All The Names - Jose Saramago

...
That night, Senhor José returned to the Central Registry. He took with him the flashlight and a
hundred-yard roll of strong string. He had put a new battery in his flashlight that would suffice for several
hours of continual use, but, more than chastened by the difficulties he had been obliged to confront during
the dangerous breakin and theft at the school, Senhor José had learned that in life you can never be too
careful, especially when you abandon the straight paths of honest behaviour and wander off down the
tortuous shortcuts of crime. What if the little bulb were to blow, what if the lens that protects and
intensifies the light were to come loose from the casing, what if the flashlight, with the battery lens and
bulb intact, were to fall down a hole so that he couldn't reach it with his arm or even with a hook, then,
not daring to use the real Ariadne's thread, despite the fact that the drawer in the Registrar's Office where
it was kept, along with a powerful flashlight, was never locked, Senhor José will instead use an ordinary,
rustic ball of string bought at the hardware store, and that string will lead back to the world of the living
the person who, at this very moment, is preparing to enter the kingdom of the dead. As a member of the
Central Registry, Senhor José has legitimate access to any documents in the civil register, which are, need
we repeat, the very substance of his work, so some may think it strange that, when he found the card
missing, he did not simply say to the senior clerk he worked under, I'm going to look for the card of a
woman who died. For it would not be enough just to say that, he would have to give a reason that was
both administratively sound and bureaucratically logical, the senior clerk would be bound to ask, What do
you want it for, and Senhor José could hardly reply, To be quite sure that she's really dead, what would
happen to the Central Registry if everyone started satisfying the same or similar curiosities, which were
not only morbid but unproductive too. The worst that could come of Senhor José's nocturnal expedition
would be that he would be unable to find the unknown woman's papers in the chaos that is the archive of
the dead. Of course, at first, since we're dealing with a recent death, the papers should be at what was
commonly termed the entrance, which is immediately problematic because of the impossibility of
knowing exactly where the entrance to the archive of the dead is. It would be too simple to say, as do
some stubborn optimists, that the space designated for the dead obviously begins where the space for the
living ends, and vice versa, perhaps adding that, in the outside world, things are arranged in a similar
fashion, given that, apart from exceptional events, albeit not that exceptional, such as natural disasters or
wars, you don't normally see the dead mingling in the street with the living. Now, for both structural and
non-structural reasons, this can in fact happen in the Central Registry. It and it does. As we have already
explained from time to time when the congestion caused by the continual and irresistible accumulation of
the dead begins to block the path of staff along the corridors and consequently to obstruct any
documentary research they have no option but to demolish the wall at the rear and rebuild it a few yards
farther back However through an involuntary oversight on our part we failed to mention the two perverse
effects of this congestion. First while the wall is being built it is inevitable that for lack of a space of their
own at the back of the building the cards and files of the recently dead come dangerously close to, and, on
the near side, even touch the files of the living, which are to be found on the far end of their respective
shelves, giving rise to an embarrassing fringe of confusion between those who are still living and those
who are now dead. Second, once the wall has been built and the roof extended, and the filing away of the
dead can at last return to normality, that same border conflict, as it were, will prevent, or, at the very
least, prove extremely prejudicial to, the transport into the outer darkness of the dead intruders, if you'll
pardon the expression. Added to these far from minor inconveniences is the fact that, without the
knowledge of the Registrar or their colleagues, the two youngest clerks have no qualms, either because
they have not been properly trained or because of a grave deficiency in their personal ethics, about simply