All The Names - Jose Saramago

has, indirectly and by different and sometimes contradictory routes, had a paradoxical effect on human
beings, and has produced in them an intellectual sublimation of their natural fear of dying. But, returning
to the matter at hand, no one could ever accuse death of having left behind in the world some forgotten old
man of no particular merit and for no apparent reason merely for him to grow ever older. We all know
that, however long old people may last, their hour will always come. Not a day passes without the clerks'
having to take down files from the shelves of the living in order to carry them to the shelves at the rear,
not a day passes without their having to push towards the end of the shelves those that remain, although
sometimes, by some ironic caprice of enigmatic fate, only until the following day. According to the socalled
natural order of things, reaching the farthest end of the shelf means that fate has grown weary, that
there is not much more road to be travelled. The end of the shelf is, in every sense, the beginning of the
fell. However, there are files which, for some unknown reason, hover on the very edge of the void,
impervious to that final vertigo, for years and years beyond what is conventionally deemed to be a
sensible length for a human life. At first those files excite the professional curiosity of the clerks, but soon
a feeling of impatience begins to stir in them, as if the shameless obstinacy of these Methuselahs were
reducing, eating and devouring their own life prospects. These superstitious clerks are not entirely wrong,
if we bear in mind the many cases of employees at every level whose files had to be prematurely
withdrawn from the archive of the living, while the covers of the files of those obstinate survivors grew
yellower and yellower, until they became dark, inaesthetic stains at the end of a shelf, an offence to the
public eye. That is when the Registrar says to one of the clerks, Senhor José, replace those covers for me,
will you. '