Read A General Theory of Oblivion Online
Authors: Jose Eduardo Agualusa
“Books instill respect,” explained the nurse. “If you carry crates full of beer bottles, the soldiers will search every inch of the vehicle. Besides which, you’ll get to Moçâmedes without a single bottle left.”
Her strategy proved correct. At the many checkpoints they passed through, the soldiers stood to attention when they saw the books,
many apologizing to Madalena, and let her go on her way. They arrived in Moçâmedes on an airless morning. Jeremias saw, through a small hole in the rusty metal of the vehicle, a little town, dazed and spinning slowly about itself like a drunk at a funeral. Months earlier, the South African troops had come through here on their way to Luanda, easily crushing a troop made up of
pioneiros
and Mucubals.
Madalena parked the van in front of a solid blue mansion. She got out, leaving Jeremias baking inside. The mercenary was sweating heavily. He could barely breathe. It would be preferable to get out too, he thought, even if it meant risking arrest, getting himself killed. He couldn’t push the crates aside. He started kicking at the metal. An old man came over.
“Who’s in there?”
Then he heard Madalena’s gentle voice:
“I’m taking a little goat over to Virei.”
“But Virei’s full of goats already! Ha ha! Imagine taking a goat to Virei!”
When the van was moving again, a bit of fresh air began to come in. Jeremias settled down. They drove for more than an hour, bumping about along secret routes through a landscape that seemed, to Jeremias, to be made entirely of hard wind, stone, dust, and barbed wire. Finally, they stopped. A commotion of voices surrounded the vehicle. The back door was opened and someone pulled out the boxes. There were dozens of curious faces. Women with their bodies painted red. Some of them older. Others still adolescent, their breasts pert and nipples swollen. Tall lads who looked very elegant indeed, each with a tuft of hair on the top of his head.
“My late father was born in the desert. He was buried here. These people are very devoted to him,” explained Madalena. “They’ll take you in and hide you for as long as necessary.”
The mercenary sat down on the floor, straightened his shoulders, like a king parading naked, his silhouette the prickly shadow of a mutiati tree. A group of children surrounded him, touched him, pulled his hair. The young men laughed loudly. They were fascinated by the rough silence of this man, his distant gaze, the spectre of a past they sensed was violent and troubled. Madalena said goodbye with a slight nod:
“Wait here. They’ll come for you. When everything calms down you’ll be able to cross the border to South-West Africa. I imagine you have good friends among the white men.”
Years passed. Decades. Jeremias never crossed the border.
Che Guevara was very agitated this morning
.
He was jumping from branch to branch. Crying out
.
Later, looking out the living-room window, I saw a man, running. A tall fellow, really thin, incredibly agile. Three soldiers were running after him, close behind. Throngs of people were streaming from the corners, in bursts, joining the soldiers. Within moments there was a whole crowd in pursuit of the fugitive. I saw him crash into a boy who was crossing in front of him, on a bicycle, and tumble flailing in the dust. The mob was about to reach him, it was just an arm’s length from him, when the man jumped onto the bicycle and resumed his flight. By now a second group had formed, a hundred meters farther along the road, and there were stones raining down. The poor wretch ducked into a narrow alleyway. If he could have seen a bird’s-eye view, like I could, he never would have done it: a dead end. When he realized his mistake, he ditched the bike and tried to jump the wall
.
A tossed stone hit the back of his neck and he fell
.
The throng reached him. They launched themselves, kicking, onto his thin body. One of the soldiers drew a pistol and fired it into the air, clearing
a way through. He helped the man to his feet, holding the pistol pointed toward the crowd. The other two were shouting orders, attempting to calm tempers. Finally they managed to make the crowd move back, they dragged the prisoner off to a van, threw him inside, and left
.
I haven’t had electricity for more than a week. So I haven’t listened to the radio. I have no way of knowing what’s going on
.
I was woken by gunshots. Later, looking through the living-room window, I saw the really thin man, running. Phantom roamed about all day, going round and round his own fear, gnawing on his toes. I heard shouts in the next-door apartment. Several men arguing. Then, silence
.
I couldn’t sleep. At four in the morning I went up onto the terrace. The night, like a well, was swallowing stars
.
Then I saw a flatbed truck go by, laden with dead bodies
.
Monte didn’t like interrogations. For years he avoided discussing the subject. He’d even avoided recalling the seventies, when in order to preserve the socialist revolution, certain excesses – to use a euphemism for which we’re indebted to the agents of the political police – were permitted. He confessed to his friends that he learned a lot about human nature while he was interrogating fractionists, and young men linked to the far left, in the terrible years that followed Independence. People with a happy childhood, he said, tend to be hard to break.
Perhaps he was thinking of Little Chief.
Little Chief – who had been baptized Arnaldo Cruz – didn’t like talking about the periods he’d spent in detention. Orphaned at an early age, raised by his paternal grandmother, old Dulcineia, a professional sweet-seller, he wanted for nothing. He completed high school, and then, when everyone expected him to go to university and become a doctor, he became involved in political gatherings and got himself locked up. He had been imprisoned in Campo de São Nicolau, a little over a hundred kilometers from Moçâmedes, for four months when the Carnation Revolution broke out in Portugal. He reappeared in Luanda as a hero. Old Dulcineia believed her grandson would be made a minister, but Little Chief had more enthusiasm than real talent for the intrigues of politics, and just a few months after Independence, by
which time he was a law student, he was locked up again. His grandmother could not bear the grief. She died, from a heart attack, days later.
Little Chief managed to escape from prison, hiding inside a coffin, a burlesque episode that deserves a lengthier account at a later point. Once out he disappeared into anonymity. And yet, instead of taking refuge in a dark room somewhere, or even inside a wardrobe in the house of an elderly aunt, like some of his friends did, he chose the opposite solution. It’s easiest to hide in plain sight, he thought. And so he would wander the streets, ragged, his hair in long tangled locks, covered in mud and tar. To make himself disappear still further, escaping the raids of the soldiers who moved about the city day and night, rounding up cannon fodder, he pretended to be crazy. A person can only pass for insane, they can only make people believe this, if they really do go a bit crazy in the process.
“Imagine falling half asleep,” explains Little Chief. “Part of you is alert, the other rambles. The part that rambles is the public part.”
It was in this state of social near-invisibility and semidementia, his lucidity traveling like a stowaway, that Little Chief saw the pigeon:
“Days of hunger. I could barely stand, the slightest breeze would have carried me off. I constructed a slingshot, with a stick, a few strips of rubber, and I was trying to hunt down some rat over in Catambor when a pigeon came down, all aglow, its whiteness lightening everything around it. I thought, ‘It’s the Holy Ghost.’ I looked for a stone, fixed my eye on the pigeon, and fired. A perfect shot. It was dead before it hit the ground. I immediately noticed the small plastic cylinder attached to a ring. I opened it, took out the little slip of paper, and read:
“Tomorrow. Six o’clock, usual place. Be very careful. I love you
.
“It was when I gutted the pigeon to grill it that I found the diamonds.”
Little Chief didn’t understand right away what had happened:
“In my failure to understand, I thought it was God giving me the stones. I even thought it was God who’d written me the message. My usual place was in front of the Lello Bookshop. The next day, at six o’clock, there I was, waiting for God to show himself.”
God showed himself, in mysterious ways, via a hugely fat woman, with a smooth, shining face and an expression of permanent delight. The woman got out of a small van, an old Citroën 2CV, and approached Little Chief, who watched her, half hidden behind a Dumpster.
“Hey, handsome!” cried Madalena. “I need your help.”
Little Chief walked over to her, alarmed. The woman said she’d often watched him. It annoyed her to see a man in perfect condition, actually in
truly
perfect condition, spending his day sprawled out on the street playing the madman. The ex-con straightened himself up, unable to hold back his indignation:
“But I am extremely crazy, actually!”
“Not crazy enough,” the nurse cut him short. “A real crazy person would try to appear a bit more circumspect.”
Madalena had inherited a small farm close to Viana that produced fruit and vegetables, which were so hard to find in the capital, and she was looking for someone who could keep an eye on the property. Little Chief accepted. Not for the obvious reasons, that he was broken with hunger and on a farm he’d get to eat every day. Besides, he’d be safe from the soldiers, the police, and other predators. He accepted, because he believed it was the will of God.
Five months later, well fed, even better slept, he had fully recovered
his lucidity. In his case, unfortunately, lucidity proved itself an enemy of good sense. He would have been better off staying insane for five or six more years. Lucid now, his uneasiness returned. The country’s collapse pained him in his soul, as if this were an actual organ with blood flowing through it. It hurt even more from the fate of the companions he had left behind bars. Bit by bit he reformed old connections. Together with a young footballer, Maciel Lucamba, whom he had met in Campo de São Nicolau, he constructed an imaginative plan that would entail the rescuing of a group of prisoners, and their flight, on a trawler, to Portugal. He never spoke to anyone of the diamonds. Not even to Maciel. He meant to sell the stones in order to pay for part of the operation. He didn’t know to whom he might sell them, and he wasn’t allowed the time to give this any thought. One Sunday afternoon, while he was resting, stretched out on a mat, these two guys burst in suddenly and he was arrested. It pained him to learn that Madalena was detained too.
Monte interrogated him. He was hoping to demonstrate the nurse’s involvement in the conspiracy. He promised to free them both if the young man revealed the whereabouts of a Portuguese mercenary whom Madalena had saved. Little Chief could have told the truth, that he had never heard of this mercenary. He thought, however, that any words at all exchanged with the agent would be tantamount to acknowledging his legitimacy, and so he merely spat on the floor. The stubbornness left him with scars on his body.
For the whole time he was detained, he kept the diamonds with him. Neither the guards nor the other prisoners ever suspected that this humble young man, always so concerned about other people, could be
hiding a small fortune. On the morning of May 27, 1977, he was woken by a fierce din. Gunshots. A man he didn’t recognize opened the door to his cell and shouted that he could leave if he wanted. A group in revolt had occupied the prison. The young man made his way through the commotion calm as a ghost, feeling much more nonexistent than when he used to roam the streets disguised as a madman. In the yard, sitting in the shade of a frangipani, he found a highly respected poetess, a historic name from the nationalist movement, who, like him, had been detained just a few days after Independence, accused of supporting a strand of intellectuals who had been criticizing the party leadership. Little Chief asked after Madalena. She had been released weeks earlier. The police had been unable to prove a thing against her. “Amazing woman!” added the poet. She advised Little Chief not to leave the prison. In her opinion the revolt would be quickly stifled and the fugitives taken, tortured, and shot:
“There’s a bloodbath on the way.”
He agreed. He held her tight in a long hug, then left, dazed, into the torrential light of the streets. He considered looking for Madalena. He wanted to offer her his most profuse apologies. But he knew that this might cause her even more problems. Her house would be the first place the police would look for him. So he wandered the city, dazed, distressed, now following – at a distance – the groups of protestors, now accompanying the movements of the forces loyal to the president. He was walking this way and that, ever more lost, when a soldier recognized him. The man started to chase after him, crying “Fractionist! Fractionist!” and within moments a crowd had assembled to run him down. Little Chief was six feet tall, with long legs. During his
adolescence he had been an athlete. The months he’d spent in a narrow cell, however, made him shorter of breath. For the first five hundred meters he’d managed to get some distance between himself and his pursuers. He even believed that he would shake them off. Unfortunately, the commotion attracted yet more people. He felt his chest bursting. Sweat was running into his eyes, clouding his sight. A bicycle sprang out, suddenly, in front of him. He wasn’t able to dodge past and fell on top of it. He got up, grabbed hold of it, and again managed to gain some distance. He veered right. A dead end. He dropped the bicycle and tried to jump the wall. A stone hit him in the back of the neck, he felt the taste of blood in his mouth, dizziness. The next moment he was in a car, handcuffed, a soldier on each side, and everybody shouting.
“You’re going to die, reptile!” yelled the one who was driving. “We’ve got orders to kill you all. But first I’m going to pull out your nails, one by one, till you tell us everything you know. I want those fractionists’ names.”