He went there the following morning, but he decided not to go up and ask the present occupants of the apartment and the buildings other tenants if they had known the girl in the photograph. It was more than likely that they would tell him they hadn't, that they had been living there only a short time, or that they didn't remember, You know how it is, people come and go, I really can't remember anything about the family, it's not worth puzzling your head about, and if someone did say yes and did seem to have a vague recollection, they would probably only go on to add that their relationship had been the usual one among the polite classes, So you never saw them again, Senhor José would ask, No, never, after they moved out, I never saw them again, That's a shame, I've told you everything I know, I'm sorry not to be of more use to the Central Registry. The good fortune of immediately finding the lady in the ground-floor apartment, so well informed, so close to the original sources, could not possibly happen twice, but only much later, when none of what is being related here was of any importance anymore, did Senhor José discover that here too the same good fortune had acted prodigiously in his favour, saving him from the most disastrous of consequences. Unbeknownst to him, by some diabolical coincidence, one of the deputies at the Central Registry lived in that building, you can imagine the terrible scene, our trusting Senhor José knocking at the door, showing the index card, possibly even the forged letter of authority, and the woman who came to the door saying treacherously, Come back later when my husbands at home, he always deals with matters like this, and Senhor José would go back, his heart full of hope, and would come face-to-face with a furious deputy, who would arrest him on the spot, literally not figuratively, for the Central Registry's regulations permit of neither precipitate actions nor improvisation, the worst thing being that we don't even know what all the regulations are. Having resolved this time, as if his guardian angel had been whispering the advice urgently in his ear, to turn his attention to the shops in the area, Senhor José had unwittingly saved himself from the worst disgrace in his long career as a civil servant. He contented himself, then, with looking up at the windows of the apartment where the unknown woman had lived when she was young, and in order to get properly inside the skin of a real investigator, he imagined her leaving for school, carrying her satchel, walking to the bus stop and waiting there, it wasn't worth following her, Senhor José knew perfectly well where she was going, he had the relevant proof hidden between the mattress and the base of his bed. A quarter of an hour later, her father left, he sets off in the opposite direction, that's why he doesn't leave with his daughter when she goes to school, unless it's simply that father and daughter don't like to walk along together and give this as an excuse or give no excuse at all, but there will be some kind of tacit agreement between the two, so that the neighbours won't notice their mutual indifference. Now Senhor José needs to be patient for a little while longer, until the mother goes out shopping, as usually happens in families, that way he will know where he should make his inquiries, the nearest commercial establishment three buildings along is that chemist's shop but Senhor José immediately doubts that he will obtain any useful information there, the assistant is a young man young in age and young as an employee, he himself says so, I don't know, I've only been here two years. But Senhor José won't be discouraged by that, he has read more than enough newspapers and magazines, not to mention the lessons life has been teaching him, to know that these investigations, carried out in the old way, take a lot of work, involve a lot of walking, pounding streets and pavements, going up stairs, knocking at doors, coming down stairs, the same questions asked a thousand times, identical replies, almost always in a reserved tone of voice, I don't know, I've never heard of such a person, only very rarely does it happen that from the back room there emerges an older pharmacist who has heard the conversation and is, by nature, extremely inquisitive, Can I help you, he asked, I'm looking for someone, replied Senhor José, at the same time raising his hand to his inside jacket pocket in order to show the letter of authority. He did not complete the movement, a sudden feeling of unease stopped him, this time it wasn't the work of any guardian angel, what made him slowly withdraw his hand was the look in the pharmacist's eye, a look that was more like a dagger, a perforating drill, no one would think it, with his lined face and his white hair, but the effect of that look is to put even the most ingenuous of creatures immediately on guard, which is probably why the pharmacist's curiosity is never satisfied, the more he wants to know the less people tell him. That is what happened with Senhor José. He did not even show him the letter of authority, he did not say that he had come on behalf of the Central Registry, he merely took from his other pocket the girl's most recent school record card, which, fortunately, he had remembered to bring with him, Our school needs to find this lady in order to give her a diploma that she failed to pick up from the secretary's office, Senhor José felt a pang of pleasure, almost enthusiasm, at the exercise of inventive abilities he had imagined he had, so sure of himself that he remained unperturbed by the pharmacist's question, And you're only looking for her now, all these years later, It's quite possible she won't be interested, he replied, but the school is under an obligation to do all it can to make sure the diploma is delivered, And you've waited all this time for her to appear, To tell you the truth, we didn't even notice, it was a lamentable lack of attention on our part, a bureaucratic error, if you like, but it's never too late to right a wrong, It will definitely be too late if the lady's already dead, We have reason to believe that she's still alive, Why, We began by consulting the records, Senhor José was careful not to mention the words Central Registry, that was what saved him, because, at least at that moment, it meant that the pharmacist did not suddenly recall that a deputy registrar from the said Central Registry was one of his customers and lived three buildings down. For the second time, Senhor José had escaped the ultimate punishment. It's true that the deputy only rarely went into the chemist's, such purchases, and indeed all other purchases, apart from condoms, which the deputy was morally scrupulous enough to go and buy elsewhere, were made by his wife, so it's not that easy to imagine a conversation between the pharmacist and him, although one can't exclude the possibility of another conversation, the pharmacist saying to the deputy's wife, There was some school administrator in here looking for someone who used to live in the building where you live, at one point he mentioned consulting the records it was only after he'd gone that I thought it strange that he should have said records rather than Central Registry, it seemed to me that he had something to hide, there was even a moment when he raised his hand to his inside jacket pocket as if he were about to show me something, but he had second thoughts and instead took a school record card from his other pocket, I've been racking my brains to think what it could all be about, I think you should talk to your husband, you never know, there are some funny people about, Perhaps it's the same man I noticed the day before yesterday, standing on the pavement looking up at our windows, A middle-aged chap, a bit younger than me, who looked as if he'd only recently recovered from an illness, That's the one, You know I've got an instinct for these things, it never fails, there aren't many people can pull the wool over my eyes, It's a shame he didn't knock at my door, I'd have told him to come back in the afternoon, when my husband was home, then we'd know who he was and what he wanted, I'm going to keep an eye out in case he shows up again, And I'll make a point of mentioning it to my husband. Which she did, but she didn't tell the whole story, she unwittingly left out the most important detail, perhaps the most important of all, she did not say that the man who had been hanging around the building looked as if he had only recendy recovered from an illness. Accustomed to making links between causes and effects, since that is essentially what underpins the system of forces which, from the beginning of time, has ruled in the Central Registry, where everything was, is and will continue to be forever linked to everything, what is still alive to what is already dead, what is dying to what is being born, all beings to all other beings, all things to all other things, even when the only thing they seem to have in common, both beings and things, is what at first sight appears to separate them, the wise deputy would immediately have thought of Senhor José, the clerk who, with the inexplicably benevolent compliance of the Registrar, had been behaving very strangely lately. Finding the end of the thread and then untangling the whole skein would be only a step. That will not happen, though, Senhor José will not be seen again in that area. Of the ten different shops he went into to ask questions, including the pharmacy, in only three of them did he find someone who claimed to remember the girl and her parents, the picture on the report card jogged their memories, unless, of course, it merely took the place of their memories, it's quite likely that the people questioned simply wanted to be nice and did not want to dis appoint this man who looked as if he had just got over a nasty bout of flu and who spoke to them of a school diploma issued twenty years earlier and never delivered. When Senhor José got home, he felt exhausted and discouraged, this first stage in the new phase of his investigations had indicated no route along which to continue, quite the contrary, it seemed to have placed before him an unscalable wall. The poor man threw himself down on the bed wondering why he didn't do what the pharmacist, with ill-disguised sarcasm, had suggested, If I were you, I would already have solved the problem, How, asked Senhor José, I'd have looked in the phone book, that's the easiest way of finding someone these days, Thanks for the suggestion, but we've already done that, and the lady's name isn't there, replied Senhor José, thinking that would shut the man up, but the pharmacist returned to the charge, Go to the tax office then, they know everything about everyone. Senhor José stood staring at this spoilsport, struggling to disguise his embarrassment, the lady in the ground-floor apartment hadn't thought of that, then he managed to murmur a response, That's a good idea, I'll tell the head teacher. He left the pharmacy feeling furious with himself, as if, at the last moment, he had lacked the presence of mind to respond to an insult, he was all set to go back home without asking any more questions, but then, resigned, he thought, The wine has been poured, I must drink it, he did not, like someone else, say, Take this cup away from me, what you want is to kill me The second shop was a hardware store the third a butcher's, the fourth stationer's, the fifth an electrical goods shop the sixth a haberdasher's the usual routine suburban selection, and so on to the tenth shop, fortunately, his luck held, after the pharmacist no one else mentioned the tax office or the telephone directory: Now lying on his back, with his hands interlaced behind his head, Senhor José looks up at the ceiling and asks What am I going to do now and the ceiling replied, Nothing, your knowing her last address, I mean, the last address she lived at during her schooldays, gave you no clue as to how to continue your search, of course, you could go to earlier addresses, but that would be a waste of time, if the most recent shopkeepers couldn't help you, the others certainly won't be able to, So you think I should give up then, You've probably got no option, unless you go to the tax office, it shouldn't be difficult with that letter of authority you've got, besides they're civil servants like you, It's a forgery, Yes, you're right, you'd probably better not use it, I wouldn't like to be in your skin if one day they catch you redhanded, You couldn't be in my skin, you're just a plaster ceiling, I know, but what you're seeing of me is also a skin, besides, the skin is only what we want others to see of us, underneath it not even we know who we are, I'll hide the letter, If I were you, I'd tear it up or burn it, I'll put it with the bishop's papers, where I kept it before, Well, it's up to you, I don't like the tone you said that in, it doesn't augur at all well, The wisdom of ceilings is infinite, If you're such a wise ceiling, then give me an idea, Keep looking at me, sometimes it works.
The idea that the ceiling gave to Senhor José was to cut his holiday short and go back to work, You tell the boss that you're much stronger now and ask him to reserve the other days for another occasion, that is if you ever find a way out of the hole you've got yourself into, with all doors shut and not a single clue to follow, The Registrar is going to find it strange a member of staff going in to work when he's not obliged to and without being called, You've done stranger things than that recently, I lived a peaceful life before this absurd obsession, looking for a woman who doesn't even know I exist, But you know that she exists, that's the problem, I'd better just give up once and for all, Maybe, maybe, anyway just remember that not only the wisdom of ceilings is infinite, life's surprises are too, What do you mean by that tired old cliché, That the days go by and never come again, That's an even tireder cliché, don't tell me that the wisdom of ceilings consists only in clichés like that, said Senhor José scornfully, You know nothing about life if you think there is more than that to know, replied the ceiling and fell silent. Senhor José got off the bed, hid the letter in the wardrobe, among the bishop's papers, then went to fetch his notebook and began describing the frustrating events of the morning, laying particular emphasis on the pharmacists unpleasant manner and his gimlet eye. At the end of the report he wrote, as if the idea had been his, I think it's best that I go back to work. When he was putting away the notebook underneath the mattress, he remembered that he hadn't had any lunch, his head told him, not his stomach, if, over a period of time, people forget to eat, they get out of the habit of listening to the clock of hunger. If Senhor José were to continue his holiday, he wouldn't in the least mind going back to bed for the rest of the day, skipping lunch and supper, sleeping all night if he could, or taking refuge in the voluntary torpor of someone who has decided to turn his back on the disagreeable facts of life. But he had to feed his body in order to work the following day, he would hate it if weakness made him break out in a cold sweat again and suffer ridiculous dizzy spells that would be greeted with the feigned commiseration of his colleagues and the impatience of his superiors. He beat two eggs, added a few slices of chorizo sausage, a generous pinch of sea salt, put some oil in a frying pan, and waited until it had heated to just the right point, that was his one culinary talent, otherwise he resorted to opening cans. He ate the omelette slowly in small geometrically precise pieces, making it last as long as possible, not from any gastronomical pleasure, but just to fill the time. Above all, he did not want to think. His imaginary and metaphysical dialogue with the ceiling had served to disguise his complete mental disorientation the feeling of panic provoked by the idea that he would now hive nothing further to do in life, if as he had reason to fear the search for the unknown woman was over He felt a hard knot in his throat, like when he was told off as a child and he was expected to cry, and he would resist, resist, until at last the tears came, as they came now. He pushed his plate away, rested his head on his folded arms and cried without shame, at least this time there was no one here to laugh at him. On these occasions, ceilings can do nothing to help people in distress, they must merely wait up there until the storm passes, until the soul has unburdened itself, until the body is rested. That is what happened to Senhor José. After a few moments, he felt better, he brusquely wiped away the tears with his shirtsleeve and went to wash his plate and the cutlery. He had the whole afternoon ahead of him and nothing to do. He considered going to visit the lady in the ground-floor apartment, to tell her more or less what had happened, but then he thought that it wasn't worth it, she had told him everything she knew, and perhaps she would finally ask him what the devil the Central Registry was up to going to so much trouble over one person, a woman of no importance, it would be an indecent lie, as well as arrant stupidity, to tell her that we are all equal in the eyes of the Central Registry, just as the sun is there for everyone each time it rises, there are things one should avoid saying to an older person if we don't want them to laugh in our faces. Senhor José went to a corner of the house to get an armful of magazines and old newspapers from which he had already cut out articles and photographs, he might have missed something interesting, or there might be an article about someone who seemed a promising candidate for the rocky road to fame. Senhor José was returning to his collections.
The person who seemed least surprised was the Registrar. Having, as usual, arrived when everyone else was already at their places working, he paused for three seconds beside Senhor José's desk, but he didn't say a word. Senhor José was expecting to be submitted to a thorough interrogation as to the reasons for his early return to work, but the Registrar merely listened to the explanations given by the deputy in charge of that section, whom he later dismissed with an abrupt wave of his right hand, his index finger and middle finger held stiffly together, the others slightly bent, which, according to the gestural code of the Central Registry, meant that he did not care to hear another word on the matter. Caught between an initial expectation that he would be interrogated and relief at being left in peace, Senhor José struggled to clarify his ideas, to concentrate all his senses on the work that the senior clerk had placed on his desk, twenty or so birth certificates the information from each of which had to be transferred onto record cards and then filed away in the card-index system under the counter, in proper alphabetical order. It was a simple task, but a responsible one, which, fortunately for Senhor José, who was still weak in legs and head, could at least be carried out sitting down. The errors of copyists are the least excusable, there's no point in their coming to us and saying, I got distracted, on the contrary, recognising that one was distracted is the same as confessing that one was thinking about something else instead of giving full attention to the names and dates whose supreme importance lies in the fact that, in the present instance, it is those names and dates that give legal existence to the reality of existence. Especially the name of the person who was born. A simple error of transcription, a change in the initial letter of a surname for example, would mean that the index card would be put in the wrong place possibly far from where it should be as would inevitably happen in this Central Registry, where there are so many names, indeed where all the names are if the clerk who in times past had copied Senhor José's name onto the card had written José instead his mind confused by a similarity in pronunciation that verges on coincidence, there would be no end of work, involved, in trying to find the lost record card in order to write on it any of the three most commonly occurring notes marriage divorce death two more or less avoidable, the other not. That is why Senhor José copies with the greatest of care, letter by letter, these proofs of the existence of these new beings which have been entrusted to him, he has already transcribed sixteen birth certificates, now he is drawing the seventeenth towards him, he's preparing the record card, when his hand suddenly trembles, his eyes swim, beads of sweat appear on his forehead. The name before him, of a person of the female sex, is, in almost every detail, identical to that of the unknown woman, only the last name is different, and even then, the first letter is the same. It is highly likely that this card, bearing the name that it does, will have to be filed immediately after the other one, which is why Senhor José, like someone unable to control his impatience as the moment of a long-awaited encounter approaches, got up from his chair as soon as he had finished the transcription, ran to the appropriate drawer in the card index, nervously riffled through the cards, looked for and found the place. The unknown woman's card was not there. The fatal words immediately flashed up in Senhor José's head, the fulminating words, She's dead. Because Senhor José knows that the absence of a card from the card-index system inevitably means the death of the person whose name is on the card, he has lost count of the cards which he himself, in his twenty-five years as a civil servant, has removed from there and carried to the archive of the dead, but now he is refusing to accept the evidence that this could be the reason for the disappearance, some careless, incompetent colleague must have misfiled the card, perhaps it's a little further on a. little further back, Senhor José, out of desperation, wants to deceive himself, never, in all the centuries of the Central Registry's existence, has a card in this index system been misplaced there is only one possibility only one that the woman might still be alive, and that is if her card is temporarily in the possession of one of the other clerks because some new piece of information is to be added to it, Perhaps she's got married again, thought Senhor José, and, for an instant, his unexpected irritation at the idea mitigated his disquiet. Then, barely noticing what he was doing, he placed the card onto which he had copied the details from the birth certificate in the place of the one that had disappeared, and, his legs trembling, he returned to his desk. He could not ask his colleagues if, by any chance, they had the woman's card, he could not walk around all their desks trying to get a glimpse of the papers they were working on, all he could do was watch the drawer in the card-index system to see if someone replaced the small cardboard rectangle taken from there by mistake or for a less routine reason than death. The hours passed, morning gave way to afternoon, Senhor José barely managed to eat a thing at lunchtime, he must have something wrong with his throat to be so easily afflicted by these knots, these tightnesses, these anxieties. During the whole day not one colleague went to open that drawer, not one lost card found its way back, the unknown woman was dead.