A General Theory of Oblivion

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

  “My late father was born in the desert. He was buried here. These people are very devoted to him,” explained Madalena. “They’ll take you in and hide you for as long as necessary.”

  The mercenary sat down on the floor, straightened his shoulders, like a king parading naked, his silhouette the prickly shadow of a mutiati tree. A group of children surrounded him, touched him, pulled his hair. The young men laughed loudly. They were fascinated by the rough silence of this man, his distant gaze, the spectre of a past they sensed was violent and troubled. Madalena said goodbye with a slight nod:

  “Wait here. They’ll come for you. When everything calms down you’ll be able to cross the border to South-West Africa. I imagine you have good friends among the white men.”

  Years passed. Decades. Jeremias never crossed the border.

  May 27

  Che Guevara was very agitated this morning.

  He was jumping from branch to branch. Crying out.

  Later, looking out the living-room window, I saw a man, running. A tall fellow, really thin, incredibly agile. Three soldiers were running after him, close behind. Throngs of people were streaming from the corners, in bursts, joining the soldiers. Within moments there was a whole crowd in pursuit of the fugitive. I saw him crash into a boy who was crossing in front of him, on a bicycle, and tumble flailing in the dust. The mob was about to reach him, it was just an arm’s length from him, when the man jumped onto the bicycle and resumed his flight. By now a second group had formed, a hundred meters farther along the road, and there were stones raining down. The poor wretch ducked into a narrow alleyway. If he could have seen a bird’s-eye view, like I could, he never would have done it: a dead end. When he realized his mistake, he ditched the bike and tried to jump the wall.

  A tossed stone hit the back of his neck and he fell.

  The throng reached him. They launched themselves, kicking, onto his thin body. One of the soldiers drew a pistol and fired it into the air, clearing a way through. He helped the man to his feet, holding the pistol pointed toward the crowd. The other two were shouting orders, attempting to calm tempers. Finally they managed to make the crowd move back, they dragged the prisoner off to a van, threw him inside, and left.

  I haven’t had electricity for more than a week. So I haven’t listened to the radio. I have no way of knowing what’s going on.

  I was woken by gunshots. Later, looking through the living-room window, I saw the really thin man, running. Phantom roamed about all day, going round and round his own fear, gnawing on his toes. I heard shouts in the next-door apartment. Several men arguing. Then, silence.

  I couldn’t sleep. At four in the morning I went up onto the terrace. The night, like a well, was swallowing stars.

  Then I saw a flatbed truck go by, laden with dead bodies.

  On the Slippages of Reason

  Monte didn’t like interrogations. For years he avoided discussing the subject. He’d even avoided recalling the seventies, when in order to preserve the socialist revolution, certain excesses – to use a euphemism for which we’re indebted to the agents of the political police – were permitted. He confessed to his friends that he learned a lot about human nature while he was interrogating fractionists, and young men linked to the far left, in the terrible years that followed Independence. People with a happy childhood, he said, tend to be hard to break.

  Perhaps he was thinking of Little Chief.

  Little Chief – who had been baptized Arnaldo Cruz – didn’t like talking about the periods he’d spent in detention. Orphaned at an early age, raised by his paternal grandmother, old Dulcineia, a professional sweet-seller, he wanted for nothing. He completed high school, and then, when everyone expected him to go to university and become a doctor, he became involved in political gatherings and got himself locked up. He had been imprisoned in Campo de São Nicolau, a little over a hundred kilometers from Moçâmedes, for four months when the Carnation Revolution broke out in Portugal. He reappeared in Luanda as a hero. Old Dulcineia believed her grandson would be made a minister, but Little Chief had more enthusiasm than real talent for the intrigues of politics, and just a few months after Independence, by which time he was a law student, he was locked up again. His grandmother could not bear the grief. She died, from a heart attack, days later.

  Little Chief managed to escape from prison, hiding inside a coffin, a burlesque episode that deserves a lengthier account at a later point. Once out he disappeared into anonymity. And yet, instead of taking refuge in a dark room somewhere, or even inside a wardrobe in the house of an elderly aunt, like some of his friends did, he chose the opposite solution. It’s easiest to hide in plain sight, he thought. And so he would wander the streets, ragged, his hair in long tangled locks, covered in mud and tar. To make himself disappear still further, escaping the raids of the soldiers who moved about the city day and night, rounding up cannon fodder, he pretended to be crazy. A person can only pass for insane, they can only make people believe this, if they really do go a bit crazy in the process.

  “Imagine falling half asleep,” explains Little Chief. “Part of you is alert, the other rambles. The part that rambles is the public part.”

  It was in this state of social near-invisibility and semidementia, his lucidity traveling like a stowaway, that Little Chief saw the pigeon:

  “Days of hunger. I could barely stand, the slightest breeze would have carried me off. I constructed a slingshot, with a stick, a few strips of rubber, and I was trying to hunt down some rat over in Catambor when a pigeon came down, all aglow, its whiteness lightening everything around it. I thought, ‘It’s the Holy Ghost.’ I looked for a stone, fixed my eye on the pigeon, and fired. A perfect shot. It was dead before it hit the ground. I immediately noticed the small plastic cylinder attached to a ring. I opened it, took out the little slip of paper, and read:

  “Tomorrow. Six o’clock, usual place. Be very careful. I love you.

  “It was when I gutted the pigeon to grill it that I found the diamonds.”

  Little Chief didn’t understand right away what had happened:

  “In my failure to understand, I thought it was God giving me the stones. I even thought it was God who’d written me the message. My usual place was in front of the Lello Bookshop. The next day, at six o’clock, there I was, waiting for God to show himself.”

  God showed himself, in mysterious ways, via a hugely fat woman, with a smooth, shining face and an expression of permanent delight. The woman got out of a small van, an old Citroën 2CV, and approached Little Chief, who watched her, half hidden behind a Dumpster.

  “Hey, handsome!” cried Madalena. “I need your help.”

  Little Chief walked over to her, alarmed. The woman said she’d often watched him. It annoyed her to see a man in perfect condition, actually in truly perfect condition, spending his day sprawled out on the street playing the madman. The ex-con straightened himself up, unable to hold back his indignation:

  “But I am extremely crazy, actually!”

  “Not crazy enough,” the nurse cut him short. “A real crazy person would try to appear a bit more circumspect.”

  Madalena had inherited a small farm close to Viana that produced fruit and vegetables, which were so hard to find in the capital, and she was looking for someone who could keep an eye on the property. Little Chief accepted. Not for the obvious reasons, that he was broken with hunger and on a farm he’d get to eat every day. Besides, he’d be safe from the soldiers, the police, and other predators. He accepted, because he believed it was the will of God.

  Five months later, well fed, even better slept, he had fully recovered his lucidity. In his case, unfortunately, lucidity proved itself an enemy of good sense. He would have been better off staying insane for five or six more years. Lucid now, his uneasiness returned. The country’s collapse pained him in his soul, as if this were an actual organ with blood flowing through it. It hurt even more from the fate of the companions he had left behind bars. Bit by bit he reformed old
connections. Together with a young footballer, Maciel Lucamba, whom he had met in Campo de São Nicolau, he constructed an imaginative plan that would entail the rescuing of a group of prisoners, and their flight, on a trawler, to Portugal. He never spoke to anyone of the diamonds. Not even to Maciel. He meant to sell the stones in order to pay for part of the operation. He didn’t know to whom he might sell them, and he wasn’t allowed the time to give this any thought. One Sunday afternoon, while he was resting, stretched out on a mat, these two guys burst in suddenly and he was arrested. It pained him to learn that Madalena was detained too.

  Monte interrogated him. He was hoping to demonstrate the nurse’s involvement in the conspiracy. He promised to free them both if the young man revealed the whereabouts of a Portuguese mercenary whom Madalena had saved. Little Chief could have told the truth, that he had never heard of this mercenary. He thought, however, that any words at all exchanged with the agent would be tantamount to acknowledging his legitimacy, and so he merely spat on the floor. The stubbornness left him with scars on his body.

  For the whole time he was detained, he kept the diamonds with him. Neither the guards nor the other prisoners ever suspected that this humble young man, always so concerned about other people, could be hiding a small fortune. On the morning of May 27, 1977, he was woken by a fierce din. Gunshots. A man he didn’t recognize opened the door to his cell and shouted that he could leave if he wanted. A group in revolt had occupied the prison. The young man made his way through the commotion calm as a ghost, feeling much more nonexistent than when he used to roam the streets disguised as a madman. In the yard, sitting in the shade of a frangipani, he found a highly respected poetess, a historic name from the nationalist movement, who, like him, had been detained just a few days after Independence, accused of supporting a strand of intellectuals who had been criticizing the party leadership. Little Chief asked after Madalena. She had been released weeks earlier. The police had been unable to prove a thing against her. “Amazing woman!” added the poet. She advised Little Chief not to leave the prison. In her opinion the revolt would be quickly stifled and the fugitives taken, tortured, and shot:

  “There’s a bloodbath on the way.”

  He agreed. He held her tight in a long hug, then left, dazed, into the torrential light of the streets. He considered looking for Madalena. He wanted to offer her his most profuse apologies. But he knew that this might cause her even more problems. Her house would be the first place the police would look for him. So he wandered the city, dazed, distressed, now following – at a distance – the groups of protestors, now accompanying the movements of the forces loyal to the president. He was walking this way and that, ever more lost, when a soldier recognized him. The man started to chase after him, crying “Fractionist! Fractionist!” and within moments a crowd had assembled to run him down. Little Chief was six feet tall, with long legs. During his adolescence he had been an athlete. The months he’d spent in a narrow cell, however, made him shorter of breath. For the first five hundred meters he’d managed to get some distance between himself and his pursuers. He even believed that he would shake them off. Unfortunately, the commotion attracted yet more people. He felt his chest bursting. Sweat was running into his eyes, clouding his sight. A bicycle sprang out, suddenly, in front of him. He wasn’t able to dodge past and fell on top of it. He got up, grabbed hold of it, and again managed to gain some distance. He veered right. A dead end. He dropped the bicycle and tried to jump the wall. A stone hit him in the back of the neck, he felt the taste of blood in his mouth, dizziness. The next moment he was in a car, handcuffed, a soldier on each side, and everybody shouting.

  “You’re going to die, reptile!” yelled the one who was driving. “We’ve got orders to kill you all. But first I’m going to pull out your nails, one by one, till you tell us everything you know. I want those fractionists’ names.”

  He didn’t pull out any of his nails at all. A truck crashed into them at the next junction, throwing the car against the pavement. The door farthest from the collision opened and Little Chief was spat out along with one of the soldiers. With some difficulty he got up, scattering blood, his own and others’, and shards of glass. He didn’t even have time to understand what was happening. A stocky guy with a smile that seemed to gleam with sixty-four teeth approached him, put a coat over him to hide the handcuffs, and dragged him away. Fifteen minutes later the two of them went into a building that was elegant, albeit rather dilapidated. They climbed eleven floors on foot, Little Chief limping badly, as his right leg had been nearly broken.

  The elevators weren’t working, the man with the brilliant smile apologized:

  “These hicks toss their rubbish into the elevator shaft. There’s rubbish almost all the way up.”

  He invited him in. On the living-room wall, which was painted shocking pink, there was a very conspicuous oil painting, depicting, with naïve brushstrokes, the happy owner. There were two women sitting on the floor, beside a small battery-powered radio. One of them, who was very young, was breast-feeding a baby. Neither paid him any notice. The man with the brilliant smile pulled over a chair. He gestured to Little Chief to sit down. He took a paper clip from his pocket and straightened it out, then he leaned over the handcuffs, inserted the wire into the lock, counted to three, and opened it. He shouted something in Lingala. The older woman got up, without a word, and disappeared into the apartment. She returned, some minutes later, with two bottles of Cuca beer. An irate voice was yelling on the radio: We must find them, tie them up, and shoot them!

  The man with the brilliant smile shook his head:

  “This wasn’t what we made our Independence for. Not for Angolans to kill one another like rabid dogs.” He sighed. “Now we must treat your injuries. Then, rest. We have an extra room. You will stay there till the chaos is over.”

  “It could take quite some time for the chaos to be over.”

  “But end it will, comrade. Even evil needs to take a rest sometimes.”

  The Rebel Aerial

  In the first months of her isolation, Ludo only rarely did without the security of her umbrella when she visited the terrace. Later, she began using a long cardboard box, in which she had cut two holes at eye level for looking through and two others to the sides, lower down, to keep her arms free. Thus equipped, she could work on the flowerbeds, planting, picking, weeding. From time to time she would lean out over the terrace wall, bitterly studying the submerged city. Anybody looking at the building from another of a similar height would see a large box moving around, leaning out and drawing itself back again.

  Clouds surrounded the city, like jellyfish.

  They reminded Ludo of jellyfish.

  When people look at clouds they do not see their real shape, which is no shape at all, or every shape, because they are constantly changing. They see whatever it is that their heart yearns for.

  You don’t like that word, heart?

  Very well, choose another, then: soul, unconscious, fantasy, whatever you think best. None of them will be quite the right word.

  Ludo watched the clouds and she saw jellyfish.

  She had got into the habit of talking to herself, saying the same words over and over for hours on end: Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Good words, which dissolved like chocolate on the roof of her mouth and brought happy memories to mind. She believed that as she said them, as she evoked them, birds would return to the skies of Luanda. It had been years since she’d seen pigeons, seagulls, not so much as one lost little bird. Nighttime brought bats. The flight of the bats, however, had nothing to do with the flight of birds. Bats, like jellyfish, are beings of no substance. See a bat streaking across the shadows and you don’t think of it as a thing of flesh, of blood, concrete bones and heat and sensations. Elusive shapes, quick ghosts amid t
he ruins, they’re there, now they’re gone. Ludo hated bats. Dogs were rarer than pigeons, and cats rarer than dogs. The cats were the first to disappear. The dogs held out on the city streets for some years. Wild packs of pedigree dogs. Gangly greyhounds, heavy asthmatic mastiffs, demented Dalmatians, disappointed pointers, and then, for another two or three years, the unlikely and despicable mixing of these many and once so noble pedigrees.

  Ludo sighed. She sat down facing the window. From there she could see only the sky. Low, dark clouds, and remnants of a blue almost completely defeated by the darkness. She remembered Che Guevara. She used to see him, gliding along the walls, running across patios and rooftops, seeking refuge in the highest branches of the enormous mulemba tree. It did her good to see him. They were closely related beings, both of them mistakes, foreign bodies in the exultant organism of this city. People used to throw stones at the monkey. Others would throw him poisoned fruit. The animal avoided it. He would sniff at the fruit and then move away with an expression of disgust. Shifting position slightly, Ludo could look at the satellite dishes. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of them, covering the rooftops of the buildings like a fungus. For a long time she had seen all of them turned toward the north. All of them, except one – the rebel aerial. Another mistake. She used to think she wouldn’t die as long as that aerial kept its back to its companions. As long as Che Guevara survived, she wouldn’t die. It had been more than two weeks, however, since she’d last seen the monkey, and in the early hours of that morning, as she first glanced out over the rooftops, she saw the aerial turned northward – like the others. A darkness, thick and burbling, like a river, spilled down over the windowpanes. Suddenly a great flash lit everything up, and the woman saw her own shadow thrown against the wall. The thunderclap reverberated a second later. She shut her eyes. If she died there, like this, in that lucid moment, while out there the sky was dancing, triumphant and free, that would be good. Decades would go by before anyone found her. She thought about Aveiro, and realized that she had stopped feeling Portuguese. She didn’t belong to anywhere. Over there, where she had been born, it was cold. She saw them again, the narrow streets, people walking, heads down, against the wind and their own weariness. Nobody was waiting for her.