criteria of selection and representation as those employed by Senhor Jose, it is not easy, especially when one is dealing with a small country, to come up with a good hundred truly famous people without falling into the familiar laxness of anthologies of the one hundred best love sonnets or the one hundred most touching elegies, which so often leave us feeling perfectly justified in suspecting that the last to be chosen are only there to make up the numbers. Considered in its entirety, Senhor Jose's collection far exceeded one hundred, but, for him, as for the compiler of anthologies of elegies and sonnets, the number one hundred was a frontier, a limit, a ne plus ultra, or, to put it in ordinary language, like a litre bottle which, however hard you try, will never hold more than a litre of liquid. According to this way of thinking, the relative nature of fame could, we believe, be best described as 'dynamic,' since Senhor Jose's collection, necessarily divided into two parts, on the one hand, the hundred most famous people, on the other, those who have not quite got that far, is in constant movement in that area which we normally refer to as the frontier. Fame, alas, is a breeze that both comes and goes, it is a weather vane that turns both to the north and to the south, and just as a person might pass from anonymity to celebrity without ever understanding why, it is equally common for that person, after preening himself in the warm public glow, to end up not even knowing his own name. If one applies these sad truths to Senhor Jose's collection, one will see that it, too, contains glorious rises and dramatic falls, one person will have left the group of substitutes and entered the ranks, another will no longer fit in the bottle and will have to be disposed of. Senhor Jose's collection is very much like life.
Working with determination, sometimes long into the night until dawn, with the foreseeable negative consequences on the level of productivity he was obliged to reach in his normal work as a clerk, it took Senhor Jose less than two weeks to collect and transcribe the original data into the individual files of the one hundred most famous people in his collection. He experienced moments of indescribable panic each time he had to perch on the topmost rung of the ladder in order to reach the upper shelves, where, as if his suffering from vertigo were not enough, it seemed that every spider in the Central Registry had decided to go and weave the densest, dustiest, most entangling webs that ever brushed a human face. Repugnance, or, put more crudely, fear, made him wave his arms about wildly to free himself from that repellent touch, it was just as well that he was tied firmly to the rungs with his belt, but there were occasions when both he and the ladder came close to tumbling down, dragging with them a cloud of ancient dust and a triumphal rain of papers. In one such moment of affliction he even went so far as to consider detaching the belt and accepting the risk of an unbroken fall, this happened when he imagined the shame that would forever stain his name and memory if his boss should come in one morning and discover Senhor Jose caught between two shelves, dead, his head cracked open and his brains spilling out, ridiculously bound to the ladder by a belt. Then it occurred to him that untying the belt would save him from ridicule, but not from death, and that it was not, therefore, worth it. Struggling against the fearful nature with which he came into the world, and despite the fact that he had to carry out the work in near-darkness, towards the end of the task he managed to create and perfect a technique of locating and manipulating the files which allowed him to extract the documents he needed in a matter of seconds. The first time that he had the courage not to use the belt it was as if an immortal victory had been inscribed in his very modest curriculum vitae as clerk. He felt exhausted, in need of sleep, he had butterflies in the pit of his stomach, but he was happier than he had ever been in his entire life when the celebrity classified as number one hundred, now fully identified in accordance with all the rules of the Central Registry, took his place in the corresponding box, Senhor Jose thought then that, after such a great effort, he needed a bit of rest, and since the weekend began the following day, he decided to postpone until Monday the next phase of work, which involved giving full civil status to the forty or so famous people still waiting in the rearguard. He never dreamed that something more serious than simply falling from a ladder was about to happen to him. As a result of a fall he might have lost his life, which would doubtless have a certain importance from a statistical and personal point of view, but what, we ask, if that life were instead to remain biologically the same, that is, the same being, the same cells, the same features, the same stature, the same apparent way of looking, seeing and noticing, and, without the change even being registered statistically, what if that life became another life, and that person a different person.
He found it very hard to bear the abnormal slowness with which those two days dragged past, Saturday and Sunday seemed to him to last forever. He passed the time making clippings from newspapers and magazines, occasionally he opened the communicating door to contemplate the Central Registry in all its silent majesty. He felt that he was enjoying his work more than ever, for it allowed him to penetrate into the private lives of all those famous people, to know, for example, things that some went to great lengths to hide, for example, being the daughter of an unknown father or mother, or of unknown parentage, which was the case in one instance, or saying that they were from the capital of a district or province when in fact they had been born in some godforsaken village at a crossroads with a barbarous-sounding name, or even in a place that simply stank of manure and cowpens and barely deserved a name at all. With such thoughts, and others of a similarly sceptical cast, Senhor Jose arrived at Monday having just about recovered from the tremendous efforts he had made, and, despite the inevitable nervous tension caused by a permanent conflict between desire and fear, still determined to make further nocturnal excursions and further bold ascents. The day, however, began on a sour note. The deputy who was in charge of stores told the Registrar that, during the last two weeks, he had noticed that the number of record cards and file covers being used had risen considerably, and even taking into consideration the average number of administrative errors committed while filling them in, that number bore no relation to the number of new births registered. The Registrar wanted to know what measures the deputy had taken to discover the reasons for this strange increase in consumption and what other measures he intended taking to prevent its happening again. The deputy explained discreetly that he had taken no measures as yet, that he had not even allowed himself to have an idea, still less begin an initiative, without first explaining the matter to his superior for his consideration, as he was doing at that very moment. The Registrar replied in his usual brusque way, Now that you've explained, you can act, and I want to hear no more of the matter. The deputy returned to his desk in order to think and, after an hour he returned to his boss with the draft of an internal memorandum, according to which the cabinet containing the forms would remain under lock and key, the key to remain per manently in his possession, as the person in charge of stores. The Registrar signed it and the deputy made a great show of locking the cabinet so that everyone would notice the change, and Senhor Jose, after his initial fright, breathed a sigh of relief because he had at least managed to complete the work on the most important part of his collection. He tried to remember how many record cards he had in reserve at home, twelve, perhaps fifteen. It wasn't that disastrous. When they ran out, he would copy onto ordinary paper the thirty that remained, the loss would only be an aesthetic one, You can't have everything, he thought to console himself.
As a possible pilferer of those forms, there was no reason why he should be considered any more suspicious than his other colleagues of the same rank, since only the clerks filled in the cards and the file covers, but all day Senhor Jose's frague nerves made him fearful that the tremors of his guilty conscience might be seen and noticed from the outside. Despite this, he acquitted himself very well in the interrogation to which he was submitted. Adjusting his face and voice to suit the situation, he stated that he was always most scrupulous in his use of the forms, in the first place, because that was the way he was by nature, but above all, because he was conscious, at every moment, that the paper used in the Central Registry was paid for by public taxes, paid for over and over with the hard-earned money of taxpayers, and that he, as a responsible civil servant, had a strict duty to respect that and to make their money last. His declaration was well received by his superiors both for its form and for its content, so much so that the colleagues who were subsequently called for questioning repeated it with only minimal modifications of style, but it was thanks to the universal, tacit belief, inculcated in the staff over time by their chief's own peculiar personality, that, whatever happened, nothing in the Central Registry could be allowed to go against the interests of work, that no one even noticed that Senhor Jose had never uttered so many words consecutively since he had first started work there many years before. Had the deputy been versed in the investigatory methods of applied psychology, before you could say boo, Senhor Jose's deceitful speech would have collapsed around him, like a house of cards in which the king of spades had lost his footing, or like a vertigo sufferer on a ladder when that ladder is shaken. Fearful that, on reflection, the deputy in charge of the inquiry might suspect there was something fishy going on, Senhor Jose decided that to avoid further trouble he would stay home that night. He would not move from his corner, he would not go into the Central Registry, not even if someone were to promise him the extraordinary good fortune of discovering the document everyone has been looking for since the world began, nothing more nor less than the birth certificate of God. The wise man is only wise insofar as he is prudent, they say, and it must be acknowledged that Senhor Jose, despite recent irregularities in his conduct, did possess a kind of involuntary wisdom, albeit sadly lacking in precision and definition, the kind of wisdom that appears to have entered the body via the respiratory tract or from too much sun on the head, which is why it is not considered worthy of any
