Lost in the tedium of a bureaucratic job, he starts to collect information about various famous people and decides, one evening, to use the side entrance to sneak in and steal their record cards.

On one nocturnal venture Senhor José grabs the record card of an "unknown woman" by mistake and quickly becomes obsessed with finding her.

Senhor José uses his power as a registry clerk to gather information about the "unknown woman" from her past neighbors and, when it is suggested to look her up in a phone book, he ignores the advice, choosing instead to keep his distance.

This special attention given to a clerk by the Registrar is unprecedented in the known history of the Central Registry and begins to worry his fellow employees.

The proof can be found in the fact that, though life leads us to carry out the most diverse actions one after the other, we do not prelude each one with a period of reflection, evaluation and calculation, and only then declare ourselves able to decide if we will go out to lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman.