All The Names - Jose Saramago

least be carried out sitting down. The errors of copyists are the least excusable, there's no point in their
coming to us and saying, I got distracted, on the contrary, recognising that one was distracted is the same
as confessing that one was thinking about something else instead of giving full attention to the names and
dates whose supreme importance lies in the fact that, in the present instance, it is those names and dates
that give legal existence to the reality of existence. Especially the name of the person who was born. A
simple error of transcription, a change in the initial letter of a surname for example, would mean that the
index card would be put in the wrong place possibly far from where it should be as would inevitably
happen in this Central Registry, where there are so many names, indeed where all the names are if the
clerk who in times past had copied Senhor José's name onto the card had written José instead his mind
confused by a similarity in pronunciation that verges on coincidence, there would be no end of work,
involved, in trying to find the lost record card in order to write on it any of the three most commonly
occurring notes marriage divorce death two more or less avoidable, the other not. That is why Senhor
José copies with the greatest of care, letter by letter, these proofs of the existence of these new beings
which have been entrusted to him, he has already transcribed sixteen birth certificates, now he is drawing
the seventeenth towards him, he's preparing the record card, when his hand suddenly trembles, his eyes
swim, beads of sweat appear on his forehead. The name before him, of a person of the female sex, is, in
almost every detail, identical to that of the unknown woman, only the last name is different, and even then,
the first letter is the same. It is highly likely that this card, bearing the name that it does, will have to be
filed immediately after the other one, which is why Senhor José, like someone unable to control his
impatience as the moment of a long-awaited encounter approaches, got up from his chair as soon as he
had finished the transcription, ran to the appropriate drawer in the card index, nervously riffled through
the cards, looked for and found the place. The unknown woman's card was not there. The fatal words
immediately flashed up in Senhor José's head, the fulminating words, She's dead. Because Senhor José
knows that the absence of a card from the card-index system inevitably means the death of the person
whose name is on the card, he has lost count of the cards which he himself, in his twenty-five years as a
civil servant, has removed from there and carried to the archive of the dead, but now he is refusing to
accept the evidence that this could be the reason for the disappearance, some careless, incompetent
colleague must have misfiled the card, perhaps it's a little further on a. little further back, Senhor José, out
of desperation, wants to deceive himself, never, in all the centuries of the Central Registry's existence, has
a card in this index system been misplaced there is only one possibility only one that the woman might
still be alive, and that is if her card is temporarily in the possession of one of the other clerks because
some new piece of information is to be added to it, Perhaps she's got married again, thought Senhor José,
and, for an instant, his unexpected irritation at the idea mitigated his disquiet. Then, barely noticing what
he was doing, he placed the card onto which he had copied the details from the birth certificate in the
place of the one that had disappeared, and, his legs trembling, he returned to his desk. He could not ask
his colleagues if, by any chance, they had the woman's card, he could not walk around all their desks
trying to get a glimpse of the papers they were working on, all he could do was watch the drawer in the
card-index system to see if someone replaced the small cardboard rectangle taken from there by mistake
or for a less routine reason than death. The hours passed, morning gave way to afternoon, Senhor José
barely managed to eat a thing at lunchtime, he must have something wrong with his throat to be so easily
afflicted by these knots, these tightnesses, these anxieties. During the whole day not one colleague went to
open that drawer, not one lost card found its way back, the unknown woman was dead.