The Collected Novels of José Saramago (289 page)

Despite this exhaustive accumulation of details, which some may consider insignificant, a case, to resort to botanical comparisons again, of not being able to see the forest for the trees, it is quite possible that some vigilant, attentive listener to this story, someone who has not lost a sense of standards inherited from mental processes determined, above all, by the logic acquired from knowledge, it is quite possible that such a listener might declare himself radically opposed to the existence, and still more to the spread, of such wild, anarchic cemeteries as this, which has grown to the point where it is almost cheek by jowl with the places that the living had intended for their exclusive use, that is, houses, streets, squares, gardens and other public amenities, theatres and cinemas, cafes and restaurants, hospitals, insane asylums, police stations, playgrounds, sports fields, fairgrounds and exhibition areas, car parks, large department stores, small shops, side streets, alleyways, avenues. For, while aware of the General Cemetery’s irresistible need for growth, in symbiotic union with the development of the city and its increased population, they consider that the area intended for one’s final rest should nevertheless keep within strict bounds and obey strict rules. An ordinary quadrilateral of high walls, with no decoration or fantastic architectural excrescences, would be more than sufficient, instead of this vast octopus, more octopus really than tree, however much that may pain poetic imaginations, reaching out with its eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four tentacles, as if to embrace the whole world. In civilised countries, the correct practice, with advantages proven by experience, is for bodies to remain beneath the earth for a few years, five usually, at the end of which, apart from the odd case of miraculous incorruptibility, what little is left after the corrosive work of quicklime and the digestive work of worms is dug up to make room for the new occupants. In civilised countries, they do not have this absurd practice of plots in perpetuity, this idea of considering any grave forever untouchable, as if, since life could not be made definitive, death can be. This has obvious consequences, the blocked-off door, the anarchic internal traffic system, the ever longer route that funerals have to make around the General Cemetery before they reach their destination at the far end of one of the octopus’s sixty-four tentacles which they would never find if they did not have a guide with them. Like the Central Registry, although, by some deplorable lapse of memory, this information was not given at the appropriate moment, the General Cemetery’s unwritten motto is All the Names, although it should be said that, in fact, these three words fit the Central Registry like a glove, because it is there that all the names are to be found, both those of the dead and those of the living, while the cemetery, given its role as ultimate destination and ultimate depository, has to content itself only with the names of the dead. This mathematical evidence, however, is not enough to silence the keepers of the General Cemetery who, confronted by what they call their apparent numerical inferiority, usually shrug their shoulders and argue, With time and patience everyone ends up here, the Central Registry, from this point of view, is merely a tributary of the General Cemetery. Needless to say, it is an insult to the Central Registry to call it a tributary. Despite these rivalries, this professional competitiveness, relations between those who work in the Central Registry and those in the Cemetery are openly friendly and full of mutual respect, because, at bottom, apart from the inevitable institutional collaboration between them, given the formal similarity and objective contiguity of their respective statutes, they know that they are digging at either end of the same vine, the vine called life and which is situated between two voids.

This is not the first time that Senhor José has been to the General Cemetery. The bureaucratic need to check certain data,
clarify discrepancies, compare facts, clear up differences, means that the people working in the Central Registry have to go to the cemetery with relative frequency, a task that nearly always falls to the clerks, hardly ever to the senior clerks, and never, need it be said, to the deputies or the Registrar. Sometimes, for similar reasons, the clerks and, on rare occasions, the officials from the General Cemetery go to the Central Registry, where they are received with the same cordiality with which Senhor José will be greeted here. Like the facade, the interior of the building is a perfect copy of the Central Registry, although, of course, one must point out that the people working in the General Cemetery usually say that the Central Registry is a perfect copy of the cemetery building, indeed an incomplete copy, since they lack the great door, to which those at the Central Registry reply that a fat lot of good the door is anyway, since it’s always closed. Nevertheless, here we find the same long counter stretching the whole length of the enormous room, the same towering shelves, the same arrangement of staff, in a triangle, with the eight clerks in the first row, the four senior clerks behind them, then the two deputy keepers, for that is what they are called here, not deputy registrars, just as the keeper, at the apex, is not a registrar, but a keeper. However, there are other members of staff at the cemetery apart from the clerks. Sitting on two continuous benches, on either side of the entrance door, opposite the counter, are the guides. Some people continue bluntly to call them gravediggers, as in the old days, but their professional title, in the city’s official gazette, is cemetery guide, which, contrary to what one might expect or imagine, is not just a well-intentioned euphemism intended to disguise the painful brutality of a spade digging a rectangular hole in the earth, rather, it is a correct description of a role which is not merely a question of lowering the dead into the depths, but of leading them over the surface too. These men, who work in pairs, wait there in silence for the funeral corteges to arrive and then, armed with the respective pass, filled in by the clerk chosen to deal with the matter, they get into one of the cars waiting in the parking lot, the ones that have a luminous sign at the rear that flicks on and off and says Follow me, like the cars used at airports, at least the keeper of the General Cemetery is quite right in that regard, when he says that they are more advanced in matters of modern technology than they are at the Central Registry, where tradition still dictates that the clerks use old-fashioned pens and inkwells. The fact is that when you see the funeral car and those in it obediently following the guides along the well-tended streets of the city and along the rough roads of the suburbs, with the light flashing on and off all the way to the grave, Follow me, Follow me, Follow me, it is impossible not to agree that not all changes in the world are for the worst. And although the detail may not be of any real importance for a global understanding of the story, it may be of interest to explain that a marked personality trait among these guides is a belief that the universe is in fact ruled by a superior thought process which is permanently alert to human needs, because if that were not so, they argue, cars would not have been invented at precisely the moment when they became most necessary, that is, when the General Cemetery had become so vast that it would be a real calvary to bear the deceased to his or her particular Golgotha by the traditional methods, whether using stick and rope or a two-wheeled cart. When someone sensibly remarks to them that they should be more careful in their use of words, since Golgotha and calvary originally mean one and the same thing, and that it makes no sense to use terms denoting pain and sorrow with regard to the transportation of someone who will never suffer again, you can guarantee that they will respond, rudely, that each man knows himself, but only God knows all men.

Senhor José went in and went straight up to the counter, casting a cold eye over the seated guides, whom he disliked because
their existence tilted the numerical balance of staff in the cemetery’s favour. Since he was known to the people there, he did not need to show the identity card proving that he was a member of staff at the Central Registry, and as for the famous letter of authority, it hadn’t even occurred to him to bring it, besides, even the least experienced of the clerks would have seen at a glance that it was false from beginning to end. Of the eight clerks lined up behind the counter, Senhor José chose one of the men with whom he got on best, a man a little older than himself, who had the absorbed air of one who no longer expects anything more from life. Like all the other clerks, he always seemed to be there whatever day it was. At first, Senhor José had thought that the people who worked at the cemetery never got a day off or took a holiday, that they worked every day of the year, until someone told him that this was not the case, that there was a group of casual workers contracted to work on Sundays, we are no longer in the days of slavery, Senhor José. Needless to say, the clerks at the General Cemetery have long hoped that the aforesaid casual workers might take over on Saturday afternoons too, but, for alleged reasons of budgets and finances, that demand has not yet been met, and in vain did the cemetery staff invoke the example of the Central Registry staff, who only worked on Saturday mornings, for, according to the sibylline communique issued from above refusing their request, The living can wait, the dead cannot. Anyway, it was unheard of for a member of staff from the Central Registry to appear there for work reasons on a Saturday afternoon, when everyone assumed he would be enjoying his weekly leisure time with his family, going on a trip into the country, or occupied with domestic tasks that have to wait until there’s a bit of free time, or merely lazing about, or even wondering what is the point of having leisure time if we don’t know what to do with it. In order to avoid any awkward questions, which could easily become embarrassing, Senhor José adroitly
pre-empted the other person’s curiosity, giving the excuse he had already prepared, It’s a special case, very urgent, my deputy needs this information first thing on Monday morning, that’s why he asked me to come to the General Cemetery today, in my free time, I see, you’d better tell me what it’s about then, It’s very simple, we just want to know when this woman was buried. The man took the card that Senhor José held out to him, copied the name and date of death onto a piece of paper, and went to consult the relevant senior clerk. Senhor José couldn’t catch what they said, here, as in the Central Registry, you can speak only in a low voice, and they were some way away from him too, but he saw the senior clerk nod and, judging by his lips, he was sure that he had said, Fine, go ahead. The man went to look in the card index under the counter, where all the cards of those who died in the last fifty years were to be found, the others filled the high shelves that stretched into the interior of the building, he opened one of the drawers, found the woman’s card, copied down the relevant date and came back to where Senhor José was standing, Here it is, he said, and added, as if he thought the information might be useful, She’s in the section for suicides. Senhor José felt a sudden contraction in the pit of his stomach which, according to an article he had read once in a popular magazine about science, is the approximate location of a kind of many-pointed star of nerves, a radiating junction called the solar plexus, however, he managed to hide his surprise behind an automatic mask of indifference, the cause of death would, of course, be on the lost death certificate, which he had never seen, but as a clerk in the Central Registry, especially coming to the cemetery, as he was, on business, he could not let on that he did not know. Very carefully he folded up the piece of paper and put it in his wallet and thanked the clerk, not forgetting to add, as one official to another, although that is purely a manner of speaking, since both were mere clerks, that he was always at his disposal
should he need anything at the Central Registry and always assuming that it was within his power to grant it. When he had taken two steps towards the door, he turned around, I’ve just had an idea, since I’m here, I think I’ll spend part of the afternoon taking a little stroll around the cemetery, if you could let me through here, I wouldn’t have to go the long way around, Hang on, I’ll go and ask, said the clerk. He took the request to the senior clerk to whom he had spoken before, but instead of replying, the latter got up and went over to the deputy keeper in charge of his work. Although he was even farther away this time, Senhor José could see by the nod the deputy gave and by the movement of his Hps that he was going to be allowed to use the inner door. The clerk did not return to the counter immediately, he first opened a cabinet from which he took a large card which he then placed beneath the Hd of a machine with little coloured fights on it. He pressed a button, there was a mechanical noise, more lights came on, and then a smaller piece of paper emerged from a slit in the side. The clerk put the card back in the cabinet and then came back to the counter, You’d better take a map with you, there have been cases of people getting lost, and it’s incredibly difficult to find them again, the guides have to go out looking for them in the cars and that gums up the works, you get funerals backed up outside, People panic easily, all they have to do is go in a straight line in the same direction, they’re bound to reach somewhere, now in the archive of the dead in the Central Registry it really is complicated, because there are no straight lines, In theory, you’re right, but the straight lines here are like the straight lines in a labyrinth of corridors, they’re constantly breaking off, changing direction, you walk around a grave and suddenly you don’t know where you are, In the Central Registry, we use Ariadne’s thread, it never fails, There was a time when we used it too, but it didn’t last long, the thread was found cut on several occasions and no one ever found out who the culprit was or why they’d done it, It certainly wasn’t the dead, that’s for sure, Who knows, The people who got lost were people with no initiative, they could have oriented themselves by the sun, Some probably would have if they hadn’t been unlucky enough to get lost on a cloudy day, We haven’t got one of those machines in the Central Registry, We’ve found them really useful. The conversation could not go on any longer, the senior clerk had already looked at them twice, and the second time he was frowning, it was Senhor José who remarked in a low voice, That senior clerk has already looked over here twice, I don’t want you to get into any trouble on my account, I’ll just show you where the woman is buried, see the end of this path, the wavy Une here is a stream which, for the moment, still serves as a boundary Une, the grave is in that corner there, you can identify it by the number, And by the name, Yes, if someone’s put one there, but it’s the numbers that count, the names wouldn’t fit on the map, you’d need a map the size of the world, Scale one to one, Yes, scale one to one, and even then, the names would have to be superimposed on each other, Is it up-to-date, We update it every day, Now tell me, what made you think I’d want to see the woman’s grave, No reason, perhaps because, in your place, I’d have done the same, Why, Just to be certain, That she’s dead, No, to be certain that she’d been alive. The senior clerk looked at them for a third time, made a movement as if he were about to get up, but did not complete it, Senhor José bade a hasty farewell to the clerk, Thank you, thank you, he said, at the same time nodding slightly in the direction of the keeper, a person to whom one should always bow, just as one gives thanks to heaven, even when it’s cloudy, with the important difference that then you don’t lower your head, you raise it.