The Society of Reluctant Dreamers Read online

  José Eduardo Agualusa

  THE SOCIETY OF RELUCTANT

  DREAMERS

  Translated from the Portuguese by

  Daniel Hahn

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, and is one of the leading literary voices in Angola and the Portuguese-speaking world. His novel Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and A General Theory of Oblivion won the DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

  Also by José Eduardo Agualusa in English translation

  Rainy Season

  Creole

  The Book of Chameleons

  My Father’s Wives

  A General Theory of Oblivion

  For Yara, this and all my dreams.

  For Patricia Reis and Sidarta Ribeiro.

  For Laurinda Gouveia, Rosa Conde, Luaty Beirão,

  Domingos da Cruz, Nito Alves, Mbanza Hamza, José Cheick Hata,

  Samussuko Tchikunde, Inocêncio Brito, Sedrick de Carvalho,

  Albano Bingo, Nicola Radical, Nelson Dibango,

  Arante Kivuvu Lopes, Nuno Álvaro Dala, Benedito Jeremias,

  Osvaldo Caholo, and all Angola’s young dreamers.

  ‘The Real gives me asthma.’

  E. M. CIORAN

  ‘Let us always remember that to dream is to look for ourselves.’

  BERNARDO SOARES / FERNANDO PESSOA

  1.

  I woke very early. Through the narrow window, I saw long black birds fly past. I’d dreamed about them. It was as though they had leaped from my dream up into the sky, a damp piece of dark-blue tissue paper, with bitter mould growing in the corners.

  I got up and went out to the beach, barefoot and in my underpants. There was nobody on the sands. I didn’t notice the man who was watching me, sitting in a dark-green rocking chair, as the sun climbed the hillsides. Soon the air would be filled with light. Small waves, one and then another, embroidered their foam into fine bands of lace. The cliffs rose behind me. Atop the cliffs cacti grew like tall cathedrals of thorns and then, beyond them, the quick blaze of the sky.

  I entered the water and swam, taking slow strokes. There are people who swim out of pure pleasure. There are those who swim to keep in shape. I swim to think better. I often remember a line from the Mozambican poet Glória de Sant’Anna: ‘Inside the water I am exactly right.’

  I had divorced the previous day. I’d been at the offices of O Pensamento Angolano newspaper, transcribing an interview I had carried out with a pilot, when the telephone rang. The pilot, Domingos Perpétuo Nascimento, was a soldier. He’d trained in the Soviet Union. He’d fought in Mavinga, in the biggest battle on African soil since the Second World War, at the controls of a MiG-21. Years later he was captured by guerrilla forces, in an attack on a column of civilian vehicles travelling from Luanda to Benguela, and crossed over to the kidnappers’ side. After the end of the war he joined the national airline. A few days ago he had found a bag containing a million dollars in one of the bathrooms on the plane and handed it over to the police. It was a good story. The kind of story I specialised in. I was so excited about it that I ignored the ringing. The phone fell silent for a brief moment, then started back up again. I answered, finally. I recognised the harsh, authoritarian voice of Lucrécia.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At the paper …’

  ‘Well, you’re supposed to be at the courthouse – the divorce hearing is scheduled for fifteen minutes from now.’

  I told her I had no idea. Nobody had informed me. Lucrécia’s voice went up a notch:

  ‘The court sent you a summons, but it ended up at the wrong address. I only just realised. I wrote your address down wrong. Whatever, you’ve got ten minutes.’

  I first met Lucrécia at a party. No sooner had I seen her than I knew I was going to marry her. I remarked to a friend that I thought her practically perfect:

  ‘Just a shame she straightens her hair.’

  In all the years we were married, I never managed to convince her to wear her hair in its natural state, curling down over her shoulders.

  ‘I look like a wild animal,’ Lucrécia would complain.

  We started dating in September 1992, during the first elections. Back then, euphoria walked the streets arm in arm with terror. My days passed between rallies, parties, trips to the provinces, unending conversations in bars, on verandas, in back yards. People would fall asleep with the certainty that the country was approaching its end, and then awake convinced they were living through the dawn of a long age of progress and peace. Soon afterwards the war started up again, more violent than ever, and we were married. At the time, I was running the culture section of the Jornal de Angola. I wrote about books. I interviewed writers, musicians and film-makers. I liked my job. Lucrécia was enrolled on an interior decorating course in London. Work didn’t take up much of her time.

  Her father, Homero Diaz da Cruz, had got rich mysteriously in the latter years of the one-party system and the centralised economy, when expressions such as ‘proletarian internationalism’ and ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship’ were still popular, and nobody talked about ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ as a euphemism for corruption.

  Homero had graduated in Law, from Coimbra, in 1973. Right after independence he was named director of an important state firm. He abandoned the public sector in 1990 – by which time he was very rich, and also a member of the central committee of the party – to set up a company supporting the mining industry. He’s a brusque, cold man, often rude to his staff and his business associates. Yet he was always an attentive husband and an affectionate father. To this day, although his children are all over forty, he makes a point of organising their lives. We, for example, were offered an apartment. We lived in Maianga. We led a peaceful life. The war did not affect us.

  Lucrécia got pregnant. Our daughter was born on a glorious sunny morning in March, in a private clinic in London. We named her Lúcia. She grew to be a happy, healthy child, who early on showed a burning passion for birds. Homero had a huge cage in his back yard, in which there lived, noisily and chaotically together, dozens of blue waxbills, long-tailed tyrants, lined seedeaters, finches and canaries. Lúcia would cling to the bars of the cage and spend hours trying to communicate with the birds. She learned to imitate each one’s song well before she learned to speak. I assumed this was why my father started calling her Karinguiri, after the little bird fr
om Benguela. The nickname stuck.

  It was only after a Portuguese newspaper took me on as a correspondent, and I started covering politics and society, that the problems between me and Lucrécia began. Not that Lucrécia disapproved of what I wrote. She never took any interest in politics. It was Homero who didn’t approve.

  ‘We should always wash our dirty linen in private,’ he pronounced on one occasion. ‘I don’t like you going around bad-mouthing our country in a foreign paper.’

  I tried explaining to him that we mustn’t confuse the government with the country. Criticising mistakes made by the government wasn’t the same as insulting Angola and the Angolans. On the contrary, I criticised the government’s errors because I dreamed of a better country. Homero waved away my arguments with irritation:

  ‘You have no need to write for that newspaper. How much are they paying you?’

  ‘A thousand dollars a month.’

  ‘A thousand dollars? A thousand dollars?! All that work for a thousand dollars? Well then, I’ll give you ten thousand a month not to write. You have a daughter now. You need to pay more attention to your family.’

  I looked at him, astonished, and I refused his offer. A few days later I was called to the office of João Aquilino, director of the Jornal de Angola. Aquilino knew that everyone on the editorial staff despised him. Nobody ever referred to him except by his nickname, the Mole, which suited him perfectly. He was a haggard-looking guy, slightly hunched, with narrow little eyes and a sallow complexion, somewhat rustic in appearance, which none of his expensive suits managed to improve. He had been named director not for his qualifications as a journalist, of which he had none, but for his history as a committed party activist. He told me, in a reedy little voice, that I was contravening house rules by collaborating with a foreign publication. The paper insisted on exclusivity. Either I stopped collaborating with the Portuguese or he’d have to fire me. I pointed out that several other staff journalists, including the editor-in-chief, also worked for foreign publications. If the journal wanted exclusivity, they should pay better. The Mole stood up. He walked around the desk, arms behind his back, and positioned himself in front of me on his tiptoes:

  ‘Do you know why I haven’t fired you yet? Out of the great respect I have for the gentleman who is your father-in-law. I’m tired of your insolence. You, senhor, you think you’re God’s gift. You think you’re better than all of us just because you studied abroad and you’ve read half a dozen books in English. But be warned – one more article in a settler paper and you’re out on your ear.’

  I took two steps back and turned to leave. I was already at the door when the spirit of Devil Benchimol – that’s what I call him – descended on me. I closed the door again and advanced on the Mole, pointing my finger at him:

  ‘And you, senhor, aren’t you ashamed?’

  The wretch hopped back away from me, terrified.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘You aren’t even a journalist! You, senhor, are a policeman of thought, a political agent in the service of the dictatorship.’

  ‘You’re fired! Fired! Get your things and leave!’

  I left to the applause of half the editorial staff. The other half pretended they couldn’t see me. That night, when I told her what had happened, Lucrécia got angry with me. My father-in-law reacted even worse. He phoned in a rage to tell me that, with my behaviour, I had shamed the whole family. Two weeks later, during a Saturday lunch, he got up from the big chair he occupied at the head of the table and shouted at me:

  ‘I’m sick of those articles of yours in that Portuguese newspaper, always bad-mouthing Angola and Angolans. Always talking our nation down. I’m going to buy the rag myself and you’ll never write there again.’

  One of Lucrécia’s cousins, who had lived in Lisbon since childhood and on completing his studies had decided to come back to Angola, tried to defend me:

  ‘Take it easy, uncle. Daniel’s allowed to write whatever he wants, and you have the right to disagree with him. We’re in a democracy, and in a democracy it’s healthy to have different opinions.’

  ‘You shut up!’ Homero commanded him. ‘You’ve just set foot in the country and already you’re talking about democracy? God made the lions and He made the gazelles, and He made the gazelles to be eaten by the lions. God is not democratic.’

  An uncomfortable silence descended on the table. I got up, and left. Two weeks later, somebody – I never learned the name of the businessman or the corporate group – bought the Portuguese newspaper for which I worked. The director called, regretfully, to tell me he could no longer continue working with me.

  ‘We belong to an Angolan firm now, I can’t tell you the name. They promised not to mess with our editorial line, but they want your head. Try to understand, my friend, I’ve got a family – I can’t afford to lose this job.’

  Lucrécia took her father’s side. I became the enemy.

  ‘You don’t like my family,’ she said. ‘You don’t make any effort to fit in. Anyone who doesn’t like my family doesn’t like me.’

  I called around a number of papers and magazines in Luanda, begging for a job, but got nowhere. I spent my days at home, reading, surfing the net, watching movies on TV, playing with my daughter. Lucrécia would come home from work and argue with me. They were terrible months. I would wake up crying. I would take long baths in dirty water, and it felt as if I was sinking into night itself. I was saved by a friend, Armando Carlos, who one evening came by our house for a visit and yanked me out of my torpor.

  ‘Get dressed. Pack a bag and come with me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘My house. You can’t stay here.’

  Armando Carlos lived in an apartment across the street. He’d inherited it from an elderly aunt, a spinster without children, who had died three years earlier. It was on the fourth floor of a very dilapidated building. The wooden floorboards were loose, and some of the planks needed replacing. The paint was peeling on the walls. The outer coat, in lime green, matched harmoniously with the colour of the original coat, a faded yellow. The general impression wasn’t of decadence so much as a weary luxury, perhaps because of the lushness of the magnificent light that came freely through the enormous curtainless windows and reflected on the walls. The apartment consisted of a huge living room, a kitchen and three bedrooms, two of them en suite. The lack of furnishing made it seem clearer. It had almost nothing inside, apart from three mattresses, one in each room, and half a dozen books.

  ‘I gave away the furniture. I gave away the records and the books. I gave away almost all my clothes,’ Armando explained while he showed me around the apartment. ‘I’ve just got two shirts, two pairs of trousers, two pairs of socks, two pairs of underpants and a pair of shoes. I don’t need any more than that. Having stuff eats up a lot of energy. Keeping an eye on everything you have eats up even more – it erodes, it corrupts the soul. The really good thing is enjoying what you have. I don’t want the sailing boat, I want the journey. I don’t want the record, I want the song. You understand?’

  His enthusiasm made me laugh.

  ‘Yeah, I think I understand.’

  ‘Man, I suffer from such a longing for not having. My greatest ambition is to have less and less. If you have nothing, you have more time for everything that really matters.’

  ‘Is that Buddhism?’

  ‘Nah, it’s pure lazyism.’

  ‘You think that’s lazy? Seems like a huge ambition to me, specially in a country where everybody wants to have more and more.’

  Armando thought a moment.

  ‘Maybe you’re right. I am a lazy guy, but I’m a lazy guy with great ambitions. If the aim is to not have, I want to not have a lot. If the aim is to not do, I want to not do a lot.’

  His thick dreadlocks were not yet the immaculate white they are now. Light strands mixed with the dark ones, giving an overall impression of silver, in handsome contrast with the dark sheen of his skin. We went to the kitchen, the only room t
hat was furnished and well-equipped, and he made me some scrambled eggs with cheese and ham.

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking when I fell in love with that woman,’ I admitted, after I’d finished my third beer.

  Armando laughed.

  ‘Passion is a moment of madness. People who marry in a state of passion should be considered of unsound mind, and those marriages annulled.’

  ‘Not such a bad idea,’ I agreed.

  ‘People should only be allowed to marry when lucid. I don’t know why it is that you aren’t allowed to drive when you’re drunk, but you are allowed to get married when you’re drunk, or when you’re in love, which is the same thing. A marriage isn’t so different from a car as all that. If driven badly, it can hurt a lot of people, starting with the kids. If people always got married when lucid, they’d only ever do it out of self-interest, like my parents.’

  ‘Your parents married out of self-interest?’

  ‘Of course. They’re still married today.’

  I lived in Armando’s apartment for several years. During that time, I wrote stage plays and did technical translations for various companies. Armando is an actor. He directs a small but dynamic company, Mukishi, that receives funding from northern European institutions to work on questions relating to human rights and public health. I didn’t have all that much money. And yet, having adopted my friend’s philosophy, I discovered I was able to live on almost nothing and be happy. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as I was back then. Three or four years ago, I was invited to join the editorial team on a new online newspaper, an independent project, which I thought exciting. So I rented an apartment in Talatona, I bought a cat, whom I named Baltazar, and I went back to having a more or less normal life. That was when I got the call from Lucrécia. She had started seeing a businessman, a guy who’d been at high school with me, and she wanted to marry him. She asked for a divorce. I agreed. And yet, for reasons I couldn’t understand, she still went ahead with a lawsuit.