She knew, even before opening her eyes, that the storm was moving off. The sky was clearing. A ray of sunlight warmed her face. From up on the patio she heard a whine, a weak complaint. Phantom, stretched out at her feet, leaped up, ran across the apartment to the living room, ran up the spiral staircase tripping over himself, and disappeared. Ludo raced after him. The dog had cornered the monkey against the banana tree, and he was growling, nervous, head down. Ludo grabbed him by the collar, firmly, pulling him toward her. The German shepherd resisted. He made as if to bite her. The woman smacked him on the nose with her left hand, again and again. Finally, Phantom gave in. He let himself be dragged away. She tied him up in the kitchen, shut the door, and returned to the terrace. Che Guevara was still there, watching her with light, wondering eyes. She had never seen such an intensely human look in the eyes of any man. On his right leg she could see a gash that was deep and clean, that looked like it had been made just moments earlier by a machete blow. The blood was mixing with rainwater.
Ludo peeled a banana, which she had brought from the kitchen, and held her arm out. The monkey leaned forward, sticking out his muzzle. He shook his head, in a gesture that might have indicated pain, or distrust. The woman called sweetly to him:
“Come on now, come on, little one. Come, I’ll look after you.”
The animal approached, dragging his leg, crying sadly. Ludo let go of the banana and grabbed him by the neck. With her left hand she drew the knife she had at her waist and buried it in the lean flesh. Che Guevara gave a cry, broke free, the blade stuck in his belly, and with two big jumps reached the wall. He stopped there, leaning against the wall, wailing, spattering blood. The woman sat down on the floor, exhausted, and she, too, was crying. They stayed like that a long while, the two of them, looking at each other, until it started raining again. Then Ludo got up, walked over to the monkey, pulled out the knife, and slit his throat.
In the morning, as she salted the meat, Ludo noticed that the rebel aerial was once again turned toward the south.
That aerial, and three others.
The Days Slide By as if They Were Liquid
The days slide by as if they were liquid. I have no more notebooks to write in. I have no more pens either. I write on the walls, with pieces of charcoal, brief lines.
I save on food, on water, on fire, and on adjectives.
I think about Orlando. I hated him, at first. Then I began to see his appeal. He could be very seductive. One man and two women under the same roof – a dangerous combination.
Haikai
I am oyster-sized
kept apart here with my pearls
•
•
•
shards in the abyss
The Subtle Architecture of Chance
The man with the brilliant smile was called Bienvenue Ambrosio Fortunato. Not many people knew him by that name. At the end of the sixties he’d composed a bolero entitled “Papy Bolingô.” The song, which was performed by François Luambo Luanzo Makiadi, the great Franco, had been an immediate hit, played day and night on the radios of Kinshasa, and the young guitar player earned himself a nickname that would accompany him for the rest of his life. A little over twenty years old, persecuted by the regime of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a.k.a. Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, Papy Bolingô had sought exile in Paris. He first got work as a doorman at a nightclub, and later as a guitarist in a circus band. It was in France, where he made contact with the small Angolan community, that he rediscovered the country of his ancestors. As soon as Angola became independent, he packed his bags and set off for Luanda. He performed at weddings and other private parties frequented by Angolans who had returned from Zaire, and by true Zaireans pining for their homeland. The daily bread that was so hard to earn he managed to get through his work as a sound technician at Rádio Nacional. He was on duty on the morning of May 27 when the rebels entered the building. He then witnessed the arrival of the Cuban soldiers, who quickly put the house in order, with slaps and kicks, retaking control of the broadcast.
As he left, very disturbed by the events he had been witnessing, he saw a military truck plowing into a car. He ran over to save the occupants. He immediately recognized one of the wounded men, a chubby guy with short, strong arms, who had on one occasion questioned him at the radio station. Then he noticed the tall young man, gaunt as an Egyptian mummy, his wrists cuffed together. He didn’t hesitate. He helped the young man to his feet, covered his hands with his jacket, and brought him to his apartment.
“Why did you help me?”
Little Chief asked this question over and over, countless times, during the four years he spent hidden in the sound technician’s apartment. His friend rarely answered. He gave a big laugh, the laugh of a free man, shook his head, changed the subject. One day he looked him straight in the eye:
“My father was a priest. He was a good priest and an excellent father. To this day I don’t trust priests without children. How can you be a priest if you aren’t a father? Mine taught us to help the weak. And that time, when I saw you sprawled out on the pavement, you sure looked pretty weak to me. Besides, I recognized one of the policemen, a security officer, who had been at my work interrogating people. I don’t like thought police. I never have. So I did what my conscience told me.”
Little Chief spent long months hidden away. After the death of the first president, the regime experimented with a hesitant opening-up. Those political prisoners not linked to the armed opposition were released. Some received invitations to occupy positions in the apparatus of the State. As he went out onto the streets of the capital, feeling somewhere between alarmed and intrigued, Little Chief discovered that almost everybody believed him dead. Some friends assured him they had actually been at his funeral. A few of his comrades in the struggle even seemed a little disappointed to be reunited with him quite so alive. As for Madalena, she received him joyfully. In the years that had passed she’d set up an NGO, Stone Soup, committed to improving the diet of the communities living in Luanda’s slum housing. She would go through the poorest neighborhoods of the city, teaching the mothers and feeding the children, as best she could, with the limited resources available.
“You can eat better without spending any more,” she explained to Little Chief. “You and your friends fill your mouths with big words – Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution – and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables and a good fish broth, at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people to the table.”
The young man was enthused by this. He started accompanying the nurse, in exchange for a symbolic wage, three meals a day, a bed, and laundry. In the meantime, the years went by. The socialist system was dismantled by the very same people who had set it up, and capitalism rose from the ashes, as fierce as ever. Guys who just months ago had been railing against bourgeois democracy at family lunches and parties, at demonstrations, in newspaper articles, were now dressed in designer clothing, driving around the city in cars that gleamed.
Little Chief allowed a thick prophet’s beard to stretch down over his thin chest. He was still incredibly elegant and, despite the beard, retained a youthful look about him. However, he began to walk stooped slightly to the left, as though he were being pushed, from within, by a violent gale. One afternoon, seeing the rich people’s cars parading past, he remembered the diamonds. Following Papy Bolingô’s advice, he went over to the Roque Santeiro market. He was carrying a piece of paper with a name on it. He thought, as he allowed himself to be dragged along by the crowd, that it would be impossible to track anyone down in the vastness of that chaos. He was afraid he would never be able to get out. He was wrong. The first trader he approached pointed him in one particular direction. Another, a few meters on, confirmed it. After fifteen minutes he stopped outside a stall on whose door someone had painted, in rough strokes, the torso of a wom
an, with a long neck, lit up by a diamond necklace. He knocked. He was met by slim man in a pink jacket and trousers and a livid red tie and hat. His shoes, which were highly polished, shone in the gloom. Little Chief remembered the sapeurs Papy Bolingô had introduced him to, years earlier, on a short visit to Kinshasa. Sapeurs are what they call the fashion-mad in the Congo. Guys who dress in clothes that are expensive and showy, spending everything they have, or don’t have, to walk the streets like models on a catwalk.
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.
Blindness
(And the Eyes of the Heart)
I’ve been losing my eyesight. Close my right eye and I can only see shadows now. Everything confuses me. I walk clinging on to the walls. It’s a struggle to read, and I can only do that in sunlight, using stronger and stronger magnifying glasses. I reread my last remaining books, the ones I refuse to burn. I have been burning the beautiful voices that have kept me company over all these years.
I sometimes think: I’ve gone mad.
I saw, from out on the terrace, a hippopotamus dancing on the veranda of the apartment next door. An illusion, I’m quite aware of that, but I did see it just the same. It might be hunger. I’ve been feeding myself very badly.
My weakness, my vanishing eyesight, it means I stumble over letters as I read. I read pages I’ve read so many times before, but they’re different now. I get things wrong, as I read, and in those mistakes, sometimes, I find incredible things that are right.
In these mistakes I find myself, often.
Some pages are improved by these mistakes.
A sparkle of fireflies, fireflying through the rooms. I move about, like a medusa jellyfish, in this illuminated haze. I sink into my own dreams. One might perhaps call this dying.
I was happy in this house, on those afternoons when the sun came into the kitchen to pay me a visit. I would sit down at the table. Phantom would come over and rest his head in my lap.
If I still had the space, charcoal, and available walls,
I could compose a great work about forgetting:
a general theory of oblivion.
I realize I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book. After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice.
In this house all the walls have my mouth.
The Collector of Disappearances
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 swall
owed 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.
A General Theory of Oblivion Page 5
