ground-floor apartment said, Watch your tongue, please, But she is an old girl, She's just getting on a bit, Oh, enough of your hypocrisy, we're all getting on a bit, the question is how much, if it's not much, you're young if it's a lot, you're old, the rest is just idle twaddle, Oh, forget it, All right, Anyway, I'm going to look in the phone book, That's what I've been telling you to do for the last half hour. In pyjamas and slippers and wrapped in a blanket, Senhor Jose went into the Central Registry. His unusual outfit made him feel rather uneasy, as if he were being disrespectful to the venerable archives, to that eternal yellowish light which, like a moribund sun, hovered above the Registrars desk. The telephone book was there, on one corner of the table, you were not allowed to consult it without permission, even if it was an official call, and now, as he had done before, Senhor Jose could sit down at the desk, it's true that he had done so only once before, in a peerless moment that had seemed to him triumphant and glorious, but this time he didn't dare, perhaps because he was improperly dressed, out of an absurd fear that someone might surprise him like that, but what other living being, apart from him, wandered about there after hours. He thought it might be best to take the phone book with him, he would feel more comfortable at home, without the threatening presence of those towering shelves that seemed about to hurl themselves down from the shadowy ceiling, up there where the spiders weave and gorge. He shuddered as if the dusty, sticky webs really were falling on him and he very nearly made the rash mistake of picking up the phone book without first taking the precaution of measuring exactly the distances that separated it, above and to the side, from the edge of the table, and not just the distances, the precise angles too, fortunately, though, the Registrar's geometrical and topographical inclinations showed a clear preference for right angles and parallel lines. He returned home in the certainty that, shortly afterwards, when he replaced the phone book, it would be in exactly the right place, to the millimetre, and that the Registrar would not have to give orders to his deputies to find out who had used it how when and why. Up until the very last moment he was still expecting something to happen that would prevent him from taking the book a murmur, a suspicious creaking, a bright light emerging suddenly out of the mortuary depths of the archives, but there was absolute quiet, not even the sound of the woodworms tiny grinding jaws.
Now, Senhor Jose, with the blanket round his shoulders, is sitting at his own table, in front of him is the telephone book, he opens it at the beginning and lingers over the instructions, the codes, the price tariffs, as if that were what he was looking for. After a few moments, a sudden, unwitting impulse makes him leaf rapidly through the pages, forwards and backwards, until he stops on the page where the name of the unknown woman should be. Either it isn't there or his eyes won't see it. No, it's not there. It should come after that name, and it doesn't. It should come before that name, and it doesn't. Just as I said, thought Senhor Jose, and it wasn't true that he had said any such thing, that's just a way of proving oneself right in the eyes of the world, of giving expression, in this case, to joy, any police investigator would have shown his irritation by thumping the table, not Senhor Jose, Senhor Jose wears the ironic smile of someone who, having been sent to look for something he knew did not exist, returns from the search with these words on his lips, Just as I said, either she hasn't got a phone or she doesn't want her name to appear in the book He was so pleased that, immediately after that, without bothering to weigh the pros and cons, he looked for the name of the unknown woman's father, and that was there. Not a fibre of his being trembled. On the contrary, determined now to burn all his bridges, drawn on by an impulse known only to the true researcher, he looked for the name of the man. whom the unknown woman had divorced, and he was there too If he had a map of the city he would be able to mark the first five established staging posts, two in the street where the girl in the photo had been born another at the school and now these the beginning of a design made up like that of all lives of broken lines, crossings, intersections, but never bifurcations, because the spirit never goes anywhere without its legs, and the body would be incapable of moving without the wings of the spirit. He noted down the addresses, then what he would need to buy, a large map of the city, a thick piece of cardboard of the same size on which to fix it, a box of pins with coloured heads, red so they could be seen from a distance, for lives are like paintings, you always need to look at them from four paces away, even if one day you manage to touch their skin, catch their smell, taste them. Senhor Jose was quite calm, he wasn't troubled by the fact that he now knew where the unknown woman's parents and former husband lived, the husband, curiously enough, lived quite close to the Central Registry, obviously, sooner or later, Senhor Jose would go and knock at their doors, but only when he felt the moment had arrived, only when the moment told him, Now. He closed the phone book, returned it to the boss's desk, to the exact place where he had taken it from, and he went back home. According to the clock, it was suppertime, but the emotions of the day must have distracted his stomach, which gave no signs of impatience. He sat down again, pulled the blanket around him, tugging at the corners so as to cover his legs, and took up the notebook he had bought at the stationer's. It was time to begin making notes on how the search was going, the people he had met, the conversations he had had, his thoughts, his plans and tactics for an investigation that promised to be complex, The steps taken by someone in search of someone else, he thought, and the truth is, that although the process was only in its early stages, he already had a lot to say, If this were a novel, he murmured as he opened the notebook, the conversation with the lady in the ground-floor apartment would be a chapter in itself. He picked up a pen to begin but stopped halfway his eyes caught the paper on which he had written down the addresses, there was something he hadn't considered before the perfectly plausible hypothesis that the unknown woman, after she got divorced, had gone to live with her parents, the equally possible hypothesis that her husband had left the apartment, leaving the telephone in his name. If that was so, and bearing in mind that the street in question was near the Central Registry, the woman on the bus might well have been the same one. The inner dialogue seemed to want to start up again, It was, It wasn't, It was, It wasn't, but this time, Senhor Jose paid no heed to it and, bending over the notebook, he began to write the first words, Thus, I went into the building, went up the stairs to the second floor and listened at the door of the apartment where the unknown woman was born, then I heard a little baby crying, it could be her child I thought, and, at the same time, I heard a woman crooning to it softly, It must be her, later, I found out that it wasn't.
...
Contrary to what people might think when viewing these things from the outside, life is not necessarily easy in a government department, certainly not in this Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, where, since time which cannot be described as immemorial simply because the Registry contains a record of everything and everyone, thanks to the persistent efforts of an unbroken Une of great Registrars, all that is most sublime and most trivial about public office has been brought together, the qualities that make of the civil servant a creature apart, both usufructuary and dependent of the physical and mental space defined by the reach of his pen nib. Put simply, and with a view in this preamble to a more exact understanding of the general facts considered in the abstract, Senhor Jose has a problem to solve. Knowing how difficult it had been to squeeze out of the rule-bound reluctance of the hierarchy one miserable half hour off, which meant that he was not caught in flagrante by the husband of the young woman in the second-floor apartment, we can imagine his current distress as, night and day, he racks his brain for some convincing excuse that would allow him to ask for not one hour, but two, not two, but three hours, which is probably the amount of time he will need if he is to carry out a useful search of the schools archives. The effects of this constant, obsessive disquiet soon revealed themselves in mistakes at work, in lack of attention, in sudden bouts of drowsiness during the day due to insomnia, in short, Senhor Jose, until then considered by his various superiors to be a competent, methodical and dedicated civil servant, began to be the object of severe warnings, reprimands and calls to order that only served to confuse him all the more, and, needless to say, the way he was carrying on, he could be absolutely sure of a negative response if, at some point, he could actually bring himself to ask for the longed-for time off. Things reached such a pitch that, after fruitless analysis by senior clerks and deputies in turn, they had no option but to bring the matter to the notice of the Registrar, who, at first, found the whole business so absurd that he could not understand what all the fuss was about. The fact that a civil servant should have so grievously neglected his duties made any benevolent tendency towards reaching an exculpatory decision impossible, it constituted a grave offence against the working traditions of the Central Registry, something that could only be justified by some grave illness. When the delinquent was brought into his presence, that was exactly what the Registrar asked Senhor Jose, Are you ill, I don't think so, sir, Well, if you're not ill, how do you explain your recent poor standard of work, I don't know, sir, perhaps it's because I haven't been sleeping well, In that case, you are ill, No, it's just that I'm not sleeping very well, If you're not sleeping well, it's because you're ill, a healthy person always sleeps well, unless he has something weighing on his conscience, some reprehensible mistake, the sort that your conscience cannot forgive, for conscience is most important, Yes, sir, If your errors at
