José Saramago - All the Names

After a few moments, still lying facedown, because he was not so foolish as to attempt to stand up in the midst of the darkness, running the risk of taking a false step and plunging back into the abyss from which he had come, Senhor José managed, with difficulty, to turn around and to remove the flashlight he had put in his back trouser pocket. He switched it on and shone it over the floor immediately ahead of him. There were scattered papers, cardboard boxes, some of them burst, all of them thick with dust. A few yards ahead he could see what seemed to be the legs of a chair. He raised the beam slightly, it was a chair. It seemed in good condition, the seat, the back, and above it, hanging from the low ceiling, was a bare lightbulb, Just like in the Central Registry, thought Senhor José. He directed the beam around the room and saw the fleeting shapes of shelves that seemed to cover every wall. They were not high shelves, nor could they be, given the steepness of the roof, and they were weighted down with boxes and shapeless bundles of paper. I wonder where the light switch is, thought Senhor José, and the reply was as expected, It's downstairs and it doesn't work, I don't think I can find the record cards with only this flashlight, besides I'm beginning to think the battery might be getting low, You should have thought of that before, Perhaps there's another switch in here, Even if there is, we already know that the bulb's burned out, We don't know that, It would have come on otherwise, The only thing we know is that we tried the switch and the light didn't come on, Exactly, It could mean something else, What, That there's no bulb downstairs, So I'm right, the bulb here has burned out too, But there's nothing to say that there aren't two switches and two bulbs, one on the stairs and the other in the attic, now the one downstairs has burned out, but we still don't know about the one upstairs, If you're clever enough to deduce that, then find the switch. Senhor José abandoned the awkward position in which he was still lying and sat up, My clothes will be in a dreadful state by the time I leave here, he thought, and pointed the beam at the wall nearest the opening onto the stairs, If there is a switch, then it will be here. He found it at the precise moment when he was reaching the discouraging conclusion that the only switch was indeed downstairs. As he shifted his free hand on the floor in order to get more comfortable, the light went on, the switch, one of those button switches, had been installed in the floor, so that it would be within immediate reach of anyone coming up the stairs. The yellowish light from the bulb barely reached the wall at the back, there was no sign of footprints on the floor. Remembering the record cards that he had seen on the floor below, Senhor José said out loud, It's at least six years since anyone came in here. When the echo of his words had faded, Senhor José noticed that there was a vast silence in the attic, as if the silence that had been there before contained a larger silence, the woodworms must have stopped their excavating work. From the ceiling hung spiders' webs black with dust, their owners must have died long ago from lack of food, there was nothing here that would attract a stray fly, especially not with the door shut downstairs, and the moths, the silverfish and the woodworms in the beams had no reason to exchange the galleries of cellulose, where they lived, for the outside world. Senhor José got up, vainly trying to brush the dust from his trousers and shirt, his face looked like the face of some eccentric clown, with a great stain on one side only. He went and sat down on the chair, underneath the bulb, and started talking to himself, Let's look at this rationally, he said, if the old record cards are here, and everything indicates that they are, it is highly unlikely that they are going to be grouped student by student, that is, that the record cards of each student will be all together, so that you can see at a glance the whole of their scholastic career, its more likely that, at the end of each school year, the secretary bundled up all the record cards corresponding to that year and placed them here, I doubt she would even have gone to the trouble of putting them in boxes, or perhaps she did, we'll have to see, I hope, if she did, she at least thought to write the relevant year on them, but one way or another, it will just be a question of time and patience. This conclusion had not added greatly to his initial premise, from the very beginning of his life, Senhor José has known that he only needs time in order to use patience, and from the very beginning he has been hoping that patience will not run out of time. He got up, and faithful to the rule that, in all searches, the best plan is to start at one point and proceed from there on with method and discipline, he set to work at the end of one of the rows of shelves, determined to leave no piece of paper unturned, always checking that there wasn't another piece of paper hidden between top and bottom sheets. Each movement he made, opening a box, untying a bundle, raised a cloud of dust, so much so that in order not to be asphyxiated, he had to tie his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, a preventive measure that the clerks were advised to follow each time they went into the archive of the dead in the Central Registry. In a matter of moments his hands were black and the handkerchief had lost any remaining trace of whiteness, Senhor José had become a coal miner hoping to find in the depths of the mine the pure carbon of a diamond.

He found the first file after half an hour. The girl no longer had bangs, but, in this photograph taken at fifteen, her eyes had the same air of wounded gravity. Senhor José placed it carefully on the chair and continued his search. He was working in a kind of dream state, meticulous, feverish, moths fluttered out from beneath his fingers, terrified by the light, and little by little, as if he were rummaging in the remains of a tomb, the dust became grafted onto his skin, so fine that it penetrated his clothing. At first, when he picked up a bundle of record cards, he went straight to what really interested him, then he began to linger over names, images, for no reason, just because they were there and because no one else would go into this attic to remove the dust covering them, hundreds, thousands of faces of boys and girls, looking straight at the camera, at the other side of the world, waiting, for what exactly they didn't know. It wasn't like that in the Central Registry, in the Central Registry there were only words, in the Central Registry you could not see how faces had changed or continued to change, when that was precisely what was most important, the thing that time changes, not the name, which never changes. When Senhor José's stomach began to rumble, there were seven record cards on the chair, two of them with identical pictures, her mother must have said, Take this one from last year, there's no need to go to the photographer again, and she took the picture, sad that she wouldn't have a new photograph this year. Before going down to the kitchen, Senhor José went to the head teacher's bathroom to wash his hands, he was amazed by what he saw in the mirror, he hadn't imagined that his face could possibly get into this state, filthy, furrowed with lines of sweat, It doesn't even look like me, he thought, and yet he had probably never looked more like himself. When he had finished eating, he went up to the attic as fast as his knees would allow, it occurred to him that if the light failed, something to bear in mind after all this rain, he would not be able to complete bis search. Assuming that she hadn't repeated a year, he only had five more record cards to find, and if he were now to be plunged into darkness, all his efforts would be in part lost, since he would never be able to get back into the school. Absorbed in his work, he had forgotten about bis headache, his cold, and now he realised that he was feeling worse. He went downstairs again to take another two pills, then went back up, making a supreme effort, and resumed his work. The afternoon was drawing to a close when he found the last record card. He turned off the light in the attic, closed the door and, like a sleepwalker, put on his jacket and raincoat, removed as best he could any sign of his passing and sat down to wait for night to come.