A General Theory of Oblivion Read online

  Copyright © José Eduardo Agualusa, 2013

  English translation copyright © Daniel Hahn, 2015

  First published as Teoria Geral do Esquecimento by Publicações Dom Quixote,

  2013, in Portugal.

  By arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt, e.k.,

  Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Agualusa, José Eduardo, 1960–

  [Teoria geral do esquecimento. English]

  A general theory of oblivion / Jose Eduardo Agualusa;

  translated by Daniel Hahn.

  pages cm

  eISBN 978-0-914671-32-9 (paperback)

  1. Women hermits – Angola – Luanda – Fiction.

  I. Hahn, Daniel, translator. II. Title.

  PQ9929.A39T4713 2015

  869.3′42–dc23 2015018851

  “Aviso à Navegação – A Brief Introductory Look at the Kuvale Shepherds” copyright © Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, INALD, 1997.

  Excerpt from FERNANDO PESSOA & CO. by Fernando Pessoa, translation copyright © 1998 by Richard Zenith. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc and SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

  Cover art: Jean Dubuffet, La butte aux visions (Knoll of Visions), 1952

  Archipelago Books gratefully acknowledges the generous support from Lannan Foundation, the Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Biblietecas, and the New York State Council of the Arts, a state agency.

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Our Sky Is Your Floor

  Lullaby for a Small Death

  Soldiers Without Fortune

  The Substance of Fear

  After the End

  Che Guevara’s Mulemba Tree

  The Second Life of Jeremias Carrasco

  May 27

  On the Slippages of Reason

  The Rebel Aerial

  The Days Slide By as if They Were Liquid

  Haikai

  The Subtle Architecture of Chance

  Blindness: (And the Eyes of the Heart)

  The Collector of Disappearances

  The Letter

  The Death of Phantom

  About God and Other Tiny Follies

  Exorcism

  The Day Ludo Saved Luanda

  Apparitions, and a Nearly Fatal Fall

  Mutiati Blues

  In Which a Disappearance Is Cleared Up (Almost Two), Or How, to Quote Marx: All That Is Solid Melts into Air

  Sabalu and His Dead

  Daniel Benchimol Investigates Ludo’s Disappearance

  Mutiati Blues (2)

  The Strange Destiny of the Kubango River

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

  Mysteries of Luanda

  The Death of Monte

  The Meeting

  A Pigeon Called Love

  The Confession of Jeremias Carrasco

  The Accident

  Last Words

  Dreams Are Where It All Begins

  Acknowledgments and Bibliography

  FOREWORD

  Ludovica Fernandes Mano died in Luanda, at the Sagrada Esperança clinic, in the early hours of October 5, 2010. She was eighty-five years old. Sabalu Estevão Capitango gave me copies of ten notebooks in which Ludo had been writing her diary, in the first years of the twenty-eight during which she had shut herself away. I also had access to the diaries that followed her release as well as to a huge collection of photographs taken by the visual artist Sacramento Neto (Sakro) of Ludo’s texts and charcoal pictures on the walls of her apartment. Ludo’s diaries, poems, and reflections helped me to reconstruct the tragedies she lived through. They helped me, I believe, to understand her. In the pages that follow, I have made use of much of her first-hand account. What you will read is, however, fiction. Pure fiction.

  Our Sky Is Your Floor

  Ludovica never liked having to face the sky. When still only a little girl, she was horrified by open spaces. She felt, upon leaving the house, fragile and vulnerable, like a turtle whose shell had been torn off. When she was very small, six, seven years old, she was already refusing to go to school without the protection of a vast black umbrella, whatever the weather. Neither her parents’ annoyance nor the cruel mockery of the other children deterred her. Later on, it got better. Until what she called The Accident happened and she started to look back on that feeling of primordial dread as something like a premonition.

  After the death of her parents, Ludo lived in her sister’s house. She rarely went out. She earned a little money giving Portuguese lessons to bored teenagers. Besides this, she read, embroidered, played the piano, watched television, cooked. When night fell, she would go over to the window and look into the darkness like somebody leaning out over an abyss. Odete, irritated, shook her head:

  “What’s the matter, Ludo? Scared of falling into the stars?”

  Odete taught English and German at the high school. She loved her sister. She avoided travel so as not to leave her by herself. She spent her holidays at home. Some of her friends praised her selflessness, others criticized her for being excessively indulgent. Ludo couldn’t imagine living alone. And yet she worried that she had become a burden. She thought of the two of them as Siamese twins, joined at the navel. Her, paralyzed, almost dead, and the other, Odete, forced to drag her along wherever she went. She felt happy, she felt terrified, when her sister fell in love with a mining engineer. His name was Orlando. A widower, childless. He had come to the Portuguese city of Aveiro to resolve some complicated issue to do with an inheritance. An Angolan, originally from Catete, he lived between Angola’s capital and Dundo, a town run by the diamond company for which he worked. Two weeks after they’d met, quite by chance, in a patisserie, Orlando asked Odete to marry him. Expecting her to turn him down, being familiar with Odete’s reasons, he insisted that Ludo would come to live with them in Angola. The following month they were set up in a huge apartment on the top floor of one of the most luxurious buildings in Luanda. The so-called Prédio dos Invejados – that is, the building of those who inspire envy.

  The journey was hard for Ludo. She left home in a daze, under the effects of tranquilizers, moaning and protesting. She slept the whole flight. The following morning, she awoke to a routine similar to that she’d had back home. Orlando owned a valuable library, thousands of titles, in Portuguese, French, Spanish, English, and German, among which almost all the great classics of universal literature were to be found. Ludo had access to more books now, while also to less time, because she insisted on dispensing with the two maids and the cook, taking charge of all the domestic chores herself.

  One evening, the engineer arrived home carefully carrying a large cardboard box. He handed it to his sister-in-law:

  “This is for you, Ludovica. To keep you company. You spend too much time alone.”

  Ludo opened the box. Inside, looking fearfully at her, she found a little white newborn puppy.

  “He’s a male. A German shepherd,” Orlando explained. “They grow quickly. This one’s an albino,
rather unusual. He shouldn’t get too much sun. What are you going to call him?”

  Ludo didn’t hesitate:

  “Phantom!”

  “Phantom?”

  “Yes, he looks like a phantom. All white like that.”

  Orlando shrugged his bony shoulders.

  “Very well. Then Phantom he shall be.”

  An elegant, anachronistic wrought-iron staircase climbed in a tight spiral from the drawing room up to the terrace. From there, your eyes could take in a good part of the city, the bay, the Ilha promontory, and out in the distance a long necklace of abandoned beaches fringed by the fine lacework of the waves. Orlando took advantage of the space to construct a garden. A bower of bougainvillea threw a scented lilac shade over the coarse brick floor. In one of the corners grew a pomegranate tree and several banana trees. Guests used to be surprised:

  “Bananas, Orlando? Is this a city garden or the backyard of a farm?”

  The engineer would get annoyed. The banana trees reminded him of the large yard, hemmed in by adobe walls, where he had played as a boy. If it had been up to him, he would have planted mango trees, too, and medlar trees, and lots of papaya plants. When he came home from the office, that was where he used to sit, a glass of whisky within arm’s reach, a black cigarette alight between his lips, watching as night conquered the city. Phantom would be there with him. The puppy also loved that terrace. Ludo, meanwhile, refused to go up. In the first few months she did not even dare approach the windows.

  “The African sky is much bigger than ours,” she explained to her sister. “It crushes us.”

  One sunny April morning, Odete came back from the high school to have her lunch, and she was thrilled and frightened. Chaos had broken out in the capital. Orlando was in Dundo. He arrived back that night, and shut himself away in the bedroom with his wife. Ludo could hear them arguing. She wanted to leave Angola as quickly as possible:

  “The terrorists, my love, the terrorists …”

  “Terrorists? Never use that word in my house again.” Orlando never shouted. He whispered harshly, the sharp edge of his voice like a blade against his interlocutor’s throat: “These so-called terrorists are fighting for the freedom of my country. I am Angolan. I will not leave.”

  Turbulent days passed. Demonstrations, strikes, rallies. Ludo closed the windows to prevent the apartment being filled with the laughter of the people on the streets, bursting into the air like fireworks. Orlando, the son of a trader from Minho who’d settled in Catete in the early years of the century, and a Luandan mestiza who’d died in childbirth, had never nurtured family connections. One of his cousins, Vitorino Gavião, showed up again around that time. He had spent five months living in Paris, occupying himself with drink, women, plotting, and writing poems on paper napkins in the bistros that were frequented by exiles from Portugal and Africa, thereby acquiring the aura of a romantic revolutionary. He entered their house like a tempest, disordering the books in the bookcase, the glasses on the dresser, and unsettling Phantom. The puppy would chase around after him at a safe distance, barking and growling.

  “The comrades want to speak to you, damn it!” shouted Vitorino, leveling a punch at Orlando’s shoulder. “We’re negotiating a provisional government. We need good men.”

  “Could be,” admitted Orlando: “Actually we have plenty of good men. What we’re short of is good sense.”

  He hesitated. Yes, he murmured, the country could use the experience he had gathered. However, he feared the more extremist currents at the heart of the movement. He understood the necessity for greater social justice, but the communists, who were threatening to nationalize everything, alarmed him. Expropriating private property. Expelling the whites. Knocking out all the petite bourgeoisie’s teeth. He, Orlando, took pride in having a perfect smile, and he had no desire for dentures. His cousin laughed, attributing all their verbal excesses to the euphoria of the moment, then complimented him on the whisky, and poured himself some more. That cousin with a sphere of curly hair like Jimi Hendrix, a flowery shirt open over his sweating chest, alarmed the sisters.

  “He talks like a black!” said Odete accusingly. “And besides, he stinks. Whenever he comes over, he infects the whole house.”

  Orlando became enraged. He left, slamming the door behind him. He returned in the evening, drier, sharper, a man with a close kinship to a thornbush. He went up to the terrace, Phantom with him, with a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of whisky, and there he stayed. He returned when night was drawing in, bringing the nightfall with him, and a strong smell of alcohol and tobacco. He stumbled over his own feet, shoving into the furniture, with harsh whispers against this whole fucking life.

  The first gunshots signaled the start of the big farewell parties. Young people were dying in the streets, waving flags, and meanwhile the settlers danced. Rita, their neighbor in the next-door apartment, traded Luanda for Rio de Janeiro. On her last night, she invited two hundred friends round for a dinner which lingered on till daybreak.

  “Whatever we can’t drink we’ll leave for you,” she said to Orlando, pointing at the pantry stacked high with cases of the finest Portuguese wines. “Drink them. The important thing is that there mustn’t be anything left over for the communists to celebrate with.”

  Three months later, the apartment block was almost empty. Ludo, meanwhile, didn’t know where to put so many bottles of wine, crates of beer, tinned food, ham, pieces of salt-cod, kilos of salt, sugar, and flour, not to mention the endless supply of cleaning and hygiene products. Orlando had received from one friend – a collector of sports cars – a Chevrolet Corvette and an Alfa Romeo GTA. Another had given him the keys to his apartment.

  “I’ve never been a lucky man,” Orlando complained to the two sisters, and it was not clear whether he was being ironic or speaking in earnest. “Just when I start collecting cars and apartments, the communists show up wanting to take everything away from me.”

  Ludo would turn on the radio and the revolution would come into the house: It’s the power of the people that is the cause of all this chaos, one of the most popular singers of the moment kept repeating.

  Hey, brother, sang another,

  love your brother

  Don’t look to see what his color is

  Just see him as Angolan.

  With the Angolan people united

  Independence will soon be here.

  Some of the tunes didn’t really go with the words. It was as though they were stolen from songs from some other age, ballads that were sad like the light of an ancient dusk. Leaning out the window, half hidden behind the curtains, Ludo could see the trucks pass by, loaded up with men. Some of them were flying flags. Others had banners with slogans:

  Full Independence!

  Five hundred years of colonial oppression are enough!

  We want the Future!

  The demands all ended in exclamation marks. The exclamation marks got mixed up with the machetes the protesters were carrying. There were also machetes shining on the flags and the banners. Some of the men were carrying one in each hand. They were holding them up high. They were striking the blades against each other, in a mournful clamor.

  One night, Ludo dreamed that beneath the streets of the city, under the respectable mansions in the lower town, there stretched an endless network of tunnels. The roots of the trees would wind their way, unimpeded, down through the vaults. There were thousands of people living underground, sunk deep in mud and darkness, feeding themselves on whatever the bourgeoisie tossed into the sewers. Ludo was walking amid the throng. The men were waving machetes. They were striking their blades against each other and the noise echoed down the tunnels. One of them approached, brought his dirty face right up close to the Portuguese woman’s face, and smiled. He whispered in her ear, in a voice that was deep and sweet:

  “Our sky is your floor.”

  Lullaby for a Small Death

  Odete insisted that they leave Angola. Her husband responded with muttered, harsh wo
rds. The women could go if they wanted. Let the settlers set sail. Nobody wanted them there. A cycle was being completed. A new time was beginning. Come sun or storm, the Portuguese would not be lit by the light of the future, nor lashed by wild hurricanes. The more they whispered, the angrier the engineer got. He could spend hours enumerating the crimes committed against the Africans, the mistakes, the injustices, the disgraces, until his wife gave up and shut herself away in the guest bedroom in tears. It was a huge surprise when he arrived home, two days before Independence, and announced that a week later they would be in Lisbon. Odete opened her eyes wide:

  “Why?”

  Orlando sat down in one of the living-room armchairs. He pulled off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and finally, in a gesture quite unlike him, took off his shoes and put his feet up on the little coffee table.

  “Because we can. We can go, now.”

  The next night the couple went out for yet another farewell party. Ludo waited for them to come home, reading, knitting, till two in the morning. She went to bed worried, and she slept badly. She got up at seven, put on a dressing gown, called out to her sister. No one answered. She was certain some tragedy must have befallen them. She waited another hour before looking for their address book. First she called the Nuneses, the couple who had organized the previous night’s party. One of the servants answered. The family had gone off to the airport. Mr. Orlando the engineer and his wife had indeed been at the party, yes, but they hadn’t stayed long. He’d never seen Mr. Orlando in such a good mood. Ludo thanked him and hung up. She opened the address book again. Odete had scratched out in red ink the names of the friends who had left Luanda. Few remained. Only three answered, and none of them knew a thing. One of them, a math teacher at the Salvador Correia high school, promised to phone a policeman friend of his. He would call back as soon as he had any information.

  Hours passed. There was gunfire. First some isolated shots and then the intense crackle of dozens of automatic weapons. The telephone rang. A man who still seemed young, with a Lisbon accent, sounding like he came from a good family, asked if he might speak to Miss Odete’s sister.