All the Names

by José Saramago

indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

I’ll begin by asking you if you know how many people there are in a marriage, Two, a man and a woman, No, there are three people in a marriage, there’s the woman, there’s the man, and there’s what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together, I’ve never thought of that, For example, if one of the two commits adultery, the person who is most hurt, who receives the deepest cut, however incredible it may seem, is not the other person, but that other “other” which is the couple, not one person, but two,

The most common thing in marriage is to see the man or the woman, or both, each in their own way, trying to destroy the third person that they form together, the one that resists, that wants to survive regardless,

Just as I said, either she hasn’t got a phone or she doesn’t want her name to appear in the book.

Or she got married and her name changed.

Like the Central Registry, although, by some deplorable lapse of memory, this information was not given at the appropriate moment, the General Cemetery’s unwritten motto is All the Names, although it should be said that, in fact, these three words fit the Central Registry like a glove, because it is there that all the names are to be found, both those of the dead and those of the living, while the cemetery, given its role as ultimate destination and ultimate depository, has to content itself only with the names of the dead.

Now we know how this book got its name.

It’s very simple, we just want to know when this woman was buried.

The man went to look in the card index under the counter, where all the cards of those who died in the last fifty years were to be found, the others filled the high shelves that stretched into the interior of the building, he opened one of the drawers, found the woman’s card, copied down the relevant date and came back to where Senhor José was standing,

Here it is, he said, and added, as if he thought the information might be useful, She’s in the section for suicides.

Did Senhor Jose cause this suicide by his inquiry? (Godmother contacted her.)