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Fortunately, there are not that many famous people. As we have seen, even using such eclectic, generous criteria of selection and representation as those employed by Senhor José, 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 José'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 José'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 José'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 José'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 José 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 José 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 José 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.