separated by about three yards and forming an irregular corridor, narrower with each day that passed, that joins the two side walls. The darkness here is absolute. The feeble daylight that manages to penetrate the layer of filth covering the windows inside and out, especially the last windows on either side, which are nearest to him, does not reach this far because of the soaring piles of bundled documents that almost touch the ceiling. As for the rear wall, it is entirely and inexplicably blank, that is, there isn't even a simple bull's-eye window to aid the frail beam from the flashlight. No one has ever been able to understand why the board of architects, resorting to a rather unconvincing aesthetic excuse, have stubbornly refused to modify the historic plan and authorise the creation of windows in the wall when it proves necessary to move it back yet again, despite the fact that from a layman's point of view, it would simply be satisfying a practical need. They should be here now, muttered Senhor Jose, then they'd know how difficult it is. The piles of paper on either side of the central passage are of different heights, the file and card of the unknown woman could be in either of them, although it's more Likely to be in one of the lower piles, if the law of least effort was that preferred by the clerk charged with filing them away. Unfortunately, in our disoriented society, there is no shortage of twisted minds, and it would come as no surprise if the clerk who came to put away the unknown woman's file and card, if indeed it was here that he came, had had the mischievous idea, born of sheer malice, of placing the enormous stepladder used for this purpose next to the highest pile of papers and climbing up it to place file and card right on the top. That is how things are in this world.
In a methodical, unhurried way, almost as if he were remembering the gestures and movements of the night he had spent in the school attic, when the unknown woman was probably still alive, Senhor Jose began his search. There was far less dust covering the papers here, which is easy enough to understand when you bear in mind that not a day passes without the files and cards of the deceased being brought here, which, imaginatively speaking, but in evident bad taste, would be the same as saying that in the depths of the Central Registry the dead are always clean. Only up high, where, as we have already said, the papers almost touch the ceiling, the dust sieved by time settles tranquilly on the dust already sieved by time, so much so that with the files you find up there, you have to clap the covers together to remove the dust, if you want to know who they belong to. If Senhor Jose fails to find what he's looking for on the lower levels, he will again have to sacrifice himself and climb the stepladder, but this time he will only have to be perched up there for a minute, he won't even have time to get dizzy, the flashlight beam will show him, at a glance, if a file was placed there recently. If the death of the unknown woman could be placed with a considerable degree of probability within the extremely short period of time corresponding, give or take a day, according to Senhor Jose, to one of the two periods in which he was absent from work, the week when he had flu and during his briefest of holidays, checking the documents in each of the piles can be done quite quickly, and even if the woman had died before, immediately after the memorable day on which the card fell into Senhor Jose's hands, not so much time had elapsed that the documents would now be filed away beneath an excessive number of other files. This repeated examination of situations as they arise, these persistent reflections, these meticulous ponderings on the light and the dark, on the straight and the labyrinthine, on the clean and the dirty, are all going on, just as we describe them, in Senhor Jose's head. But the apparently exaggerated amount of time it takes to explain them, or, strictly speaking, to reproduce them, is the inevitable consequence not only of the complexity, in both form and content, of the above-mentioned factors, but also of the very special nature of the mental circuitry of our particular clerk, who is now about to be tested to the limit. Advancing step by step along the narrow corridor formed, as we said, by the piles of documents and by the back wall, Senhor Jose has gradually been moving closer to one of the side walls. In principle, and speaking purely abstractly, no one would think of describing such a corridor, with its comfortable width of almost three yards, as narrow, but if you consider it in relation to the actual length of the corridor, which, we repeat, stretches from wall to wall, then we should really ask how it is that Senhor Jose, whom we know to be subject to serious perturbations of a psychological nature, for example, vertigo and insomnia, has not until now suffered a violent attack of claustrophobia in this enclosed and suffocating space. The explanation can perhaps be found precisely in the fact that the darkness does not allow him to perceive the limits of this space, which could be here or there, and that all he can see before him is the familiar, calming mass of papers. Senhor Jose has never spent so much time here, usually you just go there, file away the documents of a finished life and return to the safety of your desk, and if it's true that, on this occasion, from the moment he set off into the archive of the dead, he has been unable to shrug off a disquieting feeling of a presence surrounding him, he has attributed it to the diffuse terror of the hidden and the unknown to which even the most courageous of people have an all too human right. Senhor Jose had not felt fear, what you could really call fear, until he reached the end of the corridor and came face-to-face with the wall. He bent down to examine some papers fallen on the floor and that could well have been those of the unknown woman scattered here at random by the indifferent clerk, and suddenly, before he even had time to examine them, he stopped being Senhor Jose, clerk at the Central Registry, he stopped being fifty years old, now he is a very young Jose who has just started going to school, he is the child who hated going to sleep because every night he had the same obsessive nightmare, a massive stone wall, a blind wall, a prison, and over there, at the far end of the corridor, hidden in the darkness, there is just a small stone. A small stone that was slowly growing, that he could not see now with his eyes, but which the memory of the dreams he had dreamed told him was there, a stone that was increasing in size and moving as if it were alive, a stone that was expanding sideways and upwards, that was climbing the walls, and dragging itself towards him, curled in upon itself, as if it were not stone but mud, as if it were not mud but thick blood. The child emerged screaming from the nightmare when the filthy mass was touching his feet, when the tightening garrote of fear was almost strangling him, but poor Senhor Jose cannot wake from a dream which is no longer his. Cowering against the wall like a frightened dog, he points the flashlight with tremulous hand towards the other end of the corridor, but the beam doesn't reach that far, it stops halfway, more or less where the path to the archive of the living is to be found. He thinks that if he runs fast he'll be able to escape the advancing stone, but fear tells him, Be careful, how do you know it isn't there waiting for you you'll walk straight into the lion's den. In the dream the advance of the stone was accompanied by a strange music that seemed to be born out of the air, but here the silence is absolute, total, so dense that it swallows up Senhor Jose's breathing, just as the darkness swallows the beam from the flashlight, and which it has just swallowed completely. It was as if the darkness had suddenly advanced and covered Senhor Jose's face like a sucker. The child's nightmare was over though. For the child, ah, who can understand the human heart, the fact that he could not see the walls of the prison, both near and far, was tantamount to their having ceased to be there, it was as if the space around him had suddenly grown larger, freer, stretching out to infinity, as if the stones were just the inert mineral of which they are made, as if water were simply the basic ingredient of mud, as if blood flowed only in his veins, not outside them. Now it is not a childhood nightmare that is frightening Senhor Jose, what paralyses him with fear is once more the thought that he might die in this place, just as, all that time ago, he imagined that he might fall from that other ladder and lie dead here, undocumented in the midst of all the documents of the dead, crushed by the darkness, by the avalanche that would soon unleash itself from above, and that tomorrow they would come and find him, Senhor Jose hasn't come in to work, I wonder where he is, He'll turn up, and when a colleague came to transfer other files and other cards, he would find him there, exposed to the light of a far superior flashlight than this one which had served him so badly when he needed it most. The minutes passed that had to pass before Senhor Jose could gradually begin to hear inside himself a voice saying, Look, apart from being afraid, nothing really bad has happened to you yet, you're sitting here quite unharmed, it's true the flashlight went out on you, but what do you need a flashlight for, you've got the string tied round your ankle, with the other end tied to the leg of the Registrar's desk, you're safe, like an unborn child attached by the umbilical cord to its mother's womb, not that the Registrar is your mother, or your father, but relationships between people here are complicated, what you must remember is that childhood nightmares never come true, far less dreams, that business with the stone really was pretty horrible, but it's probably got a scientific explanation, like when you used to dream you were flying over houses and gardens, rising, falling, hovering with your arms outstretched, do you remember, it was a sign that you were growing, probably the stone had a function too, if you have to experience terror, then rather sooner than later, besides, you should know better than anyone that the dead people here aren't really dead, it's a macabre exaggeration to call this the archive of the dead, if the papers you have in your hand are those of the unknown woman, they are just paper, not bones, they're paper, not putrefying flesh, that was the miracle worked by your Central Registry, transforming life and death into mere paper, it's true that you wanted to find that woman, but you didn't manage it in time, you couldn't even do that, or, rather, you wanted it and didn't want it, you hesitated between desire and fear, it happens to lots of people, you probably should have just gone to the tax office after all, as someone told you to, it's over, it's best just to leave it, her time has run out and the end of your time isn't far off either.
Pressed right up against the unstable wall formed by the files, Senhor Jose got to his feet, very slowly and
