A General Theory of Oblivion

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

  Little Chief found the building’s architecture peculiar. He was confused by that wall blocking off the corridor, an arrangement that didn’t happen on the other floors. There had to be another apartment on that floor – but where was it?

  Meanwhile, just a few meters away, on the other side of the wall, Ludo forced herself to move toward the kitchen. With each centimeter she felt farther away from her own self. The first light of morning found her still in the living room, about two meters from the door. She was burning with fever. Her thirst was troubling her more than the pain. Around two in the afternoon she reached the door. Fainted. She opened her eyes and saw, vaguely, a face before her. She brought her hands to her eyes, rubbed them. The face was still there. A boy, it looked to her like the face of a boy, with two big, astonished eyes:

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Sabalu.”

  “Did you get in from the scaffolding?”

  “Yes, I climbed the scaffolding. They put scaffolding on the building next door. They’re painting it. The scaffolding comes nearly all the way up to your terrace. Then I piled some crates on the top level and climbed up. It was easy. What about you, did you fall?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seven. Are you dying?”

  “I don’t know. I did start thinking I was dead already. Water. Go get me water.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “Yes, I’ll give you all the money but go get me water.”

  The boy got up. He glanced around him:

  “There’s hardly anything here. Not even furniture. Looks like you’re poorer than me. Where’ve you got the money?”

  “Water!”

  “OK there, Grandma, take it easy, I’ll go fetch you a soda.”

  He brought the bottle of Coca-Cola from the kitchen. Ludo drank straight from the bottle, greedily. She was struck by how sweet it was. It had been years since she’d felt the taste of sugar. She told the boy to go to the study to find her purse, where she kept the money. Sabalu came back, laughing hard as he scattered wads of banknotes around him.

  “This isn’t money anymore, Grandma, it’s not worth anything.”

  “There’s silver cutlery. Take the silver cutlery.”

  The boy laughed again:

  “I’ve already taken them, didn’t you even notice?”

  “No. Was it you who brought the bread yesterday?”

  “The day before. You don’t want to call a doctor?”

  “No, no, I don’t!”

  “I can call a neighbor. You must have neighbors.”

  “No, no! Don’t call anyone.”

  “You don’t like people? I don’t like people either.”

  Ludo started to cry:

  “Go away. Go away.”

  Sabalu got up:

  “Where’s the door to get out?”

  “There isn’t one. Leave the way you came.”

  Sabalu put the rucksack on his back and disappeared. Ludo took a deep breath. She leaned on the wall. The pain was subsiding. Maybe she should have let the boy call a doctor. Then she thought that along with the doctor would come the police, then journalists, and she was keeping a skeleton on the terrace. She preferred to die there, a prisoner, and yet free, just as she had lived the past thirty years.

  Free?

  Often, as she looked out over the crowds that clashed violently against the sides of the building, that vast uproar of car horns and whistles, cries and entreaties and curses, she had experienced a profound terror, a feeling of siege and threat. Whenever she wanted to go out she would look for a book in the library. She felt, as she went on burning those books, after having burned all the furniture, the doors, the wooden floor tiles, that she was losing her freedom. It was as though she was incinerating the whole planet. When she burned Jorge Amado she stopped being able to visit Ilhéus and São Salvador. Burning Ulysses, by Joyce, she had lost Dublin. Getting rid of Three Trapped Tigers, she had incinerated old Havana. There were fewer than a hundred books left. She kept them more out of stubbornness than to make any use of them. Her eyesight was so bad that even with an enormous magnifying glass, even holding the book in direct sunlight, sweating as though she were in a sauna, it took her an entire afternoon to decipher one page. In recent months she had taken to writing her favorite lines from the books she had left in huge letters on those walls of the apartment that were still empty. “It won’t be long,” she thought, “and I really will be a prisoner. I don’t want to live in a prison.” She fell asleep. She was awoken by a quiet laugh. The boy was there again in front of her, a slender silhouette, cut out against the stormy glare of the sunset.

  “Now what? You’ve already taken the cutlery. I don’t have anything else.”

  Sabalu laughed again:

  “Tsh, Grandma! I thought you’d died.”

  He put his rucksack down at the lady’s feet:

  “I bought medicines. Loads of them. They’ll help you.” He sat down on the floor. “I also bought more Coke. And food, grilled chicken. You hungry?”

  They ate just there where they were, sharing the bread and the pieces of chicken. Sabalu showed her the medicines he had brought: painkillers, anti-inflammatories.

  “I went to Roque Santeiro. I talked to this guy. I said my father had hit my mother, he broke her arm, and she’s embarrassed to go to the doctor. Then he sold me all this. I paid with the money from the cutlery. There was loads left over. Can I sleep in your house?”

  Sabalu helped the old lady up, took her to her room, and lay her down on the mattress. Then he lay beside her and fell asleep. The next morning he went to the market and came back carrying vegetables, matches, salt, various spices, and two kilos of beef. He also brought a portable stove, the kind for camping, with a small butane gas canister. He did the cooking himself, on the bedroom floor, following Ludo’s instructions. They both ate with gusto. Then the boy washed the dishes and put away the crockery. He roamed about the house, curious:

  “You know, you’ve got a lot of books.”

  “A lot of books? Yes, I did have a lot. There aren’t many now.”

  “I’ve never seen so many.”

  “Can you read?”

  “I’m not very good at putting the letters together. I only did one year at school.”

  “Would you like me to teach you? I’ll teach you to read, and then you can read to me.”

  Sabalu learned to read while Ludo convalesced. The old lady also taught him to play chess. The boy took to the board naturally. While he played he talked to her of his life out there. For the woman it was like having an extraterrestrial revealing the secrets of a distant planet to her. One afternoon, Sabalu discovered that the scaffolding was being taken down.

  “How am I going to leave now?”

  Ludo was fretting:

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, how did you come in?”

  “I didn’t come in. I’ve always lived in this house.”

  The boy looked at her, confused. Ludo gave in. She took him to the front door. She opened it and showed him the wall she herself had put up, thirty years before, separating the apartment from the rest of the building:

  “On the other side of this door is the world.”

  “Can I break through the wall?”

  “You can, but I’m afraid. I’m very afraid.”

  “Don’t be afraid, Grandma. I’ll protect you.”

  The boy went to fetch a pickax, and with half a dozen violent blows opened a hole in the wall. Looking through it, he saw, on the other side, the astonished face of Little Chief:

  “Who are you?”

  Sabalu widened the hole with two more blows. He introduced himself:

  “My name’s Sabalu Estevão Capitango, senhor. I’m busy breaking through this wall.”

  The businessman shook the plaster dust off his jacket. He took two steps back.

  “Jesus! What planet have you come from?”

  The boy could have made use of the brilliant retort give
n by the singer Elza Soares, at the start of her career, aged thirteen, scrawny, badly dressed, when Ary Barroso asked her the exact same question (behind him the audience was laughing at her. At home, one of her children was dying): I’ve come from Planet Hunger. Sabalu, however, had never heard of Elza Soares, nor of Ary Barroso, so he shrugged and replied with a smile:

  “We live here.”

  “We?”

  “Me and my grandmother.”

  “You live there? There’s an apartment on that side?”

  “Sure is.”

  “And you’ve been living there how long?”

  “Always.”

  “Oh, really? And how do you get out?”

  “We didn’t go out. We just lived here. Now we will, though, we’re going to start going out.”

  Little Chief shook his head, stunned:

  “Very well, very well. You finish breaking down that wall and then clean up the hallway. I don’t want a speck of dust left, understand? This isn’t a slum anymore. It’s a smart building now, well-respected, like in the colonial days.”

  He went back into his apartment, walked over to the kitchen, found a beer in the fridge. He went to drink it on the veranda. Sometimes he felt a kind of nostalgia for the days when, mad and wretched, he would spend his hours dancing out on the streets and the squares. The world, washed in sunlight, was not troubled by mysteries. Everything seemed transparent to him, and lucid, even God, who, assuming a variety of forms, so often appeared to him at evening-time for a couple of thimblefuls of pleasant conversation.

  Mutiati Blues

  Today the Kuvale number no more than five thousand, but they occupy a vast area, more than half of the Namibe Province. Nowadays they are a prosperous people, in terms of the things they themselves value: they have copious head of oxen. With the exception of the northeast, their territories were spared almost any direct incidents from the war, there has been rain in recent years, at least enough to keep the cattle (there have even been some good years, and it has been a long time since there has been a really bad one), and yet the course Angola has taken over these years puts them in a position of food poverty. They are unable to trade their oxen for corn. This apparent paradox – so many oxen yet so much hunger – is yet another way in which they are unusual. But isn’t that true of Angola, too? So much oil …?

  Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

  The detective squatted down. He fixed his gaze on the old man, who was sitting, very straight-backed, a few meters ahead of him. The brightness of the sky was dazing him, preventing him from seeing clearly. He turned to the guide:

  “That old man, over there, he’s a mulatto?”

  The guide smiled. The question seemed to unsettle him:

  “Maybe. Some white man who came through here seventy years ago. These things happen. They still happen today. These guys offer their wives to the visitors, didn’t you know that?”

  “I’d heard.”

  “They do it. But if the woman refuses, that’s fine, they’re under no obligation. Women have more power, here, than people think.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Here and everywhere else. Eventually women are going to end up with all the power.” He addressed the old man: “Do you speak Portuguese?”

  The man he’d spoken to ran his right hand over his head, which was covered by a kind of hat, a very nice one, with red and yellow stripes. He looked straight at Monte, in a silent challenge, opened his mouth – which was almost toothless – and gave the tiniest little laugh, a soft laugh that was dispersed like dust into the luminous air. A lad who was sitting beside him made some comment to the guide. The man translated it:

  “He’s saying the old man doesn’t talk. Never has.”

  Monte got up. He wiped the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve:

  “He reminds me of a guy I met many years ago. He died. A shame, as I’d have really liked to kill him again. Nowadays, now I’m older, I’m assailed by these memories, incredibly clear ones, of things that have happened. As if someone were inside my head, someone who had been passing the time leafing through an old photo album.”

  They had been walking for hours along the dry riverbed. Monte had been summoned by a general, one of his companions from those fighting days, who had bought a huge estate near there to pass on to his daughter. He’d had a solid barrier put up around the property, cutting off the traditional grazing routes of the Mucubal shepherds. Gunshots were exchanged. A shepherd was wounded. The following night a group of young Mucubals attacked the farm, making off with a fourteen-year-old boy, the general’s grandson, as well as some twenty head of cattle.

  Monte took two steps toward the old man:

  “May I see your wrist? Your right wrist?”

  The old man was wearing a simple piece of cloth, tied at his waist, in a variety of shades of red and orange. He wore dozens of necklaces, his wrists adorned with bright, broad copper bracelets. Monte held his arm. He was about to push aside the bracelets when the blow knocked him down. The lad sitting beside the old man had leaped to his feet, throwing a violent punch in his chest. The detective fell on his back. He turned. He crawled away a few meters, coughing, trying to recover his breath, as well as his poise, while behind him a fierce argument was breaking out. Finally he managed to get back up onto his feet. The commotion had brought people over. Young people with lustrous, rust-colored skin were emerging from the splendor of the evening, like a miracle, gathering around the old man. They were shaking long sticks. They were rehearsing dance steps. They were leaping about. Shouting. The guide drew back, terrified:

  “This is getting ugly, man. Let’s get out of here!”

  Back in Luanda now, sitting at a bar table, in between gulps of beer, Monte was summarizing the humiliating defeat, resorting to an image that was expressive, if inelegant:

  “We were run out of there like dogs. I swallowed so much dust I’ve been crapping bricks ever since.”

  In Which a Disappearance Is Cleared Up (Almost Two), Or How, to Quote Marx:

  All That Is Solid Melts into Air

  Magno Moreira Monte woke up, on a lightless morning, feeling like a river that had lost its source. Out there, a gentle rain was dying. His wife was combing her hair, in panties and sandals, sitting on the bed.

  “It’s over,” said Monte. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  Maria Clara looked at him with a mother’s calm:

  “That’s just as well, my love. So we can be happy now.”

  That was in 2003. The new directions being taken by the party appalled him. He didn’t approve of the abandoning of the old ideals, the surrender to market economics, the cozying up to capitalist powers. He quit the intelligence services and restarted his life as a private detective. Clients sought him out, on the advice of common friends, in search of information about competing firms, substantial thefts, missing persons. He received visits, too, from desperate women, looking for evidence of their husbands’ betrayal, and jealous husbands, offering him considerable sums to watch their wives. Monte didn’t accept these kinds of commissions, which he called, contemptuously, “bed business.” He would recommend other colleagues.

  One afternoon the wife of a well-known businessman appeared in his office. She sat down, crossed and uncrossed her magnificent legs, like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, and shot out in a single breath:

  “I want you to kill my husband.”

  “What?!”

  “Slowly. Very slowly.”

  Monte leaned forward in his chair. He looked at her in silence, for a long moment, expecting to break her. The woman didn’t lower her eyes.

  “I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Monte knew the businessman in question, an unscrupulous opportunist, who had begun to fill his pockets back in the Marxist days, stealing, here and there, from public works.

  “It’s a lot of money for such a small job.”

  “So you accept?”

  “Why do you want to kill him?”

  “I�
�m fed up with his betrayals. I want to see him dead. Do you accept?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t accept?”

  “No. I don’t accept. I’d kill him without the slightest remorse – with a certain amount of pleasure, even, especially if it’s slowly, but you haven’t given me the proper motive.”

  The woman left, furious. Weeks later the newspapers reported the businessman’s death. He had been shot, in his car, while resisting an attempted robbery.

  To this day Monte can’t help a slight smile when he hears occasional comments on the disappearance of Simon-Pierre Mulamba. People who see him smiling take it badly. They believe that he, an obstinate Marxist, a skeptic by nature and by training, is smiling at popular superstitions. At the time, he had been annoyed at the failure of the operation. He could not bear mistakes, his own or other people’s, even though the final result of the whole mix-up had pleased him. Finally, he resigned. “That was the straw that broke the back of my infinite patience,” he explained to a friend. The war had ended. In the hotels of Luanda businessmen from Portugal, Brazil, South Africa, Israel all rubbed shoulders, in search of quick money in a country going through a process of frantic reconstruction. From upstairs – some lavish, air-conditioned office – the order came to silence a journalist, Daniel Benchimol, who was a specialist in disappearances. Benchimol had spent weeks questioning pilots, mechanics, businessmen, whores, traveling salesmen, opposition politicians and government ones, too, all kinds of people, about the vanishing of a Boeing 727. The plane vanished at daybreak, forty-five tons of solid metal, a wonder that nobody could explain.

  “All that is solid melts into air,” muttered Monte, thinking about Marx, and thinking, like Marx, not about planes but about the capitalist system, which there, in Angola, thriving like mold amid ruins, had already begun to rot everything, to corrupt everything and, thus, to bring about its own end.