All the Names

by José Saramago

  Senhor José did not wait until Saturday. The following day when the office closed, he went to the laundry to pick up the clothes he had left there to be cleaned. He listened abstractedly to the conscientious assistant saying to him, Now just have a look at this darning, look, run your fingers over it and tell me if you can notice any difference, you wouldn't even know there was anything there, that is how people who content themselves with mere appearances speak. Senhor José paid her, put the package under his arm and went home to change his clothes. He was going to visit the lady in the ground-floor apartment and he wanted to look clean and presentable, to take advantage not only of the perfect, truly praiseworthy work done by the invisible mender, but also of the rigorous crease in his trousers, the gleaming starch in his shirt, the miraculous recovery of his tie. He was just about to leave when a morbid thought went through his mind, which is, as far as one knows, the only thinking organ at the service of the body, What if the lady in the ground-floor apartment has died too, she wasn't exactly brimming with health, besides, in order to die you need only be alive, especially at her age, he imagined himself ringing the bell again and again, and, after a long time, hearing the door of the ground-floor apartment opposite opening and a woman appearing, irritated by all the noise, and saying, There's no point ringing, no one's there, Has she gone out, She's dead, Dead, Exactly, When did it happen, A fortnight ago, and who might you be, I'm from the Central Registry, Well, it doesn't look like you do your work very well over there, you say you're from the Central Registry, but you didn't even know she'd died. Senhor José told himself he was being obsessive, but he preferred to sort things out right there and then, so as not to have to put up with the rudeness of the woman in the other ground-floor apartment. He would go in to the Central Registry and in less than a minute he would have checked the old lady's card, by now, the two cleaning ladies must have finished their work, not that it takes them long, they just empty the wastepaper bins, sweep and lightly mop the floor as far as the shelf just behind the Registrar's desk, it's impossible to persuade them, with kind words or cruel, to go any farther, they're afraid, they wouldn't be caught dead in there, they say, they too are of the kind who content themselves with appearances, that's just the way they are. After looking at the unknown woman's card to check the name of the lady in the ground-floor apartment, her godmother, Senhor José very gingerly opened the door and peered out. As he had foreseen, the cleaning ladies were no longer there. He entered, walked quickly over to the card index and looked for her name, She's here, he said, and gave a sigh of relief. He went back home, finished dressing and went out. In order to get the bus that would drop him near where the lady lived, he had to go to the square opposite the Central Registry, that was where the stop was. Although the evening was quite advanced, much of the daylight lingering in the sky still hovered over the city, it would be at least twenty minutes before the street lamps came on. Senhor José was waiting for the bus with a few other people, he probably wouldn't manage to get on the first bus to come along. And indeed that is what happened. But a second bus appeared soon afterwards, and this one wasn't full. Senhor José got on in time to get a place by the window. He looked out, noticing how, due to some unusual optical effect, the diffusion of light in the atmosphere lit the facades of the buildings with a reddish tone, as if the sun were about to rise at that very moment for each and every one of them. There was the Central Registry, with its ancient door and the three black stone steps that led up to it, and the five narrow windows on the front, the whole building had the air of a ruin fixed in time, as if it had been mummified rather than restored when the dilapidated state of its materials demanded it. Some hold-up in the traffic was preventing the bus from proceeding. Senhor José felt nervous, he didn't want to arrive too late to call on the lady in the ground-floor apartment. Despite the full and frank conversation they had had, despite certain confidences exchanged, some of which were unexpected in people who had only just met, they hadn't become so close that he could go knocking on her door at any hour of the day or night. Senhor José looked again at the square. The light had changed, the facade of the Central Registry had grown suddenly grey, but it was nevertheless a luminous grey that seemed to vibrate, to tremble, and it was then, just as the bus was pulling away, slowly moving out into the traffic lane, that a tall, well-built man walked up the steps of the Central Registry, opened the door and went in. The Registrar, murmured Senhor José, what's he doing at the Central Registry at this hour. Impelled by a sudden, inexplicable panic, he got up suddenly from his seat, made as if to get off, provoking a look of surprise and irritation in the passenger beside him, then sat down again, puzzled by his own behaviour. He realised that his impulse was to rush home, as if to protect it from some danger, which was, of course, absurdly illogical. A thief, always supposing, now really, yet another absurd illogicality, that the boss was a thief, wouldn't go in through the front door of the Central Registry in order to reach Senhor José's front door. But then it was bordering on the absurd for the Registrar to want to go back there after the office was closed, for, as we stated earlier, there would be no work waiting for him, Senhor José could stake his life on that. Imagining the head of the Central Registry doing overtime was rather like trying to imagine a square circle. The bus had already left the square, and Senhor José was still trying to work out the deep reasons that had driven him to behave in that disoriented fashion. He decided in the end that the reason must lie in the fact that, after a good few years as sole resident, he had grown used to being the only nocturnal tenant of the group of edifices formed by the Central Registry and his house, if the latter deserves the name of edifice, doubtless appropriate from a rigorously linguistic point of view, since an edifice can be any kind of building, but obviously inappropriate when compared with the architectural dignity that seems to emanate from the word itself, especially when spoken. Seeing his boss go into the Central Registry had had the same impact on him, he thought, as if, when he went back home, he were to find him sitting in his chair. The relative calm that this idea brought Senhor José, that is, not taking into account pertinent and morally embarrassing considerations, the physical and material impossibility of the Registrar entering the private rooms of his subordinate and even using his chair, immediately melted away when he remembered the unknown woman's school record cards and wondered if he had put them back under the mattress or carelessly left them out on the table. Even if his house were as safe as a bank vault, with special combination locks and reinforced floors, walls and ceiling, those record cards should never but never have been left out. The fact that there was no one there to see them did not excuse the grave imprudence committed, how are we, being ignorant, to know how far the advances of science might go, just as radio waves, which no one can see, carry sounds and images through the air and the wind, leaping over mountains and rivers, crossing oceans and deserts, it would not be so very extraordinary if scanner waves and photographic waves had not already been discovered or invented, or were to be discovered tomorrow, waves capable of penetrating walls and recording and transmitting to the outside world the deeds, mysteries and humiliations of our life that we had thought safe from indiscretions. Hiding them, those deeds, mysteries and humiliations under a mattress, still continues to be the safest way of hiding things, especially when we bear in mind that it is increasingly difficult for the customs of today to understand the customs of yesterday. However expert that scanner wave or photographic wave might be, it would never think of sticking its nose between a mattress and a bed base.

  As everyone knows, our thoughts, both anxious and happy thoughts, and others which are neither one thing nor the other, sooner or later grow weary and bored with themselves, it's just a question of letting time do its work, it's just a matter of leaving them to the lazy daydreaming that comes naturally to them, adding no new irritating or polemical reflection to the bonfire, above all taking supreme care not to intervene whenever an attractive bifurcation, branch Une, or turning appears befo
re a thought which is already ripe for distraction. Or, rather, you can intervene, but only to give it a gentle shove from behind, especially if it's a troubling thought, as if we were saying, Go on, off you go, you're fine. This was what Senhor José did when that mad, providential fantasy of the photographic wave and the scanner wave came to him, he at once abandoned himself to his imagination, let it show him those invasive waves scouring the whole room in search of those records, which he had not, in fact, left on the table, perplexed and ashamed because they could not carry out the orders they had received, Remember, either you find those records, read them and photograph them, or we go back to the old-style espionage. Senhor José still thought about the Registrar, but it was a purely residual thought, one that helped him find an acceptable explanation for his return to the Central Registry outside of normal hours, He must have forgotten something he needed, what other reason could there be. Without realising, he repeated out loud the final part of the phrase, What other reason could there be, again provoking the distrust of the passenger travelling next to him, whose thoughts immediately became clear and explicit when he changed his seat, The guy is mad, we're sure that he used these or similar words to think it. Senhor José did not notice the withdrawal of the man next to him on the seat, he moved seamlessly on to thoughts of the lady in the ground-floor apartment, she was there before him at the door, Do you remember me, I'm from the Central Registry, Of course I do, I've come here about that matter we discussed the other day, You've found my goddaughter, No, I haven't, or rather, yes, that is, I mean, I'd like to have a little chat with you, if you wouldn't mind, if you've got a moment, Come in, I've got something to tell you too. That, more or less, was what Senhor José and the lady in the ground-floor apartment said when she opened the door and saw him there, Ah, its you, she exclaimed, so he had no need to ask, Do you remember me, I'm Senhor José from the Central Registry, but despite this, he couldn't resist asking the question, so constant, so imperious, so demanding it would seem is our need to go about the world declaring who we are, even when we've just heard someone else say, Ah, it's you, as if just because they've recognised us, they know us and need to know nothing more about us, or as if the little that remained unknown wasn't worth the effort of formulating another question.

  Nothing had changed in the small living room, the chair where Senhor José had sat the first time was in the same place, at the same distance from the table, the curtains hung as they had before, in the same folds, the woman made the same gesture when she folded her hands in her lap, right over left, only the light from the ceiling seemed slightly paler, as if the bulb were burning out. Senhor José asked, How have you been since my last visit, and then he reproached himself for his lack of sensitivity, worse still, for the utter crassness he was revealing, he should know that you don't always have to Mow the rules of elementary politeness to the letter, you must take into account the circumstances, you have to weigh each case, let's imagine that the woman responds now with a broad smile, I'm very well, thank you, my health is excellent, I'm in good spirits, I haven't felt this fit for ages, and then he blurts out, Well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but your goddaughter has died, what do you make of that. But the woman didn't reply to his question, she merely shrugged indifferently, then she said, Do you know, for some days I've been thinking of phoning you at the Central Registry, then I decided not to, I thought that sooner or later you would come and visit me, It's just as well you didn't phone, the Registrar doesn't like us getting phone calls, he says it gets in the way of work, Of course, but that needn't have been a problem, I just had to give him the information I had, he wouldn't have had to call you over. Beads of sweat broke out on Senhor José's forehead. He had just discovered that, for weeks, ignorant of the danger, unconscious of the threat hanging over him, he had been living on the brink of absolute disaster, the public exposure of irregularities in his professional conduct, the continual and wilful affront he was in the process of committing against the venerable deontological laws of the Central Registry, whose chapters, articles, paragraphs and clauses, however complex, due to the extreme archaism of the language, had finally been reduced down by the experience of two centuries to nine practical words, Don't stick your nose in where it isn't wanted. For a moment, Senhor José hated and detested the woman before him, he insulted her mentally, he called her a feeble old woman, cretin, nincompoop, and like someone who can find no better way of overcoming some sudden, violent shock, he was almost on the point of saying to her, Well, try this on for size, your goddaughter, the one in the picture, has kicked the bucket. The woman asked, Are you feeling ill, Senhor José, would you like a glass of water, No, I'm fine, don't worry, he replied, ashamed of that wicked impulse, I'm going to make you some tea, There's no need, really, I don't want to be any bother, at that moment, Senhor José was feeling as base and humble as the dust in the street, the woman had left the room, he heard her rattling cups in the kitchen, a few minutes passed, first you have to boil the water, Senhor José remembers having read somewhere, probably in one of the magazines where he gets his clippings of famous people, tea should be made with water that has just boiled but is not actually boiling, he would have been quite happy with a glass of cold water, but the tea would do him far more good, everyone knows that there's nothing like a nice cup of tea for lifting the spirits, all the manuals say so, both in the East and the West. The lady of the house appeared with a tray, she had also brought a plate of biscuits, as well as the teapot, cups and the sugar bowl. I didn't even ask if you liked tea, it only just occurred to me that perhaps you would prefer coffee, she said, No, I like tea, I really do, Do you take sugar, No, I don't, suddenly he went pale and started sweating, he thought he should explain, It must be the remains of the flu I caught, So if I'd phoned, you probably wouldn't even have been there, and I really would have had to tell your boss what had happened. This time the sweat only dampened Senhor José's palms, but even so it was lucky that his cup was on the table, had he been holding it at that moment it would have fallen to the floor, or spilled scalding tea all over the wretched clerk's legs, with inevitable consequences, first the burn, then the return of his trousers to the laundry. Senhor José took a biscuit from the plate, nibbled at it slowly, listlessly and, disguising with chewing the difficulty he was having in formulating any words, he managed to ask the long-delayed question, And what was this information you had to give me. The woman took a sip of tea, reached a hesitant hand out to the plate of biscuits, but did not complete the gesture. She said, You remember that I suggested to you, at the end of your visit, just when you were leaving, that you should look up my goddaughter's name in the phone book, Yes I do, but I decided not to follow your advice, Why, It's rather difficult to explain, Well, you probably had your reasons, It's easy enough to give reasons for what we do or don't do, when we see that we haven't got a reason or not enough of a reason, then we try to invent one, in the case of your goddaughter, for example, I could now say that I preferred to take the longest, most complicated route, And is that one of the real reasons or one of the invented ones, Let's just say there's as much truth in it as there is falsehood, And which bit is the falsehood, Me pretending that the reason I gave to you should be taken as the whole truth, And it isn't, No, because I've left out the reason why I preferred that route and not another more direct one, You're bored with the routine of your job, That could be another reason, How are your investigations going, Tell me first what happened, let's pretend that I was at the Central Registry when you first thought of phoning me and that the boss doesn't mind us getting phone calls. The woman raised the cup to her Hps again, replaced it on the saucer without making the slightest noise and said, as her hands returned to her lap, again her right hand covering her left, I did what I told you to do, You phoned her, Yes, You spoke to her, Yes, When was that, A few days after you came here, I couldn't cope with all the memories, I couldn't sleep, And what happened, We talked, She must have been surprised, She didn't seem to be, But that would be the normal reac
tion after so many years of separation and silence, You obviously don't know much about women, especially when they're unhappy, So she was unhappy, It didn't take long before we were both crying, as if we were bound to each other by a thread of tears, What happened next, What do you mean, Did she tell you anything about her life, Very little, just that she'd been married, but was now divorced, We know that already, it's on her card, We left it that she would come and visit me as soon as she had time, Did she come, No, not as yet, What do you mean, Just that she hasn't come, And she hasn't phoned either, No, she hasn't, How long ago was this, About two weeks, More or less, Less I think, yes, less, And what did you do, At first, I thought she'd changed her mind, that she didn't want to renew old friendships, that she didn't want us to get close, those tears must have been a moment of weakness and nothing more, it happens often enough, there are times in our lives when we just let go, when we're capable of telling the first stranger we meet about our pain and sorrow, do you remember, when you were here, Of course I remember, and I never thanked you properly for the trust you placed in me, It wasn't a question of trust, it was despair, Whatever it was, I promise you will never regret it, you can trust me, I'm very discreet, Yes, I'm sure I won't regret it, Thank you, But the reason I know I won't regret it is because nothing really matters to me anymore, Ah. It wasn't easy passing from a disconsolate interjection like that to a direct question of the type, So, then what did you do, it required time and tact, so Senhor José fell silent, waiting for what would happen next. As if she were aware of that too, the woman asked, Would you like some more tea, he accepted, Yes, please, and held out his cup. Then the woman said, A few days ago I telephoned her house, And what happened, No one answered, I got the answering machine, You only phoned once, On the first day, yes, but the following days I tried several times and at different hours, I phoned in the morning, I phoned in the afternoon, I phoned after supper, I even phoned at midnight, And nothing, Nothing, I thought perhaps she'd gone away, Did she tell you where she worked, No. The conversation could not continue to roll around the black hole hiding the truth, the moment was approaching when Senhor José would say Your goddaughter is dead, in fact, he should have told her as soon as he arrived, that's what the woman will say to him shortly, Why didn't you tell me straightaway, why did you ask all those questions if you knew she was already dead, and he will be unable to lie alleging that he remained silent because he didn't want to spring the painful news on her, without preparation, without due respect, in truth, the only reason for this long, slow dialogue had been the words she had said at the start, I've got something to tell you too, at that point, Senhor José lost the resigned serenity that would have made him reject the temptation of knowing about that tiny, useless thing, whatever it was, he lacked the serene resignation necessary to say, It doesn't matter, she's dead. It was as if what the lady in the ground-floor apartment had to tell him might still, who knows how, make time run backwards and, at the very last moment, steal the unknown woman back from death. Weary, with no other desire now than to delay the inevitable for a few more seconds, Senhor José asked, You didn't consider going to her house, asking the neighbours if they'd seen her, Of course I did, but I didn't go, Why, Because it would look as if I was interfering, she might not like that, But you phoned, That's different. There was a silence, then the expression on the woman's face began to change, it became interrogative, and Senhor José realised that she was going to ask, at last, what questions relating to the matter of her goddaughter had brought him there today, had he managed to speak to her and when, was the problem with the Central Registry resolved and how, I regret to tell you that your goddaughter is dead, said Senhor José. The woman opened her eyes very wide, raised her hands from her lap and covered her mouth, What, Your goddaughter has died, How do you know, asked the woman without thinking, That's what the Central Registry is there for, said Senhor José, and he shrugged his shoulders slightly, as if to say, It's not my fault, When did she die, I've got the card here, if you want to see it. The woman reached out her hand, held the card close to her eyes then moved it farther off, mumbling, My glasses, but she didn't go and look for them, she knew they wouldn't help, even if she wanted to she wouldn't be able to read what was written there, her tears were blurring the words. Senhor José said, I'm very sorry. The woman left the room and was gone for a few brief moments, when she came back she was drying her eyes with a handkerchief. She sat down, poured herself some more tea, then asked, Did you come here just to tell me that my goddaughter had died, Yes, That was very kind of you, I thought it was my duty really, Why, Because I felt I was in your debt, Why, Because of the nice way you received me and helped me, the way you answered my questions, Now that force of circumstances has brought the job they gave you to an end, you won't have to wear yourself out any more looking for my poor goddaughter, No, I won't, Perhaps the Central Registry has already instructed you to start looking for another person, No, no, cases like this are very rare, That's the good thing about death, it brings everything to a close, Its not always like that, that's when the battles begin between heirs, the ferocious dividing up of the spoils, then there's inheritance tax to be paid, For the person who's died I meant, As for that, yes, you're right, everything ends, It's odd, you never explained to me why the Central Registry was looking for my goddaughter, why they were so interested in her, As you said, death resolves all problems, So there was a problem, Yes, What, It's not worth talking about it, the matter is of no importance now, What matter, Please don't insist, it's confidential, said Senhor José desperately. The woman angrily put down her cup and saucer and, looking straight at him, said, All the time that you and I have been together here, both the other day and today, right from the start, one of us has always told the truth and the other has always lied, But I didn't He then and I'm not lying now, You'll admit that I always talked to you frankly, clearly, openly, that it would never even have occurred to you that there might be a single He in anything I said, Absolutely, Then if there's a liar in this room, as I know there is, it's certainly not me, I'm not a liar, No, I'm sure you're not a fiar by nature, but you lied when you first came here, and you've been lying ever since, You wouldn't understand, I understand enough not to believe that the Central Registry sent you here looking for my goddaughter, You're wrong, they did send me, Then if you've nothing more to say to me, if that is your final word, please leave my house this instant, now, she almost shouted that last word, and then she began to cry. Senhor José got up, took a step towards the door, then sat down again, Forgive me, he said, don't cry, I'll tell you everything.