All The Names - Jose Saramago

Senhor José was quite calm, he wasn't troubled by the fact that he now knew where the unknown woman's
parents and former husband lived, the husband, curiously enough, lived quite close to the Central Registry,
obviously, sooner or later, Senhor José would go and knock at their doors, but only when he felt the
moment had arrived, only when the moment told him, Now. He closed the phone book, returned it to the
boss's desk, to the exact place where he had taken it from, and he went back home. According to the
clock, it was suppertime, but the emotions of the day must have distracted his stomach, which gave no
signs of impatience. He sat down again, pulled the blanket around him, tugging at the corners so as to
cover his legs, and took up the notebook he had bought at the stationer's. It was time to begin making notes
on how the search was going, the people he had met, the conversations he had had, his thoughts, his plans
and tactics for an investigation that promised to be complex, The steps taken by someone in search of
someone else, he thought, and the truth is, that although the process was only in its early stages, he already
had a lot to say, If this were a novel, he murmured as he opened the notebook, the conversation with the
lady in the ground-floor apartment would be a chapter in itself. He picked up a pen to begin but stopped
halfway his eyes caught the paper on which he had written down the addresses, there was something he
hadn't considered before the perfectly plausible hypothesis that the unknown woman, after she got
divorced, had gone to live with her parents, the equally possible hypothesis that her husband had left the
apartment, leaving the telephone in his name. If that was so, and bearing in mind that the street in question
was near the Central Registry, the woman on the bus might well have been the same one. The inner
dialogue seemed to want to start up again, It was, It wasn't, It was, It wasn't, but this time, Senhor José
paid no heed to it and, bending over the notebook, he began to write the first words, Thus, I went into the
building, went up the stairs to the second floor and listened at the door of the apartment where the
unknown woman was born, then I heard a little baby crying, it could be her child I thought, and, at the
same time, I heard a woman crooning to it softly, It must be her, later, I found out that it wasn't.