My second reading of Saramago’s “All the Names” makes me realise how little I remember of the story. I almost had no recollection that Senhor José did not meet the unknown woman all the way through. She committed suicide two days after he broke into the school where she studied as a child, and later taught mathematics. The plot is simple and yet fantastical. 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. 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. Alone in the office, he spent his time copying details from the official record cards onto new ones that eventually formed his personal collection. 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. Curiosity kills the cat, so the proverb says. Senhor José couldn’t resist the temptation of seeking out this unknown woman. He suddenly turned into a different person. As someone who usually followed a rigid routine, the transformation caught his colleagues by surprise. 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. 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 became bolder and committed even more crimes by first breaking into the school to steal all her student record cards, and later using another forged letter to make her parents talk. He was so obsessed with his search that it became an addiction. Like any gambler, he no longer exercised prudence and placed a higher stake each time. The reader follows his story with both condemnation and sympathy. Other than feeling sorry for a lonely man who had no friends and no family, she also finds his behaviour tyrannical. Given the opportunity, any good person can turn into a tyrant (cf. p. 44).
A more important message of the story seems to be what makes a life worth remembering. A government is only interested in facts such as dates and places of births and deaths; it is not concerned with people’s happiness or unhappiness. The protagonist of this story is, however, concerned about a person’s mental state. He wanted to find out what drove the woman to kill herself. In his Nobel prize award ceremony speech in Stockholm, 1998, Saramago said that his writings of his grandparents were to transform ordinary people into literary figures in order that he would not forget them. Perhaps, he did exactly that in writing “All the Names”. This unknown woman was immortalized so we will not forget her. The story may seem trivial to some people; the voice of a clerk, Senhor José may seem little, but to Saramago, the voices of his characters is all.