The oldest part of the General Cemetery, which was a few dozen yards behind the administrative building, was the one preferred by archaeologists for their investigations. These an cient stones, some so worn by time that you could only make out a few barely visible marks that could as easily be the remains of letters as the result of scratches made by an unskilled chisel, continued to be the object of intense debate and polemic in which, with no hope, in the majority of cases, of ever knowing who had been buried beneath them, archaeologists merely discussed, as if it were a matter of vital import, the probable date of the tombs. Such insignificant differences as a few hundred years here or there were the motive for long, long controversies, both public and academic, which almost always resulted in the violent breakup of personal relationships and even in mortal enmities. Things got still worse, if that were possible, when historians and art critics decided to stick their oar in, for while it was relatively easy, in the circumstances, for the board of archaeologists to reach agreement over a broad concept of antiquity acceptable to all, leaving aside actual dates, the matter of truth and beauty created a veritable tug-of-war among the men and women of aesthetics and history, each pulling for their own side, and it was a not uncommon sight to see a critic suddenly changing his opinion simply because the changed opinion of another critic meant that they both now agreed. Throughout the centuries, the ineffable peace of the General Cemetery, with its banks of spontaneous vegetation, its flowers, its creepers, its dense bushes, its festoons and garlands, its nettles and its thistles, the powerful trees whose roots often dislodged tombstones and forced up into the sunlight a few startled bones, had been both the target of and a witness to fierce wars of words and to one or two physical acts of violence. Whenever incidents of this nature occurred, the keeper would begin by ordering the available guides to go and separate the illustrious contenders, and when some particularly difficult situation arose, he would go there in person to remind the fighters ironically that there was no point tearing their hair out over such minor matters during their lifetime, since, sooner or later, they would all end up together in the cemetery bald as coots. Just like the Registrar, the keeper of the General Cemetery made brilliant use of sarcasm, which confirms the general assumption that this character trait had proved indispensable in their rise to their respective high ranks, together, of course, with a competent knowledge, both practical and theoretical, of archivistic technique. On one matter, however, historians, art critics and archaeologists are in agreement, the obvious fact that the General Cemetery is a perfect catalogue, a showcase, a summary of all styles, especially architectural, sculptural and decorative, and therefore an inventory of every possible way of seeing, being and living that has existed up until now, from the first elementary drawing of the outline of the human body, subsequently carved and chiselled out of bare stone, to the chromium-plated steel, reflecting panels, synthetic fibres and mirrored glass which are used willy-nilly in the current age.
The first funerary monuments were made of dolmens, cromlechs and menhirs, then there appeared, like a great blank page in relief, niches, altars, tabernacles, granite bowls, marble urns, tombstones, smooth and carved, columns, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, caryatids, friezes, acanthuses, entablatures and pediments, false vaults, real vaults, as well as stretches of brick wall, the gables of Cyclopean walls, lancet windows, rose windows, gargoyles, oriel windows, tympanums, pinnacles, paving stones, flying buttresses, pillars, pilasters, recumbent statues representing men in helmet, sword and armour, capitals with and without ornamentation, pomegranates, lilies, immortelles, campaniles, cupolas, recumbent statues representing women with small hard breasts, paintings, arches, faithful dogs lying down, swaddled infants, the bearers of gifts, mourners with their heads covered, needles, mouldings, stained-glass windows, daises, pulpits, balconies, more pinnacles, more tympanums, more capitals, more arches, angels with wings spread, angels with wings folded, tondos, empty urns, or urns filled with false stone flames or with a piece of languid crepe draped about them, griefs, tears, majestic men, magnificent women, delightful children cut down in the flower of life, old men and old women who could have expected no more, whole crosses and broken crosses, steps, nails, crowns of thorns, lances, enigmatic triangles, the occasional unusual marble dove, flocks of real doves wheeling above the cemetery. And silence. A silence interrupted only from time to time by the steps of the occasional sighing lover of solitude drawn here by a sudden bout of sadness from the rustling outskirts where someone can still be heard weeping at a graveside on which they have placed bunches of fresh flowers, still damp with sap, piercing, one might say, the very heart of time, these three thousand years of graves of every shape, meaning and appearance, united by the same neglect, by the same solitude, for the sadness they once gave rise to is now too old for there to be any surviving heirs. Orienting himself with the map, although occasionally wishing he had a compass, Senhor José walks towards the area set aside for suicides, where the woman on the card is buried, but his step is slower now, less determined, from time to time he stops to study a sculptural detail stained by lichen or discoloured by the rain, a few mourners caught in mid-lament, a few solemn depositions, a few hieratic folds, or else he struggles to decipher an inscription whose lettering attracted him in passing, its understandable that even the very first line takes him a long time to decipher, for, despite having occasionally had to examine parchments more or less contemporary with these in the Central Registry, this clerk is not versed in ancient forms of writing, which is why he has never got beyond being a clerk. On top of a small rounded hillock, in the shadow of an obelisk that was once a geodesic marker, Senhor José looks around him as far as he can see, and he finds nothing but graves rising and falling with the curves of the land, graves poised on the edge of the occasional precipitous slope and spreading out over the plains, There are millions of them, he murmurs, then he thinks of the vast amount of space they would have saved if the dead had been buried standing up, side by side, in serried ranks, like soldiers at attention, and at their head, as the only sign of their presence there, a stone cube on which would be written, on the five visible sides, the principal facts about the life of the deceased, five stone squares like five pages, the summary of a whole book that had proved impossible to write. Almost as far as the horizon, far, far into the distance, Senhor José can see slowly moving lights, like yellow lightning, flicking on and off at constant intervals, they are the guides' cars calling to the people behind them, Follow me, Follow me, one of them suddenly stops, the light disappears, that means it's reached its destination. Senhor José looked up at the sun, then at his watch, it's getting late, he'll have to walk fast if he wants to reach the unknown woman before dusk He consulted the map, ran his index finger over it to reconstruct, approximately, the route he had followed from the administrative building to the place where he now finds himself, compared it with the distance he still has to walk and almost lost courage. In a straight line, according to the scale, it would be about three miles, but, as we have already said, in the General Cemetery, the straight continuous line never lasts for long, to those three miles as the crow flies, you will have to add another two, or possibly three, travelling overland. Senhor José calculated the amount of time left and the strength still remaining in his legs, he heard a prudent voice telling him to leave it for another day, when he had more time to visit the grave of the unknown woman, because, now he knows where she is, any taxi or bus could drop him off nearer to the actual place, skirting around the cemetery, as families do when they come to weep over their loved ones and place new flowers in the jars or refresh the water, especially in summer. Senhor José was still weighing this perplexing problem when he remembered his adventure at the school, the grim, rainy night, the steep, slippery mountain slope of the porch roof, and then, soaked from head to toe, his grazed knee rubbing painfully against his trousers, his anxious search inside the building, and how, by dint of tenacity and intelligence, he had managed to conquer his own fears and overcome the thousand difficulties that blocked his path until he discovered and finally entered the mysterious attic, confronting a darkness even more frightening than that in the archive of the dead. Anyone brave enough to do all that had no right to feel discouraged by the thought of a walk, however long it might be, especially when doing so in the frank brilliance of the bright sun which, as we all know, is the friend of heroes. If the shades of dusk caught up with him before he had reached the unknown woman's grave, if night came to cut off all paths back, sowing them with invisible terrors and preventing him from going any farther, he could lie down on one of these mossy stones, with a sad stone angel to watch over his sleep, and wait for the birth of the new day. Or else he could shelter beneath a flying buttress like that one over there, thought Senhor José, but then it occurred to him that, farther on, he wouldn't find any flying buttresses. Thanks to the generations yet to come and to the consequent development of civil engineering, it won't be long before they invent less expensive means of holding up a wall, indeed it is in the General Cemetery that the results of progress are set out before the eyes of the studious or the merely curious, there are even those who say that a cemetery like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn't matter, you can learn as much from people as from books. Senhor José looked back, from where he was he could see only the roof ridge of the administrative building above the taller funerary monuments, I had no idea I'd come so far, he murmured, and having said that, as if, in order to make a decision, he had needed only to hear the sound of his own voice he once more continued on. his way When he at last reached the section of the suicides, with the sky already sifting the still-white ashes of the dusk, he thought that he must have gone the wrong way or that there was something wrong with the map. Before him was a great expanse of field, with numerous trees, almost a wood, where the graves, apart from the barely visible gravestones, seemed more like tufts of natural vegetation. You could not see the stream from there, but you could hear the lightest of murmurs slipping over the stones, and in the atmosphere, which was like green glass, there hovered a coolness which was not just the usual coolness of the first hour of dusk. Being so recent, only a matter of a few days ago, the grave of the unknown woman must be on the outer limit of the area, the question was in which direction. Senhor José thought that the best thing, in order not to get lost, would be to walk over to the small stream and then go along the bank until he found the latest graves. The shadow of the trees covered him immediately, as if night had suddenly fallen. I should be afraid, murmured Senhor José, in the midst of this silence, among these tombs, with these trees surrounding me, instead I feel as calm as if I were in my own house, except that my legs ache from having walked so much, here's the stream, if I was afraid, I could leave here this minute, all I'd have to do is cross the stream, I'd just have to take my shoes and socks off and roll up my trouser legs, hang my shoes around my neck and wade across, the water wouldn't even reach my knees, I'd soon be back in the land of the living again, with those lights over there that have just gone on. Half an hour later, Senhor José reached the end of the field, when the moon, almost full, almost completely round, was just coming up over the horizon. There the graves did not as yet have carved headstones to cover them nor any sculptural adornments, they could only be identified by the white numbers painted on the black labels stuck in at the head of the grave, like hovering butterflies. The moonlight gradually spread over the field, slipped slowly through the trees like a habitual, benevolent ghost. In a clearing, Senhor José found what he was looking for. He didn't take from his pocket the piece of paper the cemetery clerk had given him, he had made no particular effort to remember the number, but he knew it when he needed to, and now it was there before him, brilliantly lit, as if written in phosphorescent paint. Here she is, he said.