A General Theory of Oblivion

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

  Daniel Benchimol learned of the writer’s disappearance before the police. He only needed two telephone calls to discover, with a considerable number of details, where and with whom Simon-Pierre had spent his first nights. Two more calls and he knew that the Frenchman had been seen at five in the morning leaving a disco, in Quinaxixe market, a place frequented by European expats, slutty teenage girls, and poets with rather more interest in pursuing the booze than the muse. That night, he went to the disco himself. Fat, sweaty men were drinking in silence. Others, half hidden in the dark, stroked the bare knees of girls who were very young. He particularly noticed one of the girls because she was wearing a black felt hat with a thin red ribbon. He was going to approach her when a blond guy with his long hair tied into a ponytail gripped his arm:

  “Queenie’s with me.”

  Daniel reassured him:

  “Don’t worry. I’ve just got a question I want to ask her.”

  “We don’t like journalists. Are you a journalist?”

  “Sometimes, pal, it depends. I mostly just feel Jewish, though.”

  The other man let go of him, confused. Daniel greeted Queenie:

  “Good evening. I just wanted to know where you got the hat.”

  The girl smiled:

  “The French mulatto who was here yesterday, he lost it.”

  “He lost the hat?”

  “Or the other way round, he’s the one who was lost. The hat found me.”

  She explained that the previous night, a group of boys, those ones who live out on the street, had seen the Frenchman leave the club. He had stopped a few meters on, round the back of a building, to urinate, and then the earth swallowed him up. All that was left was his hat.

  “The earth swallowed him up?”

  “That’s what they’re saying, old man. It could be quicksand, it could be witchcraft, I don’t know. The boys pulled the hat out with a stick. I bought the hat from them. It’s mine now.”

  Daniel left the disco. There were two boys watching television, sitting on the pavement in front of a shop window. The sound from the television didn’t reach outside, so the two of them were improvising the dialogue for each of the actors in turn. The journalist had seen the film before. The new dialogue, however, had transformed the plot entirely. He spent a few minutes enjoying watching the show. He took advantage of a break to speak to the boys:

  “I’ve heard there was a guy, a French guy, who disappeared near here, last night. They say he was swallowed up by the earth.”

  “Yes,” one of the children confirmed this. “These things happen.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “No. But Baiacu saw it.”

  Daniel questioned other boys in the days that followed, and all spoke of Simon-Pierre’s sad end as though they had witnessed it. Then, when pressed, they acknowledged that they had not been there. Certainly nobody saw the French writer again. The police filed the case.

  There is only one grade-ten disappearance on the Benchimol Scale. The journalist witnessed that remarkable loss himself. On April 28, 1988, the Jornal de Angola, the newspaper for which Daniel was working, sent him, accompanied by a photographer, the famous Kota Kodak, or KK, to a small town called Nova Esperança, where twenty-five women had been murdered, under suspicion of witchcraft. The two reporters disembarked from a commercial airliner in Huambo airport. There was a driver waiting to take them to Nova Esperança. Once they were there, Daniel chatted to the chieftain and various members of the tribe. KK took their portraits. It was getting dark when they got back to Huambo. They were due to return to Nova Esperança the following morning, in an air force helicopter. The pilot, however, proved unable to locate the village:

  “It’s weird,” he confessed, troubled, after two hours wandering the skies. “There’s nothing at those coordinates. Nothing down there but grass.”

  Daniel became impatient at the young man’s ineptitude. He hired the same driver who’d first taken them there. KK refused to go with them:

  “There’s nothing to take pictures of. You can’t photograph absences.”

  They went round and round in the car, revisiting the same landscapes, as in a dream, for that infinite length of time that a dream can occupy, until the driver, too, admitted his embarrassment:

  “We’re lost!”

  “We? You’re the one who’s lost!”

  The man turned to face him in a rage, as though he thought him responsible for the lunacy of the world:

  “These roads are more and more muddled.” He was pummelling the steering wheel hard. “I think we’ve had a geographical accident!”

  Suddenly a bend loomed up in the road and they emerged from that mistake, or that illusion, dazed and trembling. They did not find Nova Esperança. A signpost did however return them to the highway, which in turn took them to Huambo. KK was waiting for him in the hotel, arms crossed across his thin chest, a dark expression on his face:

  “Bad news, partner. I developed the film and it’s all burned out. All the gear’s complete crap. Gets worse every day.”

  Nobody on the paper seemed concerned at the news that Nova Esperança had disappeared. The editor in chief, Marcelino Assumpção da Boa Morte, had laughed:

  “The village disappeared? Everything’s always disappearing in this country! Perhaps the whole country is in the process of disappearing, a village here, a village there, by the time we notice there’ll be nothing left at all.”

  In 2003, a few weeks after the mysterious disappearance of the French writer Simon-Pierre Mulamba, to which the Angolan newspapers gave a certain prominence, Marcelino Assumpção da Boa Morte called Daniel to his office. He held out a blue envelope:

  “I’ve got something for you here, seeing as you collect disappearances. Read this. See if there might be a piece in it.”

  The Letter

  Dear Managing Director of the “Jornal de Angola,”

  My name is Maria da Piedade Lourenço Dias and I’m a clinical psychologist. About two years ago I discovered an awful truth: I was adopted. My biological mother handed me over for adoption immediately after my birth. I was confused, and decided to investigate why she did it. Ludovica Fernandes Mano – that is my biological mother’s name – was brutally raped by a stranger, in the summer of 1955, and became pregnant. Following this tragic event, she always lived in the house of an older sister, Odete, who in 1973 married a mining engineer, based in Luanda, called Orlando Pereira dos Santos.

  They didn’t come back to Portugal after Angola’s Independence. The Portuguese consulate in Luanda has no record of any of them either. I’m presuming to write to you to find out whether your newspaper might in any way be able to help me find Ludovica Fernandes Mano.

  Respectfully yours,

  Maria da Piedade Lourenço

  The Death of Phantom

  Phantom died in his sleep. In his last weeks he had been eating very little. To tell the truth, he had never eaten much – there wasn’t much to eat – which perhaps explains how he had lived so long. Laboratory experiments show that the life expectancy of mice increases considerably when they are given a low-calorie diet.

  Ludo woke up, and the dog was dead.

  The woman sat down on the mattress, opposite the open window. She hugged her thin knees. She lifted her eyes toward the sky, where, bit by bit, pink, light clouds were forming. Chickens clucked on the terrace. The crying of a child rose up from the floor below. Ludo felt her chest emptying. Something – some dark substance – was escaping from inside her, like water out of a cracked vessel, and then slipping down onto the cold cement. She had lost the only creature in the world who loved her, and she had no tears to cry.

  She stood up, chose a piece of charcoal, sharpened it, and attacked one of the walls, which was still clean, in the guest bedroom:

  Phantom died tonight. Everything is so useless now.

  The look in his eyes caressed me, explained me, and sustained me.

  She climbed up to the terrace without the protection
of the old cardboard box. The day was unfurling itself, a warm yawn of a day. Maybe it was Sunday. The streets were almost deserted. She watched a group of women walking past dressed in pristine white. One of them, spotting her, raised her right hand in a joyful greeting.

  Ludo drew back.

  She could jump, she thought. She’d step forward. She would climb out onto the ledge, so simple.

  The women, down there, would see her one moment – a feather-light shadow – hovering a second and then falling. She stepped back, went on stepping back, cornered by the blue, by the vastness, by the certainty that she would go on living, even with nothing to give life any meaning.

  Death circles around me, shows its teeth, snarls. I kneel down and offer it my bare throat. Come, come, come now, friend. Bite. Let me go. Oh, you did come today and you forgot me._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Nighttime. It’s nighttime again. I’ve counted more nights than days. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ The nights, then, and the clamor of the frogs. I open the window and see the lagoon. The night that has split in two. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ It rains, everything overflows. At night, it’s as though the darkness were singing. The night rising up in waves, devouring the buildings. I think, once again, of that woman to whom I returned the pigeon. Tall, prominent bones, with that slight disdain with which very beautiful women make their way through reality. She walks through Rio de Janeiro, along the bank of the Lagoa (I’ve seen photographs, I found several illustrated books about Brazil in the library). Cyclists pass her. The ones who let their gaze linger on her never come back.

  The woman is called Sara, I call her Sara.

  She looks like she’s out of a canvas by Modigliani.

  About God and Other Tiny Follies

  I find it easier to have faith in God, notwithstanding His being something so far beyond our incredibly limited understanding, than in arrogant humanity. For many years, I called myself a believer out of sheer laziness. It would have been hard to explain my nonbelief to Odete, to everyone else. I didn’t believe in men either, but that was something people accepted easily. I have understood over these last years that in order to believe in God, it is essential to have trust in humanity. There is no God without humanity.

  I continue not to believe, neither in God, nor in humanity. Since Phantom died I have worshipped His spirit. I talk to Him. I believe that He hears me. I believe this not through an effort of the imagination, still less intelligence, but by engaging another faculty entirely, which we might call unreason.

  Am I talking to myself?

  Perhaps. Just like the saints, by the way, who boasted about talking to God. I’m less arrogant. I talk to myself, believing that I’m talking to the sweet soul of a dog. In any case, these conversations do me good.

  Exorcism

  I carve out verses

  Short

  as prayers

  words are legions

  of demons

  expelled

  I cut adverbs

  pronouns

  I spare my wrists

  The Day Ludo Saved Luanda

  On the living-room wall there hung a watercolor depicting a group of Mucubals dancing. Ludo had met the artist, Albano Neves e Sousa, a fun, playful kind of guy, an old friend of her brother-in-law’s. She’d hated the picture at first. She saw in it a distillation of everything she hated about Angola: savages celebrating something – some cause of joy, some glad omen – that was quite alien to her. Then, bit by bit, over the long months of silence and solitude, she began to feel some affection toward those figures that moved, circling around a fire, as though life really deserved such elegance.

  She burned the furniture, she burned thousands of books, she burned all the paintings. It wasn’t until she was desperate that she took the Mucubals down off the wall. She was going to pull out the nail, just for aesthetic reasons, because it looked wrong there, serving no purpose, when it occurred to her that maybe this, this piece of metal, was holding up the wall. Maybe it was holding up the whole building. Who knows, if she pulled the nail out of the wall, the whole city might collapse.

  She did not pull out the nail.

  Apparitions, and a Nearly Fatal Fall

  November passed, cloudless. December too. February arrived and the air was cracked with thirst. Ludo saw the lagoon drying out. First it darkened, then the grass turned gold, almost white, and the nighttimes lost the uproarious noise of the frogs. The woman counted the bottles of water. Not many left. The chickens, to which she gave the muddy water from the swimming pool to drink, fell sick. They all died. There was still corn left, and beans, but to cook them used up a lot of water, and she needed to save it.

  She went hungry again. One morning, she got up early, shaking off her nightmares, staggered into the kitchen, and saw a bread roll on the table:

  “Bread!”

  She picked it up, in disbelief, with both hands.

  She smelled it.

  The scent of the bread carried her back to her childhood. Her and her sister, on the beach, splitting some bread with butter. She bit into the dough. It was only when she had finished eating that she realized she was crying. She sat down, trembling.

  Who could have brought her that bread?

  Maybe someone had thrown it through the window. She imagined a broad-shouldered young man hurling a loaf of bread into the air. The bread tracing a slow arc before landing on her table. The person in question might have thrown the bread up into the sky, from the lagoon, which was now almost dry, as part of some mysterious ritual aimed at summoning the rain. A Quimbanda witchdoctor, a real champion bread-thrower, since it was a quite considerable distance. That night she fell asleep early. She dreamed an angel had visited her.

  In the morning she found, on the kitchen table, six bread rolls, a tin of guava jelly, and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. Ludo sat down, her heart racing. Someone was coming in and out of her house. She got up. In recent months her eyesight had been getting worse and worse. After a certain time of the day, no sooner had the light begun to fade, than she began to move about just by instinct. She went up onto the terrace. She ran across to the building’s right-hand façade, which faced another block just a few meters away, and which was the only one not to have any windows. She leaned over and saw the scaffolding, which surrounded the neighboring building, right up against her own. That was how the invader had come in. She went down the stairs. It might have been because of her nerves, or because of the lack of light, but whatever the reason, her instinct failed her, she missed a step, and tumbled, flailing. She fainted. No sooner had she recovered her senses than she knew she had fractured her left femur. “So that’s how it’s going to be,” she thought. “I’m going to die not the victim of some mysterious African affliction, not through lack of appetite or exhaustion, not murdered by a thief, not because the sky has fallen on my head, but conspired against by one of the most famous laws of physics: given two bodies of mass m1 and m2, and a distance r between them, these two bodies will be attracted to one another with a force proportional to the mass of each and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them.” She had been saved by her lack of mass. Twenty kilos more and the impact would have been devastating. Pain climbed up her leg, paralyzing the left side of her trunk, preventing her from thinking clearly. She stayed immobile for quite some time, while night twisted about, out there, like a boa constrictor, choking the accosted acacias on the streets and squares. The pain was barking, the pain was biting. Her mouth felt dry. She tried to spit out her tongue, because it was as though it didn’t belong to her, a piece of cork trapped in her throat.

  She thought about the bottle of Coca-Cola. About the bottles of water she kept in the pantry. She would need to drag herself fifteen meters or so. She stretched out her arms, held on to the cement, straightened up her trunk. It was as if her leg were being cut off with the blade of an ax. She yelped. Her own yelp surprised her.

  “I’ve woken the whole building,” she muttered.


  She woke up Little Chief, in the next-door apartment. The businessman had been dreaming about the Kianda. He had been having the same dream for several nights. He would go out onto the veranda in the middle of the night and see a light gleaming in the lagoon. The light increased in volume, a rainbow that was round and musical, and in the meantime the businessman felt his body losing its weight. He awoke at the moment when the light rose to meet him. This time he woke earlier, because the light screamed, or it seemed to him as though the light was screaming, in a sudden explosion of mud and frogs. He sat up in bed, feeling stifled, his heart pounding. He remembered the time he had spent shut away in that same room. Sometimes he used to hear a dog barking. He would hear the distant voice of a woman chanting old songs.

  “The building is haunted,” Papy Bolingô assured him. “There’s the barking dog, which no one’s ever seen, like a kind of phantom dog. They say it can go through walls. You’ve got to be careful when you’re asleep. The dog comes through the wall, it’s barking, bow-wow-wow, but you don’t see a thing, you just hear its barking, and then it inveigles itself into your dreams. You start having dreams that are really filled with barking. One of the residents, on the floor below, a young craftsman called Eustákio, woke up one morning and could no longer speak. He just barked. They took him to a traditional doctor, pretty well renowned, who took five days to remove the dog’s spirit, and its barking, from Eustákio’s head.”