Authors: José Saramago
Pressed right up against the unstable wall formed by the files, Senhor José got to his feet, very slowly and carefully so that none of the files would fall on top of him. The voice that had addressed that speech to him was now saying things like this, Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you, a little while ago, you nearly started screaming just because you imagined some danger, just because you remembered the nightmare you used to have when you were little, my dear chap, you have to learn to five with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside, now, please, get up and put the flashlight back in your pocket, it's useless now, and, since you're determined to take them with you, slip the papers in between your jacket and your shirt, or to be safer, between your shirt and your skin, take a firm hold of the piece of string, wind it up as you go along so that you don't get it tangled round your feet, and off you go, you don't want to be that worst of all things, a coward. Lightly brushing the wall of paper with his shoulder, Senhor José took two timid steps. The darkness opened like black water and closed behind him, another step and another, he had already lifted five yards of string from the floor and wound them up, Senhor José could have done with a third hand to feel the air in front of him, but there's a simple enough remedy, he merely has to raise his two hands to face height, one hand rolling, the other being rolled, the bobbin principle. Senhor José is nearly out of the corridor, a few steps more and he'll be safe from any new attack by the nightmare stone, the string tightens a little, but that's a good sign, it means that it's got caught, at floor level, on the corner of the passage leading to the archive of the living. Oddly enough, during that whole walk, right to the end, just as if someone were throwing them down from above, papers and more papers kept raining down on Senhor José's head, slowly, first one, then another and another, like a farewell. And when, at last, he reached the Registrar's desk, when, even before he untied the string, he took out from inside his shirt the file he had picked up from the floor, and when he opened it and saw that it was the unknown woman's file, his excitement was such that he did not hear the door of the Central Registry closing, as if someone had just left the building.
The fact that psychological time is not the same as mathematical time was something that Senhor José had learned in exactly the same way as, over a lifetime, he had acquired other types of useful knowledge, drawing first of all, of course, on his own experiences, for, despite never having risen higher than the post of clerk, he does not merely follow where others go, but drawing too on the formative influence of a few books and magazines of a scientific nature in which one can put one's trust or faith, depending on the feeling of the moment, and also, why not, a number of popular works of fiction of an introspective type, which also tackled the subject, though employing different methods and with an added dash of imagination. However, on no other occasion had he had a real objective sense, as physical as a sudden muscular contraction, of the effective impossibility of measuring the time that we might call the time of the soul, as when, back in his house again, looking once more at the unknown woman's date of death, he struggled, vaguely, to place it in the time that had passed since he first set out to find her. To the question, What were you doing on that day, he could give an almost immediate response, he would just have to go and look at the calendar and, thinking simply as plain Senhor José, the Central Registry clerk who had been away from work sick, he would say, That day I was in bed with flu, I didn't go to work, but if they went on to ask him, Now relate it to your activities as a researcher and tell me when it was, then he would have to go and consult the notebook that he kept beneath the mattress, It was two days after I broke into the school, he would reply. Assuming the date of death written on the card was correct, the unknown woman had indeed died two days after the deplorable episode that had transformed a hitherto honest Senhor José into a criminal, but these intersecting statements, that of the clerk cutting across that of the researcher, that of the researcher cutting across that of the clerk, apparently more than enough to match the psychological time of one with the mathematical time of the other, did not remove from either statement a feeling of dizzying disorientation. Senhor José is not standing on the top rungs of a very high ladder, looking down and seeing how the rungs grow ever narrower until they become one point touching the ground, but it is as if his body, instead of seeing itself as an integral unit existing in each passing moment, found itself fragmented during those last few days, during that period not of real or mathematical time, but of psychological or subjective time, as if it were contracting and dilating along with time itself. I am utterly absurd, Senhor José told himself sternly, the day already contained twenty-four hours when it was determined how many hours it should have, an hour has and always has had sixty minutes, the sixty seconds of the minute have been there since eternity, if a clock starts to go fast or slow it is a defect in the machine not in time, Perhaps one of my springs has gone. The idea brought a faint smile to his lips, Since, as far as I know, the fault does not lie in the mechanism of real time, but in the psychological mechanism that measures it, what I should do is look for a psychologist who could repair my escape wheel. He smiled again, then grew serious, The matter can be resolved more easily than that, besides, nature has already done so, the woman is dead, there's nothing more to do, I'll keep the file and the card in case I want to have some palpable souvenir of this adventure, for the Central Registry it will be as if that person had never been born, I doubt that anyone will ever need these papers, otherwise I could just leave them in some part of the archive of the dead, at the entrance, along with the oldest ones, here or there it doesn't matter, they all share the same history, they were born, they died, who now is going to be interested in who she was, her parents, if they loved her, will weep for her for a time, then they will weep less, then they will stop weeping, that's how it usually is, it will make no difference to the man she divorced, it's true she might have some current romantic relationship, she might be living with someone, or about to marry again, but that will be the history of a future that cannot now be lived, there is no one else in the world interested in the strange case of the unknown woman. He had before him the file and the card, he also had the thirteen school reports, the same name repeated thirteen times, twelve different images of the same face, one of them repeated, but each and every one of them dead in the past, already dead before the woman they later became had died, old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him- or herself in us, Who's that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say. Then, suddenly, Senhor José remembered that there was another picture, the one the lady in the ground-floor apartment had given him. He had unexpectedly just found the answer to the question of who else would be interested in the strange case of the unknown woman.
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.