The Collected Novels of José Saramago (295 page)

The concierge hadn’t come and asked him where he had sprung from, the building is silent, it seems uninhabited. It was this silence that provoked an idea, the most daring he had ever had, What if I were to stay here tonight, what if I were to sleep in her bed, no one would ever know. Tell Senhor José that nothing could be easier, he just has to go up in the lift again, go into the apartment, take off his shoes, maybe another wrong number will ring, if they do, then you’ll have the pleasure of hearing again the grave, veiled voice of the mathematics teacher, I’m not at home, she’ll say, and if, during the night, lying in her bed, some pleasant dream excites your old body, as you know, the remedy is to hand, but you’ll have to be careful not to mess up the sheets. These are sarcasms and vulgarities that Senhor José does not deserve, his daring idea, rather more romantic than daring, goes just as it came, and he is no longer inside the building, but outside, what helped him to leave, apparendy, was the painful memory of his old, darned socks and his bony, white shins with their sparse hairs. Nothing in the world makes any sense, murmured Senhor José, and set off for the road where the lady in the ground-floor apartment lives. The afternoon is at an end, the Central Registry will already have closed, the clerk does not have many hours in which to invent an excuse to justify having missed a whole day’s work Everyone knows he has no family that would require him to rush to them in an emergency, and even if he did, there can be no excuse in his case, living as he does right next to the Central Registry, all he had to do was go in and stand at the door and say, I’ll be back tomorrow, one of my cousins is dying. Senhor José decides he’s ready for anything, that they can dismiss him if they want, expel him from the civil service, perhaps the shepherd needs an assistant to help him change the numbers on the graves, especially if he’s considering widening his field of activity, there’s really no reason why he should limit himself to the suicides, the dead are all equal, what you can do to some you can do to all, jumble them up, confuse them, it doesn’t matter, the world doesn’t make sense anyway.

When Senhor José knocked at the door of the lady in the ground-floor apartment he was thinking only of the cup of tea he would have. He rang once, twice, but no one answered. Perplexed, worried, he rang the doorbell of the apartment opposite. A woman appeared who asked him sharply, What do you want, No one’s answering across the way, So what, Has anything happened to her, do you know, What do you mean, An accident, an illness, for example, It’s possible, an ambulance came to get her, And when was that, Three days ago, And you’ve heard nothing since, do you happen to know where she is, No, I don’t, now if you’ll excuse me. The woman slammed the door, leaving Senhor José in the dark. Tomorrow I’ll have to go to all the hospitals, he thought. He felt exhausted, he had spent all day walking from one place to another, bombarded by emotions all day, and now this shock on top of everything else. He left the building and stood on the sidewalk wondering if he should do something more, go and ask one of the other tenants, they couldn’t all be as unpleasant as the woman opposite, Senhor José went back into the building, went up the stairs to the second floor and rang at the door of the mother with the child and the jealous husband, who by now would be back from work, not that it matters, Senhor José is only going to ask if they know anything about the lady in the ground-floor apartment. The stair light is on. The door opens, the woman isn’t carrying her baby and doesn’t recognise Senhor José, Can I help you, she asks, I’m sorry to trouble you, I came to visit the lady in the ground-floor apartment, but she’s not there and the woman opposite told me that an ambulance took her away three days ago, Yes, that’s right, You don’t happen to know where she is, do you, in which hospital, or if she’s with some member of her family. Before the woman had time to reply, a male voice asked from inside, What is it, she turned her head, It’s someone asking about the lady in the ground-floor apartment, then she looked at Senhor José and said, No, we don’t know anything. Senhor José lowered his voice and asked, Don’t you recognise me, she hesitated, Oh, yes, I do now, she said in a whisper and slowly closed the door.

Out in the street, Senhor José hailed a taxi, Take me to the Central Registry, he said distractedly to the driver. He would have preferred to walk, in order to save what little money he had and to end the day as he had begun it, but weariness would not allow him to take another step. Or so he thought. When the driver announced, Here we are, Senhor José discovered that he wasn’t outside his house, but at the door of the Central Registry. It wasn’t worth explaining to the man that he should go around
the square and up the side street, he’d only have to walk about fifty yards, not even that. He paid with his last few coins, got out and when he put his feet on the pavement and looked up, he saw that the lights in the Central Registry were on, Not again, he thought, and he immediately forgot his concern for the fate of the lady in the ground-floor apartment and the fact that the mother with the child had remembered him, the problem now is finding an excuse for the following day. He went around the corner, there was his house, squat, almost a ruin really, clinging to the high wall of the building that seemed about to crush it. It was then that brutal fingers clutched at Senhor José’s heart. The light was on in his house. He was sure he’d turned it off when he went out, but, bearing in mind the confusion that has reigned for days now inside his head, he admits that he might have forgotten, if it weren’t for that other light, the one in the Central Registry, the five windows brilliantly lit. He put his key in the door, he knew what he was going to see, but he paused on the threshold as if social convention required him to be surprised. His boss was sitting at the table, before him were a few papers carefully lined up. Senhor José did not need to approach in order to find out what they were, the two forged letters of authority, the unknown woman’s report cards, his notebook, the cover from the Central Registry file containing official documents. Come in, said his boss, it’s your house. The clerk closed the door, went over to the table and stopped. He didn’t speak, he felt his head become a whirlpool in which all his thoughts were dissolving. Sit down, as I said, it’s your house. Senhor José noticed that on top of the report cards there was a key the same as his. Are you looking at the key, asked the Registrar, and continued calmly, don’t imagine it’s some fraudulent copy, the houses of staff members, when there were houses, always had two keys to the communicating door, one, of course, for the use of the owner, and another which remained in the possession of the Central Registry,
everything’s fine, as you see, Apart from your having come in here without my permission, Senhor José managed to say, I didn’t need your permission, the master of the key is the master of the house, let’s say we’re both the masters of this house, just as you seem to have considered yourself master enough of the Central Registry to remove official documents from the archive, I can explain, There’s no need, I’ve been keeping regular track of your activities, and, besides, your notebook has been a great help to me, may I take the opportunity to congratulate you on the excellent style and the appropriateness of the language, I’ll hand in my resignation tomorrow, I won’t accept it. Senhor José looked surprised, You won’t accept it, No, I won’t, Why, if you don’t mind my asking, Feel free, since I am an accomplice to your irregular activities, I don’t understand. The Registrar picked up the file of the unknown woman, then said, You will understand, first, though, tell me what happened in the cemetery, your narrative ends with the conversation you had with the clerk over there, It’ll take a long time, Just tell me in a few words, so that I get the complete picture, I walked through the General Cemetery to the section for suicides, I went to sleep under an olive tree, and the following morning, when I woke up, I was in the middle of a flock of sheep, and then I found out that the shepherd amuses himself by swapping around the numbers on the graves before the tombstones are put in place, Why, It’s hard to explain, it’s all to do with knowing where the people we’re looking for really are, he thinks we’ll never know, Like the woman you call the unknown woman, Yes, sir, What did you do today, I went to the school where she was a teacher and I went to her apartment, Did you find anything out, No, sir, and I don’t think I wanted to. The Registrar opened the file, took out the record card that had got stuck to the cards of the last five famous people in whom Senhor José had taken an interest, Do you know what I would do in your position, he asked, No, sir, Do you know what is the only logical conclusion to everything that has happened up until now, No, sir, Make up a new card for this woman, the same as the old one, with all the correct information, but without a date for her death, And then, Then go and put it in the archive of the living, as if she hadn’t died, That would be a fraud, Yes, it would, but nothing that we have done or said, you and I, would make any sense if we don’t, I still don’t understand. The Registrar leaned back in the chair, drew his hands slowly over his face, then asked, Do you remember what I said inside there on Friday, when you turned up for work without having shaved, Yes, sir, Everything, Everything, Then you’ll remember that I referred to certain facts without which I would never have realised the absurdity of separating the dead from the living, Yes sir, Do I need to tell you which facts I was referring to, No, sir.

The Registrar got up, I’ll leave the key here, I have no intention of using it again, and he added, before Senhor José could say anything, There is still one last thing to resolve, What’s that, sir, There’s no death certificate in the unknown woman’s file, I didn’t manage to find it, it must be somewhere back there in the archive, or perhaps I dropped it on the way, As long as it remains lost, that woman will be dead, She’ll be dead whether I find it or not, Unless you destroy it, said the Registrar. Having said that, he turned his back, and shortly afterwards came the sound of the door to the Central Registry closing. Senhor José stood in the middle of the room. There was no need to fill in a new card because he already had a copy in the file. He would, however, have to tear up or burn the original, where the date of death was registered. And there was still the death certificate. Senhor José went into the Central Registry, walked over to the Registrar’s desk, opened the drawer where the flashlight and Ariadne’s thread were waiting for him. He tied the end of the thread around his ankle and set off into the darkness.

The Cave

What a strange scene you describe
and what strange prisoners,
They are just like us.

—Plato,
The Republic,
Book VII

The man driving the truck is called Cipriano Algor, he is a potter by profession and is sixty-four years old, although he certainly does not look his age. The man sitting beside him is his son-in-law, Marçal Gacho, and he is not yet thirty. Nevertheless, from his face too, you would think him much younger. As you will have noticed, attached to their first names both these men have unusual family names, whose origin, meaning, and reason they do not know. They would probably be most put out to learn that “algor” means the intense cold one feels in one’s body before a fever sets in, and that “gacho” is neither more nor less than the part of an ox’s neck on which the yoke rests. The younger man is wearing a uniform, but is unarmed. The older man has on an ordinary jacket and a pair of more or less matching trousers, and his shirt is soberly buttoned up to the neck, with no tie. The hands grasping the wheel are large and strong, peasant’s hands, and yet, perhaps because of the daily contact with soft clay inevitable in his profession, they also suggest sensitivity. There is nothing unusual about Marçal Gacho’s right hand, but there is a scar on the back of his left hand that looks like the mark left by a burn, a diagonal line that goes from the base of his thumb to the base of his little finger. The truck does not really deserve the name of truck, since it is really only a medium-sized van, of a kind now out of date, and it is laden with crockery. When the two men left home, twenty kilometers back, the day had barely begun to dawn, but now the morning has filled the world with sufficient light for one to notice Marçal Gacho’s scar and to speculate about the sensitivity of Cipriano Algor’s hands. The two men are traveling slowly because of the fragile nature of the load and also because of the uneven road surface. The delivery of merchandise not considered to be of primary or even secondary importance, as is the case with plain ordinary crockery, is carried out, in accordance with the official timetables, at mid-morning, and the only reason these two men got up so early is that Marçal Gacho has to clock in at least half an hour before the doors of the Center open to the public. On the days when he does not have to give his son-in-law a lift but still has crockery to deliver, Cipriano Algor does not have to get up quite so early However, every ten days, he is the one who goes to fetch Marçal Gacho from work so that the latter can spend the forty hours with his family to which he is entitled, and, afterward, Cipriano Algor is also the one who, with or without crockery in the back of the van, punctually returns him to his responsibilities and duties as a security guard. Cipriano Algor’s daughter, who is called Marta and bears the family names of Isasca, from her late mother, and Algor, from her father, only enjoys the presence of her husband at home and in bed for six nights and three days every month. On the previous night, she became pregnant, although she does not know this yet.