All The Names - Jose Saramago

thinks of the vast amount of space they would have saved if the dead had been buried standing up, side by
side, in serried ranks, like soldiers at attention, and at their head, as the only sign of their presence there,
a stone cube on which would be written, on the five visible sides, the principal facts about the life of the
deceased, five stone squares like five pages, the summary of a whole book that had proved impossible to
write. Almost as far as the horizon, far, far into the distance, Senhor José can see slowly moving lights,
like yellow lightning, flicking on and off at constant intervals, they are the guides' cars calling to the
people behind them, Follow me, Follow me, one of them suddenly stops, the light disappears, that means
it's reached its destination. Senhor José looked up at the sun, then at his watch, it's getting late, he'll have
to walk fast if he wants to reach the unknown woman before dusk He consulted the map, ran his index
finger over it to reconstruct, approximately, the route he had followed from the administrative building to
the place where he now finds himself, compared it with the distance he still has to walk and almost lost
courage. In a straight line, according to the scale, it would be about three miles, but, as we have already
said, in the General Cemetery, the straight continuous line never lasts for long, to those three miles as the
crow flies, you will have to add another two, or possibly three, travelling overland. Senhor José
calculated the amount of time left and the strength still remaining in his legs, he heard a prudent voice
telling him to leave it for another day, when he had more time to visit the grave of the unknown woman,
because, now he knows where she is, any taxi or bus could drop him off nearer to the actual place,
skirting around the cemetery, as families do when they come to weep over their loved ones and place new
flowers in the jars or refresh the water, especially in summer. Senhor José was still weighing this
perplexing problem when he remembered his adventure at the school, the grim, rainy night, the steep,
slippery mountain slope of the porch roof, and then, soaked from head to toe, his grazed knee rubbing
painfully against his trousers, his anxious search inside the building, and how, by dint of tenacity and
intelligence, he had managed to conquer his own fears and overcome the thousand difficulties that blocked
his path until he discovered and finally entered the mysterious attic, confronting a darkness even more
frightening than that in the archive of the dead. Anyone brave enough to do all that had no right to feel
discouraged by the thought of a walk, however long it might be, especially when doing so in the frank
brilliance of the bright sun which, as we all know, is the friend of heroes. If the shades of dusk caught up
with him before he had reached the unknown woman's grave, if night came to cut off all paths back,
sowing them with invisible terrors and preventing him from going any farther, he could lie down on one of
these mossy stones, with a sad stone angel to watch over his sleep, and wait for the birth of the new day.
Or else he could shelter beneath a flying buttress like that one over there, thought Senhor José, but then it
occurred to him that, farther on, he wouldn't find any flying buttresses. Thanks to the generations yet to
come and to the consequent development of civil engineering, it won't be long before they invent less
expensive means of holding up a wall, indeed it is in the General Cemetery that the results of progress are
set out before the eyes of the studious or the merely curious, there are even those who say that a cemetery
like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn't matter, you can
learn as much from people as from books. Senhor José looked back, from where he was he could see only
the roof ridge of the administrative building above the taller funerary monuments, I had no idea I'd come
so far, he murmured, and having said that, as if, in order to make a decision, he had needed only to hear
the sound of his own voice he once more continued on. his way When he at last reached the section of the
suicides, with the sky already sifting the still-white ashes of the dusk, he thought that he must have gone
the wrong way or that there was something wrong with the map. Before him was a great expanse of field,
with numerous trees, almost a wood, where the graves, apart from the barely visible gravestones, seemed
more like tufts of natural vegetation. You could not see the stream from there, but you could hear the
lightest of murmurs slipping over the stones, and in the atmosphere, which was like green glass, there
hovered a coolness which was not just the usual coolness of the first hour of dusk. Being so recent, only a
matter of a few days ago, the grave of the unknown woman must be on the outer limit of the area, the