A General Theory of Oblivion (4 page)

Ludo witnessed the revival of the lagoon. She even saw the return of the hippos (the one hippo, if we’re to be completely objective). This happened many years later. We will get there. In the months that followed Independence, the woman and the dog shared tuna and sardines, sausages and chorizo. Once the cans had been emptied, they moved on to eating bean soups and rice. By this point there were whole days that passed with no electricity. Ludo started making small bonfires in the kitchen. First, she burned the boxes, bits of paper of no use, the dry branches of the bougainvillea. Then the pieces of furniture that served no purpose. When she removed the crossbars from the
double bed, she found, under the mattress, a small leather purse. She opened it and feeling no surprise watched as dozens of small stones rolled out onto the floor. After burning beds and chairs, she started to pull up the floor tiles. The dense, heavy wood burned slowly, with a fine flame. At first she used matches. Once those had run out, she moved on to one of the magnifying glasses Orlando had used to study his collection of foreign stamps. She would wait for the sun, at around ten in the morning, to flood the kitchen floor with light. Obviously she could only cook on sunny days.

The hunger came. For weeks, weeks as long as months, Ludo barely ate. She fed Phantom on a flour porridge. The nights merged into the days. She would wake to find the dog watching over her with a fierce eagerness. She would fall asleep and feel his burning breath. She went to the kitchen to fetch a knife, the one with the longest blade there was, the sharpest one, and took to carrying it around attached to her waist like a sword. She, too, would lean over the animal as he slept. Several times she brought the knife to his throat.

It would get dark, it would get light, and it was the same void with no beginning and no end. At some indeterminate moment she heard, coming from the terrace, a loud rustling. She rushed upstairs, and found Phantom devouring a pigeon. She approached, resolved to tear off a piece. The dog drove his paws into the ground and showed his teeth. Blood, thick and nocturnal, with feathers and flesh still clinging to it, covered his muzzle. The woman drew back. Then it occurred to her to prepare a very simple trap. A box turned upside down, tilted precariously, resting on a piece of kindling. A piece of thread tied to the twig. In the shade, two or three diamonds. She waited there for
more than two hours, crouched low, hidden behind the umbrella, until a pigeon touched down on the patio. The bird approached with the little tottering steps of a drunk. It backed away. It beat its wings and flew off, lost in the brightly lit sky. Not long afterward, it returned. This time it walked around the trap, pecked at the thread, moved forward into the shade of the box. Ludo pulled the thread. That afternoon she successfully trapped two more pigeons. She cooked them and recovered her strength. In the months that followed she caught many more.

For a long time there was no rain. Ludo watered the flowerbeds with the water that had accumulated in the swimming pool. Finally there was a rip in the cold curtain of low-hanging clouds, which in Luanda they call
cacimbo
, and the rain came down again. The corn grew. The bean plants yielded flowers and beans. The pomegranate tree was filled with red fruit. Around that time, the pigeons in the city’s sky became more scarce. One of the last ones to fall into the trap had a ring wrapped around its right leg. Attached to the ring Ludo found a little plastic cylinder. She opened it and found a slip of paper rolled up like a raffle ticket. She read the line that was written in lilac-colored ink in a small, firm hand.

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

She rolled the piece of paper back up and replaced it in the cylinder. She hesitated. Hunger gnawed at her stomach. As well as this, the pigeon had swallowed one or two of the stones. There were not many left, some of them too big to serve as bait. On the other hand, that note intrigued her. She felt powerful all of a sudden. The fate of
a couple was there, in her hands, pulsing in pure terror. She held it firmly, this winged fate, and threw it back at the big, wide sky. She wrote in her diary:

Leaning out the bedroom window, she would see, on the drawn-out Saturday mornings, one of the neighbor women on the veranda of 10-A, pounding corn. Then she would see her mashing up the cassava paste. Preparing and grilling fish or, other times, fat chicken legs. The air would be filled with a thick, scent-heavy smoke that would rouse her appetite. Orlando used to like Angolan food. Ludo, however, had always refused to cook black people’s things. She regretted that very much. In those days what she most fancied was to eat grilled meat. She started to watch the chickens that lived on the veranda, scratching away, as the day broke, at the first grains of sunlight. She waited till one Sunday morning. The city slept. She leaned out the window and lowered a piece of string with a slip noose at the end down to the veranda of 10-A. About fifteen minutes later she managed to loop the neck of a huge black rooster. She gave a sharp tug, and brought it quickly up. To her surprise, the animal was still alive (though only barely) when she set it on the bedroom floor. She drew the knife from her waist, she was going to slit its throat – then a sudden flash of inspiration stopped her. There would be enough corn for the next few months, as well as beans and bananas. With a rooster and a hen she could start breeding. It would be good to eat fresh eggs every week. She lowered the string again and this time she managed to loop one of the hens by a leg. The wretched bird struggled, an appalling uproar, feathers and down and dust flying. A moment later the building was woken by the neighbor’s screams:

“Thieves! Thieves!”

Then, having ascertained the impossibility of anyone scaling the smooth walls to get to the veranda and steal the poultry, the woman’s accusations were transformed into a terrified wailing:

“Witchcraft … Witchcraft …”

Then straightaway with total certainty:

“A Kianda … A Kianda …”

Ludo had heard Orlando talk about a sea goddess called the Kianda. Her brother-in-law had tried to explain to her the difference between Kiandas and mermaids:

“A Kianda is a being, an energy capable of good or evil. This energy is expressed through the colored lights that come from the water, the waves of the sea, and the raging of the winds. Fishermen pay her tribute. When I was a child and I used to play by the lagoon, the one behind this very building, I was always finding offerings. Sometimes the Kianda would kidnap somebody as they strolled past. People would reappear days later, very far away, beside some other lagoon or river, or on some beach. That used to happen a lot. After a certain point the Kianda began to be represented in the form of a mermaid. It was transformed into a mermaid, but kept its original powers.”

Thus it was, with a vulgar theft, and a stroke of luck, that Ludo began a small run of poultry breeding on her terrace, while simultaneously contributing to the strengthening of the Luandans’ belief in the presence and powers of the Kianda.

Any one of us, over the course of our lives, can know many different existences. Or occasionally, desistances. Not many, however, are given the opportunity to wear a different skin. Jeremias Carrasco had something very like this happen to him. He awoke, after facing a careless firing squad, in a bed that was too short for his six feet, and so narrow that were he to uncross his arms they would both hang down with their fingers touching the cement floor, one on each side. He had a lot of pain in his mouth, neck, and chest, and terrible trouble breathing. He saw, on opening his eyes, a low ceiling that was discolored and cracked. A small gecko, hanging directly above him, was studying him curiously. The morning was coming in, wavy and scented, through a tiny window high up on the facing wall, just below the ceiling.

“I’ve died,” thought Jeremias. “I’ve died, and that gecko is God.”

Even supposing that the gecko was indeed God, he would appear to be hesitating about what fate to assign to him. To Jeremias this indecision was even stranger than finding himself face-to-face with the Creator and the fact that He had taken on the form of a reptile. Jeremias knew, and had known for quite some time, that he was destined to burn for all eternity in the flames of Hell. He had killed, he had tortured. And if he’d started off doing those things out of duty,
obeying orders, he had later acquired a taste for it. He only felt awake, whole, when he was racing through the night, in pursuit of other men.

“Make your mind up,” said Jeremias to the gecko. Or rather, he tried to say, but all that came out of his mouth was a dull, tangled thread of sounds. He made a second attempt, and, as in a nightmare, the dark rush of noise came again.

“Don’t try to talk. Actually, you’re not going to talk ever again.”

Jeremias believed, for some moments, that it was God who was condemning him to eternal silence. Then he turned his eyes toward the right and saw a hugely fat woman leaning against the door. Her hands, with tiny, fragile fingers, danced before her as she spoke:

“Yesterday they announced your death in the newspapers. They published a photograph, it was quite an old one, I almost didn’t recognize you. They said you were a devil. You died, you were reborn, and you have another chance. Make the most of it.”

Madalena had been working at the Maria Pia Hospital for five years. Before that she had been a nun. A neighbor had witnessed the shooting of the mercenaries at a distance and had notified her. The nurse drove to the site on her own. One of the men was still alive. A bullet had passed through his chest, on a miraculous, perfect course that hadn’t hit a single vital organ. A second projectile had gone into his mouth, shattering his two upper incisors, then perforating his throat.

“I don’t understand what happened. Were you trying to catch the bullet in your teeth?” She laughed, her body shaking. The light seemed to laugh with her. “Yes, sir, those are some good reflexes. And it wasn’t even such a bad idea, either. If the bullet hadn’t found your teeth, it would have taken a different direction. It would have killed you or left
you paralyzed. I thought it best not to take you to the hospital. They would take care of you and then when you were recovered they’d only shoot you again. So be patient, and I’ll look after you myself with what little resources there are. I just have to get you out of Luanda. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hide you. If the comrades find you, they’ll shoot me, too. As soon as possible we’ll travel south.”

She hid him for nearly five months. By listening to the radio, Jeremias was able to follow the difficult progress of the government troops, supported by the Cubans, against the improvised, unstable alliance between the UNITA party, the National Front, the South African army, and mercenaries from Portugal, England, and North America.

Jeremias was dancing on the beach, in Cascais, with a platinum blonde, and he had never been in a war, never killed, never tortured anyone, when Madalena shook him:

“Come on, Captain! We go today or never.”

The mercenary sat up in bed, with some effort. The rain was crackling in the darkness, muffling the noise of what sparse traffic there was at that time. They were to travel in a little old van, a Citroën 2CV, its yellow bodywork badly worn, eaten away by rust, but with its engine in perfect working order. Jeremias was stretched out on the backseat, hidden by various crates of books.