All The Names - Jose Saramago

...
One enters the cemetery via an old building with a façade which is the twin sister of the Central
Registry façade. There are the same three black stone steps, the same ancient door in the middle, the same
five narrow windows above. Apart from the great two-leaved door alongside the façade, the only
observable difference would be the sign above the entrance, in the same enamelled lettering, that says
General Cemetery. The large door was closed many years ago, when it was clear that access through there
had become impracticable, that it had ceased satisfactorily to fulfil the end for which it had been intended,
that is, to allow easy passage not only for the dead and their companions, but also for those who would
visit the dead afterwards. Like all cemeteries in this or any other world, it was tiny when it started, a
small patch of land on the outskirts of what was still the embryo of a city, turned to face the open air of the
fields, but later, alas, with the passing of time, the inevitable happened, it kept growing and growing and
growing, until it became the immense necropolis that it is today. At first, it was surrounded by a wall and,
for generations, whenever the pressure inside began to hinder both the orderly accommodation of the dead
and the free circulation of the living, they did the same as in the Central Registry, they would demolish the
walls and rebuild them a little farther on. One day, it must be close to four centuries ago, the then keeper
of the cemetery had the idea of leaving it open on all sides, apart from the area facing onto the street,
alleging that this was the only way to rekindle the sentimental relationship between those inside and those
outside, much diminished at the time, as anyone could see just by looking at the neglected state of the
graves, especially the oldest ones. He believed that, although walls served the positive aims of hygiene
and decorum, ultimately, they had the perverse effect of aiding forgetfulness, which is hardly surprising,
given the popular wisdom which has declared, since time began, that what the eye doesn't see the heart
doesn't grieve over. We have many reasons to think that the motives behind the Registrar's decision to
break with tradition and routine and to unify the archives of the dead and of the living, thus reintegrating
human society in the specific documentary area under his jurisdiction, were purely internal. It is,
therefore, all the more difficult for us to understand why no one immediately applied the earlier lesson
provided by a humble, primitive cemetery keeper, who, as was only natural in his line of work and
bearing in mind the times he lived in, was doubtless not particularly well educated, but was, nevertheless,
a man of revolutionary instincts, and who, sad to say, has not even been given a decent gravestone to point
out the fact to future generations. On the contrary, for four centuries now, curses, insults, calumnies and
humiliations have been heaped upon the memory of the unfortunate innovator, for he is held to be the
person historically responsible for the present state of the necropolis, which is described as disastrous
and chaotic, mostly because not only does the General Cemetery still have no walls about it but it could
never possibly be walled in again. Allow us to explain. We said earlier that the cemetery grew, not, of
course, because of some intrinsic reproductive powers of its own, as though, if you will permit us a
somewhat macabre example, the dead had engendered more dead, but simply because the city's
population grew and so therefore did its size. Even when the General Cemetery was still surrounded by
walls, something occurred which, in the language of municipal bureaucracy, is called an urban
demographic explosion, and this happened more than once and in successive ages. Little by little, people
came to live in the wide fields behind the cemetery, small groups of houses appeared, villages, hamlets,
second homes, which grew in turn, occasionally contiguous, but still leaving between them large empty
spaces, which were used as farmland or woods or pasture or areas of scrub. Those were the areas into
which the General Cemetery advanced when its walls were demolished. Like floodwaters that begin by
encroaching on the lowlying land, snaking along valleys and then, slowly, creeping up hillsides, so the
graves gained ground, often to the detriment of agriculture, for the besieged owners had no alternative but