A General Theory of Oblivion

APPARITIONS, AND A NEARLY FATAL FALL

November passed, cloudless. December too. February arrived and the air was cracked with thirst. Ludo saw the lagoon drying out. First it darkened, then the grass turned gold, almost white, and the night-time lost the uproarious noise of the frogs. The woman counted the bottles of water. Not many left. The chickens, which she gave the muddy water from the swimming pool to drink, fell sick. They all died. There was still corn left, and beans, but to cook them used up a lot of water, and she needed to save it.

She went hungry again. One morning she got up early, shaking off her nightmares, staggered into the kitchen, and saw a bread roll on the table:

‘Bread!’

She picked it up in disbelief, with both hands.

She smelled it.

The scent of the bread carried her back to her childhood. She and her sister, on the beach, splitting some bread with butter. She bit into it. It was only when she had finished eating that she realised she was crying. She sat down, trembling.

Who could have brought her that bread?

Maybe someone had thrown it through the window. She imagined a broad-shouldered young man hurling a loaf of bread into the air. The bread tracing a slow arc, before landing on her table. The person in question might have thrown the bread up into the sky from the lagoon, which was now almost dry, as part of some mysterious ritual aimed at summoning the rain. A Quimbanda witch doctor, a real champion bread-thrower, since it was a quite considerable distance. That night she fell asleep early. She dreamed an angel had visited her.

In the morning she found, on the kitchen table, six bread rolls, a tin of guava jelly and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. Ludo sat down, her heart racing. Someone was coming in and out of her house. She got up. In recent months her eyesight had been getting worse and worse. No sooner had the light begun to fade, after a certain time of the day, than she began to move about just by instinct. She went up onto the terrace. She ran across to the building’s right-hand façade, the only one without any windows, which faced another block just a few metres away. She leaned over and saw the scaffolding, which surrounded the neighbouring building, right up against her own. That was how the invader had come in. She went down the stairs. It might have been because of her nerves, or because of the lack of light, but whatever the reason, her instinct failed her, she missed a step and tumbled, flailing. She fainted. The moment she had recovered her senses she knew she had fractured her left femur. So that’s how it’s going to be, she thought. I’m going to die not the victim of some mysterious African affliction, not through lack of appetite or exhaustion, not murdered by a thief, not because the sky has fallen on my head, but conspired against by one of the most famous laws of physics: Given two bodies of mass m1 and m2, and a distance r between them, these two bodies will be attracted to each other with a force proportional to the mass of each and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them. She had been saved by her lack of mass. Twenty kilos more and the impact would have been devastating. Pain climbed up her leg, paralysing the left side of her torso, preventing her from thinking clearly. She stayed immobile for quite some time, while night twisted about out there, like a boa constrictor, choking the harassed acacias on the streets and squares. The pain was barking, the pain was biting. Her mouth felt dry. She tried to spit out her tongue, because it was as though it didn’t belong to her, a piece of cork trapped in her throat.

She thought about the bottle of Coca-Cola. About the bottles of water she kept in the pantry. She would need to drag herself fifteen metres or so. She stretched out her arms, braced her hands against the cement, straightened her trunk. It was as if her leg were being chopped off with the blade of an axe. She yelped. Her own yelp surprised her.

‘I’ve woken the whole building,’ she muttered.

She woke up Little Chief, in the next-door apartment. The businessman had been dreaming about the Kianda. He had been having the same dream for several nights. He would go out onto the veranda in the middle of the night and see a light gleaming in the lagoon. The light increased in volume, a rainbow that was round and musical, and in the meantime the businessman felt his body losing its weight. He awoke at the moment when the light rose to meet him. This time he woke earlier, because the light screamed, or it seemed to him as though the light was screaming, in a sudden explosion of mud and frogs. He sat up in bed, feeling stifled, his heart pounding. He remembered the time he had spent shut away in that same room. Sometimes he used to hear a dog barking. He’d hear the distant voice of a woman chanting old songs.

‘The building is haunted,’ Papy Bolingô had assured him. ‘There’s the barking dog, which no one’s ever seen, like a kind of phantom dog. They say it can go through walls. You’ve got to be careful when you’re asleep. The dog comes through the wall, it’s barking, bow-wow-wow, but you don’t see a thing, you just hear its barking, and then it inveigles itself into your dreams. You start having dreams that are really filled with barking. One of the residents, on the floor below, a young craftsman called Eustákio, woke up one morning and could no longer speak. He just barked. They took him to a traditional doctor, pretty well renowned, who took five days to remove the dog’s spirit, and its barking, from Eustákio’s head.’

Little Chief found the building’s architecture peculiar. He was confused by the wall blocking off the corridor, an arrangement that didn’t occur on the other floors. There had to be another apartment on that floor — but where was it?

Meanwhile, just a few metres away, on the other side of the wall, Ludo forced herself to move towards the kitchen. With each centimetre she felt further away from her own self. The first light of morning found her still in the living room, about two metres from the door. She was burning with fever. Her thirst was troubling her more than the pain. Around two in the afternoon she reached the door. She fainted. She opened her eyes and saw, vaguely, a face before her. She brought her hands to her eyes, rubbed them. The face was still there. A boy, it looked to her like the face of a boy, with two big astonished eyes.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name’s Sabalu.’

‘Did you get in from the scaffolding?’

‘Yes, I climbed the scaffolding. They put scaffolding on the building next door. They’re painting it. The scaffolding comes nearly all the way up to your terrace. Then I piled some crates on the top level and climbed up. It was easy. What about you, did you fall?’

‘How old are you?’

‘Seven. Are you dying?’

‘I don’t know. I did start thinking I was dead already. Water. Go get me water.’

‘Do you have money?’

‘Yes, I’ll give you all the money but go get me water.’

The boy got up. He glanced around him.

‘There’s hardly anything here. Not even furniture. Looks like you’re poorer than me. Where’ve you got the money?’

‘Water!’

‘OK there, grandma, take it easy, I’ll go fetch you a soda.’

He brought the bottle of Coca-Cola from the kitchen. Ludo drank straight from the bottle, greedily. She was struck by how sweet it was. It had been years since she’d felt the taste of sugar. She told the boy to go to the study to find her purse, where she kept the money. Sabalu came back, laughing hard as he scattered wads of banknotes around him.

‘This isn’t money any more, grandma, it’s not worth anything.’

‘There’s silver cutlery. Take the silver cutlery.’

The boy laughed again.

‘I’ve already taken them, didn’t you even notice?’

‘No. Was it you who brought the bread yesterday?’

‘The day before. You don’t want to call a doctor?’

‘No, no, I don’t!’

‘I can call a neighbour. You must have neighbours.’

‘No, no! Don’t call anyone.’

‘You don’t like people? I don’t like people either.’

Ludo started to cry.

‘Go away. Go away.’

Sabalu got up.

‘Where’s the door to get out?’

‘There isn’t one. Leave the way you came.’

Sabalu put the rucksack on his back and disappeared. Ludo took a deep breath. She leaned on the wall. The pain was subsiding. Maybe she should have let the boy call a doctor. Then she thought that along with the doctor would come the police, then journalists, and she was keeping a skeleton on the terrace. She preferred to die here, a prisoner and yet free, just as she had lived the past thirty years.

Free?

Often, as she looked out over the crowds that clashed violently against the sides of the building, that vast uproar of car horns and whistles, cries and entreaties and curses, she experienced a profound terror, a feeling of siege and threat. Whenever she wanted to go out she would look for a book in the library. She felt, as she went on burning those books, after having burned all the furniture, the doors, the wooden floor tiles, that she was losing her freedom. It was as though she was incinerating the whole planet. When she burned Jorge Amado she stopped being able to visit Ilhéus and São Salvador. Burning Ulysses, by Joyce, she had lost Dublin. Getting rid of Three Trapped Tigers, she incinerated old Havana. There were fewer than a hundred books left. She kept them more out of stubbornness than to make any use of them. Her eyesight was so bad that even with an enormous magnifying glass, even holding the book in direct sunlight, sweating as though she were in a sauna, it took her an entire afternoon to decipher one page. In recent months, she had taken to writing her favourite lines from the books she had left in huge letters on those walls of the apartment that were still blank. It won’t be long, she thought, and I really will be a prisoner. I don’t want to live in a prison. She fell asleep. She was awoken by a quiet laugh. The boy was there again in front of her, a slender silhouette, cut out against the stormy glare of the sunset.

‘Now what? You’ve already taken the cutlery. I don’t have anything else.’

Sabalu laughed again.

‘Tsh, grandma! I thought you’d died.’

He put his rucksack down at the lady’s feet.

‘I bought medicines. Loads of them. They’ll help you.’ He sat down on the floor. ‘I also bought more Coke. And food, grilled chicken. You hungry?’

They ate just there, where they were, sharing the bread and the pieces of chicken. Sabalu showed her the medicines he had brought: painkillers, anti-inflammatories.

‘I went to Roque Santeiro. I talked to this guy. I said my father had hit my mother, he broke her arm, and she’s embarrassed to go to the doctor. Then he sold me all this. I paid with the money from the cutlery. There was loads left over. Can I sleep in your house?’

Sabalu helped the old lady up, took her to her room and lay her down on the mattress. Then he lay beside her and fell asleep. The next morning he went to the market and came back carrying vegetables, matches, salt, various spices and two kilos of beef. He also brought a portable stove, the kind for camping, with a small butane gas canister. He did the cooking himself, on the bedroom floor, following Ludo’s instructions. They both ate with gusto. Then the boy did the washing-up and put away the crockery. He roamed about the house, curious:

‘You know, you’ve got a lot of books.’

‘A lot of books? Yes, I did have a lot. There aren’t many now.’

‘I’ve never seen so many.’

‘Can you read?’

‘I’m not very good at putting the letters together. I only did one year at school.’

‘Would you like me to teach you? I’ll teach you to read, and then you can read to me.’

Sabalu learned to read while Ludo convalesced. The old lady also taught him to play chess. The boy took to the board naturally. While he played he talked to her of his life out there. For the woman it was like having an extra-terrestrial revealing the secrets of a distant planet to her. One afternoon, Sabalu discovered that the scaffolding was being taken down.

‘How am I going to leave now?’

Ludo was fretting:

‘I don’t know!’

‘Well, how did you come in?’

‘I didn’t come in. I’ve always lived in this house.’

The boy looked at her, confused. Ludo gave in. She took him to the front door. She opened it and showed him the wall she herself had put up, thirty years before, separating the apartment from the rest of the building.

‘On the other side of this door is the world.’

‘Can I break through the wall?’

‘You can, but I’m afraid. I’m very afraid.’

‘Don’t be afraid, grandma. I’ll protect you.’

The boy went to fetch a pickaxe, and with half a dozen violent blows opened a hole in the wall. Looking through it he saw, on the other side, the astonished face of Little Chief.

‘Who are you?’

Sabalu widened the hole with two more blows. He introduced himself:

‘My name’s Sabalu Estevão Capitango, senhor. I’m busy breaking through this wall.’

The businessman shook the plaster dust off his jacket. He took two steps back:

‘Jesus! What planet have you come from?’

The boy could have made use of the brilliant retort given by the singer Elza Soares at the start of her career, aged thirteen, scrawny, badly dressed, when Ary Barroso asked her the exact same question (behind him the audience was laughing at her. At home, her first child was dying): ‘I’ve come from Planet Hunger.’ Sabalu, however, had never heard of Elza Soares, nor of Ary Barroso, so he shrugged and replied with a smile:

‘We live here.’

‘We?’

‘Me and my grandmother.’

‘You live there? There’s an apartment on that side?’

‘Sure is.’

‘And you’ve been living there how long?’

‘Always.’

‘Oh really? And how do you get out?’

‘We didn’t go out. We just lived here. Now we will, though, we’re going to start going out.’

Little Chief shook his head, stunned.

‘Very well, very well. You finish breaking down that wall and then clean up the hallway. I don’t want a speck of dust left, understand? This isn’t a slum any more. It’s a smart building now, well respected, like in the colonial days.’

He went back into his apartment, walked over to the kitchen, found a beer in the fridge. He went to drink it on the veranda. Sometimes he felt a kind of nostalgia for the days when, mad and wretched, he would spend his hours dancing out on the streets and the squares. The world, washed in sunlight, was not troubled by mysteries. Everything had seemed transparent to him then, and lucid — even God, who, assuming a variety of forms, so often appeared to him at evening-time for a couple of thimblefuls of pleasant conversation.