A General Theory of Oblivion

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 waza 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 that he made contact with the small Angolan community and 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, which was so hard to earn, he managed to get through his work as a sound technician at Rádio Nacional. He was on duty the morning of 27 May, 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 witnessed, he saw a military truck ploughing into a car. He ran over to save the occupants. He immediately recognised 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 recognised one of policemen, a security officer, who had been at my work interrogating people. I don’t like the 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 had 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 neighbourhoods 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 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 sat at 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 metres on, confirmed it. After fifteen minutes he stopped outside a shack on whose door someone had painted, in rough strokes, the torso of a woman, with a long neck, lit up by a diamond necklace. He knocked. He was met by a 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, and some that they don’t have, to walk the streets like models on a catwalk.

He went inside. 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 took 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 desk drawers, put it into a shoebox and pushed it towards 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 had 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 the 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 Kimbundo, 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 and the air was dazzlingly bright, he met Papy Bolingô at Rialto. They ordered some beers. They chatted without any urgency, slow and chilled, stretching out into 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 had 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 on 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 grown 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 neighbours in the building grew. Many of them owned dogs. Some insisted on raising chickens on their verandas, or 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 your place? 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 favour, 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.