said, and gave a sigh of relief. He went back home, finished dressing and went out. In order to get the bus that would drop him near where the lady lived, he had to go to the square opposite the Central Registry, that was where the stop was. Although the evening was quite advanced, much of the daylight lingering in the sky still hovered over the city, it would be at least twenty minutes before the street lamps came on. Senhor Jose was waiting for the bus with a few other people, he probably wouldn't manage to get on the first bus to come along. And indeed that is what happened. But a second bus appeared soon afterwards, and this one wasn't full. Senhor Jose got on in time to get a place by the window. He looked out, noticing how, due to some unusual optical effect, the diffusion of light in the atmosphere lit the facades of the buildings with a reddish tone, as if the sun were about to rise at that very moment for each and every one of them. There was the Central Registry, with its ancient door and the three black stone steps that led up to it, and the five narrow windows on the front, the whole building had the air of a ruin fixed in time, as if it had been mummified rather than restored when the dilapidated state of its materials demanded it. Some hold-up in the traffic was preventing the bus from proceeding. Senhor Jose felt nervous, he didn't want to arrive too late to call on the lady in the ground-floor apartment. Despite the full and frank conversation they had had, despite certain confidences exchanged, some of which were unexpected in people who had only just met, they hadn't become so close that he could go knocking on her door at any hour of the day or night. Senhor Jose looked again at the square. The light had changed, the facade of the Central Registry had grown suddenly grey, but it was nevertheless a luminous grey that seemed to vibrate, to tremble, and it was then, just as the bus was pulling away, slowly moving out into the traffic lane, that a tall, well-built man walked up the steps of the Central Registry, opened the door and went in. The Registrar, murmured Senhor Jose, what's he doing at the Central Registry at this hour. Impelled by a sudden, inexplicable panic, he got up suddenly from his seat, made as if to get off, provoking a look of surprise and irritation in the passenger beside him, then sat down again, puzzled by his own behaviour. He realised that his impulse was to rush home, as if to protect it from some danger, which was, of course, absurdly illogical. A thief, always supposing, now really, yet another absurd illogicality, that the boss was a thief, wouldn't go in through the front door of the Central Registry in order to reach Senhor Jose's front door. But then it was bordering on the absurd for the Registrar to want to go back there after the office was closed, for, as we stated earlier, there would be no work waiting for him, Senhor Jose could stake his life on that. Imagining the head of the Central Registry doing overtime was rather like trying to imagine a square circle. The bus had already left the square, and Senhor Jose was still trying to work out the deep reasons that had driven him to behave in that disoriented fashion. He decided in the end that the reason must lie in the fact that, after a good few years as sole resident, he had grown used to being the only nocturnal tenant of the group of edifices formed by the Central Registry and his house, if the latter deserves the name of edifice, doubtless appropriate from a rigorously linguistic point of view, since an edifice can be any kind of building, but obviously inappropriate when compared with the architectural dignity that seems to emanate from the word itself, especially when spoken. Seeing his boss go into the Central Registry had had the same impact on him, he thought, as if, when he went back home, he were to find him sitting in his chair. The relative calm that this idea brought Senhor Jose, that is, not taking into account pertinent and morally embarrassing considerations, the physical and material impossibility of the Registrar entering the private rooms of his subordinate and even using his chair, immediately melted away when he remembered the unknown woman's school record cards and wondered if he had put them back under the mattress or carelessly left them out on the table. Even if his house were as safe as a bank vault, with special combination locks and reinforced floors, walls and ceiling, those record cards should never but never have been left out. The fact that there was no one there to see them did not excuse the grave imprudence committed, how are we, being ignorant, to know how far the advances of science might go, just as radio waves, which no one can see, carry sounds and images through the air and the wind, leaping over mountains and rivers, crossing oceans and deserts, it would not be so very extraordinary if scanner waves and photographic waves had not already been discovered or invented, or were to be discovered tomorrow, waves capable of penetrating walls and recording and transmitting to the outside world the deeds, mysteries and humiliations of our life that we had thought safe from indiscretions. Hiding them, those deeds, mysteries and humiliations under a mattress, still continues to be the safest way of hiding things, especially when we bear in mind that it is increasingly difficult for the customs of today to understand the customs of yesterday. However expert that scanner wave or photographic wave might be, it would never think of sticking its nose between a mattress and a bed base.
As everyone knows, our thoughts, both anxious and happy thoughts, and others which are neither one thing nor the other, sooner or later grow weary and bored with themselves, it's just a question of letting time do its work, it's just a matter of leaving them to the lazy daydreaming that comes naturally to them, adding no new irritating or polemical reflection to the bonfire, above all taking supreme care not to intervene whenever an attractive bifurcation, branch Une, or turning appears before a thought which is already ripe for distraction. Or, rather, you can intervene, but only to give it a gentle shove from behind, especially if it's a troubling thought, as if we were saying, Go on, off you go, you're fine. This was what Senhor Jose did when that mad, providential fantasy of the photographic wave and the scanner wave came to him, he at once abandoned himself to his imagination, let it show him those invasive waves scouring the whole room in search of those records, which he had not, in fact, left on the table, perplexed and ashamed because they could not carry out the orders they had received, Remember, either you find those records, read them and photograph them, or we go back to the old-style espionage. Senhor Jose still thought about the Registrar, but it was a purely residual thought, one that helped him find an acceptable explanation for his return to the Central Registry outside of normal hours, He must have forgotten something he needed, what other reason could there be. Without realising, he repeated out loud the final part of the phrase, What other reason could there be, again provoking the distrust of the passenger travelling next to him, whose thoughts immediately became clear and explicit when he changed his seat, The guy is mad, we're sure that he used these or similar words to think it. Senhor Jose did not notice the withdrawal of the man next to him on the seat, he moved seamlessly on to thoughts of the lady in the ground-floor apartment, she was there before him at the door, Do you remember me, I'm from the Central Registry, Of course I do, I've come here about that matter we discussed the other day, You've found my goddaughter, No, I haven't, or rather, yes, that is, I mean, I'd like to have a little chat with you, if you wouldn't mind, if you've got a moment, Come in, I've got something to tell you too. That, more or less, was what Senhor Jose and the lady in the ground-floor apartment said when she opened the door and saw him there, Ah, its you, she exclaimed, so he had no need to ask, Do you remember me, I'm Senhor Jose from the Central Registry, but despite this, he couldn't resist asking the question, so constant, so imperious, so demanding it would seem is our need to go about the world declaring who we are, even when we've just heard someone else say, Ah, it's you, as if just because they've recognised us, they know us and need to know nothing more about us, or as if the little that remained unknown wasn't worth the effort of formulating another question.
Nothing had changed in the small living room, the chair where Senhor Jose had sat the first time was in the same place, at the same distance from the table, the curtains hung as they had before, in the same folds, the woman made the same gesture when she folded her hands in her lap, right over left, only the light from the ceiling seemed slightly paler, as if the bulb were burning out. Senhor Jose asked, How have you been since my last visit, and then he reproached himself for his lack of sensitivity, worse still, for the utter crassness he was revealing, he should know that you don't always have to Mow the rules of elementary politeness to the letter, you must take into account the circumstances, you have to weigh each case, let's imagine that the woman responds now with a broad smile, I'm very well, thank you, my health is excellent, I'm in good spirits, I haven't felt this fit for ages, and then he blurts out, Well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but your goddaughter has died, what do you make of that. But the woman didn't reply to his question, she merely shrugged indifferently, then she said, Do you know, for some days I've been thinking of phoning you at the Central Registry, then I decided not to, I thought that sooner or later you would come and visit me, It's just as well you didn't phone, the Registrar doesn't like us getting phone calls, he says it gets in the way of work, Of course, but that needn't have been a problem, I just had to give him the information I had, he wouldn't have had to call you over. Beads of sweat broke out on Senhor Jose's forehead. He had just discovered that, for weeks, ignorant of the danger, unconscious of the threat hanging over him, he had been living on the brink of absolute disaster, the public exposure of irregularities in his professional conduct, the continual and wilful affront he was in the process of committing against the venerable deontological laws of the Central Registry, whose chapters, articles, paragraphs and clauses, however complex, due to the extreme archaism of the language, had finally been reduced down by the experience of two centuries to nine practical words, Don't stick your nose in where it isn't wanted. For a moment, Senhor Jose hated and detested the woman before him, he insulted her mentally, he called her a feeble old woman, cretin, nincompoop, and like someone who can find no better way of overcoming some sudden, violent shock, he was almost on the point of saying to her, Well, try this on for size, your
