A General Theory of Oblivion

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

  “I have a letter for you,” Daniel was saying. “Perhaps it would be better if we went inside, so you can sit down and we might talk.”

  While this was happening, Magno Moreira Monte was coming into the building. He didn’t find the doorman, he called the elevator and went up. He heard Nasser’s shouts as he chased Baiacu:

  “Come back. You can’t go up there!”

  Little Chief, who was at home, shaving, was also alarmed at the doorman’s shouts. He washed his face, put on some trousers, and went to the door to look into the hallway and see what the commotion was about. Baiacu ran past him, pushed the shepherds aside, and stopped just a few meters away from Daniel Benchimol. Then at once the elevator door opened and the ex-prisoner was surprised to find himself face-to-face with the man who, twenty-five years back, had questioned and tortured him.

  Baiacu took a switchblade from his trouser pocket, flicked it open, and showed it to Sabalu:

  “Thief! I’m going to cut your ears off!”

  The boy faced up to him:

  “Come on, then. I’m not scared of you anymore!”

  Ludo pushed him into the apartment:

  “Go in, child. We were wrong to open the door.”

  Nasser Evangelista fell onto Baiacu and disarmed him:

  “Easy, kid, drop that now. We’re going to have a talk.”

  Monte was pleased to see Little Chief’s astonishment:

  “Ah, comrade Arnaldo Cruz! Whenever I hear anyone speaking ill of Angola, I always use you as an example. A country in which even the madmen get rich, even the enemies of the regime, does necessarily have to be a pretty generous one!”

  António, stunned at the collection of events, whispered into the old man’s ear, in the twisting language of the Kuvale:

  “These people don’t have oxen, father. They know nothing about oxen.”

  Daniel Benchimol held Ludo’s arm:

  “Wait a moment, ma’am. Read the letter.”

  Little Chief stuck an index finger into Monte’s chest:

  “What are you laughing at, you hyena? The hyenas’ days are over now.”

  Ludo handed back the envelope:

  “My eyes are no longer any use for reading.”

  Monte pushed Little Chief’s arm away, and as he turned his body he noticed Jeremias. This coincidence seemed to please him even more:

  “Well, now, another familiar face. That meeting of ours out in Namibe didn’t go too well. Not for me, at least. But this time, you people are on my turf.”

  Daniel Benchimol shuddered when he heard Monte’s voice. He turned to the detective:

  “I’m just starting to remember you myself, sir. You woke me on the night Simon-Pierre disappeared. The idea was to make me disappear, not him – right?”

  At this point all eyes were on the old agent. Nasser Evangelista let go of Baiacu and advanced on Monte, enraged, the knife in the air:

  “I remember you, too, sir, and they are not happy memories.”

  Finding himself surrounded by Jeremias, António, Little Chief, Daniel Benchimol, and Nasser Evangelista, Monte began to back toward the staircase.

  “Take it easy, take it easy – what happened, happened. We’re all Angolans.”

  Nasser Evangelista didn’t hear him. He heard only his own cries, a quarter of a century earlier, in a narrow cell that stank of shit and piss. He heard the cries of a woman he never saw, coming from some other identical darkness. Shouts and the barking of dogs. Behind him everything was shouting. Everything was barking. He took two steps forward and pressed the blade to Monte’s chest. He was surprised to meet no resistance. He repeated the gesture again and again. The detective staggered, very pale, and brought his hands up to his shirt. He saw no blood. His clothes were intact. Jeremias took Nasser by the shoulders and pulled him toward him. Daniel grabbed the knife from his hand.

  “It’s fake. Thank God, it’s a circus knife.”

  So it was. The knife had a hollow handle, with a spring, into which the blade slid, disappearing when something pushed against it.

  Daniel stabbed himself in the chest and the neck to demonstrate to the others the fakeness of the weapon. Then he leaped onto Jeremias. He stabbed Nasser. He laughed loud, big, hysterical laughter, and the others joined in. Ludo, too, laughed, holding on to Sabalu, tears running from her eyes.

  Only Monte remained serious. He smoothed out his shirt, straightened his back, walked down the steps. Outside the air burned. A dry wind shook the trees. The detective struggled to breathe. His chest hurt, not where Nasser had struck those fictional knife blows, but inside, in some secret place, somewhere he couldn’t name. He wiped his eyes. He took the dark glasses from his trouser pocket and put them on. He recalled, for no apparent reason, the image of a canoe floating in the Okavango Delta.

  The Kubango starts being called the Okavango when it crosses the Namibian border. Though it is a large river, it doesn’t fulfill the same destiny as its peers: it doesn’t empty into the sea. It opens its broad arms and dies in the middle of the desert. It is a sublime death, a generous one, that fills the sands of the Kalahari with green and with life. Monte had spent his thirtieth wedding anniversary on the Okavango Delta, in an eco-lodge – a gift from his children. Those had been blessed days, him and Maria Clara, catching beetles and butterflies, reading, going on canoe trips.

  There are some people who experience a fear of being forgotten. It’s a pathology called athazagoraphobia. The opposite happened with him: he lived in terror that he would never be forgotten. There, on the Okavango Delta, he had felt forgotten. He had been happy.

  In Which It Is Revealed How Nasser Evangelista Helped Little Chief to Escape from Prison

  We always die of dejection, that is, when our souls fail us – then we die. That was Little Chief’s theory. In support of this, the businessman described what happened to him the second time he was arrested. He faced the terrible prison conditions, the ill treatment, the torture, with a courage that surprised not only his companions in misfortune but also the prison guards and the agents of the political police.

  It wasn’t courage, he admits: “I was experiencing serious rebelliousness. My soul was rebelling against the injustices. Fear, yes, the fear came to hurt me more than the blows, but the rebellion was growing over the fear and that was when I confronted the police. I was never quiet. When they shouted at me, I shouted louder. From a certain point, I realized those guys were more scared of me than I was of them.”

  One time when they were punishing him, and they put him in a tiny cell, which they called Kifangondo after the site of the great battle, Little Chief found a rat and adopted it. He called it Splendour, a name that was perhaps a little optimistic for a common rat, brown and shifty, with a gnawed-on ear and fur in pretty poor shape. When Little Chief reappeared in the regular cell, with Splendour nestled on his right shoulder, some of his companions teased him. Most ignored him. At that time, at the end of the seventies, the São Paulo Prison brought together an extraordinary collection of personalities. American and English mercenaries, taken in combat, lived alongside dissident exiles from the ANC who had fallen into misfortune. Young intellectuals from the far left exchanged ideas with old Portuguese Salazarists. There were guys locked up for diamond trafficking, and others for not having stood to attention during the raising of the flag. Some of the prisoners had been important leaders in the party. They took pride in their friendship with the President.

  “Only yesterday the Old Man and I went fishing together,” one of them boasted to Little Chief. “When he finds out what’s happened, he’ll get me out of here and have the morons who did this to me arrested.”

  He was shot the following week.

  Many didn’t even know what they’d been accused of. Some went crazy. The interrogations often seemed erratic, preposterous, as though the aim was not to extract information from the detainees, merely to torture and confuse them.

  In this context, a man with a trained rat wasn’t enough to surprise an
yone. Little Chief took care of Splendour. He taught him tricks. He’d say, “Sit!” – and the animal sat. “Around!” he’d order, and the rat started walking in circles. Monte heard of this and went to the cell to visit the prisoner.

  “They tell me you’ve made a new friend.”

  Little Chief didn’t answer. He’d created a rule for himself never to reply to an agent from the political police, unless the agent was shouting. In such cases he would scream an attack at him, accusing him of being in the service of the sociofascist dictatorship, etc. Monte found the prisoner’s behavior exasperating.

  “I’m talking to you, for fuck’s sake! Don’t act like I’m invisible.”

  Little Chief turned his back on him. Monte lost it. He tugged on his shirt. That was the moment he saw Splendour. He grabbed hold of the animal, threw it onto the floor and stamped on it. In the midst of all those crimes, such vast crimes that were being committed in those days, right there, within the prison walls, the tiny death of Splendour affected nobody, apart from Little Chief. The young man fell into a deep dejection. He would spend his days lying on a mat, unspeaking, unmoving, indifferent to his cellmates. He became so thin that his ribs stuck out beneath his skin like the keys of a kisanji. Finally, they took him to the infirmary.

  When he was arrested, Nasser Evangelista was working at the Maria Pia Hospital as an orderly. He took no interest in politics. All his attention was trained on a young nurse called Sueli Mirela, well known for the length of her legs, which she displayed generously in daring miniskirts, and for her round hairdo, in the style of Angela Davis. The girl, who was going out with a state security agent, allowed herself to be seduced by the orderly’s sweet words. Her boyfriend, in a rage, accused his rival of being linked to the fractionists. When he was locked up, Nasser started to work in the infirmary. He was moved when he saw Little Chief’s condition. He conceived and organized the plan himself, a plan that was brave and yet happy, which made it possible to return the frail young man to freedom. Well, to relative freedom, since, as Little Chief himself likes to repeat, no man is free as long as one other man is in prison.

  Nasser Evangelista registered the death of Little Chief, alias Arnaldo Cruz, aged nineteen, student of law, and he himself put the body in the coffin. A distant cousin, who was in reality a comrade from the same small party in which he was himself an activist, received the casket. He buried it, in a discreet ceremony, at the Alto das Cruzes cemetery. This after removing the passenger in question. Little Chief got into the habit of visiting the grave on the anniversary of his supposed death, taking flowers to himself. “To me, it’s a reflection on the fragility of life and a small exercise in otherness,” he explains to his friends. “I go out there, and I try and think of myself as a close relative. I am, really, my own closest relative. I think about his defects, about his qualities, and whether or not he deserves my tears. I almost always cry a little.”

  It was months before the police discovered the fraud. Then they arrested him again.

  Mysteries of Luanda

  Little Chief enjoyed talking to the handicraft sellers. He would get lost down the dusty alleyways, amid the wooden stalls, studying the Congolese fabrics, the thousand and one cloths showing sunsets and drums, the Chokwe masks that the craftsmen used to bury, during the rainy months, to make them look old. Sometimes he’d buy some object or other he didn’t even like just to prolong the conversation. Moved more by a spirit of solidarity than any thought of financial gain, he set up a company to produce and trade in handicrafts. He would imagine and design pieces in dark wood, which the craftsmen would then undertake to replicate. He’d sell the objects at Luanda airport and in small shops dedicated to so-called “fair trade,” in Paris, London, and New York. He employed more than twenty craftsmen. One of the most successful pieces was the Thinker, a popular figure of traditional Angolan statuary, with a gag over his mouth. The people named it Don’t Think.

  One afternoon, Little Chief walked across the market without paying much attention to the sellers. He just smiled, nodding at anyone who greeted him. Papy Bolingô was beginning his show. Fofo was singing an old number by Orchestra Baobab. The bar was full. Seeing him arrive, one of the staff came over to him carrying a folding chair. He opened it up and the businessman sat down. People laughed, fascinated, as Fofo moved in time with the rhythm, opening and closing his enormous mouth.

  Little Chief watched the show many times. He knew that Papy Bolingô had worked in a circus, in France, during his years of exile. It was, doubtless, at that time that he’d discovered and developed his extraordinary skills as a ventriloquist, from which he now earned his living.

  “Fofo talks!” he would insist, laughing. “Fofo sings. It’s not me. I taught him his first words, he was very little. Then I taught him to sing.”

  “Then we want to hear him singing a long way away from you!”

  “No chance! That’s one thing this guy won’t do. He’s such a shy little creature.”

  Little Chief waited till the end of the show. People were on their way out, really excited, entranced by the miracle they had just witnessed. The businessman approached the performers:

  “Congratulations! Better every time.”

  “Thanks,” the hippo thanked him with its metallic voice, a dramatic baritone. “We had a nice audience.”

  Little Chief stroked his back:

  “How are you getting along, over on your little farm?”

  “Very well, Padrinho. I’ve got loads of water, mud for rolling around in.”

  Papy Bolingô exploded into bright laughter. His friend laughed with him. Fofo seemed to imitate them, shaking his head, stamping his thick feet on the little stage.

  The owner of the establishment, an old guerilla fighter called Pedro Afonso, had lost his right leg when a landmine exploded. This had not robbed him of his love of dancing. To see him dance, you would never have guessed he wore a prosthesis. He came over when he heard the two friends laughing, tracing out some ornate rumba steps on the beaten-earth floor:

  “God invented music so poor people could be happy.”

  He called for beer for the three of them:

  “Let’s drink to the happiness of the poor.”

  Little Chief objected:

  “And what about me?”

  “You? Ah yes, I always forget you’re rich. Here in our country, the first external sign of wealth is usually arrogance. You don’t have any of that about you. The money hasn’t gone to your head.”

  “Thanks. You know how I became rich?”

  “They say a bird came down from the sky, landed in your hand, and spat out two diamonds.”

  “That’s almost how it happened. I killed a pigeon, to eat it, and I found two diamonds in the animal’s beak. Just a few days ago I learned whose diamonds they were.” Little Chief was silent a moment, relishing his friends’ amazement. “The diamonds belonged to my neighbor, an old Portuguese woman. She lived in poverty for twenty-something years, despite being rich. And she made me rich – me – without knowing it.”

  He told the story, taking time over the details, the twists and turns, inventing whatever he didn’t know with talent and relish. Papy Bolingô wanted to know if the old lady had kept some diamonds. Yes, the businessman said. There had been two left, both so big that none of the pigeons wanted them. The Portuguese woman had offered them to a couple of Mucubal shepherds. It would seem she knew these hicks, God knows how. Luanda does have its mysteries.”

  “True,” Pedro Afonso agreed. “Our capital is full of mysteries. I’ve seen things in this city that would be too much even in a dream.”

  The Death of Monte

  Magno Moreira Monte was killed by a satellite dish. He fell off the roof while he was trying to fix the aerial. Then the thing fell on his head. Some people saw the events as an ironic allegory for the recent times. The former state security agent, the final representative of a past which few in Angola wished to recall, was felled by the future: the triumph of free communication
over obscurantism, silence, and censorship; cosmopolitanism had crushed provincialism.

  Maria Clara liked watching the Brazilian soaps. Her husband, meanwhile, took little interest in television. The pointlessness of the programs infuriated him. The news bulletins made him even angrier. He watched football matches, supporting Primeiro de Agosto and Benfica. From time to time he’d sit down, in pajamas and slippers, to rewatch some old black-and-white movie or other. He preferred books. He had collected many hundreds of titles. He planned to spend his final years rereading Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Luandino Vieira, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez.

  When they moved house, leaving the dirty, noisy air of the capital behind them, Monte tried to persuade his wife to do without the television. Maria Clara agreed. She’d got into the habit of agreeing with him. For the first weeks, they read together. Everything seemed to be going well. But Maria Clara was getting sad. She’d spend hours on the phone with her friends. Monte then decided to buy and install a satellite dish.

  Strictly speaking, he died for love.

  The Meeting

  Maria da Piedade Lourenço was a small, nervous woman, with a neglected head of grayish-brown hair, which rose up like a crest on the top of her head. Ludo couldn’t make out the details of her face. She did, however, notice the crest. “She looks like a chicken,” she thought, then immediately regretted having thought it. She’d been terribly nervous in the days leading up to her daughter’s arrival. But when the woman appeared in front of her, a great calm settled over her. She told her to come in. The living room was painted now and all set up, new flooring, new doors, the whole thing at the expense of her neighbor, Arnaldo Cruz, who had also insisted on giving her the furniture. He had bought the apartment from Ludo, granting her lifetime use of it, and committing to pay for Sabalu’s studies until the boy was done with university.