The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  Senhor José went in and went straight up to the counter, casting a cold eye over the seated guides, whom he disliked be cause their existence tilted the numerical balance of staff in the cemetery's favour. Since he was known to the people there, he did not need to show the identity card proving that he was a member of staff at the Central Registry, and as for the famous letter of authority, it hadn't even occurred to him to bring it, besides, even the least experienced of the clerks would have seen at a glance that it was false from beginning to end. Of the eight clerks lined up behind the counter, Senhor José chose one of the men with whom he got on best, a man a little older than himself, who had the absorbed air of one who no longer expects anything more from life. Like all the other clerks, he always seemed to be there whatever day it was. At first, Senhor José had thought that the people who worked at the cemetery never got a day off or took a holiday, that they worked every day of the year, until someone told him that this was not the case, that there was a group of casual workers contracted to work on Sundays, we are no longer in the days of slavery, Senhor José. Needless to say, the clerks at the General Cemetery have long hoped that the aforesaid casual workers might take over on Saturday afternoons too, but, for alleged reasons of budgets and finances, that demand has not yet been met, and in vain did the cemetery staff invoke the example of the Central Registry staff, who only worked on Saturday mornings, for, according to the sibylline communique issued from above refusing their request, The living can wait, the dead cannot. Anyway, it was unheard of for a member of staff from the Central Registry to appear there for work reasons on a Saturday afternoon, when everyone assumed he would be enjoying his weekly leisure time with his family, going on a trip into the country, or occupied with domestic tasks that have to wait until there's a bit of free time, or merely lazing about, or even wondering what is the point of having leisure time if we don't know what to do with it. In order to avoid any awkward questions, which could easily become embarrassing, Senhor José adroitly pre-empted the other person's curiosity, giving the excuse he had already prepared, It's a special case, very urgent, my deputy needs this information first thing on Monday morning, that's why he asked me to come to the General Cemetery today, in my free time, I see, you'd better tell me what it's about then, It's very simple, we just want to know when this woman was buried. The man took the card that Senhor José held out to him, copied the name and date of death onto a piece of paper, and went to consult the relevant senior clerk. Senhor José couldn't catch what they said, here, as in the Central Registry, you can speak only in a low voice, and they were some way away from him too, but he saw the senior clerk nod and, judging by his lips, he was sure that he had said, Fine, go ahead. The man went to look in the card index under the counter, where all the cards of those who died in the last fifty years were to be found, the others filled the high shelves that stretched into the interior of the building, he opened one of the drawers, found the woman's card, copied down the relevant date and came back to where Senhor José was standing, Here it is, he said, and added, as if he thought the information might be useful, She's in the section for suicides. Senhor José felt a sudden contraction in the pit of his stomach which, according to an article he had read once in a popular magazine about science, is the approximate location of a kind of many-pointed star of nerves, a radiating junction called the solar plexus, however, he managed to hide his surprise behind an automatic mask of indifference, the cause of death would, of course, be on the lost death certificate, which he had never seen, but as a clerk in the Central Registry, especially coming to the cemetery, as he was, on business, he could not let on that he did not know. Very carefully he folded up the piece of paper and put it in his wallet and thanked the clerk, not forgetting to add, as one official to another, although that is purely a manner of speaking, since both were mere clerks, that he was always at his disposal should he need anything at the Central Registry and always assuming that it was within his power to grant it. When he had taken two steps towards the door, he turned around, I've just had an idea, since I'm here, I think I'll spend part of the afternoon taking a little stroll around the cemetery, if you could let me through here, I wouldn't have to go the long way around, Hang on, I'll go and ask, said the clerk. He took the request to the senior clerk to whom he had spoken before, but instead of replying, the latter got up and went over to the deputy keeper in charge of his work. Although he was even farther away this time, Senhor José could see by the nod the deputy gave and by the movement of his Hps that he was going to be allowed to use the inner door. The clerk did not return to the counter immediately, he first opened a cabinet from which he took a large card which he then placed beneath the Hd of a machine with little coloured fights on it. He pressed a button, there was a mechanical noise, more lights came on, and then a smaller piece of paper emerged from a slit in the side. The clerk put the card back in the cabinet and then came back to the counter, You'd better take a map with you, there have been cases of people getting lost, and it's incredibly difficult to find them again, the guides have to go out looking for them in the cars and that gums up the works, you get funerals backed up outside, People panic easily, all they have to do is go in a straight line in the same direction, they're bound to reach somewhere, now in the archive of the dead in the Central Registry it really is complicated, because there are no straight lines, In theory, you're right, but the straight lines here are like the straight lines in a labyrinth of corridors, they're constantly breaking off, changing direction, you walk around a grave and suddenly you don't know where you are, In the Central Registry, we use Ariadne's thread, it never fails, There was a time when we used it too, but it didn't last long, the thread was found cut on several occasions and no one ever found out who the culprit was or why they'd done it, It certainly wasn't the dead, that's for sure, Who knows, The people who got lost were people with no initiative, they could have oriented themselves by the sun, Some probably would have if they hadn't been unlucky enough to get lost on a cloudy day, We haven't got one of those machines in the Central Registry, We've found them really useful. The conversation could not go on any longer, the senior clerk had already looked at them twice, and the second time he was frowning, it was Senhor José who remarked in a low voice, That senior clerk has already looked over here twice, I don't want you to get into any trouble on my account, I'll just show you where the woman is buried, see the end of this path, the wavy Une here is a stream which, for the moment, still serves as a boundary Une, the grave is in that corner there, you can identify it by the number, And by the name, Yes, if someone's put one there, but it's the numbers that count, the names wouldn't fit on the map, you'd need a map the size of the world, Scale one to one, Yes, scale one to one, and even then, the names would have to be superimposed on each other, Is it up-to-date, We update it every day, Now tell me, what made you think I'd want to see the woman's grave, No reason, perhaps because, in your place, I'd have done the same, Why, Just to be certain, That she's dead, No, to be certain that she'd been alive. The senior clerk looked at them for a third time, made a movement as if he were about to get up, but did not complete it, Senhor José bade a hasty farewell to the clerk, Thank you, thank you, he said, at the same time nodding slightly in the direction of the keeper, a person to whom one should always bow, just as one gives thanks to heaven, even when it's cloudy, with the important difference that then you don't lower your head, you raise it.

  The oldest part of the General Cemetery, which was a few dozen yards behind the administrative building, was the one preferred by archaeologists for their investigations. These an cient stones, some so worn by time that you could only make out a few barely visible marks that could as easily be the remains of letters as the result of scratches made by an unskilled chisel, continued to be the object of intense debate and polemic in which, with no hope, in the majority of cases, of ever knowing who had been buried beneath them, archaeologists merely discussed, as if it were a matter of vital import, the probable date of the tombs.
Such insignificant differences as a few hundred years here or there were the motive for long, long controversies, both public and academic, which almost always resulted in the violent breakup of personal relationships and even in mortal enmities. Things got still worse, if that were possible, when historians and art critics decided to stick their oar in, for while it was relatively easy, in the circumstances, for the board of archaeologists to reach agreement over a broad concept of antiquity acceptable to all, leaving aside actual dates, the matter of truth and beauty created a veritable tug-of-war among the men and women of aesthetics and history, each pulling for their own side, and it was a not uncommon sight to see a critic suddenly changing his opinion simply because the changed opinion of another critic meant that they both now agreed. Throughout the centuries, the ineffable peace of the General Cemetery, with its banks of spontaneous vegetation, its flowers, its creepers, its dense bushes, its festoons and garlands, its nettles and its thistles, the powerful trees whose roots often dislodged tombstones and forced up into the sunlight a few startled bones, had been both the target of and a witness to fierce wars of words and to one or two physical acts of violence. Whenever incidents of this nature occurred, the keeper would begin by ordering the available guides to go and separate the illustrious contenders, and when some particularly difficult situation arose, he would go there in person to remind the fighters ironically that there was no point tearing their hair out over such minor matters during their lifetime, since, sooner or later, they would all end up together in the cemetery bald as coots. Just like the Registrar, the keeper of the General Cemetery made brilliant use of sarcasm, which confirms the general assumption that this character trait had proved indispensable in their rise to their respective high ranks, together, of course, with a competent knowledge, both practical and theoretical, of archivistic technique. On one matter, however, historians, art critics and archaeologists are in agreement, the obvious fact that the General Cemetery is a perfect catalogue, a showcase, a summary of all styles, especially architectural, sculptural and decorative, and therefore an inventory of every possible way of seeing, being and living that has existed up until now, from the first elementary drawing of the outline of the human body, subsequently carved and chiselled out of bare stone, to the chromium-plated steel, reflecting panels, synthetic fibres and mirrored glass which are used willy-nilly in the current age.

  The first funerary monuments were made of dolmens, cromlechs and menhirs, then there appeared, like a great blank page in relief, niches, altars, tabernacles, granite bowls, marble urns, tombstones, smooth and carved, columns, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, caryatids, friezes, acanthuses, entablatures and pediments, false vaults, real vaults, as well as stretches of brick wall, the gables of Cyclopean walls, lancet windows, rose windows, gargoyles, oriel windows, tympanums, pinnacles, paving stones, flying buttresses, pillars, pilasters, recumbent statues representing men in helmet, sword and armour, capitals with and without ornamentation, pomegranates, lilies, immortelles, campaniles, cupolas, recumbent statues representing women with small hard breasts, paintings, arches, faithful dogs lying down, swaddled infants, the bearers of gifts, mourners with their heads covered, needles, mouldings, stained-glass windows, daises, pulpits, balconies, more pinnacles, more tympanums, more capitals, more arches, angels with wings spread, angels with wings folded, tondos, empty urns, or urns filled with false stone flames or with a piece of languid crepe draped about them, griefs, tears, majestic men, magnificent women, delightful children cut down in the flower of life, old men and old women who could have expected no more, whole crosses and broken crosses, steps, nails, crowns of thorns, lances, enigmatic triangles, the occasional unusual marble dove, flocks of real doves wheeling above the cemetery. And silence. A silence interrupted only from time to time by the steps of the occasional sighing lover of solitude drawn here by a sudden bout of sadness from the rustling outskirts where someone can still be heard weeping at a graveside on which they have placed bunches of fresh flowers, still damp with sap, piercing, one might say, the very heart of time, these three thousand years of graves of every shape, meaning and appearance, united by the same neglect, by the same solitude, for the sadness they once gave rise to is now too old for there to be any surviving heirs. Orienting himself with the map, although occasionally wishing he had a compass, Senhor José walks towards the area set aside for suicides, where the woman on the card is buried, but his step is slower now, less determined, from time to time he stops to study a sculptural detail stained by lichen or discoloured by the rain, a few mourners caught in mid-lament, a few solemn depositions, a few hieratic folds, or else he struggles to decipher an inscription whose lettering attracted him in passing, its understandable that even the very first line takes him a long time to decipher, for, despite having occasionally had to examine parchments more or less contemporary with these in the Central Registry, this clerk is not versed in ancient forms of writing, which is why he has never got beyond being a clerk. On top of a small rounded hillock, in the shadow of an obelisk that was once a geodesic marker, Senhor José looks around him as far as he can see, and he finds nothing but graves rising and falling with the curves of the land, graves poised on the edge of the occasional precipitous slope and spreading out over the plains, There are millions of them, he murmurs, then he thinks of the vast amount of space they would have saved if the dead had been buried standing up, side by side, in serried ranks, like soldiers at attention, and at their head, as the only sign of their presence there, a stone cube on which would be written, on the five visible sides, the principal facts about the life of the deceased, five stone squares like five pages, the summary of a whole book that had proved impossible to write. Almost as far as the horizon, far, far into the distance, Senhor José can see slowly moving lights, like yellow lightning, flicking on and off at constant intervals, they are the guides' cars calling to the people behind them, Follow me, Follow me, one of them suddenly stops, the light disappears, that means it's reached its destination. Senhor José looked up at the sun, then at his watch, it's getting late, he'll have to walk fast if he wants to reach the unknown woman before dusk He consulted the map, ran his index finger over it to reconstruct, approximately, the route he had followed from the administrative building to the place where he now finds himself, compared it with the distance he still has to walk and almost lost courage. In a straight line, according to the scale, it would be about three miles, but, as we have already said, in the General Cemetery, the straight continuous line never lasts for long, to those three miles as the crow flies, you will have to add another two, or possibly three, travelling overland. Senhor José calculated the amount of time left and the strength still remaining in his legs, he heard a prudent voice telling him to leave it for another day, when he had more time to visit the grave of the unknown woman, because, now he knows where she is, any taxi or bus could drop him off nearer to the actual place, skirting around the cemetery, as families do when they come to weep over their loved ones and place new flowers in the jars or refresh the water, especially in summer. Senhor José was still weighing this perplexing problem when he remembered his adventure at the school, the grim, rainy night, the steep, slippery mountain slope of the porch roof, and then, soaked from head to toe, his grazed knee rubbing painfully against his trousers, his anxious search inside the building, and how, by dint of tenacity and intelligence, he had managed to conquer his own fears and overcome the thousand difficulties that blocked his path until he discovered and finally entered the mysterious attic, confronting a darkness even more frightening than that in the archive of the dead. Anyone brave enough to do all that had no right to feel discouraged by the thought of a walk, however long it might be, especially when doing so in the frank brilliance of the bright sun which, as we all know, is the friend of heroes. If the shades of dusk caught up with him before he had reached the unknown woman's grave, if night came to cut off all paths back, sowing them with invisible terrors and preventing him from going any farther,
he could lie down on one of these mossy stones, with a sad stone angel to watch over his sleep, and wait for the birth of the new day. Or else he could shelter beneath a flying buttress like that one over there, thought Senhor José, but then it occurred to him that, farther on, he wouldn't find any flying buttresses. Thanks to the generations yet to come and to the consequent development of civil engineering, it won't be long before they invent less expensive means of holding up a wall, indeed it is in the General Cemetery that the results of progress are set out before the eyes of the studious or the merely curious, there are even those who say that a cemetery like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn't matter, you can learn as much from people as from books. Senhor José looked back, from where he was he could see only the roof ridge of the administrative building above the taller funerary monuments, I had no idea I'd come so far, he murmured, and having said that, as if, in order to make a decision, he had needed only to hear the sound of his own voice he once more continued on. his way When he at last reached the section of the suicides, with the sky already sifting the still-white ashes of the dusk, he thought that he must have gone the wrong way or that there was something wrong with the map. Before him was a great expanse of field, with numerous trees, almost a wood, where the graves, apart from the barely visible gravestones, seemed more like tufts of natural vegetation. You could not see the stream from there, but you could hear the lightest of murmurs slipping over the stones, and in the atmosphere, which was like green glass, there hovered a coolness which was not just the usual coolness of the first hour of dusk. Being so recent, only a matter of a few days ago, the grave of the unknown woman must be on the outer limit of the area, the question was in which direction. Senhor José thought that the best thing, in order not to get lost, would be to walk over to the small stream and then go along the bank until he found the latest graves. The shadow of the trees covered him immediately, as if night had suddenly fallen. I should be afraid, murmured Senhor José, in the midst of this silence, among these tombs, with these trees surrounding me, instead I feel as calm as if I were in my own house, except that my legs ache from having walked so much, here's the stream, if I was afraid, I could leave here this minute, all I'd have to do is cross the stream, I'd just have to take my shoes and socks off and roll up my trouser legs, hang my shoes around my neck and wade across, the water wouldn't even reach my knees, I'd soon be back in the land of the living again, with those lights over there that have just gone on. Half an hour later, Senhor José reached the end of the field, when the moon, almost full, almost completely round, was just coming up over the horizon. There the graves did not as yet have carved headstones to cover them nor any sculptural adornments, they could only be identified by the white numbers painted on the black labels stuck in at the head of the grave, like hovering butterflies. The moonlight gradually spread over the field, slipped slowly through the trees like a habitual, benevolent ghost. In a clearing, Senhor José found what he was looking for. He didn't take from his pocket the piece of paper the cemetery clerk had given him, he had made no particular effort to remember the number, but he knew it when he needed to, and now it was there before him, brilliantly lit, as if written in phosphorescent paint. Here she is, he said.