Respect for the facts, and a simple moral obligation not to offend the credulity of anyone prepared to accept as plausible and coherent the difficulties of such an extraordinary exploit, demand immediate clarification of that last statement: Senhor José did not drop as lightly from the windowsill as a leaf falling from a bough. On the contrary, he fell very heavily, the way an entire tree would fall, when he could perfectly easily have lowered himself gradually down from his temporary seat until his feet touched the ground. The fall, given the thud with which he hit the ground and the subsequent succession of painful collisions, revealed to him, before bis eyes could confirm the fact, that the place he had landed in was like a prolongation of the porch outside, since both places were used as a storage space for things no longer needed, although it had probably happened the other way around, this place came first and, only later, when there was no more room here, did they resort to the porch outside. Senhor José sat there for a few moments, waiting for his breathing to return to normal and for his arms and legs to stop shaking. Then he turned on the flashlight, being careful to shine it only on the floor in front of him, and he saw that, between the piled-up furniture on either side, there was a path that led to the door. It troubled him to think that the door might be locked, in which case he would have to break it down despite having none of the necessary imple ments and despite the ensuing noise. Outside it was still raining, everyone must be asleep, but we can't be sure, there are people who sleep so lightly that even the whine of a mosquito is enough to wake them, then they get up, go to the kitchen for a glass of water, look casually out of the window and see a black rectangular hole in the wall of the school, and perhaps think, They're awfully careless at that school, imagine leaving a window open in weather like this, or, If I remember rightly, that window was closed, it must have been blown open by the wind, no one is going to think there's a thief inside, besides, they'd be quite wrong, because Senhor José, may we remind you once again, has not come here to steal. It has just occurred to him that he should close the window so that no one outside will notice the break-in, but then he has doubts, he wonders if it wouldn't be better to leave it as it is, They'll think it was the wind or carelessness on the part of some employee, if I close it they'll immediately notice that there's no glass in it, especially since the glass is opaque, almost white. Convinced that the rest of the world follows the same deductive paths as he does, he decided to leave the window open and then began to crawl past the furniture to the door. It wasn't locked. He gave a sigh of relief, from then on, there should be no further obstacles. Now what he needed was a comfortable chair, or, even better, a sofa, to spend what remained of the night resting, if his nerves would let him sleep. As an experienced chess player, he had calculated the moves, indeed, when you're reasonably sure of the immediate objective causes, it's not that difficult to think through the range of probable and possible effects and their transformation into causes, all in turn generating effects causes effects and causes effects causes, and so on into infinity, but we know that Senhor José has no need to go quite that far. To prudent people it will seem foolish for the clerk to have walked straight into the lion's den, and then, as if that were not audacious enough, to remain there calmly for what remained of the night and all of tomorrow, with the risk of being caught in flagrante by someone with far greater deductive powers than his in the matter of open windows. It must be recognised, however, that it would have been even less sensible to have gone walking from room to room putting on lights. The combination of an open window and a light, when everyone knows that the legitimate users of a house or a school are absent, is a mental leap that anyone can make, however trusting they may be, they usually call the police.
Senhor José ached all over, he had skinned his knees, which were possibly bleeding, the discomfort caused by his trousers rubbing against them could mean nothing else, apart from that, he was soaked to the skin and dirty from head to foot. He removed his dripping raincoat and thought, If there was an inner room here, I could turn on the light, and a bathroom, a bathroom where I could have a wash, or at least wash my hands. Feeling his way, opening and shutting doors, he found what he was looking for, first, a small, windowless room lined with shelves containing stationery for school and office, pencils, notebooks, loose paper, pens, erasers, bottles of ink, rulers, set squares, bevel squares, protractors, drawing sets, tubes of glue, boxes of staples, and other things he couldn't see. With the light on he could at last examine the damage caused by his adventure. The wounds to his knees were not as bad as he had imagined, they were only superficial grazes, although still painful. In the morning, when he would no longer need to turn on lights, he would look for something that can be found in every school, the white first-aid cabinet, disinfectant, alcohol, peroxide, cotton wool, bandages, compresses, plasters, not all of which he would need. None of those remedies would be of any help to his raincoat, which is suffering from terminal grime, the lard having impregnated the fabric, Perhaps I could get the worst of it off with alcohol, thought Senhor José. Then he went in search of a bathroom, and he was lucky, he didn't have to walk very far before he found one which, to judge by its tidiness and cleanliness, must have been used by the teachers. The window, which also opened onto the back of the school, apart from having frosted glass, obviously more necessary here than in the storeroom through which he had entered, had internal wooden shutters, thanks to which Senhor José could at last turn on the light, have a wash and be able to see what he was doing. Then, more or less clean, his strength restored, he went in search of a place to sleep. Although, as a student, he had not been in a school like this, so luxurious and spacious, he knew that every school has a head teacher, and that every head teacher has a study, and that all such studies have a sofa, which was exactly what his body was crying out for. He continued to open and close doors, he looked inside rooms to which the diffuse light from outside gave a ghostly air, where the students' desks looked like lines of tombs, where the teacher's desk was like a sombre sacrificial altar, and the blackboard the place where everyone would be called to account. He saw, pinned to the walls, like the vague stains that time leaves behind on the skins of people and things, maps of the sky, of the world and of different countries, hydrographic and orographic maps of the human body, the channelling of the blood, the digestive tract, the ordering of the muscles, the communication network of the nervous system, the framework of the bones, the bellows of the lungs, the labyrinth of the brain, the section of the eye, the tangle of the genitals. The classrooms followed one after the other, along corridors that circled the school, everywhere there was the smell of chalk, almost as old as that of bodies, there are even those who believe that God, after shaping the clay from which he later made them, began by drawing a man and a woman with a stick of chalk on the surface of the first night, which is where we get the one certainty we have, that we were, are and will be dust, and that we will be lost in another night as dark as that first night. In some places the darkness was thick, absolute, as if swathed in black cloths, but in others, there hovered the vibrant shimmer of an aquarium, a phosphorescence, a blue-tinged luminosity that could not possibly come from the street lamps, or, if it did, it was transformed as it came in through the glass. Remembering the pale lamp eternally suspended above the Registrar's desk, and which the surrounding shadows always seemed about to devour, Senhor José murmured, The Central Registry is different, then he added, as if requiring a response to his own remark, Probably the greater the difference, the greater the similarity, and the greater the similarity, the greater the difference, at that moment he did not yet know how right he was.
There were only classrooms on that floor, the head teacher's study was doubtless upstairs, removed from voices, from irksome noises, from the hubbub of students entering and leaving their classes. There was a skylight above the staircase and, as he went up the stairs, he moved from darkness into light, which, in the circumstances, had no other meaning than the prosaic one of allowing us, at last, to be able to see where we are putting our feet. Chance ordained that during this new search, before he found the head teacher's study, Senhor José should first enter the school secretary's office, a room with three windows that looked out onto the street. The room contained the usual furniture found in offices of this type, there were a few desks and an equal number of chairs, as well as cupboards, fifing cabinets, card indexes, Senhor José's heart leapt to see them, that was what he had come looking for, files, index cards, records, statements, notes, the history of the unknown woman when she had been a girl and an adolescent, always assuming that there were no other schools in her life after this one. Senhor José opened a card-index drawer at random, but the light coming in from the street was not bright enough for him to see what kinds of records it contained. I've got plenty of time, thought Senhor José, what I need now is to sleep. He left the office, and two doors farther along, he finally found the head teachers study. Compared with the austerity of the Central Registry, it would be no exaggeration here to speak of luxury. The floor was carpeted, the window was hung with heavy curtains, which were drawn shut, there was a large, old-fashioned desk and a modern chair in black leather, all this Senhor José discovered because, when he opened the door and found himself in complete darkness, he did not hesitate to turn on first his flashlight, and then, the centre light. Since you could see no fight coming in from the outside, no one outside would be able to see light coming from inside. The head teacher's chair was comfortable, he could sleep there, but even better was the long, broad, three-seater sofa that seemed charitably to be opening its arms to him in order to welcome and comfort his weary body. Senhor José looked at his watch, it was a few minutes before three. Seeing how late it was, for he hadn't even noticed time passing, he felt suddenly very tired, I've had enough, he thought, and, unable to contain himself, out of pure nervous exhaustion, he began to sob, to weep uncontrollably, almost convulsively, standing there, as if he were once again the little first-year student, in another school, who had committed some mischief and been summoned by the head teacher to receive his just punishment. He threw his drenched raincoat down on the floor, took his handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and raised it to his eyes, but the handkerchief was just as wet as everything else, for his entire being, from head to foot, he realised now, seemed to be oozing water, as if he were nothing but a wrung-out rag, his body was filthy, his spirit bruised, and both felt equally wretched, What am I doing here, he asked himself, but he preferred not to answer, he was afraid that, once laid bare, the reason that had brought him to this place would strike him as absurd, ridiculous, crazy. A sudden shiver ran through him. I've caught a cold already, he said out loud and immediately sneezed twice, and then, while he was blowing his nose, he found himself following the capricious paths of a thought which goes where it chooses without offering any explanation, and remembering those film actors who are constantly plunging into water fully clothed or getting drenched by torrential rain, and who never catch pneumonia, or even a simple cold, as happens every day in real life, at most, they wrap themselves up in a blanket over their wet clothes, which would seem a ludicrous thing to do if we did not know that filming is about to be interrupted so that the actor can withdraw to his dressing room, take a hot bath and don his monogrammed dressing gown. Senhor José began to take off his shoes, then he removed his jacket and shirt, pulled off his trousers and hung them on a tall hat stand that he found in one corner, now all he needed was to wrap himself up in that film's inevitable blanket, a difficult accessory to find in a head teacher's study, unless the head teacher was an elderly person, the sort whose knees get cold when he's been sitting down for any length of time. Senhor José's deductive powers led him once more to the correct conclusion, the blanket lay carefully folded on the seat of the chair. It wasn't a large blanket, it didn't cover him completely, but it would be better than lying naked all night. Senhor José turned off the centre light, used the flashlight to guide himself back to the sofa and, sighing, stretched out on it, but then immediately curled up tight in order to fit his whole body beneath the blanket. He was still shivering, he had kept on his underclothes and they were still damp, probably with sweat, from the physical effort, the rain couldn't possibly have penetrated that far. He sat up on the sofa, slipped off his vest and pants, removed his socks, then wrapped the blanket around him as if he were trying to make of it a second skin, and thus, rolled up like a wood louse, he let himself sink into the darkness of the study, waiting for a little merciful warmth that would transport him into the mercy of sleep. Both took a long time to come, driven away by a thought that would not leave him, What if someone walks in and finds me in this state, I mean, naked, they would call the police, they would handcuff him, they would ask him his name, his age and his profession, the head teacher would be the first to arrive, then the Registrar, and both would look at him with harsh, condemnatory eyes, What are you doing here, they would ask, and he would have no voice to reply with, he couldn't explain to them that he was looking for an unknown woman, they would probably all just burst out laughing, and then ask again, What are you doing here, and they would keep asking until he confessed everything, the proof of this was that they were still repeating it in his dreams when, as morning was returning to the world, Senhor José finally managed to abandon his exhausting vigil, or it abandoned him.
He woke up late, dreaming that he was back on the porch roof with the rain pounding down on him as loudly as a waterfall, and the unknown woman, in the shape of a film actress from his collection, was sitting on the window ledge with the head teacher's blanket folded in her lap, waiting for him to complete his climb, at the same time saying to him, Wouldn't it have been better to have knocked at the front door, to which he, panting, replied, I didn't know you were here, and she, I'm always here, I never go out, then, just as it seemed she was about to bend towards him in order to help him up, she suddenly disappeared, the porch disappeared with her, and only the rain remained, falling, falling without cease upon the chair belonging to the Registrar, where Senhor José saw himself sitting. His head ached slightly, but his cold didn't seem to have got any worse. A sliver of greyish light slipped in between the curtains, which meant that, contrary to appearances, they had not been completely closed. No one will have noticed, he thought, and he was right, the light of a star is brighter than bright, but not only is the greater part of it lost in space, a mere mist is enough to hide the excess light from our eyes. Even if those living on the other side of the street had come to peer out the window to see what the weather was like, they would think that the luminous thread undulating between the drops sliding down the windowpane was just the rain glittering. Still wrapped in the blanket, Senhor José slightly parted the curtains, it was his turn to find out what the weather was like. It wasn't raining at that moment, but the sky was covered by a single dark cloud, so low it seemed to touch the rooftops, like a huge tombstone. Just as well, he thought, the fewer people out in the street the better. He went over and felt the clothes he had taken off, to see if they were in a fit state to be put back on. His shirt, vest, underpants and socks were reasonably dry, his trousers rather less so, but bis jacket and raincoat would take many more hours to dry. To avoid the damp-stiffened cloth rubbing against his grazed knees, he put everything on except his trousers and set off in search of the first-aid cabinet. Logically, it must be on the ground floor, near the gymnasium and the accidents that tend to happen there, next to the playground where, between classes, in games of greater or lesser violence, the students go to work off their energy and, more important, the tedium and anxiety provoked by study. He was right. After washing his wounds with peroxide, he dabbed them with some disinfectant that smelled of iodine and carefully bandaged them, using so many plasters that it looked as if he were wearing knee pads. He was still able, though, to flex his joints enough to walk. He put on his trousers and felt like a new man, although not new enough to forget the general malaise affecting his whole body. There must be something here for colds and headaches, he thought, and soon afterwards, having found what he needed, he had two pills in his stomach. He did not need to take any precautions to avoid being seen from outside, since, as one would expect, the window in the first-aid room was also made of frosted glass, but from then on, he would have to pay attention to every move he made, he couldn't afford any mistakes, he must keep well away from the windows and, if he absolutely had to go over to a window, then he would have to do so on all fours, he must behave, in short, as if he had never done anything in his life but burgle houses. A sudden burning in his stomach reminded him that it had been a mistake to take the pills unaccompanied by food, even if only a biscuit, Right, where would I find biscuits here, he asked himself, realising that now he had a new problem to solve, the problem of food, since he wouldn't be able to leave the building until it was dark, Very dark, he added. Although, as we know, he is easily satisfied when it comes to food, he would have to eat something to dull his appetite until he got home, Senhor José, however, replied to that necessity with these stoical words, It's only one day, no one ever died from not eating for a few hours. He left the first-aid room, and although the secretary's office, where he would go to do his research, was on the second floor, he decided, out of sheer curiosity, to take a turn about the rooms on the ground floor. He immediately found the gymnasium, with its cloakrooms, its wall bars and other apparatus, the beam, the box, the rings, the pommel horse, the springboard, the mattresses, in his day, schools didn't have all this sports equipment, nor would he have wanted them to, being, as he had been then and as he continued to be, what is generally termed a bit of a wimp. The burning in his stomach was getting worse, a wave of bile rose into his mouth pricking his throat if only he could get rid of his headache, It's the cold, I've probably got a fever he thought as he opened another door Blessed be the spirit of curiosity, it was the refectory. Then Senhor José's thoughts grew wings, he rushed off in search of food Where there's a refectory there's a kitchen where there's a kitchen he didn't need to complete the thought, the kitchen was there with its oven its pots and pans its plates and glasses its cupboards, its huge fridge. He headed straight for it! flung open the door, and there was the food all Ut up, once more may the god of the curious be praised, as well as the god of burglars, in some cases no less deserving. A quarter of an hour later, Senhor José was definitely a new man, restored in body and soul, with his clothes almost dry, his knees bandaged and his stomach working on something rather more nutritious and substantial than two bitter anti-cold pills. Around lunchtime, he would return to this kitchen, to this kindly fridge, but now he must go and investigate the card indexes in the secretary's office, to advance a step further, whether a large step or a small one he had yet to find out, in probing the circumstances of the unknown woman's life thirty years ago, when she was just a little girl with serious eyes and bangs down to her eyebrows, she would have sat down on that bench to eat her afternoon snack of bread and jam, perhaps sad because she had blotted her fair copy, perhaps glad because her godmother had promised her a doll.
The label on the drawer was explicit, Students in Alphabetical Order, other drawers were marked differently, First-year Students, Second-year Students, Third-year Students and so on up to the final year of school. Senhor José took a quiet professional pleasure in the archive system, organised in such a way as to facilitate access to the cards of students by two convergent and complementary routes, one general, the other particular. A separate drawer contained the teachers' record cards, as one could tell from the label, Teachers. Seeing that label immediately set in motion, in Senhor José's mind, the gears of his highly efficient deductive mechanism, If, as it is logical to suppose, he thought, the teachers in this drawer are those currently teaching in the school, then the student cards, out of mere archivistic coherence, must refer to the current student population, besides, anyone can see that the record cards of thirty years' worth of students, and that's a low estimate, could never fit in these half-dozen drawers, however thin the cards. With no hope of finding the card, but merely to soothe his conscience, Senhor José opened the drawer where, according to the alphabet, the card belonging to the unknown woman would be found. It wasn't there. He closed the drawer and looked around him, There must be another card index for former pupils, he thought, they can't possibly destroy them when they come to the end of their course, that would be a crime against the most elementary rules of archivism. If such a card index existed, however, it wasn't there. Nervously, and knowing full well that the search would be fruitless, he opened the cupboards and the drawers in the desk. Nothing. As if it could not bear the disappointment, his headache intensified. What now, José, he asked himself. We must look elsewhere, he replied. He left the secretary's office and looked up and down the long corridor. There were no classrooms here, therefore the rooms on this floor, apart from the head teacher's study, must have other uses, one of them, as he saw straightaway, was the staff room, another seemed to be a storeroom for redundant school material, and the other two contained, at last, what seemed to be, what must be, the schools historic archive, arranged in boxes on large shelves. Senhor José was at first exultant, but, and this is the advantage of someone with experience in his line of work, or, given his suddenly dashed hopes, the painful disadvantage, only a few minutes sufficed for him to realise that what he wanted wasn't there either, the files were of a purely bureaucratic nature, letters received, duplicates of letters sent, statistics, attendance records, progress charts, rule books. He searched again, twice, in vain. Feeling desperate, he went out into the corridor, All this effort for nothing, he said, and then, again, forcing himself to obey logic, It's impossible, those wretched record cards must be somewhere, if these people keep all those years of correspondence that is of no use to anyone, they must have kept students' record cards, which are vital documents for biographies, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if some of the people in my collection were students at this school. In other circumstances, it might have occurred to Senhor José that, just as he had enriched his collection of clippings with copies of the relevant birth certificates, it would also be interesting to add documents regarding attendance and success at school. However, that would never be anything but an impossible dream. It was one thing having the birth certificate in hand in the Central Registry, quite another having to wander the city breaking into schools in order to find out if so-and-so got an eight or a fifteen in math in the fourth year, and if someone else really was such an unruly pupil as he claimed to have been in interviews. And if, in order to get into each of those schools, he had to suffer as much as he had suffered breaking into this one, then it would be better to remain in the peace and quiet of his home, resigned to knowing of the world only what the hands can grasp without actually leaving the house, words, images, illusions.
Determined to get to the bottom of things once and for all, Senhor José went back into the archive, If there's any logic in this world, then the record cards must be here, he said. He went through the shelves in the first room, box by box, bundle by bundle, with a fine-tooth comb, a turn of phrase that must have its origins in the days when people needed to comb their hair with what was also called a nit comb in order to catch what a normal comb missed, but the search again proved vain, there were no record cards. That is, there were, placed higgledy-piggledy in a large box, but only from the last five years. Convinced now that all the other record cards had been destroyed, torn up, thrown into the rubbish, if not burned, it was with a feeling of hopelessness, with the indifference of someone merely fulfilling a useless obligation, that Senhor José went into the second room. However, his eyes, if the expression is not entirely inappropriate, took pity on him, however hard you try you will find no other explanation for the fact that they im mediately placed before him a narrow door between two shelves, as if they knew, from the start, that the door was there. Senhor José thought he had reached the end of his work, the crowning moment of all his efforts, indeed the opposite would reveal an unforgivable harshness on the part of fate, there must be some reason why ordinary people persist in saying, despite all life's vicissitudes, that bad luck is not always waiting just behind the door, behind this one, anyway, as in the old stories, there must be a treasure, even if, in order to reach it, it might still be necessary to fight the dragon. This one does not have furious, drooling jaws, it does not snort smoke and fire through its nostrils, it does not roar loud as any earthquake, it is simply a waiting, stagnant darkness, thick and silent as the ocean deeps, there are reputedly brave people who would not have the courage to go any farther, some would even run away at once, terrified, fearful that the obscene beast would grab them round the throat with its claws. Although not a person whom one could give as an example or model of bravery, Senhor José, after his years in the Central Registry, has acquired a knowledge of the night, of shadows, obscurity and darkness that makes up for his natural timidity and now permits him, without excessive fear, to reach his arm into the body of the dragon in search of the light switch. He found it, he flicked it on, but there was no light. Shuffling forwards so as not to stumble, he advanced little until he barked his right shin on something hard. He bent down to feel the obstacle and, just as he realised that it was a metal step he felt the shape of the flashlight in his pocket in the midst of so many contradictory emotions, he had completely forgotten about it. Before him was a spiral staircase that ascended into thicker darkness than that on the threshold and which swallowed up the beam of light before it could show him the way upwards. The staircase has no bannister exactly what chronic vertigo sufferer does not need on the fifth step, if he manages to get that far Senhor José will lose all notion of the real height he has reached, he will feel that he's going to fall helplessly to the ground, and he will fell. But that is not what happened. Senhor José is being ridiculous, but it doesn't matter, only he knows just how absurd and ridiculous what he is doing is, no one will see him drag himself up that staircase like a lizard recently awoken from hibernation, clinging anxiously to the steps, one after the other, his body trying to follow the apparently never-ending, spiralling curve, his knees again bearing the brunt. When Senhor José's hands finally touched the smooth floor of the attic, his physical strength had long since lost the battle with his frightened spirit, which is why he could not immediately get up, he lay down there, his shirt and face resting on the dust covering the floor, his feet hanging over the steps, what torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures.
After a few moments, still lying facedown, because he was not so foolish as to attempt to stand up in the midst of the darkness, running the risk of taking a false step and plunging back into the abyss from which he had come, Senhor José managed, with difficulty, to turn around and to remove the flashlight he had put in his back trouser pocket. He switched it on and shone it over the floor immediately ahead of him. There were scattered papers, cardboard boxes, some of them burst, all of them thick with dust. A few yards ahead he could see what seemed to be the legs of a chair. He raised the beam slightly, it was a chair. It seemed in good condition, the seat, the back, and above it, hanging from the low ceiling, was a bare lightbulb, Just like in the Central Registry, thought Senhor José. He directed the beam around the room and saw the fleeting shapes of shelves that seemed to cover every wall. They were not high shelves, nor could they be, given the steepness of the roof, and they were weighted down with boxes and shapeless bundles of paper. I wonder where the light switch is, thought Senhor José, and the reply was as expected, It's downstairs and it doesn't work, I don't think I can find the record cards with only this flashlight, besides I'm beginning to think the battery might be getting low, You should have thought of that before, Perhaps there's another switch in here, Even if there is, we already know that the bulb's burned out, We don't know that, It would have come on otherwise, The only thing we know is that we tried the switch and the light didn't come on, Exactly, It could mean something else, What, That there's no bulb downstairs, So I'm right, the bulb here has burned out too, But there's nothing to say that there aren't two switches and two bulbs, one on the stairs and the other in the attic, now the one downstairs has burned out, but we still don't know about the one upstairs, If you're clever enough to deduce that, then find the switch. Senhor José abandoned the awkward position in which he was still lying and sat up, My clothes will be in a dreadful state by the time I leave here, he thought, and pointed the beam at the wall nearest the opening onto the stairs, If there is a switch, then it will be here. He found it at the precise moment when he was reaching the discouraging conclusion that the only switch was indeed downstairs. As he shifted his free hand on the floor in order to get more comfortable, the light went on, the switch, one of those button switches, had been installed in the floor, so that it would be within immediate reach of anyone coming up the stairs. The yellowish light from the bulb barely reached the wall at the back, there was no sign of footprints on the floor. Remembering the record cards that he had seen on the floor below, Senhor José said out loud, It's at least six years since anyone came in here. When the echo of his words had faded, Senhor José noticed that there was a vast silence in the attic, as if the silence that had been there before contained a larger silence, the woodworms must have stopped their excavating work. From the ceiling hung spiders' webs black with dust, their owners must have died long ago from lack of food, there was nothing here that would attract a stray fly, especially not with the door shut downstairs, and the moths, the silverfish and the woodworms in the beams had no reason to exchange the galleries of cellulose, where they lived, for the outside world. Senhor José got up, vainly trying to brush the dust from his trousers and shirt, his face looked like the face of some eccentric clown, with a great stain on one side only. He went and sat down on the chair, underneath the bulb, and started talking to himself, Let's look at this rationally, he said, if the old record cards are here, and everything indicates that they are, it is highly unlikely that they are going to be grouped student by student, that is, that the record cards of each student will be all together, so that you can see at a glance the whole of their scholastic career, its more likely that, at the end of each school year, the secretary bundled up all the record cards corresponding to that year and placed them here, I doubt she would even have gone to the trouble of putting them in boxes, or perhaps she did, we'll have to see, I hope, if she did, she at least thought to write the relevant year on them, but one way or another, it will just be a question of time and patience. This conclusion had not added greatly to his initial premise, from the very beginning of his life, Senhor José has known that he only needs time in order to use patience, and from the very beginning he has been hoping that patience will not run out of time. He got up, and faithful to the rule that, in all searches, the best plan is to start at one point and proceed from there on with method and discipline, he set to work at the end of one of the rows of shelves, determined to leave no piece of paper unturned, always checking that there wasn't another piece of paper hidden between top and bottom sheets. Each movement he made, opening a box, untying a bundle, raised a cloud of dust, so much so that in order not to be asphyxiated, he had to tie his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, a preventive measure that the clerks were advised to follow each time they went into the archive of the dead in the Central Registry. In a matter of moments his hands were black and the handkerchief had lost any remaining trace of whiteness, Senhor José had become a coal miner hoping to find in the depths of the mine the pure carbon of a diamond.
He found the first file after half an hour. The girl no longer had bangs, but, in this photograph taken at fifteen, her eyes had the same air of wounded gravity. Senhor José placed it carefully on the chair and continued his search. He was working in a kind of dream state, meticulous, feverish, moths fluttered out from beneath his fingers, terrified by the light, and little by little, as if he were rummaging in the remains of a tomb, the dust became grafted onto his skin, so fine that it penetrated his clothing. At first, when he picked up a bundle of record cards, he went straight to what really interested him, then he began to linger over names, images, for no reason, just because they were there and because no one else would go into this attic to remove the dust covering them, hundreds, thousands of faces of boys and girls, looking straight at the camera, at the other side of the world, waiting, for what exactly they didn't know. It wasn't like that in the Central Registry, in the Central Registry there were only words, in the Central Registry you could not see how faces had changed or continued to change, when that was precisely what was most important, the thing that time changes, not the name, which never changes. When Senhor José's stomach began to rumble, there were seven record cards on the chair, two of them with identical pictures, her mother must have said, Take this one from last year, there's no need to go to the photographer again, and she took the picture, sad that she wouldn't have a new photograph this year. Before going down to the kitchen, Senhor José went to the head teacher's bathroom to wash his hands, he was amazed by what he saw in the mirror, he hadn't imagined that his face could possibly get into this state, filthy, furrowed with lines of sweat, It doesn't even look like me, he thought, and yet he had probably never looked more like himself. When he had finished eating, he went up to the attic as fast as his knees would allow, it occurred to him that if the light failed, something to bear in mind after all this rain, he would not be able to complete bis search. Assuming that she hadn't repeated a year, he only had five more record cards to find, and if he were now to be plunged into darkness, all his efforts would be in part lost, since he would never be able to get back into the school. Absorbed in his work, he had forgotten about bis headache, his cold, and now he realised that he was feeling worse. He went downstairs again to take another two pills, then went back up, making a supreme effort, and resumed his work. The afternoon was drawing to a close when he found the last record card. He turned off the light in the attic, closed the door and, like a sleepwalker, put on his jacket and raincoat, removed as best he could any sign of his passing and sat down to wait for night to come.