All The Names - Jose Saramago

...
Senhor José got cold during the night. After having uttered those redundant, useless words, Here she
is, he wasn't sure what else he should do. It was true that, after long and arduous labours, he had managed,
at last, to find the unknown woman, or rather, the place where she lay, a good six feet beneath an earth that
still sustained him, but, he thought to himself, the normal response would be to feel afraid, fearful of the
place, the hour, the rustling trees, the mysterious moonlight, and, in particular, of the strange cemetery
surrounding him, an assembly of suicides, a gathering of silences that, from one moment to the next, might
begin to scream, We came before our time was due, our own will brought us here, but what he felt inside
him seemed more like indecision, doubt, as if, just when he thought he had reached the end of everything,
he realised that his search was not yet finished, as if having come here were merely another point on the
journey, of no more importance than the ground-floor apartment belonging to the elderly lady, or the
school, or the chemist's where he had gone to ask questions, or the archive in the Central Registry where
they kept the papers of the dead. He was so overcome by this feeling that he even muttered, as if trying to
convince himself, She's dead, there's nothing more I can do, there's nothing anyone can do about death.
For long hours he had walked through the General Cemetery, he had passed through epochs, eras,
dynasties, through kingdoms, empires and republics, through wars and epidemics, through infinite
numbers of disparate deaths, beginning with the first sorrow felt by humanity and ending with this woman
who had committed suicide only a few days ago, Senhor José, therefore, knows all too well that there is
nothing anyone can do about death. On that walk made up of so many dead, not one of them got up when
they heard him pass, not one begged him to help them reunite the scattered dust of their flesh with the
bones fallen from their sockets, not one asked him, Come and breathe into my eyes the breath of life, they
know all too well that there is nothing anyone can do about death, they know it, we all know it, but, in that
case, where does it come from, this feeling of angst that grips Senhor José's throat, this unease of mind, as
if he had cravenly abandoned a half-completed task and now did not know how to return to it with any
dignity. On the other side of the stream, not far off, one can see a few houses with the windows lit, the
moribund lights of the street lamps in the suburbs, the fleeting beam of a car passing on the road. And
immediately ahead, only thirty paces away, as sooner or later had to happen, a small bridge joins the two
banks of the stream, so Senhor José won't have to take off his shoes and roll up his trouser legs when he
wants to cross to the other side. In normal circumstances he would have done so a long time ago,
especially since we know he is not a person of great courage, courage he is going to need if he is to
survive a whole night in a cemetery unscathed, with a dead person lying beneath his feet and a moonlight
capable of making shadows walk. The circumstances, however, are these and no others, here it is not a
question of courage or cowardice, here it is a matter of life and death, which is why Senhor José, despite
knowing that he will often feel afraid during the night, despite knowing that the sighing of the wind will
terrify him that at dawn the cold fallen from the sky will join forces with the cold rising from the earth,
Senhor José is going to sit down beneath a tree, huddled up in the shelter of a providential hollow trunk.
He turns up his jacket collar, makes himself as small as possible in order to retain the warmth of his body,
folds his arms so that his hands are in his armpits, and prepares to wait for day. He can feel his stomach
asking him for food, but he takes no notice, no one ever died from going for a while without eating
between meals, except when the second meal was so long in being served that it did not appear in time to
be served at all. Senhor José wants to know if it really is all over, or if, on the contrary, there is still
something he has forgotten to do, or, more important, something that he had never even considered before
and that might turn out to be, after all, the essence of the strange adventure into which chance had plunged
him. He had looked for the unknown woman everywhere, and had found her here, beneath that little mound