The idea that the ceiling gave to Senhor José was to cut his holiday short and go back to work, You tell the boss that you're much stronger now and ask him to reserve the other days for another occasion, that is if you ever find a way out of the hole you've got yourself into, with all doors shut and not a single clue to follow, The Registrar is going to find it strange a member of staff going in to work when he's not obliged to and without being called, You've done stranger things than that recently, I lived a peaceful life before this absurd obsession, looking for a woman who doesn't even know I exist, But you know that she exists, that's the problem, I'd better just give up once and for all, Maybe, maybe, anyway just remember that not only the wisdom of ceilings is infinite, life's surprises are too, What do you mean by that tired old cliché, That the days go by and never come again, That's an even tireder cliché, don't tell me that the wisdom of ceilings consists only in clichés like that, said Senhor José scornfully, You know nothing about life if you think there is more than that to know, replied the ceiling and fell silent. Senhor José got off the bed, hid the letter in the wardrobe, among the bishop's papers, then went to fetch his notebook and began describing the frustrating events of the morning, laying particular emphasis on the pharmacists unpleasant manner and his gimlet eye. At the end of the report he wrote, as if the idea had been his, I think it's best that I go back to work. When he was putting away the notebook underneath the mattress, he remembered that he hadn't had any lunch, his head told him, not his stomach, if, over a period of time, people forget to eat, they get out of the habit of listening to the clock of hunger. If Senhor José were to continue his holiday, he wouldn't in the least mind going back to bed for the rest of the day, skipping lunch and supper, sleeping all night if he could, or taking refuge in the voluntary torpor of someone who has decided to turn his back on the disagreeable facts of life. But he had to feed his body in order to work the following day, he would hate it if weakness made him break out in a cold sweat again and suffer ridiculous dizzy spells that would be greeted with the feigned commiseration of his colleagues and the impatience of his superiors. He beat two eggs, added a few slices of chorizo sausage, a generous pinch of sea salt, put some oil in a frying pan, and waited until it had heated to just the right point, that was his one culinary talent, otherwise he resorted to opening cans. He ate the omelette slowly in small geometrically precise pieces, making it last as long as possible, not from any gastronomical pleasure, but just to fill the time. Above all, he did not want to think. His imaginary and metaphysical dialogue with the ceiling had served to disguise his complete mental disorientation the feeling of panic provoked by the idea that he would now hive nothing further to do in life, if as he had reason to fear the search for the unknown woman was over He felt a hard knot in his throat, like when he was told off as a child and he was expected to cry, and he would resist, resist, until at last the tears came, as they came now. He pushed his plate away, rested his head on his folded arms and cried without shame, at least this time there was no one here to laugh at him. On these occasions, ceilings can do nothing to help people in distress, they must merely wait up there until the storm passes, until the soul has unburdened itself, until the body is rested. That is what happened to Senhor José. After a few moments, he felt better, he brusquely wiped away the tears with his shirtsleeve and went to wash his plate and the cutlery. He had the whole afternoon ahead of him and nothing to do. He considered going to visit the lady in the ground-floor apartment, to tell her more or less what had happened, but then he thought that it wasn't worth it, she had told him everything she knew, and perhaps she would finally ask him what the devil the Central Registry was up to going to so much trouble over one person, a woman of no importance, it would be an indecent lie, as well as arrant stupidity, to tell her that we are all equal in the eyes of the Central Registry, just as the sun is there for everyone each time it rises, there are things one should avoid saying to an older person if we don't want them to laugh in our faces. Senhor José went to a corner of the house to get an armful of magazines and old newspapers from which he had already cut out articles and photographs, he might have missed something interesting, or there might be an article about someone who seemed a promising candidate for the rocky road to fame. Senhor José was returning to his collections.
The person who seemed least surprised was the Registrar. Having, as usual, arrived when everyone else was already at their places working, he paused for three seconds beside Senhor José's desk, but he didn't say a word. Senhor José was expecting to be submitted to a thorough interrogation as to the reasons for his early return to work, but the Registrar merely listened to the explanations given by the deputy in charge of that section, whom he later dismissed with an abrupt wave of his right hand, his index finger and middle finger held stiffly together, the others slightly bent, which, according to the gestural code of the Central Registry, meant that he did not care to hear another word on the matter. Caught between an initial expectation that he would be interrogated and relief at being left in peace, Senhor José struggled to clarify his ideas, to concentrate all his senses on the work that the senior clerk had placed on his desk, twenty or so birth certificates the information from each of which had to be transferred onto record cards and then filed away in the card-index system under the counter, in proper alphabetical order. It was a simple task, but a responsible one, which, fortunately for Senhor José, who was still weak in legs and head, could at least be carried out sitting down. The errors of copyists are the least excusable, there's no point in their coming to us and saying, I got distracted, on the contrary, recognising that one was distracted is the same as confessing that one was thinking about something else instead of giving full attention to the names and dates whose supreme importance lies in the fact that, in the present instance, it is those names and dates that give legal existence to the reality of existence. Especially the name of the person who was born. A simple error of transcription, a change in the initial letter of a surname for example, would mean that the index card would be put in the wrong place possibly far from where it should be as would inevitably happen in this Central Registry, where there are so many names, indeed where all the names are if the clerk who in times past had copied Senhor José's name onto the card had written José instead his mind confused by a similarity in pronunciation that verges on coincidence, there would be no end of work, involved, in trying to find the lost record card in order to write on it any of the three most commonly occurring notes marriage divorce death two more or less avoidable, the other not. That is why Senhor José copies with the greatest of care, letter by letter, these proofs of the existence of these new beings which have been entrusted to him, he has already transcribed sixteen birth certificates, now he is drawing the seventeenth towards him, he's preparing the record card, when his hand suddenly trembles, his eyes swim, beads of sweat appear on his forehead. The name before him, of a person of the female sex, is, in almost every detail, identical to that of the unknown woman, only the last name is different, and even then, the first letter is the same. It is highly likely that this card, bearing the name that it does, will have to be filed immediately after the other one, which is why Senhor José, like someone unable to control his impatience as the moment of a long-awaited encounter approaches, got up from his chair as soon as he had finished the transcription, ran to the appropriate drawer in the card index, nervously riffled through the cards, looked for and found the place. The unknown woman's card was not there. The fatal words immediately flashed up in Senhor José's head, the fulminating words, She's dead. Because Senhor José knows that the absence of a card from the card-index system inevitably means the death of the person whose name is on the card, he has lost count of the cards which he himself, in his twenty-five years as a civil servant, has removed from there and carried to the archive of the dead, but now he is refusing to accept the evidence that this could be the reason for the disappearance, some careless, incompetent colleague must have misfiled the card, perh
aps it's a little further on a. little further back, Senhor José, out of desperation, wants to deceive himself, never, in all the centuries of the Central Registry's existence, has a card in this index system been misplaced there is only one possibility only one that the woman might still be alive, and that is if her card is temporarily in the possession of one of the other clerks because some new piece of information is to be added to it, Perhaps she's got married again, thought Senhor José, and, for an instant, his unexpected irritation at the idea mitigated his disquiet. Then, barely noticing what he was doing, he placed the card onto which he had copied the details from the birth certificate in the place of the one that had disappeared, and, his legs trembling, he returned to his desk. He could not ask his colleagues if, by any chance, they had the woman's card, he could not walk around all their desks trying to get a glimpse of the papers they were working on, all he could do was watch the drawer in the card-index system to see if someone replaced the small cardboard rectangle taken from there by mistake or for a less routine reason than death. The hours passed, morning gave way to afternoon, Senhor José barely managed to eat a thing at lunchtime, he must have something wrong with his throat to be so easily afflicted by these knots, these tightnesses, these anxieties. During the whole day not one colleague went to open that drawer, not one lost card found its way back, the unknown woman was dead.
The Collected Novels of José Saramago Page 234