All The Names - Jose Saramago

prison, and over there, at the far end of the corridor, hidden in the darkness, there is just a small stone. A
small stone that was slowly growing, that he could not see now with his eyes, but which the memory of
the dreams he had dreamed told him was there, a stone that was increasing in size and moving as if it
were alive, a stone that was expanding sideways and upwards, that was climbing the walls, and dragging
itself towards him, curled in upon itself, as if it were not stone but mud, as if it were not mud but thick
blood. The child emerged screaming from the nightmare when the filthy mass was touching his feet, when
the tightening garrote of fear was almost strangling him, but poor Senhor José cannot wake from a dream
which is no longer his. Cowering against the wall like a frightened dog, he points the flashlight with
tremulous hand towards the other end of the corridor, but the beam doesn't reach that far, it stops halfway,
more or less where the path to the archive of the living is to be found. He thinks that if he runs fast he'll be
able to escape the advancing stone, but fear tells him, Be careful, how do you know it isn't there waiting
for you you'll walk straight into the lion's den. In the dream the advance of the stone was accompanied by
a strange music that seemed to be born out of the air, but here the silence is absolute, total, so dense that it
swallows up Senhor José's breathing, just as the darkness swallows the beam from the flashlight, and
which it has just swallowed completely. It was as if the darkness had suddenly advanced and covered
Senhor José's face like a sucker. The child's nightmare was over though. For the child, ah, who can
understand the human heart, the fact that he could not see the walls of the prison, both near and far, was
tantamount to their having ceased to be there, it was as if the space around him had suddenly grown larger,
freer, stretching out to infinity, as if the stones were just the inert mineral of which they are made, as if
water were simply the basic ingredient of mud, as if blood flowed only in his veins, not outside them.
Now it is not a childhood nightmare that is frightening Senhor José, what paralyses him with fear is once
more the thought that he might die in this place, just as, all that time ago, he imagined that he might fall
from that other ladder and lie dead here, undocumented in the midst of all the documents of the dead,
crushed by the darkness, by the avalanche that would soon unleash itself from above, and that tomorrow
they would come and find him, Senhor José hasn't come in to work, I wonder where he is, He'll turn up,
and when a colleague came to transfer other files and other cards, he would find him there, exposed to the
light of a far superior flashlight than this one which had served him so badly when he needed it most. The
minutes passed that had to pass before Senhor José could gradually begin to hear inside himself a voice
saying, Look, apart from being afraid, nothing really bad has happened to you yet, you're sitting here quite
unharmed, it's true the flashlight went out on you, but what do you need a flashlight for, you've got the
string tied round your ankle, with the other end tied to the leg of the Registrar's desk, you're safe, like an
unborn child attached by the umbilical cord to its mother's womb, not that the Registrar is your mother, or
your father, but relationships between people here are complicated, what you must remember is that
childhood nightmares never come true, far less dreams, that business with the stone really was pretty
horrible, but it's probably got a scientific explanation, like when you used to dream you were flying over
houses and gardens, rising, falling, hovering with your arms outstretched, do you remember, it was a sign
that you were growing, probably the stone had a function too, if you have to experience terror, then rather
sooner than later, besides, you should know better than anyone that the dead people here aren't really
dead, it's a macabre exaggeration to call this the archive of the dead, if the papers you have in your hand
are those of the unknown woman, they are just paper, not bones, they're paper, not putrefying flesh, that
was the miracle worked by your Central Registry, transforming life and death into mere paper, it's true
that you wanted to find that woman, but you didn't manage it in time, you couldn't even do that, or, rather,
you wanted it and didn't want it, you hesitated between desire and fear, it happens to lots of people, you
probably should have just gone to the tax office after all, as someone told you to, it's over, it's best just to
leave it, her time has run out and the end of your time isn't far off either.
Pressed right up against the unstable wall formed by the files, Senhor José got to his feet, very slowly
and carefully so that none of the files would fall on top of him. The voice that had addressed that speech