A General Theory of Oblivion (7 page)

He went in. He saw a desk and two chairs. A rotating fan attached to the ceiling was disturbing the drenched air with slow strokes.

“Jaime Panguila,” the sapeur introduced himself, gesturing for him to sit.

Panguila was interested in the stones. First he examined them by the light of an oil-lamp. Then he brought them to the window, drew open the curtain, and studied them, turning them around between
his fingers under the harsh rays of a sun almost at its peak. Finally, he sat down:

“These stones, though small, are good, very pure. I don’t want to know how you got hold of them. I’d be risking a lot of trouble by trying to put them on the market. I can’t offer you more than seven thousand dollars.”

He refused. Panguila doubled the offer. He drew a wad of notes from one of the drawers, put them into a shoebox, and pushed it over toward the other man.

Little Chief went to sit in a nearby bar, with the shoebox on top of the table, to think about what he was going to do with the money. He noticed the logo on his beer bottle, the silhouette of a bird with wings spread, and he remembered the pigeon. He’d kept the paper in the plastic tube, on which it was still possible to read, albeit with some difficulty:

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

Who might have written that?

Perhaps a senior official at the Diamang mining company. He imagined a man with a severe expression, scribbling out the message, putting the note into the plastic cylinder and then attaching it to the leg of the pigeon. He imagined him putting the diamonds into the bird’s beak, first one, and then the other, and then releasing it, and it flying off from a residence that was sunk amid tall, leafy mango trees, into Dundo, to the perilous skies of the capital. He imagined it flying above dark forests, the astonished rivers, the many armies pitted in conflict.

He got up, smiling. He already knew what to do with the money. In the months that followed he devised and established a small delivery
service, which he named Pigeon-Post. The Portuguese word for pigeon also meant
messenger
in Quimbundo, and the coincidence pleased him. The company prospered, and new projects came along to join it. He invested in several different areas, from hotels to real estate, always successfully.

One Sunday afternoon, it was December, the air was dazzlingly bright, he met Papy Bolingô at Rialto. They ordered some beers. They chatted without any urgency, slow and chilled, stretched out in the langour of the afternoon as if in a hammock.

“And life, Papy?”

“Goes on living.”

“And what about you, still singing?”

“Not very much, bro. I haven’t been doing the act. Fofo has been a bit funny lately.”

Papy Bolingô had been sacked from Rádio Nacional. He’d been surviving, with great effort, by playing at parties. One of his cousins, a hunting-party guide, had brought him a pygmy hippo from the Congo. The guide had found the animal in the forest, when it was still a baby, desperately watching over its mother’s dead body. The guitar player brought the animal to his apartment. He fed it from a baby’s bottle. He taught it to dance the Zaire rumba. Fofo, the hippo, started to join him when he performed at small bars in the outskirts of Luanda. Little Chief had seen the show several times, and he’d always come out feeling impressed. The problem was that the hippo had been growing too much. Pygmy hippos, or dwarf hippos (
Choeropsis liberiensis
), may look small compared to their better-known relatives, but by the time they are adults they can grow to the volume of a large pig. The protests from the neighbors in the building grew. Many of them owned dogs.
Some insisted on raising chickens on their verandas, goats, occasionally pigs. No one had hippos. A hippopotamus, even if this particular one was an artist, frightened the residents. Some of them, when they saw him out on the veranda, threw stones.

Little Chief saw that the time had come to help his friend.

“How much do you want for the apartment? I need a good apartment, right in the heart of the capital. You need a farm, a big open space, to raise the hippo.”

Papy Bolingô hesitated:

“I’ve been in that apartment so many years now. I think I’ve become attached to it.”

“Five hundred thousand?”

“Five hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand what?”

“I’ll give you five hundred thousand dollars for the apartment. You can buy yourself a nice farm with money like that.”

Papy Bolingô laughed, amused. Then he noticed the seriousness of his friend’s face and his laughter stopped. He straightened up:

“I thought you were kidding. You’ve got five hundred thousand dollars?”

“And several million more. Many million. I’m not doing you a favor, I think it’s an excellent investment. Your building is pretty shabby, but with a good coat of paint, and new elevators, it’ll get its old colonial charm back. Before too long, buyers are going to start showing up. Generals. Ministers. People with a lot more money than me. They’ll pay some paltry sums for people to leave. Those who don’t leave nicely will be made to do it nastily.”

That was how Little Chief ended up with Papy Bolingô’s apartment.

During the years 1997 and 1998, five airplanes disappeared from Angola’s skies, with a total of twenty-three crew, originating in Belarus, Russia, Moldavia, and Ukraine. On May 25, 2003, a Boeing 727 belonging to American Airlines went astray from Luanda airport and was never seen again. The thing hadn’t flown for fourteen months.

Daniel Benchimol collected stories of disappearances in Angola. All kinds of disappearances, though he preferred those of the air. It’s always more interesting being snatched away by the heavens, like Jesus Christ or his mother, than being swallowed up by the earth. Only if we aren’t speaking metaphorically, of course. People or objects who are literally swallowed by the earth, as seems to have happened with the French writer Simon-Pierre Mulamba, are, however, very rare.

The journalist classified the disappearances on a scale from one to ten. The five planes that disappeared from the skies above Angola, for example, were categorized by Benchimol as grade-eight disappearances. The Boeing 727, as a grade-nine disappearance; Simon-Pierre Mulamba, too.

Mulamba disembarked in Luanda on April 20, 2003, at the invitation of the Alliance Française, for a conference on the life and work of Léopold Sédar Senghor. Tall, distinguished-looking, never without his beautiful felt hat, which he wore tilted just slightly to the right
with studied indifference. Simon-Pierre liked Luanda. It was the first time he’d visited Africa. His father, a teacher of Latin dance, native of Ponta Negra, had told him of the heat, the humidity, warned him about the dangers of the women, but hadn’t prepared him for this excess of life, for the merry-go-round of emotions, the intoxicating tumult of sounds and smells. On the second night, right after his lecture, the writer accepted an invitation from Elizabela Montez, a young architecture student, to have a drink in one of Ilha’s smartest bars. The third night he spent dancing
mornas
and
coladeiras
in a backyard of some Cape Verdeans, in Chicala, in the company of two of Elizabela’s girlfriends. On the fourth night he disappeared. The French cultural attaché, who had arranged to meet him for lunch, went in search of him to the lodge where they had put him up, a really lovely place, close to the Barra do Quanza. Nobody had seen him. There was no answer on his cellphone. In his room, the bedcover had not yet been pulled back, the sheets still stretched tight, a chocolate on the pillow.

Daniel Benchimol learned of the writer’s disappearance before the police. He only needed two telephone calls to discover, with a considerable number of details, where and with whom Simon-Pierre had spent his first nights. Two more calls and he knew that the Frenchman had been seen at five in the morning leaving a disco, in Quinaxixe market, a place frequented by European expats, slutty teenage girls, and poets with rather more interest in pursuing the booze than the muse. That night, he went to the disco himself. Fat, sweaty men were drinking in silence. Others, half hidden in the dark, stroked the bare knees of girls who were very young. He particularly noticed one
of the girls because she was wearing a black felt hat with a thin red ribbon. He was going to approach her when a blond guy with his long hair tied into a ponytail gripped his arm:

“Queenie’s with me.”

Daniel reassured him:

“Don’t worry. I’ve just got a question I want to ask her.”

“We don’t like journalists. Are you a journalist?”

“Sometimes, pal, it depends. I mostly just feel Jewish, though.”

The other man let go of him, confused. Daniel greeted Queenie:

“Good evening. I just wanted to know where you got the hat.”

The girl smiled:

“The French mulatto who was here yesterday, he lost it.”

“He lost the hat?”

“Or the other way round, he’s the one who was lost. The hat found me.”

She explained that the previous night, a group of boys, those ones who live out on the street, had seen the Frenchman leave the club. He had stopped a few meters on, round the back of a building, to urinate, and then the earth swallowed him up. All that was left was his hat.

“The earth swallowed him up?”

“That’s what they’re saying, old man. It could be quicksand, it could be witchcraft, I don’t know. The boys pulled the hat out with a stick. I bought the hat from them. It’s mine now.”

Daniel left the disco. There were two boys watching television, sitting on the pavement in front of a shop window. The sound from the television didn’t reach outside, so the two of them were improvising
the dialogue for each of the actors in turn. The journalist had seen the film before. The new dialogue, however, had transformed the plot entirely. He spent a few minutes enjoying watching the show. He took advantage of a break to speak to the boys:

“I’ve heard there was a guy, a French guy, who disappeared near here, last night. They say he was swallowed up by the earth.”

“Yes,” one of the children confirmed this. “These things happen.”

“Did you see it?”

“No. But Baiacu saw it.”

Daniel questioned other boys in the days that followed, and all spoke of Simon-Pierre’s sad end as though they had witnessed it. Then, when pressed, they acknowledged that they had not been there. Certainly nobody saw the French writer again. The police filed the case.

There is only one grade-ten disappearance on the Benchimol Scale. The journalist witnessed that remarkable loss himself. On April 28, 1988, the
Jornal de Angola
, the newspaper for which Daniel was working, sent him, accompanied by a photographer, the famous Kota Kodak, or KK, to a small town called Nova Esperança, where twenty-five women had been murdered, under suspicion of witchcraft. The two reporters disembarked from a commercial airliner in Huambo airport. There was a driver waiting to take them to Nova Esperança. Once they were there, Daniel chatted to the chieftain and various members of the tribe. KK took their portraits. It was getting dark when they got back to Huambo. They were due to return to Nova Esperança the following morning, in an air force helicopter. The pilot, however, proved unable to locate the village:

“It’s weird,” he confessed, troubled, after two hours wandering the
skies. “There’s nothing at those coordinates. Nothing down there but grass.”

Daniel became impatient at the young man’s ineptitude. He hired the same driver who’d first taken them there. KK refused to go with them:

“There’s nothing to take pictures of. You can’t photograph absences.”

They went round and round in the car, revisiting the same landscapes, as in a dream, for that infinite length of time that a dream can occupy, until the driver, too, admitted his embarrassment:

“We’re lost!”

“We? You’re the one who’s lost!”

The man turned to face him in a rage, as though he thought him responsible for the lunacy of the world:

“These roads are more and more muddled.” He was pummelling the steering wheel hard. “I think we’ve had a geographical accident!”