All The Names - Jose Saramago

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.