He brought with him a letter that he wrote himself with a forged signature of the Registrar in order to make people co-operate and give him information about the woman. He asked for leave in order to visit the address on the record card, only to find that the woman had already moved out of her flat when she was only a child at eight years old.

As someone who usually followed a rigid routine, the transformation caught his colleagues by surprise. He suddenly turned into a different person. Senhor José couldn’t resist the temptation of seeking out this unknown woman. Curiosity kills the cat, so the proverb says. Everything seemed quite normal, if one can justify Senhor José’s actions as a way to break away from the boredom of a mundane life, until one day he took out the record card of an unknown woman by accident. Alone in the office, he spent his time copying details from the official record cards onto new ones that eventually formed his personal collection. He abused his right by using the key in his possession that opened the communicating door between his house and the Central Registry after office hours. As a clerk who had been working at the Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths for twenty-five years, Senhor José spent his evenings working as a voluntary biographer, building profiles of famous people in his city. She committed suicide two days after he broke into the school where she studied as a child, and later taught mathematics. I almost had no recollection that Senhor José did not meet the unknown woman all the way through. My second reading of Saramago’s “All the Names” makes me realise how little I remember of the story.

All The Names by José Saramago