The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  The reverential silence in which the final part of his speech had been heard was rudely shaken by the sarcasm of those last words. The Registrar had gone back to being the boss they had always known, arrogant and ironic, implacable in his judgements, rigorous as regards discipline, as he immediately went on to demonstrate, Purely in your interests, not in mine, I must make it clear to you that you would be making the biggest mistake of your lives if you were to consider the fact that I have spoken to you with an open heart and mind a sign of personal weakness or a diminution of official authority. The reason I did not simply issue an order for the reintegration or unification of the two archives to take place, without further explanation, as I would have been perfectly entitled to do, was that I wanted you to understand the deeper reasons behind the decision, it was because I wanted the work awaiting you to be carried out in the spirit of one who feels he is engaged in building something and not with the sense of bureaucratic alienation of one who has simply been ordered to put one set of papers together with another. Discipline in the Central Registry will continue to be what it has always been, no distractions, no daydreaming, no word not direcdy concerned with work, no unpunctuality, no negligence in matters of personal behaviour, in either manners or appearance. Senhor José thought, He must mean me, because I haven't shaved, but this didn't worry him, the reference was probably intended to be a general one, but, just in case, he lowered his head very slowly, like a student who has not learned his lesson and wants to avoid being called to the blackboard. It seemed that the speech had reached its end, but no one moved, they had to await the order to go back to work, which is why they all jumped when the Registrar said in a loud, sharp tone, Senhor José. Senhor José got swiftly to his feet, What can he want of me, he no longer thought that the reason for that abrupt call could be his unshaven beard, something far more serious than a simple reprimand was about to take place, or so he judged from the severe expression on the Registrars face, at least that was what a terrible fear was beginning to scream at him inside his head when he saw the Registrar advancing in his direction, stopping in front of him, Senhor José can barely breathe, he awaits the first word as a condemned man waits for the blade to fall, for the rope to tighten or for the firing squad to shoot, then the Registrar said, That beard. He then turned on his heel and signalled to his deputies for work to recommence. There was a certain look of placid calm on his face now, an air of strange peace, as if he too had come to the end of a day's work. No one will share these impressions with Senhor José, in the first place, so as not to fill his head with even more fantasies, secondly, because the order is clear, No word not direcdy concerned with work.

  One enters the cemetery via an old building with a façade which is the twin sister of the Central Registry façade. There are the same three black stone steps, the same ancient door in the middle, the same five narrow windows above. Apart from the great two-leaved door alongside the façade, the only observable difference would be the sign above the entrance, in the same enamelled lettering, that says General Cemetery. The large door was closed many years ago, when it was clear that access through there had become impracticable, that it had ceased satisfactorily to fulfil the end for which it had been intended, that is, to allow easy passage not only for the dead and their companions, but also for those who would visit the dead afterwards. Like all cemeteries in this or any other world, it was tiny when it started, a small patch of land on the outskirts of what was still the embryo of a city, turned to face the open air of the fields, but later, alas, with the passing of time, the inevitable happened, it kept growing and growing and growing, until it became the immense necropolis that it is today. At first, it was surrounded by a wall and, for generations, whenever the pressure inside began to hinder both the orderly accommodation of the dead and the free circulation of the living, they did the same as in the Central Registry, they would demolish the walls and rebuild them a little farther on. One day, it must be close to four centuries ago, the then keeper of the cemetery had the idea of leaving it open on all sides, apart from the area facing onto the street, alleging that this was the only way to rekindle the sentimental relationship between those inside and those outside, much diminished at the time, as anyone could see just by looking at the neglected state of the graves, especially the oldest ones. He believed that, although walls served the positive aims of hygiene and decorum, ultimately, they had the perverse effect of aiding forgetfulness, which is hardly surprising, given the popular wisdom which has declared, since time began, that what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over. We have many reasons to think that the motives behind the Registrar's decision to break with tradition and routine and to unify the archives of the dead and of the living, thus reintegrating human society in the specific documentary area under his jurisdiction, were purely internal. It is, therefore, all the more difficult for us to understand why no one immediately applied the earlier lesson provided by a humble, primitive cemetery keeper, who, as was only natural in his line of work and bearing in mind the times he lived in, was doubtless not particularly well educated, but was, nevertheless, a man of revolutionary instincts, and who, sad to say, has not even been given a decent gravestone to point out the fact to future generations. On the contrary, for four centuries now, curses, insults, calumnies and humiliations have been heaped upon the memory of the unfortunate innovator, for he is held to be the person historically responsible for the present state of the necropolis, which is described as disastrous and chaotic, mostly because not only does the General Cemetery still have no walls about it but it could never possibly be walled in again. Allow us to explain. We said earlier that the cemetery grew, not, of course, because of some intrinsic reproductive powers of its own, as though, if you will permit us a somewhat macabre example, the dead had engendered more dead, but simply because the city's population grew and so therefore did its size. Even when the General Cemetery was still surrounded by walls, something occurred which, in the language of municipal bureaucracy, is called an urban demographic explosion, and this happened more than once and in successive ages. Little by little, people came to live in the wide fields behind the cemetery, small groups of houses appeared, villages, hamlets, second homes, which grew in turn, occasionally contiguous, but still leaving between them large empty spaces, which were used as farmland or woods or pasture or areas of scrub. Those were the areas into which the General Cemetery advanced when its walls were demolished. Like floodwaters that begin by encroaching on the low-lying land, snaking along valleys and then, slowly, creeping up hillsides, so the graves gained ground, often to the detriment of agriculture, for the besieged owners had no alternative but to sell off strips of land, at other times, the graves skirted orchards, wheat fields, threshing floors and cattle pens, always within sight of the houses, and, often, if you like, right next door. Seen from the air, the General Cemetery looks like an enormous felled tree, with a short, fat trunk, made up of the nucleus of original graves, from which four stout branches reach out, all from the same growing point, but which, later, in successive bifurcations, extend as far as you can see, forming, in the words of an inspired poet, a leafy crown in which life and death are mingled, just as in real trees birds and foliage mingle. That is why the main door of the General Cemetery ceased to serve as a passageway for funeral processions. It is opened only very infrequently, when a researcher into old stones, having studied one of the very early funerary markers in the place, asks permission to make a mould of it, with the consequent deployment of raw materials, such as plaster, tow and wires, and, a not unusual complement, delicate, precise photographs, the sort that require spotlights, reflectors, batteries, light meters, umbrellas and other artifacts, none of which are allowed through the small door that leads from the building into the cemetery because it would disturb the administrative work carried on inside.

  Despite this exhaustive accumulation of details, which some may consider insignificant, a case, to resort to botanical comparisons again, of not being able to
see the forest for the trees, it is quite possible that some vigilant, attentive listener to this story, someone who has not lost a sense of standards inherited from mental processes determined, above all, by the logic acquired from knowledge, it is quite possible that such a listener might declare himself radically opposed to the existence, and still more to the spread, of such wild, anarchic cemeteries as this, which has grown to the point where it is almost cheek by jowl with the places that the living had intended for their exclusive use, that is, houses, streets, squares, gardens and other public amenities, theatres and cinemas, cafes and restaurants, hospitals, insane asylums, police stations, playgrounds, sports fields, fairgrounds and exhibition areas, car parks, large department stores, small shops, side streets, alleyways, avenues. For, while aware of the General Cemetery's irresistible need for growth, in symbiotic union with the development of the city and its increased population, they consider that the area intended for one's final rest should nevertheless keep within strict bounds and obey strict rules. An ordinary quadrilateral of high walls, with no decoration or fantastic architectural excrescences, would be more than sufficient, instead of this vast octopus, more octopus really than tree, however much that may pain poetic imaginations, reaching out with its eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four tentacles, as if to embrace the whole world. In civilised countries, the correct practice, with advantages proven by experience, is for bodies to remain beneath the earth for a few years, five usually, at the end of which, apart from the odd case of miraculous incorruptibility, what little is left after the corrosive work of quicklime and the digestive work of worms is dug up to make room for the new occupants. In civilised countries, they do not have this absurd practice of plots in perpetuity, this idea of considering any grave forever untouchable, as if, since life could not be made definitive, death can be. This has obvious consequences, the blocked-off door, the anarchic internal traffic system, the ever longer route that funerals have to make around the General Cemetery before they reach their destination at the far end of one of the octopus's sixty-four tentacles which they would never find if they did not have a guide with them. Like the Central Registry, although, by some deplorable lapse of memory, this information was not given at the appropriate moment, the General Cemetery's unwritten motto is All the Names, although it should be said that, in fact, these three words fit the Central Registry like a glove, because it is there that all the names are to be found, both those of the dead and those of the living, while the cemetery, given its role as ultimate destination and ultimate depository, has to content itself only with the names of the dead. This mathematical evidence, however, is not enough to silence the keepers of the General Cemetery who, confronted by what they call their apparent numerical inferiority, usually shrug their shoulders and argue, With time and patience everyone ends up here, the Central Registry, from this point of view, is merely a tributary of the General Cemetery. Needless to say, it is an insult to the Central Registry to call it a tributary. Despite these rivalries, this professional competitiveness, relations between those who work in the Central Registry and those in the Cemetery are openly friendly and full of mutual respect, because, at bottom, apart from the inevitable institutional collaboration between them, given the formal similarity and objective contiguity of their respective statutes, they know that they are digging at either end of the same vine, the vine called life and which is situated between two voids.

  This is not the first time that Senhor José has been to the General Cemetery. The bureaucratic need to check certain data, clarify discrepancies, compare facts, clear up differences, means that the people working in the Central Registry have to go to the cemetery with relative frequency, a task that nearly always falls to the clerks, hardly ever to the senior clerks, and never, need it be said, to the deputies or the Registrar. Sometimes, for similar reasons, the clerks and, on rare occasions, the officials from the General Cemetery go to the Central Registry, where they are received with the same cordiality with which Senhor José will be greeted here. Like the facade, the interior of the building is a perfect copy of the Central Registry, although, of course, one must point out that the people working in the General Cemetery usually say that the Central Registry is a perfect copy of the cemetery building, indeed an incomplete copy, since they lack the great door, to which those at the Central Registry reply that a fat lot of good the door is anyway, since it's always closed. Nevertheless, here we find the same long counter stretching the whole length of the enormous room, the same towering shelves, the same arrangement of staff, in a triangle, with the eight clerks in the first row, the four senior clerks behind them, then the two deputy keepers, for that is what they are called here, not deputy registrars, just as the keeper, at the apex, is not a registrar, but a keeper. However, there are other members of staff at the cemetery apart from the clerks. Sitting on two continuous benches, on either side of the entrance door, opposite the counter, are the guides. Some people continue bluntly to call them gravediggers, as in the old days, but their professional title, in the city's official gazette, is cemetery guide, which, contrary to what one might expect or imagine, is not just a well-intentioned euphemism intended to disguise the painful brutality of a spade digging a rectangular hole in the earth, rather, it is a correct description of a role which is not merely a question of lowering the dead into the depths, but of leading them over the surface too. These men, who work in pairs, wait there in silence for the funeral corteges to arrive and then, armed with the respective pass, filled in by the clerk chosen to deal with the matter, they get into one of the cars waiting in the parking lot, the ones that have a luminous sign at the rear that flicks on and off and says Follow me, like the cars used at airports, at least the keeper of the General Cemetery is quite right in that regard, when he says that they are more advanced in matters of modern technology than they are at the Central Registry, where tradition still dictates that the clerks use old-fashioned pens and inkwells. The fact is that when you see the funeral car and those in it obediently following the guides along the well-tended streets of the city and along the rough roads of the suburbs, with the light flashing on and off all the way to the grave, Follow me, Follow me, Follow me, it is impossible not to agree that not all changes in the world are for the worst. And although the detail may not be of any real importance for a global understanding of the story, it may be of interest to explain that a marked personality trait among these guides is a belief that the universe is in fact ruled by a superior thought process which is permanently alert to human needs, because if that were not so, they argue, cars would not have been invented at precisely the moment when they became most necessary, that is, when the General Cemetery had become so vast that it would be a real calvary to bear the deceased to his or her particular Golgotha by the traditional methods, whether using stick and rope or a two-wheeled cart. When someone sensibly remarks to them that they should be more careful in their use of words, since Golgotha and calvary originally mean one and the same thing, and that it makes no sense to use terms denoting pain and sorrow with regard to the transportation of someone who will never suffer again, you can guarantee that they will respond, rudely, that each man knows himself, but only God knows all men.