A General Theory of Oblivion (12 page)

Vitorino Gavião let out a bitter laugh:

“We’re the Greek chorus. The voice of the nation’s conscience. That’s what we are. Here we sit, in the gloom, passing comment on the progress of the tragedy. Giving warnings to which nobody pays heed.”

A runaway baldness had robbed him of the thick head of hair, Jimi
Hendrix–style, with which in the 1960s in Paris he had proclaimed his
négritude
. The way he was now, his skull smooth and shining, he could pass for a white man even in Sweden. Well, perhaps not in Sweden. He raised his voice, curious:

“What’s the news?”

The journalist pulled up a chair. He sat down:

“Did you know a guy called Orlando Pereira dos Santos, a mining engineer?”

Gavião hesitated, very pale:

“My cousin. First cousin. Did he die?”

“I don’t know. Would you stand to gain anything from his death?”

“The guy disappeared around Independence. They say he took a package of diamonds with him.”

“You think he’d still remember you?”

“We were friends. Spike’s silence in the early years didn’t surprise me. If I’d stolen a package of diamonds, I’d want to be forgotten too. He was forgotten. Everybody forgot him a long time ago. Why are you asking me these questions?”

The journalist showed him the letter from Maria da Piedade Lourenço. Gavião remembered Ludo. He’d always found her a bit distracted. Now he understood why. He remembered his visits to his cousin’s apartment, in the Prédio dos Invejados. The euphoria of the days before Independence.

“If I’d known how it was going to end up, I’d have stayed in Paris.”

“And what were you doing – there, in Paris?”

“Nothing!” sighed Gavião. “Nothing, like here. But at least I was doing it elegantly. I could be a
flâneur
.”

That same afternoon, after leaving the newspaper offices, Daniel walked up to Quinaxixe. The Prédio dos Invejados still looked pretty dilapidated. Nevertheless, the entrance hall was freshly painted, and the air was clean and cheerful. A security guard was posted at the elevator.

“Does it work?” asked the journalist.

The man smiled, proudly:

“Almost always, boss, almost always!”

He asked Daniel for some identification and only then called the lift. The journalist got in. He went up to the eleventh floor. He got out. He paused a moment, struck by the cleanness of the walls and the shine on the floor tiles. There was only one door that jarred with the others, the door to apartment D. It was scratched and revealed a small hole, halfway up, that looked like a bullet wound. The journalist pressed the doorbell. He didn’t hear a sound. Then he knocked three times, hard. A boy came to the door. Big eyes, a mature expression surprising in someone so young.

“Hello,” the journalist greeted him. “Do you live here?”

“Yes, sir, I do. Me and my grandma.”

“Can I talk to your grandma?”

“No.”

“Let be, son, I’ll talk to him.”

Daniel heard the voice, fragile, cracked, and only then saw a very pale woman appear, dragging one leg, her gray hair parted into two thick braids:

“I am Ludovica Fernandes, my good man. What do you want?”

The old man watched as January rose up and closed in around the Kuvale people like a trap. First the drought. A lot of oxen died. The farther east they traveled, climbing the range of hills, the sweeter the air became, the ground getting cooler and softer. They found some pasture, muddy watering holes, and they walked on, struggling to decipher the faint hints of green. The fence just popped up by surprise, like an insult, offending the luminous rise of the morning. The herd came to a stop. The young men gathered in nervous groups, calling out sharply in surprise and indignation. António, the son, came over. He was sweating. His handsome face, with its straight nose, its prominent chin, was flushed through effort and rage:

“What do we do?”

The old man sat down. The fence ran for hundreds of meters. To the right it came out through a harsh tangle of bramble bushes, which were called cat’s-claws there, and to the left plunged into an even thicker, sharper-pointed nightmare of wild bushes, of long cacti in the shape of candelabra, and of mutiati trees. Beyond the barrier was a soft path of white pebbles along which, at that time of year, a small brook was meant to be flowing.

Jeremias Carrasco selected a twig, smoothed out the sand, and began to write. António crouched beside him.

That afternoon they knocked down the fence and crossed to the other side. They found a bit of water. Good pastures. The wind began to blow. The wind carried heavy shadows along with it, as though it were carrying night, in shreds, yanked away from some other, even more distant desert. They heard the sound of an engine and saw, appearing through the gloom and the dust, a jeep carrying six armed men. One of them, a skinny mulatto, with the destitute look of a wet cat, leaped from the car and came toward them waving an AK-47 in his right hand.

He was shouting in Portuguese and Nkumbi. A few phrases, torn to pieces by the wind, reached Jeremias’s ears:

“This is private land! Get out! Get out now!”

The old man raised his right hand, trying to hold back the momentum of the young men. Too late. A lanky young lad, who had only just taken a wife, and whom they called Zebra, threw the small assegai spear. The weapon traced an elegant arc in the panicky sky and planted itself, with a dry crunch, just centimeters from the mulatto’s boots.

There was the briefest moment of silence. The very wind seemed to abate. Then the guard raised his gun and fired.

In the harsh light of midday it would have been a bloodbath. The six men were armed. Some of the shepherds had been through the military and they, too, were carrying firearms. At that time, however, with the wind whipping through the darkness, only two bullets found their way into flesh. Zebra was lightly wounded in one arm. The mulatto in a leg. Both parties drew back, but in the confusion a lot of cows were left behind.

The following night, a group of young shepherds, led by Zebra,
went back into the ranch. They returned with some of the missing cattle, half a dozen cows that didn’t belong to them, and a fourteen-year-old boy, who, according to Zebra, had chased after them on horseback, shouting like a man possessed.

Jeremias was alarmed. Stealing cattle is tradition. It happens all the time. In this case, it was a kind of exchange. The kidnapping of the boy, though, that really could cause them some problems. He sent for him. He was an adolescent with very green eyes, untamed hair tied into a ponytail. One of those characters who in Angola are often called
lost frontiers
, because by daylight they look white, and at twilight they are discovered in fact to be part mulatto – hence the conclusion that sometimes you can understand people better far away from the light. The boy looked at the old man with contempt:

“My granddad is going to kill you!”

Jeremias laughed. He wrote in the sand:

“I’ve died once before. Second time won’t be so bad.”

The boy stammered something, surprised. He started to cry:

“I’m André Ruço, Senhor, I’m General Ruço’s grandson. Tell them not to hurt me. Let me go. Keep the cows but let me go.”

The old man made an effort to persuade the young ones to release André. They demanded their cows back and a guarantee that they could cross the estate in search of better pastures. They’d been at this for three days when Jeremias saw the past crouching down before him. It had aged, which doesn’t always happen, sometimes the past travels centuries without time corrupting it at all. Not this time: this man had withered even more, he had more wrinkles, and what hair he had left was practically colorless now. His voice, though, remained solid
and firm. At that moment, when Jeremias found himself faced with Monte, seeing him stand up and get pushed backward, seeing him run off, chased by the young shepherds, he recalled Orlando Pereira dos Santos and his diamonds.

Nasser Evangelista was pleased with his new job. He wore a blue uniform, very clean, and spent most of his time sitting at a desk, reading, while he watched the door out of the corner of his eye. He had developed his taste for reading during the years he’d spent locked up in the São Paulo Prison in Luanda. After his release, he’d worked as a craftsman, carving masks in the Mile-Eleven Market. One afternoon he met Little Chief, with whom he’d shared a cell, and who invited him to work as a doorman at the Prédio dos Invejados at Quinaxixe, where he’d just moved in.

“It’s a quiet job,” the businessman assured him. “You’ll be able to read.”

With this, he persuaded him. That morning, Nasser Evangelista was rereading, for the seventh time, the adventures of Robinson Crusoe when he noticed a very ugly boy, his face pitted with acne, lurking around the entrance to the building. Nasser marked his page. He put the book away in a drawer. He got up and walked over to the door:

“Hey, you! Spotty kid. What do you want with my building?”

The young man approached, intimidated:

“Do you know if there’s a boy living here?”

“Several, kid. This building’s a whole city.”

“A seven-year-old boy, name’s Sabalu.”

“Ah, yes! Sabalu, I know the one. Eleven-E. Very nice kid. Lives with his grandmother, but I’ve never seen her. She doesn’t leave the house.”

At that moment, two other characters appeared. Nasser was startled to see them walking up the road, both dressed in black, as though they had stepped straight out of an adventure from
Corto Maltese
. The older of the two was wearing a Mucubal hat on his head, with red and yellow stripes, necklaces round his neck, and big bracelets on his wrists. He was wearing old leather sandals, which revealed huge feet that were cracked and covered in dust. Next to the old man, moving with the elegance of someone showing himself on a catwalk, was a young man, very tall and thin. He, too, had bracelets and necklaces, but on him such accessories seemed as natural as the bowler hat that covered his head. The two men were walking decisively toward Nasser. We’re going up, the young man informed him, while with a gesture of annoyance he pushed the doorman aside. Nasser had received very firm instructions that he was not to allow anyone in without first taking a note of the number of their ID card or driver’s license. He was about to block their way, when Baiacu, dodging around him, dashed off up the stairs. The doorman followed him. Jeremias and his son called the elevator, got in, and rode it up. When they got out on the eleventh floor, the old man had a dizzy spell. He couldn’t catch his breath. He leaned against the wall for a moment. He saw Daniel Benchimol, who was greeting Ludo, and he recognized her, even though he had never met her before.

“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.