All The Names - Jose Saramago

hold-up in the traffic was preventing the bus from proceeding. Senhor José felt nervous, he didn't want to
arrive too late to call on the lady in the ground-floor apartment. Despite the full and frank conversation
they had had, despite certain confidences exchanged, some of which were unexpected in people who had
only just met, they hadn't become so close that he could go knocking on her door at any hour of the day or
night. Senhor José looked again at the square. The light had changed, the facade of the Central Registry
had grown suddenly grey, but it was nevertheless a luminous grey that seemed to vibrate, to tremble, and
it was then, just as the bus was pulling away, slowly moving out into the traffic lane, that a tall, well-built
man walked up the steps of the Central Registry, opened the door and went in. The Registrar, murmured
Senhor José, what's he doing at the Central Registry at this hour. Impelled by a sudden, inexplicable
panic, he got up suddenly from his seat, made as if to get off, provoking a look of surprise and irritation in
the passenger beside him, then sat down again, puzzled by his own behaviour. He realised that his impulse
was to rush home, as if to protect it from some danger, which was, of course, absurdly illogical. A thief,
always supposing, now really, yet another absurd illogicality, that the boss was a thief, wouldn't go in
through the front door of the Central Registry in order to reach Senhor José's front door. But then it was
bordering on the absurd for the Registrar to want to go back there after the office was closed, for, as we
stated earlier, there would be no work waiting for him, Senhor José could stake his life on that. Imagining
the head of the Central Registry doing overtime was rather like trying to imagine a square circle. The bus
had already left the square, and Senhor José was still trying to work out the deep reasons that had driven
him to behave in that disoriented fashion. He decided in the end that the reason must lie in the fact that,
after a good few years as sole resident, he had grown used to being the only nocturnal tenant of the group
of edifices formed by the Central Registry and his house, if the latter deserves the name of edifice,
doubtless appropriate from a rigorously linguistic point of view, since an edifice can be any kind of
building, but obviously inappropriate when compared with the architectural dignity that seems to emanate
from the word itself, especially when spoken. Seeing his boss go into the Central Registry had had the
same impact on him, he thought, as if, when he went back home, he were to find him sitting in his chair.
The relative calm that this idea brought Senhor José, that is, not taking into account pertinent and morally
embarrassing considerations, the physical and material impossibility of the Registrar entering the private
rooms of his subordinate and even using his chair, immediately melted away when he remembered the
unknown woman's school record cards and wondered if he had put them back under the mattress or
carelessly left them out on the table. Even if his house were as safe as a bank vault, with special
combination locks and reinforced floors, walls and ceiling, those record cards should never but never
have been left out. The fact that there was no one there to see them did not excuse the grave imprudence
committed, how are we, being ignorant, to know how far the advances of science might go, just as radio
waves, which no one can see, carry sounds and images through the air and the wind, leaping over
mountains and rivers, crossing oceans and deserts, it would not be so very extraordinary if scanner waves
and photographic waves had not already been discovered or invented, or were to be discovered
tomorrow, waves capable of penetrating walls and recording and transmitting to the outside world the
deeds, mysteries and humiliations of our life that we had thought safe from indiscretions. Hiding them,
those deeds, mysteries and humiliations under a mattress, still continues to be the safest way of hiding
things, especially when we bear in mind that it is increasingly difficult for the customs of today to
understand the customs of yesterday. However expert that scanner wave or photographic wave might be, it
would never think of sticking its nose between a mattress and a bed base.
As everyone knows, our thoughts, both anxious and happy thoughts, and others which are neither one
thing nor the other, sooner or later grow weary and bored with themselves, it's just a question of letting
time do its work, it's just a matter of leaving them to the lazy daydreaming that comes naturally to them,
adding no new irritating or polemical reflection to the bonfire, above all taking supreme care not to
intervene whenever an attractive bifurcation, branch Une, or turning appears before a thought which is