A General Theory of Oblivion (14 page)

The woman came in. She sat down on one of the chairs, tense, clinging to her handbag as to a lifebuoy. Sabalu went to fetch tea and biscuits.

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to call you.”

“You can call me Ludovica, that’s my name.”

“One day will I be able to call you mother?”

Ludo held her hands tight against her belly. Through the windows
she could see the highest branches of the mulemba. There was no breeze to disturb them.

“I realize I have no excuse,” she murmured. “I was only very young, and I was scared. That doesn’t justify what I did.”

Maria da Piedade dragged the chair over toward her. She put her right hand on her knee.

“I didn’t come to Luanda to claim any debt. I came to meet you. I want to take you back to our country.”

Ludo took her hand:

“This is my country, child. I no longer have any other.”

She pointed at the mulemba:

“I’ve seen that tree grow. It’s seen me get old. We’ve talked a lot.”

“I presume you must have family in Aveiro?”

“Family?”

“Family, friends, whatever.”

Ludo smiled at Sabalu, who was watching it all, very alert, buried in one of the sofas:

“My family is this boy, that mulemba tree out there, and a phantom dog. My eyesight gets worse every day. An ophthalmologist friend of my neighbor’s was here in the apartment to look at me. He said I would never lose my eyesight completely. I still have my peripheral vision. I’ll always be able to make out the light, and the light in this country is a riot. In any case, I don’t aspire to any more: the light, Sabalu reading to me, the joy of a pomegranate every day.”

The pigeon that changed Little Chief’s life – and also sated his hunger – was called Love. Ridiculous, you think? Take it up with Maria Clara. It was she who gave it the name. The future wife of Magno Moreira Monte was, around the time of Independence, a high-school student. Her father, Horácio Capitão, a customs officer, bred carrier pigeons. Those named by Maria Clara tended to be champions. Before Love, it had been so with Beloved (1968), Amorous (1971), Clamorous (1973), and Enchanted (1973). Love was nearly thrown away while still an egg. “It’s no good,” explained Horácio Capitão to his daughter. “Look at the shell, crinkled, very thick. A healthy, strong pigeon, a good flier, is born from an egg with a smooth, bright shell. The girl turned the egg around in her long fingers, and prophesied:

“This one’s going to be a champion, Dad. I’m going to call it Love.”

Love was born with thin legs. It cheeped a lot in the bowl. Besides, its plumage took a long time to appear. Horácio Capitão didn’t hide his displeasure and disgust:

“We ought to get rid of it, Maria Clara. The blasted creature is never going to be a good flier. It’s a loser. A pigeon keeper needs to know how to distinguish between good pigeons and bad pigeons. The bad ones we get rid of, we don’t waste our time on them.”

“No!” his daughter insisted. “I have complete faith in this pigeon. Love was born to win.”

Love did indeed begin to develop. Unfortunately, it grew too much. Seeing that it was fat, much bigger than the other pigeons from the same brood, Horácio Capitão once again shook his head:

“We should eat it. Big pigeons only have a chance in speed trials. They’re no good for long distances.”

He was wrong. Love lived up to Maria Clara’s expectations. 1974 and 1975 were glory years, as it proved itself quick and determined, with an ingrained passion for the pigeon-house.

“The son of a bitch is demonstrating an attachment to its territory,” Horácio Capitão finally acknowledged. “Attachment to one’s territory is the main characteristic of a good flier.”

When he stood at the mirror, Horácio Capitão would see a tall, muscular man, which he was not, quite the contrary, he was barely over five feet, and had scrawny arms, narrow shoulders, little bird-bones. He never shied from whatever confronted him, and when he had the chance, he would throw the first punch, bearing those of his opponent afterward, bearing them with great suffering, on his fragile flesh, but always rigid as a colossus. He had been born in Luanda, to a petit-bourgeois mestizo family, and had only visited Portugal once. This fact notwithstanding, he felt himself to be, in his own words, Portuguese through and through. The April revolution enraged and stunned him. Some days he was more angry, others more stunned, now gazing vacantly into the sky, now railing against the traitors and communists who were planning, shamelessly, to sell Angola to the Soviet empire. Horrified, he witnessed the start of the civil war and
the triumph of the MPLA movement – and of their Cuban allies and the Eastern Bloc. He could have left for Lisbon, like so many others, but he didn’t want to:

“As long as there’s still a true Portuguese man in this country, Angola will never stop being Portuguese.”

In the months following Independence, he saw the playing out of the tragedies he had prophesied: the flight of the settlers and a good part of the native bourgeoisie, the closing of the factories and small businesses, the collapse of the water and electricity services, as well as the rubbish collection, the mass prisons, the shootings. He stopped spending time at the pigeon-house. He’d spend his days at Biker. “Didn’t I tell you?” he’d say to his few friends, most of them former civil servants, who still hung around the historic beer hall. He became so irritating, with his repeated insistence on the same old recriminations and the same gloomy premonitions, that after a certain point, the others began referring to him as Didn’t-I-Tell-You.

On one of those rainy
cacimbo
mornings, he opened the newspaper and saw a photo of a rally. He saw, in the foreground, Maria Clara hugging Magno Moreira Monte, and he ran over to show the paper to a one-time informant of the Portuguese political police, Artur Quevedo, who following Independence would end up doing little odd jobs for the new information and security services:

“Do you know this guy? Who is this guy?”

Quevedo looked at his friend with sympathy:

“He’s a fanatical communist. The worst of the communists, smart, determined, with a visceral hatred of the Portuguese.”

Horácio returned home in a panic. His daughter, his little girl, his
princess, had fallen into the hands of a subversive. He didn’t know what he’d say to his late wife when he saw her again. His heart sped up as he got closer to the house. His rage began to overcome him. As he opened the front door he was already shouting:

“Maria Clara!”

His daughter came over from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron:

“Dad?”

“I want you to start packing your bags. We’re going to Lisbon.”

“What?”

Maria Clara had turned seventeen. She had inherited her mother’s tranquil beauty, her father’s bravery and stubbornness. Monte, eight years older than her, had been her Portuguese teacher, in 1974, the year of the great euphoria. All Horácio’s flaws were qualities she admired in Monte. She also allowed herself to be seduced by the low voice in which her teacher, in his classes, used to read the lines from José Régio:

The girl took off her apron. She stamped on it, furious:

“You go, then. I’m staying in my country.”

Horácio slapped her:

“You’re seventeen years old, and you’re my daughter. You do what I tell you. For now you don’t leave the house, I won’t have you doing anything else stupid.”

He instructed the maid not to let Maria Clara out and he went off to buy plane tickets. He sold the car, for a ridiculous price, to Artur Quevedo and handed him a copy of the keys to the house:

“Go in every day and open the windows, water the garden, so people think it’s still being lived in. I don’t want the communists occupying the house.”

Maria Clara had for several weeks been using the pigeons to communicate with her lover. Horácio had had the phones disconnected after he’d started receiving anonymous calls with death threats. These threats weren’t connected to any political business. Nothing to do with that. The customs officer suspected some jealous colleague. Monte, meanwhile, traveled a lot, carrying out secret missions, sometimes in combat zones. Maria Clara, who at this point was taking sole care of the pigeon-house, would give him three or four pigeons, which he would release, at twilight, with love verses and brief pieces of news tied to their legs.

Maria Clara managed to send, via the maid, a message to a girlfriend, who went off to find Monte. She found him in Viana, investigating rumors about the planning of a military coup involving black officers who were discontented with the prevalence of whites and mestizos at the highest levels of the armed forces. Monte sat down and wrote:

Tomorrow. Six o’clock, usual place. Be very careful. I love you
.

He put the message into a little plastic cylinder and fixed it to the right leg of one of the two pigeons he had brought with him. He released the pigeon.

Maria Clara waited in vain for a reply. She cried all night. She made no protest on the way to the airport. She didn’t say a word until they had disembarked in Lisbon. She didn’t stay long in the Portuguese capital. Five months after turning eighteen, she returned to Luanda and married Monte. Horácio swallowed his pride, packed his bags, and followed his daughter. He would learn, much later, that his future son-in-law had several times prevented his being thrown in prison, in the stormy years after Independence. He never thanked him. At Monte’s funeral, however, he was one of those who shed the most tears.

God weighs souls on a pair of scales. In one of the dishes is the soul, and in the other, the tears of those who weep for it. If nobody cries, the soul goes down to hell. If there are enough tears, and they are sufficiently heartfelt, it rises up to heaven. Ludo believed this. Or wanted to believe this. That was what she told Sabalu:

“People who are missed by other people, those are the ones who go to Paradise. Paradise is the space we occupy in other people’s hearts. That’s what my grandmother used to tell me. I don’t believe it. I’d like to believe in anything that’s so simple – but I lack faith.”

Monte had people to cry for him. I find it hard to imagine him in Paradise. Perhaps, however, he’s being purged in some obscure nook of immensity, between the serene splendor of Heaven and the twisted darkness of Hell, playing chess with the angels who are guarding him. If the angels know how to play, if they play well, this would be almost Paradise to him.

As for Horácio Capitão, old Didn’t-I-Tell-You, he spends his afternoons in a run-down bar, on Ilha, drinking beer and arguing about politics, in the company of the poet Vitorino Gavião, Artur Quevedo, and another two or three aged cadavers from the old days. To this day he doesn’t recognize Angola’s Independence. He believes that just as communism ended, so one day Independence will end too. He still breeds pigeons.

Let us return to the morning when Nasser Evangelista, overcome by the echo of dark voices, hurled himself at Monte and stabbed him. Amid the confusion of people gathering at Ludo’s door, there were two characters in black, as you might recall, who stood out. The old lady noticed them after Monte’s shameful flight and the (also hurried) exit of Baiacu. She noticed them, but had no way of knowing what they had come for, since, in the meantime, Daniel Benchimol had begun to read the letter that Maria da Piedade Lourenço had written to the managing director of the
Jornal de Angola
.

The two men waited for the journalist to finish. They bore silent witness to Ludo’s anguish, to the tears wiped away with the back of her hand. Finally Daniel withdrew, promising to write to Maria da Piedade, and the two men stepped forward. The older of the two held out his hand to Ludo, but it was the younger who spoke:

“May we come in, Auntie?”

“What do you want?”

Jeremias Carrasco took a notebook from his jacket pocket and wrote something quickly in it. He showed it to Ludo. The woman shook her head:

“I can see it’s a notebook. I can’t read the letters anymore. Are you a mute?”

The young man read aloud:

“Let us in – please. I need your forgiveness, and your help.”

Ludo faced up to them, obstinately.

“I have nowhere for you to sit. It’s been thirty years since I’ve had visitors.”

Jeremias wrote again, then showed the notebook to his son:

“We’ll stand. My father says that chairs, even the best ones, don’t improve conversations.”

Ludo let them in. Sabalu went to fetch four old oil cans. They sat down on them. Jeremias looked in horror at the cement floor, the dark walls scratched in charcoal. He took off his hat. His shaved skull shone in the gloom. He wrote again in his notebook.

“Your sister and brother-in-law died in a car accident,” read the son. “It was my fault. I killed them. I met Spike, in Uíge, at the start of the war. He was the one who sought me out. Someone told him about me. He needed my help to run a sting on the Diamang mining company. A good clean job, done well, with no blood spilled and no confusion. We agreed that I’d keep half the stones. I did what I had to do, it all worked out, but at the last minute old Spike ran off. I was left empty-handed. He never thought I’d come after him to Luanda. He didn’t know me. I traveled into the city, which was surrounded by Mobutu’s troops and our own people, a crazy venture, and by looking here and there within a couple of days I found him, at a party, on Ilha. He fled as soon as he saw me. I chased after him, in my car, like in the movies. Then he went off the road and crashed into a tree. Your sister died at once. Spike lived long enough to tell me where he’d hidden the diamonds. I’m very sorry.”

António read with some difficulty. Perhaps because of the lack of light, perhaps because he wasn’t used to reading, perhaps because it was hard for him to believe what the words said. When he’d finished he looked up at his father, amazement in his eyes. The old man was leaning back against the wall. He was having trouble breathing. He took the notebook from António’s hands and wrote again. Ludo raised her hand, in a vague, agonized gesture, trying to prevent him: