A General Theory of Oblivion

IN WHICH A DISAPPEARANCE IS CLEARED UP (ALMOST TWO), OR HOW, TO QUOTE MARX: ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

Magno Moreira Monte had woken up, on a lightless morning, feeling like a river that had lost its source. Out there, a gentle rain was dying. His wife was combing her hair, in panties and sandals, sitting on the bed.

‘It’s over,’ said Monte. ‘I can’t take it any more.’

Maria Clara looked at him with a mother’s calm:

‘That’s just as well, my love. So we can be happy now.’

That was in 2003. The new directions being taken by the party appalled him. He didn’t approve of the abandoning of the old ideals, the surrender to market economics, the cosying up to capitalist powers. He quit the intelligence services and restarted his life as a private detective. Clients sought him out, on the advice of common friends, in search of information about competing firms, substantial thefts, missing persons. He received visits, too, from desperate women, looking for evidence of their husbands’ betrayals, and jealous husbands, offering him considerable sums to watch their wives. Monte didn’t accept these kinds of commissions, which he called, contemptuously, ‘bed business’. He would recommend other colleagues.

One afternoon, the wife of a well-known businessman appeared in his office. She sat down, crossed and uncrossed her magnificent legs, like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, and shot out in a single breath:

‘I want you to kill my husband.’

‘What?!’

‘Slowly. Very slowly.’

Monte leaned forward in his chair. He looked at her in silence for a long moment, expecting to break her. The woman didn’t lower her eyes.

‘I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars.’

Monte knew the businessman in question, an unscrupulous opportunist who had begun to fill his pockets back in the Marxist days, stealing, here and there, from public works.

‘It’s a lot of money for such a small job.’

‘So you accept?’

‘Why do you want to kill him?’

‘I’m fed up with his betrayals. I want to see him dead. Do you accept?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t accept?’

‘No. I don’t accept. I’d kill him without the slightest remorse — with a certain amount of pleasure, even, especially if it’s slowly, but you haven’t given me the proper motive.’

The woman left, furious. Weeks later the newspapers reported the businessman’s death. He had been shot, in his car, while resisting an attempted robbery.

Monte couldn’t help but smile when he heard occasional comments about the disappearance of Simon-Pierre Mulamba. People who saw him smiling took it badly. They believed that he, an obstinate Marxist, a sceptic by nature and by training, was smiling at popular superstition. At the time, he had been annoyed at the failure of the operation. He could not bear mistakes, his own or other people’s, even though the final result of the whole mix-up had pleased him. Finally, he resigned. ‘That was the straw that broke the back of my infinite patience,’ he explained to a friend. The war had ended. In the hotels of Luanda, businessmen from Portugal, Brazil, South Africa and Israel all rubbed shoulders, in search of quick money in a country going through a process of frantic reconstruction. From upstairs — some lavish, air-conditioned office — the order had come to silence a journalist, Daniel Benchimol, who was a specialist in disappearances. Benchimol had spent weeks questioning pilots, mechanics, businessmen, whores, travelling salesmen, opposition politicians and government ones, too, all kinds of people, about the vanishing of a Boeing 727. The plane vanished at daybreak, forty-five tons of solid metal, a wonder that nobody could explain.

‘All that is solid melts into air,’ muttered Monte, thinking about Marx, and thinking, like Marx, not about planes but about the capitalist system, which there in Angola, thriving like mould amid ruins, had already begun to rot everything, to corrupt everything and, thus, to bring about its own end.

Monte knew the journalist. He thought him an honest guy, even idealistic, in a field where many others chose to sell their souls to the Devil. The reports Benchimol put his name to, which were tempered by just a touch of humour, irritated and troubled the new bourgeoisie. He was descended from Moroccan Jews who’d settled in Benguela in the middle of the nineteenth century, subsequently becoming Christianised and mulattised. His grandfather, Alberto Benchimol, a much-loved and well-respected doctor, had belonged to the ‘Kuribeka’, the name given to Angola’s freemasons. The word comes from the Ovimbundu, and means to introduce oneself or offer oneself. The Kuribeka was established around 1860, with lodges in Benguela, Catumbela and Moçâmedes, and seems to have inspired a number of uprisings of a nationalist bent. The young man had inherited his grandfather’s openness and directness, qualities Monte admired. When he received the order to silence him, the detective couldn’t contain his disgust:

‘This country’s turned inside out. The just pay for the sinners.’

This observation, made out loud in a confident voice in front of two generals, did not go down well. One of them straightened up:

‘The world has changed. The party knew how to progress along with the world, to modernise, and that’s why we’re still here. You ought to give some thought, comrade, to the historical process. Study a bit. How many years have you been working with us? Forever, right? I think it’s too late for you to turn against us.’

The second general shrugged:

‘Comrade Monte likes being provocative. He’s always been like that, an agent provocateur. Just his style.’

Monte got into line. Obeying orders. Giving orders. That was all a life added up to, after all. He had the journalist watched. He discovered that every Saturday Benchimol would hire a bungalow at a small lodge in Barra do Kwanza, to meet the wife of a well-known politician. He would arrive around four. The lover would arrive an hour later, and she never stayed long. The man, though, allowed himself to linger till morning, have some breakfast, and only then would he return home.

It’s routines that give the prey away.

One of Monte’s best friends collected snakes and palm trees. Uli Pollak had disembarked in Luanda just a few months after Independence, on loan to the Angolan revolution from the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. He married a woman from Benguela fifteen years his junior, with whom he had two children, and, after the collapse of the GDR, he requested and was granted Angolan citizenship. A discreet man of few words, he had earned his living producing and dealing in porcelain roses. He had built a house next to Stag Hill, with a round veranda, as vast as a plaza, almost all of it overlooking the water. It was there, as the sea swallowed up the darkness, that he received his friend, the two of them sitting outside in comfortable wicker chairs. They were drinking beer. They discussed the situation in Angola, the invasion of Iraq, the chaotic state of the city. Uli waited till the darkness had overtaken everything:

‘You didn’t come here to talk about the state of the traffic.’

‘You’re right. I need one of your snakes.’

‘I knew the day would come when you’d show up to ask for something of that sort. I like my snakes. They aren’t weapons.’

‘I’m well aware of that. This will be the last favour I ask you. A lot of people mocked you when you decided to restart your life as a florist. It was a good decision.’

‘You could do the same.’

‘With flowers? I don’t know anything about flowers.’

‘Flowers. Bakeries. Nurseries. Funeral services. In this country everything is just starting up. Any business can work out.’

‘Business?’ Monte laughed. An embittered laugh. ‘I have no talent for multiplying money. I can ruin the very best businesses. I’ll never be more than just about able to scrape by, I’ve already resigned myself to that. So, anyway, give me the snake, and forget the whole thing.’

The following night, one of his men, a solid guy from Malange, armour-plated, whom they called Kissonde, made his way over to the lodge where Daniel Benchimol stayed. It was after midnight. It was raining lightly. Kissonde knocked on the door to bungalow number six. A tall, handsome mulatto man opened it. He was in a nice-looking pair of silk pyjamas, in a metallic blue with white stripes. The agent pointed a pistol at him, while at the same time bringing his left index finger to his lips in an expressive gesture:

‘Sssshhhhh. Not one word. I don’t want you to get hurt.’ He pushed the mulatto inside and made him sit on the bed. Then, never diverting the threat of the pistol, he drew a bottle of pills from his jacket pocket.

‘You’re going to swallow two. Lie down and you’ll sleep like a baby. Tomorrow you’ll wake up perfectly happy, just a little bit poorer.’

According to the plan, Daniel Benchimol would swallow the pills, and then, after just a few minutes, he would fall asleep. Kissonde was then to put on a pair of thick leather gloves, take from his rucksack a coral snake, which had come from old Uli, grip it by the head and bring it over to bite the journalist. He would then depart nice and quietly, without anyone seeing him, leaving the snake in the bedroom. The following morning a cleaning woman would come upon the dead body, the snake, the bottle of pills, and sound the alarm. A lot of shouting, a lot of weeping. Fine speeches at the funeral. A perfect crime.

Unfortunately, the mulatto refused to stick to the script. Rather than swallowing the pills and falling asleep, he let out a swear word in French, threw the bottle onto the floor, and was about to get up when Kissonde struck him violently, knocking him down. The man was sprawled across the bed, passed out, with split lips, bleeding heavily. Kissonde proceeded with his plan. He forced the pills down his throat, put on the gloves, opened the rucksack, took hold of the snake by the head and made it bite the mulatto’s neck. It was then that another unexpected occurrence took place. The snake clasped itself furiously onto the agent’s nose. Kissonde grabbed hold of it, pulled at it, but the animal didn’t let go. Finally he managed to yank it off. He threw it onto the floor, stamping on it several times. He sat down on the bed, trembling, took his cell phone out of the rucksack and called Monte:

‘Boss, we’ve got a situation.’

Monte, who was waiting for him in the car at the entrance to the lodge, raced over to bungalow number six. The door was closed. He knocked lightly. Nobody came to open it. He knocked harder. The door opened and he was met by the sight of — dishevelled, in underpants, radiating health — Daniel Benchimol.

‘Sorry, are you alright?’

The journalist rubbed his eyes, startled:

‘Shouldn’t I be?’

Monte made up a hasty excuse, another guest had heard a cry, maybe nightbirds going after their prey, a cat in heat, rogue nightmares, excused himself again, wished the astonished journalist a quiet remainder of his night and moved away. He called up Kissonde:

‘Where the hell have you got to?’

He heard a moan. A voice crumbling:

‘I’m dying, boss. Come quick.’

Monte had a brainwave. He ran over to bungalow number nine. He found that the metal number had indeed come loose at the top, and had swung down to form a number six. The door was just pushed to. He went in. Kissonde was sitting facing the door, his face swollen, nose even more swollen, eyelids drooping:

‘I’m dying, boss,’ he said, slowly holding up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘The snake bit me.’

Behind him, Monte saw another guy, bleeding from his mouth.

‘Fuck, Kissonde! What about that guy? Who’s he?’

He went straight over to a jacket hanging on the back of a chair, beside the desk. He rifled through the pockets. He found a wallet and a passport.

‘French! Holy shit, Kissonde, you’ve killed a Frenchman!’

He fetched the jeep. He sat Kissonde at shotgun. He was about to drag out the inanimate body of Simon-Pierre when he was surprised by one of the lodge’s guards.

‘Well now!’ sighed Monte. A bit of good luck amid the bad. The man had worked with him in the hard years. The guard stood to attention:

‘Commander!’

He helped Monte put Simon-Pierre on the back seat of the jeep. He brought clean sheets. They made the bed. They cleaned the room. They put the snake (what was left of it) into Kissonde’s rucksack. When Monte was just about to leave, after handing the guard a hundred dollars to make it easier for him to forget the whole episode, he spotted the felt hat the Frenchman had worn as he wandered around Luanda.

‘I’m taking the hat. I’ll take some clothes, too. Nobody goes missing in their pyjamas.’

He dropped Kissonde at the military hospital. He drove an hour to a piece of land he had bought years earlier, having intended to build there, far from the noise of Luanda, a wooden house, painted blue, where he and his wife would face their old age. He parked the jeep beside an enormous baobab. It was a lovely night, lit by a copper moon, round and tight as the skin of a drum. He took a shovel from the trunk and opened a grave in the soft earth, wet from the rain. An old Chico Buarque song came to his mind: ‘This grave where you lie / measured out by hand / is the smallest expense you ever claimed from the land / the grave is a good size / not too deep a foundation / it’s the part that falls to you of this whole plantation.’ He leaned up against the baobab, humming: ‘The grave is very large / for your corpse off its bier / but you’ll be a bigger man / than you ever were here.’

In the penultimate year of high school, in the city of Huambo, he had joined an amateur theatre group that had staged The Death and Life of Severino, a play with words by João Cabral de Melo Neto and music by Chico Buarque. The experience changed how he looked at the world. He understood, as he played the part of a poor peasant from the Brazilian north-east, the contradictions and injustices of the colonial system. In April 1974 he was in Lisbon, studying law, when the streets were filled with red carnations. He bought a ticket and returned to Luanda to start a revolution. So many years had gone by, and there he was, humming ‘The Labourer’s Funeral’ while he buried, in an unmarked grave, a writer who hadn’t had luck on his side.

He re-entered Luanda at four in the morning. He was thinking about what he might do next, how to justify the disappearance of the Frenchman, when, just as he was passing the Quinaxixe market, inspiration struck. He parked the car, and got out. He took the dead man’s hat and made his way round to the back of a building, next door to a nightclub, the Quizás, Quizás, where Simon-Pierre had been that night. He put the hat down on the damp ground. There was a kid asleep next to a dumpster. He woke him with a thump:

‘Did you see that?!’

The boy leapt up, confused.

‘See what, old man?’

‘There, where that hat is! There was a tall mulatto, taking a leak, and then all of a sudden the earth swallowed him up. It only left the hat.’

The boy turned his big spotty face to him. He opened his eyes wide:

‘Whoa, man! Did you really see it?’

‘I did, clear as day. Earth swallowed him up. First there was a glow of light, then nothing. Just the hat.’

They stood there, the two of them, stunned, contemplating the hat. Their amazement caught the attention of three other kids, who approached, looking both fearful and defiant:

‘What’s happened, Baiacu?’

Baiacu turned to face them, triumphant. In the days that followed, people would listen to him. People would crowd around him to hear what he had to say. A man with a good story is practically a king.