All The Names - Jose Saramago

tombstones and forced up into the sunlight a few startled bones, had been both the target of and a witness
to fierce wars of words and to one or two physical acts of violence. Whenever incidents of this nature
occurred, the keeper would begin by ordering the available guides to go and separate the illustrious
contenders, and when some particularly difficult situation arose, he would go there in person to remind
the fighters ironically that there was no point tearing their hair out over such minor matters during their
lifetime, since, sooner or later, they would all end up together in the cemetery bald as coots. Just like the
Registrar, the keeper of the General Cemetery made brilliant use of sarcasm, which confirms the general
assumption that this character trait had proved indispensable in their rise to their respective high ranks,
together, of course, with a competent knowledge, both practical and theoretical, of archivistic technique.
On one matter, however, historians, art critics and archaeologists are in agreement, the obvious fact that
the General Cemetery is a perfect catalogue, a showcase, a summary of all styles, especially architectural,
sculptural and decorative, and therefore an inventory of every possible way of seeing, being and living
that has existed up until now, from the first elementary drawing of the outline of the human body,
subsequently carved and chiselled out of bare stone, to the chromium-plated steel, reflecting panels,
synthetic fibres and mirrored glass which are used willy-nilly in the current age.
The first funerary monuments were made of dolmens, cromlechs and menhirs, then there appeared,
like a great blank page in relief, niches, altars, tabernacles, granite bowls, marble urns, tombstones,
smooth and carved, columns, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, caryatids, friezes, acanthuses,
entablatures and pediments, false vaults, real vaults, as well as stretches of brick wall, the gables of
Cyclopean walls, lancet windows, rose windows, gargoyles, oriel windows, tympanums, pinnacles,
paving stones, flying buttresses, pillars, pilasters, recumbent statues representing men in helmet, sword
and armour, capitals with and without ornamentation, pomegranates, lilies, immortelles, campaniles,
cupolas, recumbent statues representing women with small hard breasts, paintings, arches, faithful dogs
lying down, swaddled infants, the bearers of gifts, mourners with their heads covered, needles,
mouldings, stained-glass windows, daises, pulpits, balconies, more pinnacles, more tympanums, more
capitals, more arches, angels with wings spread, angels with wings folded, tondos, empty urns, or urns
filled with false stone flames or with a piece of languid crepe draped about them, griefs, tears, majestic
men, magnificent women, delightful children cut down in the flower of life, old men and old women who
could have expected no more, whole crosses and broken crosses, steps, nails, crowns of thorns, lances,
enigmatic triangles, the occasional unusual marble dove, flocks of real doves wheeling above the
cemetery. And silence. A silence interrupted only from time to time by the steps of the occasional sighing
lover of solitude drawn here by a sudden bout of sadness from the rustling outskirts where someone can
still be heard weeping at a graveside on which they have placed bunches of fresh flowers, still damp with
sap, piercing, one might say, the very heart of time, these three thousand years of graves of every shape,
meaning and appearance, united by the same neglect, by the same solitude, for the sadness they once gave
rise to is now too old for there to be any surviving heirs. Orienting himself with the map, although
occasionally wishing he had a compass, Senhor José walks towards the area set aside for suicides, where
the woman on the card is buried, but his step is slower now, less determined, from time to time he stops to
study a sculptural detail stained by lichen or discoloured by the rain, a few mourners caught in midlament,
a few solemn depositions, a few hieratic folds, or else he struggles to decipher an inscription
whose lettering attracted him in passing, its understandable that even the very first line takes him a long
time to decipher, for, despite having occasionally had to examine parchments more or less contemporary
with these in the Central Registry, this clerk is not versed in ancient forms of writing, which is why he has
never got beyond being a clerk. On top of a small rounded hillock, in the shadow of an obelisk that was
once a geodesic marker, Senhor José looks around him as far as he can see, and he finds nothing but
graves rising and falling with the curves of the land, graves poised on the edge of the occasional
precipitous slope and spreading out over the plains, There are millions of them, he murmurs, then he