skin, so fine that it penetrated his clothing. At first, when he picked up a bundle of record cards, he went straight to what really interested him, then he began to linger over names, images, for no reason, just because they were there and because no one else would go into this attic to remove the dust covering them, hundreds, thousands of faces of boys and girls, looking straight at the camera, at the other side of the world, waiting, for what exactly they didn't know. It wasn't like that in the Central Registry, in the Central Registry there were only words, in the Central Registry you could not see how faces had changed or continued to change, when that was precisely what was most important, the thing that time changes, not the name, which never changes. When Senhor José's stomach began to rumble, there were seven record cards on the chair, two of them with identical pictures, her mother must have said, Take this one from last year, there's no need to go to the photographer again, and she took the picture, sad that she wouldn't have a new photograph this year. Before going down to the kitchen, Senhor José went to the head teacher's bathroom to wash his hands, he was amazed by what he saw in the mirror, he hadn't imagined that his face could possibly get into this state, filthy, furrowed with lines of sweat, It doesn't even look like me, he thought, and yet he had probably never looked more like himself. When he had finished eating, he went up to the attic as fast as his knees would allow, it occurred to him that if the light failed, something to bear in mind after all this rain, he would not be able to complete bis search. Assuming that she hadn't repeated a year, he only had five more record cards to find, and if he were now to be plunged into darkness, all his efforts would be in part lost, since he would never be able to get back into the school. Absorbed in his work, he had forgotten about bis headache, his cold, and now he realised that he was feeling worse. He went downstairs again to take another two pills, then went back up, making a supreme effort, and resumed his work. The afternoon was drawing to a close when he found the last record card. He turned off the light in the attic, closed the door and, like a sleepwalker, put on his jacket and raincoat, removed as best he could any sign of his passing and sat down to wait for night to come.

  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 abse
nce 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.

  He had been drenched not only by the rain that fell on him while he slithered about on the porch roof, struggling to get into the school. When night came and he finally left through the window and reached the street, he could not, poor thing, have imagined what awaited him. The extremely tortuous circumstances of his ascent, but, above all, the dust accumulated in the attic archive, had left him, from head to foot, in an indescribably grimy state, his hair and face were smeared with black, his hands were like charred stumps, not to mention his clothes, his raincoat was like an old rag impregnated with lard, his trousers looked as if he had been rubbing them with tar, his shirt as if it had been used to clean a chimney thick with centuries of soot, even a vagabond living in the most extreme poverty would have sallied forth onto the street with more dignity. When Senhor José was two blocks away from the school, by which time it had stopped raining, he hailed a taxi to take him home, and the inevitable happened, the driver, seeing that black figure emerge suddenly from the depths of the night, took fright and accelerated, and that was not the only time, Senhor José hailed three other taxis and they all disappeared round the corner as if pursued by the devil himself. Senhor José resigned himself to having to walk home, he certainly wasn't going to get onto a bus, oh well, it would be just one more weariness to add to the one that barely allowed him to drag his feet along, but the worst thing was that, shortly afterwards, the rain started again and didn't stop throughout the whole of that interminable walk, streets, sidewalks, squares, avenues, through a city that seemed deserted, apart from that lone man, dripping water, without even the partial protection of an umbrella, you can understand why, no one takes an umbrella along when they go burgling, no more than you would when going to war, he could have taken shelter in a doorway and waited for a break in the clouds, but it wasn't worth it, he couldn't get any wetter than he was. When Senhor José reached home, the only reasonably dry part of his clothing was a pocket in his jacket, the inside pocket on his left side, where he had placed the school record cards of the unknown girl, he had kept them covered with his right hand all the time, to protect them from the rain, anyone who saw him would have thought he had something wrong with his heart, especially given the pained look on his face. Shivering, he took all his clothes off, wondering confusedly how he would solve the problem of getting that pile of clothes on the floor washed, he didn't have so many suits, shoes, socks and shirts that he could afford to send it all off to the dry cleaners, as if he were a man of means, a complete suit, he was bound to need one of those items of clothing when he had to put his remaining clothes on tomorrow. He decided to worry about that later, now he just had to get the filth off his body, the worst thing was that the heater didn't work very well, the water sometimes came out boiling hot, sometimes ice cold, just the thought of it made him shudder, and then, like someone trying to convince himself, he murmured, Perhaps it would do my cold good, a blast of hot water followed by cold, or so I've heard. He went into the cubicle that served him as a bathroom, looked in the mirror and realised why the taxi drivers had been frightened. He would have felt exactly the same and fled from this hollow-eyed phantom with a kind of black drool running from the corners of his mouth. The heater didn't behave too badly this time, it unleashed only a couple of cold lashes at the beginning, and the rest of the time it was comfortingly warm, besides, a quick scalding blast from time to time even helped dissolve the dirt. When he got out of the shower, Senhor José felt reinvigorated, like new, but as soon as he got into bed, he started shivering again, it was then that he thought of opening the drawer in his bedside table, where he kept his thermometer, and shortly afterwards, was saying, One hundred, if I feel the way I do now tomorrow morning, I won't be able to go to work. Whether it was the effects of fever or exhaustion, or both, this thought did not trouble him, the abnormal idea of being absent from work did not seem strange to him, for at that moment, Senhor José did not seem like Senhor José, or, rather, there were two Senhor Josés lying in bed, with the blankets up to their nose, one Senhor José who had lost all sense of responsibility, another to whom this was all a matter of complete indifference. He dozed for a few moments with the light on and then woke with a start when he dreamed that he had left the record cards on the chair in the attic, that he had left them there deliberately, as if during this whole adventure his sole aim had been merely to seek them out and find them. He also dreamed that someone went into the attic after he had left, saw the pile of thirteen record cards and asked, What mystery is this. Half-dazed, he got up and went to look for them, he had put them on the table when he emptied out his jacket pockets, and then returned to bed. The record cards were smeared with black fingermarks, some even bore the clear impress of his fingerprints, he would have to wipe them off tomorrow to foil any attempt at identification, How stupid, he thought, we leave fingerprints on everything we touch, if I clean those off Til just leave others, the difference is that some are visible and others are not. He closed his eyes and shortly afterwards fell asleep again, the hand barely grasping the record cards fell limply onto the bedcover, some slipped to the floor, there were the pictures of a girl at different ages, from child to adolescent, wrongfully brought here, no one has the right to
carry off photos that don't belong to them, unless they were a gift, carrying a photo of someone in your pocket is like carrying a little bit of their soul. Senhor José's dream, from which this time he did not awake, was a different one now he saw himself wiping away the fingerprints he had left at the school, they were everywhere, on the window through which he had entered, in the first-aid room, in the secretary's office, in the head teacher's study, in the refectory, in the kitchen, in the archive, he decided it wasn't worth worrying about the ones in the attic, no one was likely to go in there and ask, What mystery is this, the trouble was that the hands that wiped away the visible traces left behind them an invisible trace, if the head teacher at the school were to report the burglary to the police and there was a serious investigation, Senhor José would go to prison, as sure as two and two are four, imagine the dishonour and the shame that would forever stain the reputation of the Central Registry. In the middle of the night, Senhor José woke up burning with fever, apparendy delirious, saying, I didn't steal anything, I didn't steal anything, and it was true that, strictly speaking, he hadn't stolen anything, however much the head teacher might search and investigate, however many verifications, counts and comparisons he made, inventory in hand, ticking off one item after the other, his conclusion would be the same, There has been no theft, at least not what you could call theft, doubtless the person in charge of the kitchen would remind him that there was food missing from the fridge, but, supposing that this had been the only crime committed, stealing in order to eat, according to a fairly widely held view, is not theft, even the head teacher is in agreement there, the police, of course, are of a different opinion, on principle, they, however, would have no option but to go away, grumbling, There's some mystery there, no one burgles a school just to grab a spot of breakfast. In any event, since the head teacher's formal written statement, in which he said that nothing valuable or non-valuable was missing from the school, the police had decided not to take any fingerprints, as routine demanded, We've got more than enough work as it is, said the one in charge of the investigation squad. Despite these tranquillising words, Senhor José could not get back to sleep again all night, fearful that the dream would be repeated and that the police would return with their magnifying glasses and their special dust.