A General Theory of Oblivion (6 page)

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.”

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 the 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.

She knew, even before opening her eyes, that the storm was moving off. The sky was clearing. A ray of sunlight warmed her face. From up on the patio she heard a whine, a weak complaint. Phantom, stretched out at her feet, leaped up, ran across the apartment to the living room, ran up the spiral staircase tripping over himself, and disappeared. Ludo raced after him. The dog had cornered the monkey against the banana tree, and he was growling, nervous, head down. Ludo grabbed him by the collar, firmly, pulling him toward her. The German shepherd
resisted. He made as if to bite her. The woman smacked him on the nose with her left hand, again and again. Finally, Phantom gave in. He let himself be dragged away. She tied him up in the kitchen, shut the door, and returned to the terrace. Che Guevara was still there, watching her with light, wondering eyes. She had never seen such an intensely human look in the eyes of any man. On his right leg she could see a gash that was deep and clean, that looked like it had been made just moments earlier by a machete blow. The blood was mixing with rainwater.

Ludo peeled a banana, which she had brought from the kitchen, and held her arm out. The monkey leaned forward, sticking out his muzzle. He shook his head, in a gesture that might have indicated pain, or distrust. The woman called sweetly to him:

“Come on now, come on, little one. Come, I’ll look after you.”

The animal approached, dragging his leg, crying sadly. Ludo let go of the banana and grabbed him by the neck. With her left hand she drew the knife she had at her waist and buried it in the lean flesh. Che Guevara gave a cry, broke free, the blade stuck in his belly, and with two big jumps reached the wall. He stopped there, leaning against the wall, wailing, spattering blood. The woman sat down on the floor, exhausted, and she, too, was crying. They stayed like that a long while, the two of them, looking at each other, until it started raining again. Then Ludo got up, walked over to the monkey, pulled out the knife, and slit his throat.

In the morning, as she salted the meat, Ludo noticed that the rebel aerial was once again turned toward the south.

That aerial, and three others.

The man with the brilliant smile was called Bienvenue Ambrosio Fortunato. Not many people knew him by that name. At the end of the sixties he’d composed a bolero entitled “Papy Bolingô.” The song, which was performed by François Luambo Luanzo Makiadi, the great Franco, had been an immediate hit, played day and night on the radios of Kinshasa, and the young guitar player earned himself a nickname that would accompany him for the rest of his life. A little over twenty years old, persecuted by the regime of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a.k.a. Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, Papy Bolingô had sought exile in Paris. He first got work as a doorman at a nightclub, and later as a guitarist in a circus band. It was in France, where he made contact with the small Angolan community, that he rediscovered the country of his ancestors. As soon as Angola became independent, he packed his bags and set off for Luanda. He performed at weddings and other private parties frequented by Angolans who had returned from Zaire, and by true Zaireans pining for their homeland. The daily bread that was so hard to earn he managed to get through his work as a sound technician at Rádio Nacional. He was on duty on the morning of May 27 when the rebels entered the building. He then witnessed the arrival of the Cuban soldiers, who quickly put the house in order, with slaps and kicks, retaking control of the broadcast.

As he left, very disturbed by the events he had been witnessing, he saw a military truck plowing into a car. He ran over to save the occupants. He immediately recognized one of the wounded men, a chubby guy with short, strong arms, who had on one occasion questioned him at the radio station. Then he noticed the tall young man, gaunt as an Egyptian mummy, his wrists cuffed together. He didn’t hesitate. He helped the young man to his feet, covered his hands with his jacket, and brought him to his apartment.

“Why did you help me?”

Little Chief asked this question over and over, countless times, during the four years he spent hidden in the sound technician’s apartment. His friend rarely answered. He gave a big laugh, the laugh of a free man, shook his head, changed the subject. One day he looked him straight in the eye:

“My father was a priest. He was a good priest and an excellent father. To this day I don’t trust priests without children. How can you be a priest if you aren’t a father? Mine taught us to help the weak. And that time, when I saw you sprawled out on the pavement, you sure looked pretty weak to me. Besides, I recognized one of the policemen, a security officer, who had been at my work interrogating people. I don’t like thought police. I never have. So I did what my conscience told me.”

Little Chief spent long months hidden away. After the death of the first president, the regime experimented with a hesitant opening-up. Those political prisoners not linked to the armed opposition were released. Some received invitations to occupy positions in the apparatus of the State. As he went out onto the streets of the capital,
feeling somewhere between alarmed and intrigued, Little Chief discovered that almost everybody believed him dead. Some friends assured him they had actually been at his funeral. A few of his comrades in the struggle even seemed a little disappointed to be reunited with him quite so alive. As for Madalena, she received him joyfully. In the years that had passed she’d set up an NGO, Stone Soup, committed to improving the diet of the communities living in Luanda’s slum housing. She would go through the poorest neighborhoods of the city, teaching the mothers and feeding the children, as best she could, with the limited resources available.

“You can eat better without spending any more,” she explained to Little Chief. “You and your friends fill your mouths with big words –
Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution
– and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables and a good fish broth, at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people to the table.”

The young man was enthused by this. He started accompanying the nurse, in exchange for a symbolic wage, three meals a day, a bed, and laundry. In the meantime, the years went by. The socialist system was dismantled by the very same people who had set it up, and capitalism rose from the ashes, as fierce as ever. Guys who just months ago had been railing against bourgeois democracy at family lunches and parties, at demonstrations, in newspaper articles, were now dressed in designer clothing, driving around the city in cars that gleamed.

Little Chief allowed a thick prophet’s beard to stretch down over his thin chest. He was still incredibly elegant and, despite the beard,
retained a youthful look about him. However, he began to walk stooped slightly to the left, as though he were being pushed, from within, by a violent gale. One afternoon, seeing the rich people’s cars parading past, he remembered the diamonds. Following Papy Bolingô’s advice, he went over to the Roque Santeiro market. He was carrying a piece of paper with a name on it. He thought, as he allowed himself to be dragged along by the crowd, that it would be impossible to track anyone down in the vastness of that chaos. He was afraid he would never be able to get out. He was wrong. The first trader he approached pointed him in one particular direction. Another, a few meters on, confirmed it. After fifteen minutes he stopped outside a stall on whose door someone had painted, in rough strokes, the torso of a woman, with a long neck, lit up by a diamond necklace. He knocked. He was met by slim man in a pink jacket and trousers and a livid red tie and hat. His shoes, which were highly polished, shone in the gloom. Little Chief remembered the
sapeurs
Papy Bolingô had introduced him to, years earlier, on a short visit to Kinshasa. Sapeurs are what they call the fashion-mad in the Congo. Guys who dress in clothes that are expensive and showy, spending everything they have, or don’t have, to walk the streets like models on a catwalk.