Authors: José Saramago
He woke up late, dreaming that he was back on the porch roof with the rain pounding down on him as loudly as a waterfall, and the unknown woman, in the shape of a film actress from his collection, was sitting on the window ledge with the head teacher's blanket folded in her lap, waiting for him to complete his climb, at the same time saying to him, Wouldn't it have been better to have knocked at the front door, to which he, panting, replied, I didn't know you were here, and she, I'm always here, I never go out, then, just as it seemed she was about to bend towards him in order to help him up, she suddenly disappeared, the porch disappeared with her, and only the rain remained, falling, falling without cease upon the chair belonging to the Registrar, where Senhor José saw himself sitting. His head ached slightly, but his cold didn't seem to have got any worse. A sliver of greyish light slipped in between the curtains, which meant that, contrary to appearances, they had not been completely closed. No one will have noticed, he thought, and he was right, the light of a star is brighter than bright, but not only is the greater part of it lost in space, a mere mist is enough to hide the excess light from our eyes. Even if those living on the other side of the street had come to peer out the window to see what the weather was like, they would think that the luminous thread undulating between the drops sliding down the windowpane was just the rain glittering. Still wrapped in the blanket, Senhor José slightly parted the curtains, it was his turn to find out what the weather was like. It wasn't raining at that moment, but the sky was covered by a single dark cloud, so low it seemed to touch the rooftops, like a huge tombstone. Just as well, he thought, the fewer people out in the street the better. He went over and felt the clothes he had taken off, to see if they were in a fit state to be put back on. His shirt, vest, underpants and socks were reasonably dry, his trousers rather less so, but bis jacket and raincoat would take many more hours to dry. To avoid the damp-stiffened cloth rubbing against his grazed knees, he put everything on except his trousers and set off in search of the first-aid cabinet. Logically, it must be on the ground floor, near the gymnasium and the accidents that tend to happen there, next to the playground where, between classes, in games of greater or lesser violence, the students go to work off their energy and, more important, the tedium and anxiety provoked by study. He was right. After washing his wounds with peroxide, he dabbed them with some disinfectant that smelled of iodine and carefully bandaged them, using so many plasters that it looked as if he were wearing knee pads. He was still able, though, to flex his joints enough to walk. He put on his trousers and felt like a new man, although not new enough to forget the general malaise affecting his whole body. There must be something here for colds and headaches, he thought, and soon afterwards, having found what he needed, he had two pills in his stomach. He did not need to take any precautions to avoid being seen from outside, since, as one would expect, the window in the first-aid room was also made of frosted glass, but from then on, he would have to pay attention to every move he made, he couldn't afford any mistakes, he must keep well away from the windows and, if he absolutely had to go over to a window, then he would have to do so on all fours, he must behave, in short, as if he had never done anything in his life but burgle houses. A sudden burning in his stomach reminded him that it had been a mistake to take the pills unaccompanied by food, even if only a biscuit, Right, where would I find biscuits here, he asked himself, realising that now he had a new problem to solve, the problem of food, since he wouldn't be able to leave the building until it was dark, Very dark, he added. Although, as we know, he is easily satisfied when it comes to food, he would have to eat something to dull his appetite until he got home, Senhor José, however, replied to that necessity with these stoical words, It's only one day, no one ever died from not eating for a few hours. He left the first-aid room, and although the secretary's office, where he would go to do his research, was on the second floor, he decided, out of sheer curiosity, to take a turn about the rooms on the ground floor. He immediately found the gymnasium, with its cloakrooms, its wall bars and other apparatus, the beam, the box, the rings, the pommel horse, the springboard, the mattresses, in his day, schools didn't have all this sports equipment, nor would he have wanted them to, being, as he had been then and as he continued to be, what is generally termed a bit of a wimp. The burning in his stomach was getting worse, a wave of bile rose into his mouth pricking his throat if only he could get rid of his headache, It's the cold, I've probably got a fever he thought as he opened another door Blessed be the spirit of curiosity, it was the refectory. Then Senhor José's thoughts grew wings, he rushed off in search of food Where there's a refectory there's a kitchen where there's a kitchen he didn't need to complete the thought, the kitchen was there with its oven its pots and pans its plates and glasses its cupboards, its huge fridge. He headed straight for it! flung open the door, and there was the food all Ut up, once more may the god of the curious be praised, as well as the god of burglars, in some cases no less deserving. A quarter of an hour later, Senhor José was definitely a new man, restored in body and soul, with his clothes almost dry, his knees bandaged and his stomach working on something rather more nutritious and substantial than two bitter anti-cold pills. Around lunchtime, he would return to this kitchen, to this kindly fridge, but now he must go and investigate the card indexes in the secretary's office, to advance a step further, whether a large step or a small one he had yet to find out, in probing the circumstances of the unknown woman's life thirty years ago, when she was just a little girl with serious eyes and bangs down to her eyebrows, she would have sat down on that bench to eat her afternoon snack of bread and jam, perhaps sad because she had blotted her fair copy, perhaps glad because her godmother had promised her a doll.
The label on the drawer was explicit, Students in Alphabetical Order, other drawers were marked differently, First-year Students, Second-year Students, Third-year Students and so on up to the final year of school. Senhor José took a quiet professional pleasure in the archive system, organised in such a way as to facilitate access to the cards of students by two convergent and complementary routes, one general, the other particular. A separate drawer contained the teachers' record cards, as one could tell from the label, Teachers. Seeing that label immediately set in motion, in Senhor José's mind, the gears of his highly efficient deductive mechanism, If, as it is logical to suppose, he thought, the teachers in this drawer are those currently teaching in the school, then the student cards, out of mere archivistic coherence, must refer to the current student population, besides, anyone can see that the record cards of thirty years' worth of students, and that's a low estimate, could never fit in these half-dozen drawers, however thin the cards. With no hope of finding the card, but merely to soothe his conscience, Senhor José opened the drawer where, according to the alphabet, the card belonging to the unknown woman would be found. It wasn't there. He closed the drawer and looked around him, There must be another card index for former pupils, he thought, they can't possibly destroy them when they come to the end of their course, that would be a crime against the most elementary rules of archivism. If such a card index existed, however, it wasn't there. Nervously, and knowing full well that the search would be fruitless, he opened the cupboards and the drawers in the desk. Nothing. As if it could not bear the disappointment, his headache intensified. What now, José, he asked himself. We must look elsewhere, he replied. He left the secretary's office and looked up and down the long corridor. There were no classrooms here, therefore the rooms on this floor, apart from the head teacher's study, must have other uses, one of them, as he saw straightaway, was the staff room, another seemed to be a storeroom for redundant school material, and the other two contained, at last, what seemed to be, what must be, the schools historic archive, arranged in boxes on large shelves. Senhor José was at first exultant, but, and this is the advantage of someone with experience in his line of work, or, given his suddenly dashed hopes, the painful disadvantage, only a few minutes sufficed for him to realise that what he wanted wasn't there either, the files were of a purely bureaucratic nature, letters received, duplicates of letters sent, statistics, attendance records, progress charts, rule books. He searched again, twice, in vain. Feeling desperate, he went out into the corridor, All this effort for nothing, he said, and then, again, forcing himself to obey logic, It's impossible, those wretched record cards must be somewhere, if these people keep all those years of correspondence that is of no use to anyone, they must have kept students' record cards, which are vital documents for biographies, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if some of the people in my collection were students at this school. In other circumstances, it might have occurred to Senhor José that, just as he had enriched his collection of clippings with copies of the relevant birth certificates, it would also be interesting to add documents regarding attendance and success at school. However, that would never be anything but an impossible dream. It was one thing having the birth certificate in hand in the Central Registry, quite another having to wander the city breaking into schools in order to find out if so-and-so got an eight or a fifteen in math in the fourth year, and if someone else really was such an unruly pupil as he claimed to have been in interviews. And if, in order to get into each of those schools, he had to suffer as much as he had suffered breaking into this one, then it would be better to remain in the peace and quiet of his home, resigned to knowing of the world only what the hands can grasp without actually leaving the house, words, images, illusions.
Determined to get to the bottom of things once and for all, Senhor José went back into the archive, If there's any logic in this world, then the record cards must be here, he said. He went through the shelves in the first room, box by box, bundle by bundle, with a fine-tooth comb, a turn of phrase that must have its origins in the days when people needed to comb their hair with what was also called a nit comb in order to catch what a normal comb missed, but the search again proved vain, there were no record cards. That is, there were, placed higgledy-piggledy in a large box, but only from the last five years. Convinced now that all the other record cards had been destroyed, torn up, thrown into the rubbish, if not burned, it was with a feeling of hopelessness, with the indifference of someone merely fulfilling a useless obligation, that Senhor José went into the second room. However, his eyes, if the expression is not entirely inappropriate, took pity on him, however hard you try you will find no other explanation for the fact that they im mediately placed before him a narrow door between two shelves, as if they knew, from the start, that the door was there. Senhor José thought he had reached the end of his work, the crowning moment of all his efforts, indeed the opposite would reveal an unforgivable harshness on the part of fate, there must be some reason why ordinary people persist in saying, despite all life's vicissitudes, that bad luck is not always waiting just behind the door, behind this one, anyway, as in the old stories, there must be a treasure, even if, in order to reach it, it might still be necessary to fight the dragon. This one does not have furious, drooling jaws, it does not snort smoke and fire through its nostrils, it does not roar loud as any earthquake, it is simply a waiting, stagnant darkness, thick and silent as the ocean deeps, there are reputedly brave people who would not have the courage to go any farther, some would even run away at once, terrified, fearful that the obscene beast would grab them round the throat with its claws. Although not a person whom one could give as an example or model of bravery, Senhor José, after his years in the Central Registry, has acquired a knowledge of the night, of shadows, obscurity and darkness that makes up for his natural timidity and now permits him, without excessive fear, to reach his arm into the body of the dragon in search of the light switch. He found it, he flicked it on, but there was no light. Shuffling forwards so as not to stumble, he advanced little until he barked his right shin on something hard. He bent down to feel the obstacle and, just as he realised that it was a metal step he felt the shape of the flashlight in his pocket in the midst of so many contradictory emotions, he had completely forgotten about it. Before him was a spiral staircase that ascended into thicker darkness than that on the threshold and which swallowed up the beam of light before it could show him the way upwards. The staircase has no bannister exactly what chronic vertigo sufferer does not need on the fifth step, if he manages to get that far Senhor José will lose all notion of the real height he has reached, he will feel that he's going to fall helplessly to the ground, and he will fell. But that is not what happened. Senhor José is being ridiculous, but it doesn't matter, only he knows just how absurd and ridiculous what he is doing is, no one will see him drag himself up that staircase like a lizard recently awoken from hibernation, clinging anxiously to the steps, one after the other, his body trying to follow the apparently never-ending, spiralling curve, his knees again bearing the brunt. When Senhor José's hands finally touched the smooth floor of the attic, his physical strength had long since lost the battle with his frightened spirit, which is why he could not immediately get up, he lay down there, his shirt and face resting on the dust covering the floor, his feet hanging over the steps, what torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures.
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.