All The Names - Jose Saramago

aining, he hailed a taxi to take him home, and the inevitable happened, the driver, seeing that black figure
emerge suddenly from the depths of the night, took fright and accelerated, and that was not the only time,
Senhor José hailed three other taxis and they all disappeared round the corner as if pursued by the devil
himself. Senhor José resigned himself to having to walk home, he certainly wasn't going to get onto a bus,
oh well, it would be just one more weariness to add to the one that barely allowed him to drag his feet
along, but the worst thing was that, shortly afterwards, the rain started again and didn't stop throughout the
whole of that interminable walk, streets, sidewalks, squares, avenues, through a city that seemed deserted,
apart from that lone man, dripping water, without even the partial protection of an umbrella, you can
understand why, no one takes an umbrella along when they go burgling, no more than you would when
going to war, he could have taken shelter in a doorway and waited for a break in the clouds, but it wasn't
worth it, he couldn't get any wetter than he was. When Senhor José reached home, the only reasonably dry
part of his clothing was a pocket in his jacket, the inside pocket on his left side, where he had placed the
school record cards of the unknown girl, he had kept them covered with his right hand all the time, to
protect them from the rain, anyone who saw him would have thought he had something wrong with his
heart, especially given the pained look on his face. Shivering, he took all his clothes off, wondering
confusedly how he would solve the problem of getting that pile of clothes on the floor washed, he didn't
have so many suits, shoes, socks and shirts that he could afford to send it all off to the dry cleaners, as if
he were a man of means, a complete suit, he was bound to need one of those items of clothing when he
had to put his remaining clothes on tomorrow. He decided to worry about that later, now he just had to get
the filth off his body, the worst thing was that the heater didn't work very well, the water sometimes came
out boiling hot, sometimes ice cold, just the thought of it made him shudder, and then, like someone trying
to convince himself, he murmured, Perhaps it would do my cold good, a blast of hot water followed by
cold, or so I've heard. He went into the cubicle that served him as a bathroom, looked in the mirror and
realised why the taxi drivers had been frightened. He would have felt exactly the same and fled from this
hollow-eyed phantom with a kind of black drool running from the corners of his mouth. The heater didn't
behave too badly this time, it unleashed only a couple of cold lashes at the beginning, and the rest of the
time it was comfortingly warm, besides, a quick scalding blast from time to time even helped dissolve the
dirt. When he got out of the shower, Senhor José felt reinvigorated, like new, but as soon as he got into
bed, he started shivering again, it was then that he thought of opening the drawer in his bedside table,
where he kept his thermometer, and shortly afterwards, was saying, One hundred, if I feel the way I do
now tomorrow morning, I won't be able to go to work. Whether it was the effects of fever or exhaustion,
or both, this thought did not trouble him, the abnormal idea of being absent from work did not seem
strange to him, for at that moment, Senhor José did not seem like Senhor José, or, rather, there were two
Senhor Josés lying in bed, with the blankets up to their nose, one Senhor José who had lost all sense of
responsibility, another to whom this was all a matter of complete indifference. He dozed for a few
moments with the light on and then woke with a start when he dreamed that he had left the record cards on
the chair in the attic, that he had left them there deliberately, as if during this whole adventure his sole aim
had been merely to seek them out and find them. He also dreamed that someone went into the attic after he
had left, saw the pile of thirteen record cards and asked, What mystery is this. Half-dazed, he got up and
went to look for them, he had put them on the table when he emptied out his jacket pockets, and then
returned to bed. The record cards were smeared with black fingermarks, some even bore the clear
impress of his fingerprints, he would have to wipe them off tomorrow to foil any attempt at identification,
How stupid, he thought, we leave fingerprints on everything we touch, if I clean those off Til just leave
others, the difference is that some are visible and others are not. He closed his eyes and shortly
afterwards fell asleep again, the hand barely grasping the record cards fell limply onto the bedcover,
some slipped to the floor, there were the pictures of a girl at different ages, from child to adolescent,
wrongfully brought here, no one has the right to carry off photos that don't belong to them, unless they