He woke late, shortly before the Central Registry was due to open, he didn't even have time to shave, he pulled on some clothes and left the house at a crazy gallop quite inappropriate to his age and his condition. All the other staff, from the eight clerks to the two deputies, were sitting down, their eyes fixed on the wall clock, waiting until the minute hand was resting exactly on the number twelve. Senhor José addressed the senior clerk in charge of his section, to whom he was expected to offer his first excuse, and he apologised for being late, I slept badly, he said, even though he knew, from long years of experience, that such an explanation was pointless, Sit down, came the abrupt reply. When, immediately after that, the minute hand slipped forward to indicate the transition from waiting time to work time, Senhor José, tripping over his shoelaces, which he had forgotten to tie, still had not reached his desk, a fact coldly observed by the senior clerk, who noted down this remarkable fact in the day's diary. More than an hour passed before the Registrar arrived. He looked rather withdrawn, almost sombre, and this filled the staff with fear, at first sight, anyone would say that he had slept badly too, but he was his usual composed self, perfectly shaven, without a crease in his suit or a hair out of place. He paused for a moment by Senhor José's desk and looked at him severely, though without saying a word. Embarrassed, Senhor José began a gesture that seems instinctive in men, that of raising his hand to rub his cheek to see if his beard had grown, but he stopped halfway, as if, by doing so, he might disguise what was obvious to everyone else, his unforgivably scruffy appearance. Everyone thought that a reprimand would not be long in coming. The Registrar went over to his own desk, sat down and called over the two deputies. The general feeling was that things were looking very bad for Senhor José, if not, the boss would not have summoned both of his immediate inferiors, he must have wanted to hear their opinion of the heavy sanction he intended to impose, His patience has run out, the other clerks thought gleefully, for they had been scandalised by the recent unmerited favouritism shown to Senhor José by the boss, About time too, they said to themselves sententiously. They soon realised, however, that this was not the case. While one of the two deputies gave orders for everyone, senior clerks and clerks, to turn and face the Registrar, the other went around the counter and closed the entrance door, having first affixed a notice outside saying Closed temporarily for official business. What on earths going on, wondered the staff, including the deputies, who knew as much as the others, or perhaps slightly more, only that the Registrar had told them that he was going to speak. The first thing he said was Sit down. The order passed from the deputies to the senior clerks, from the senior clerks to the clerks, there was the inevitable noise produced by the scuffing of chairs, placed with their backs to their respective desks, but all this was done quickly, in less than a minute the silence in the Central Registry was absolute. You couldn't hear a fly, although everyone knew they were there, some perched in safe places, others dying in the filthy spiders' webs hanging from the ceiling. The Registrar rose slowly to his feet, equally slowly he surveyed the staff, one by one, as if he were seeing them for the first time, or as if he were trying to recognise them after a long absence, oddly enough, his expression was no longer sombre, or, rather, it was, but in a different sense, as if he were tormented by some moral pain. Then he spoke, Gentlemen, in my role as head of the Central Registry, the latest in a long line of Registrars begun when the oldest of the documents existing in our archives was first collected, in fulfilment of the responsibilities bestowed on me and following the example of my predeces sors, I have been scrupulous in obeying and in making others obey the written laws that regulate our work, never forgetting, indeed, at every moment, always mindful of tradition. I am aware that times have changed, I am aware of society's need for a continuous updating of working methods and processes, but I understand, as did those who were in charge of the Central Registry before me, that the preservation of the spirit, of the spirit of what I will call continuity and organic identity, must prevail over any other consideration, for if we fail to proceed along that path, we will witness the collapse of the moral edifice which, as the first and last depositories of life and death, we continue here to represent. There will doubtless be those who protest because there is not a single typewriter to be seen in the Central Registry, still less other far more modern equipment, because the cabinets and shelves are made of wood, or because the staff still have to dip their pens in inkwells and use blotters, there will be those who consider us to be ridiculously frozen in time, who demand of the government the rapid introduction into our work of advanced technologies, but while it is true that laws and regulations can be altered and substituted at any moment, the same cannot be said of traditions, which is, as such, both in form and sense, immutable. No one is going to travel back in time in order to change a tradition that was born in time and that was fed and sustained by time. No one is going to tell us that what exists did not exist, no one would ever dare, like a child, to want what has happened not to have happened. And if they did, they would be wasting their time. These are the foundations of our reason and our strength, this is the wall behind which we have, until today, been able to defend both our identity and our autonomy. Thus we have continued and thus we would continue if new thoughts had not surfaced indicating to us the need for new paths.
So far there had been nothing new in the Registrar's speech, although it was true that this was the first time that anyone in the Central Registry had heard something resembling a solemn declaration of principles. The uniform mentality of the staff had been based on providing a service, which was regulated in the early days by rigour and precision, but, due perhaps to a certain degree of historical institutional weariness, had allowed among more recent generations the grave and continuing acts of neglect mentioned before and which were worthy of censure even from the most benevolent of viewpoints. Their dulled consciences touched, the staff assumed that this would be the main subject of the unexpected lecture, but they were soon undeceived. Besides, if they had paid a little more attention to the expression on the Registrar's face, they would have realised at once that his objective was not of a disciplinary nature, it wasn't a general reprimand, in which case his words would have sounded like sharp blows and his whole face would have been filled with a look of scornful indifference. None of these signs was apparent in the attitudes the Registrar struck, merely a feeling as of someone who, having been accustomed always to winning, finds himself for the first time in his life confronted by a force greater than his. And the few, in particular the deputies and the odd senior clerk, who thought they had deduced from the Registrar's last words that he was about to announce the immediate introduction of modernisations which were already current coinage beyond the walls of the Central Registry, were soon forced to recognise, much to their amazement, that they had been wrong. The Registrar continued to speak, Do not imagine, however, that the thoughts to which I refer are merely such thoughts as would lead us to open our doors to modern inventions, that would not even require any thought, we would simply call in the appropriate technician and within twenty-four hours we would have the place full of machinery of every kind. Much as it pains me to say this and however scandalous it may seem to you, the matter that my thoughts called into question, much to my surprise, was one of the fundamental aspects of Central Registry tradition, that is, the spatial distribution of the living and the dead, their obligatory separation, not only into different archives, but in different areas of the building. There was a faint whispering, as if the common thought of the astonished workers had become audible, there can be no other explanation, since none of them would have dared to utter a word. I realise that this troubles you, continued the Registrar, because, when I first thought it, I too felt almost as if I had committed a heresy, worse still, I felt guilty of offending against the memory of those who held this position of authority before me, and against those who worked at the desks now occupied by you, but the irresistible pressure of evidence forced me to conf
ront the weight of tradition, a tradition which, all my life, I had considered immovable. Becoming aware of these facts was no chance occurrence nor the fruit of a sudden revelation. On two occasions since I have been head of the Central Registry, I have received two premonitory warnings, to which, at the time, I attributed no particular importance, except that I reacted to them in a way which I myself can only describe as primitive, but which I now realise paved the way for me to welcome with an open heart a third and more recent warning, about which I wül not speak on this occasion, for reasons which I believe should remain secret. The first occasion, which you will aU doubtless remember, was when one of my deputies here present proposed that the archive of the dead should be arranged the other way around, that is, with the oldest farthest off and the most recent nearest. Because of the amount of work involved in such a change and bearing in mind the small staff we have at our disposal, the suggestion was manifestly impracticable, and I conveyed those feelings to the proposer of the idea, however, I did so in terms that I would prefer now to forget and that I would like him to forget too. The deputy referred to blushed with satisfaction and turned around to show himself, before turning back to face his superior, nodding slightly, as if he were thinking, You see, if you paid a little more attention to what other people told you. The Registrar went on, I did not realise then that behind an apparently absurd idea, which, from the operational point of view, was indeed absurd, lay an intuition of something absolutely revolutionary, an unwitting, unconscious intuition its true, but no less effective for that. Of course, one could expect no more from the brain of a mere deputy, but as Registrar, I was obliged, both by the duties imposed on me by my post and by reason of experience, to understand immediately what the seeming futility of the idea concealed. This time the deputy did not turn around, and if he blushed with hurt pride no one saw it because he kept his head bowed. The Registrar paused to give a deep sigh and then went on, The second occasion was when the researcher went missing in the archive of the dead and was only discovered a week later, almost at death's door, when we had nearly lost hope of finding him alive. Since it was, in a sense, such a common occurrence, for I cannot believe that anyone here has not, at least once in his life, got lost in there, I merely took the necessary precautions, issuing an order imposing the obligatory use of Ariadne's thread, a classical, and if I may say, ironic description, of the length of string that I keep in the drawer. The fact that since then nothing similar has occurred is proof that it worked. In light of the direction my talk is taking, one might ask what conclusions I should have drawn from the affair of the lost genealogist, and I would say, with all humility, that but for certain other recent events and the thoughts which those events aroused in me, I would never have come to understand the double absurdity of separating the dead from the living. It is absurd in the first place from the archivistic point of view, when one considers that the easiest way of finding the dead would be to look for them among the living, since the latter, because they are alive, are always there before us, but it is equally absurd from the mnemonic point of view, for if the dead are not kept in the midst of the living, sooner or later they will be forgotten and then, if you'll forgive the rather vulgar expression, it's the Devils own job to find them when we need them, which, again, sooner or later, we always do. For all those listening to me, without regard to rank or personal circumstance, it will be clear that I have been talking only about the Central Registry, not the outside world, where, in order to protect the physical hygiene and mental health of the living, we usually bury the dead. But I would go so far as to say that an identical need for physical hygiene and mental health should ensure that we of the Central Registry, we who write and manipulate the papers of life and death, should reunite the dead and the living in one single archive which we will call the historic archive, and where they will be inseparable, a circumstance which, beyond these walls, law, custom and fear do not allow. I will issue an order that will specify, firstly, that from this date on, the dead will remain in the same place that they occupied in the archive while alive, secondly, that gradually, file by file, document by document, from the most recent to the most ancient, we will move towards the reintegration of the past dead into the archive which will then become everyone's present. I know that the second part of the operation will take several decades to carry out, that we will no longer be alive, nor, probably, will the subsequent generation, when the papers of the last dead person, torn, worm-eaten, darkened by the dust of ages, return to the world from which, by one last, unnecessary act of violence, they were removed. Just as definitive death is the ultimate fruit of the will to forget, so the will to remember will perpetuate our lives. Were I expecting you to express an opinion you would perhaps argue, with what you fondly imagine to be subtlety, that such a perpetuity will be of no use to those who have died. That would be the argument of one who sees no further than the end of his own nose. In that case, and always assuming I took the trouble to respond, I would have to explain to you that I have been talking only about life here, not death, and if you failed to realise that before, that is because you will never be capable of understanding anything at all.
The Collected Novels of José Saramago Page 238