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 Jose'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 Jose 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 Jose 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 Jose'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 Jose 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, Jose, 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 Jose 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 Jose 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 Jose 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 Jose 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 Jose 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 Jose, 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 Jose 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 Jose 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 Jose'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 Jose 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 Jose. 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 Jose, and the
