A General Theory of Oblivion

OUR SKY IS YOUR FLOOR

Ludovica never liked having to face the sky. While still only a little girl, she was horrified by open spaces. She felt, upon leaving the house, fragile and vulnerable, like a turtle whose shell had been torn off. When she was very small — six, seven years old — she was already refusing to go to school without the protection of a vast black umbrella, whatever the weather. Neither her parents’ annoyance nor the cruel mockery of the other children deterred her. Later on, it got better. Until what she called ‘The Accident’ happened and she started to look back on this feeling of primordial dread as something like a premonition.

After the death of her parents, Ludo lived in her sister’s house. She rarely went out. She earned a little money giving Portuguese lessons to bored teenagers. Besides this, she read, embroidered, played the piano, watched television, cooked. When night fell, she would go over to the window and look into the darkness like someone leaning out over an abyss. Odete, irritated, would shake her head:

‘What’s the matter, Ludo? Scared of falling into the stars?’

Odete taught English and German at the high school. She loved her sister. She avoided travel so as not to leave Ludo by herself. She spent her holidays at home. Some of her friends praised her selflessness, others criticised her for being excessively indulgent. Ludo couldn’t imagine living alone. And yet she worried that she had become a burden. She thought of the two of them as Siamese twins, joined at the navel. Herself, paralysed, almost dead, and the other, Odete, forced to drag her along wherever she went. She felt happy and she felt terrified when her sister fell in love with a mining engineer. His name was Orlando. A widower, childless. He had come to the Portuguese city of Aveiro to resolve some complicated issue to do with an inheritance. An Angolan, originally from Catete, he lived between Angola’s capital and Dundo, a town run by the diamond company for which he worked. Two weeks after they’d met, quite by chance, in a patisserie, Orlando asked Odete to marry him. Expecting her to turn him down, being familiar with her reasons, he insisted that Ludo would go to live with them in Angola. The following month, they were set up in a huge apartment on the top floor of one of the most luxurious buildings in Luanda. The so-called Prédio dos Invejados — that is, the building of those who inspire envy.

The journey was hard for Ludo. She left home in a daze, under the effects of tranquillizers, moaning and protesting. She slept the whole flight. The following morning, she awoke to a routine similar to the one she’d had back home. Orlando owned a valuable library — thousands of titles, in Portuguese, French, Spanish, English and German, among which almost all the great classics of universal literature were to be found. Ludo had access to more books now, but also to less time, because she insisted on dispensing with the two maids and the cook, taking over all the domestic chores herself.

One evening, the engineer arrived home, carefully carrying a large cardboard box. He handed it to his sister-in-law:

‘This is for you, Ludovica. To keep you company. You spend too much time alone.’

Ludo opened the box. Inside, looking fearfully at her, she found a little white newborn puppy.

‘It’s a male. A German Shepherd,’ Orlando explained. ‘They grow quickly. This one’s an albino, rather unusual. He shouldn’t get too much sun. What are you going to call him?’

Ludo didn’t hesitate:

‘Phantom!’

‘Phantom?’

‘Yes, he looks like a phantom. All white like that.’

Orlando shrugged his bony shoulders.

‘Very well. Then Phantom he shall be.’

An elegant, anachronistic wrought-iron staircase climbed in a tight spiral from the drawing room up to the terrace. From there, your eyes could take in a good part of the city, the bay, the Ilha promontory, and off in the distance a long necklace of abandoned beaches fringed by the fine lacework of the waves. Orlando had taken advantage of the space to construct a garden. A bower of bougainvillea threw its scented lilac shade over the coarse brick floor. In one of the corners grew a pomegranate tree and several banana trees. Guests were often surprised:

‘Bananas, Orlando? Is this a city garden or a backyard of a farm?’

The engineer would get annoyed. The banana trees reminded him of the large yard, hemmed in by adobe walls, where he had played as a boy. If it had been up to him, he would have planted mango trees too, and medlar trees, and lots of papaya plants. When he came home from the office, this garden was where he used to sit, a glass of whisky within arm’s reach, a black cigarette alight between his lips, watching as night conquered the city. Phantom would be there with him. The puppy also loved the terrace. Ludo, meanwhile, refused to go up the stairs. In the first few months she did not even dare approach the windows.

‘The African sky is much bigger than ours,’ she explained to her sister. ‘It crushes us.’

One sunny April morning, Odete came back from the high school to have her lunch. Chaos had broken out in the capital, and she was thrilled and frightened. Orlando was in Dundo. He arrived back that night, and shut himself away in the bedroom with his wife. Ludo could hear them arguing. Her sister wanted to leave Angola as quickly as possible:

‘The terrorists, my love, the terrorists …’

‘Terrorists? Never use that word in my house again.’ Orlando never shouted. He whispered harshly, the sharp edge of his voice like a blade against the throats of his interlocutors. ‘These so-called terrorists are fighting for the freedom of my country. I am Angolan. I will not leave.’

Turbulent days passed. Demonstrations, strikes, rallies. Ludo closed the windows to prevent the apartment from being filled with the laughter of the people on the streets, which burst into the air like fireworks. Orlando, the son of a trader from Minho who’d settled in Catete in the early years of the century, and a Luandan mestiza who’d died in childbirth, had never nurtured family connections. However, one of his cousins, Vitorino Gavião, showed up again around this time. He had spent five months living in Paris, occupying himself with drink, women, plotting, and writing poems on paper napkins in the bistros that were frequented by exiles from Portugal and Africa, thereby acquiring the aura of a romantic revolutionary. He entered their house like a tempest, disordering the books in the bookcase, the glasses on the dresser, and unsettling Phantom. The puppy would chase around after him at a safe distance, barking and growling.

‘The comrades want to speak to you, damn it!’ shouted Vitorino, levelling a punch at Orlando’s shoulder. ‘We’re negotiating a provisional government. We need good men.’

‘Could be,’ admitted Orlando. ‘Actually, we have plenty of good men. What we’re short of is good sense.’

Then he paused. Yes, he said, quietly now, the country could use the experience he had gathered. But he feared the more extremist currents at the heart of the movement. He understood the necessity for greater social justice, but the communists, who were threatening to nationalise everything, alarmed him. Expropriating private property. Expelling the whites. Knocking out all the petite bourgeoisie’s teeth. He, Orlando, took pride in having a perfect smile, and he had no desire for dentures. His cousin laughed, attributing their verbal excesses to the euphoria of the moment, then complimented him on the whisky and poured himself some more. This cousin with a sphere of curly hair like Jimi Hendrix, a flowery shirt open across his sweating chest, alarmed the sisters.

‘He talks like a black!’ said Odete, accusingly. ‘And besides, he stinks. Whenever he comes over, he infects the whole house.’

Orlando became enraged. He left, slamming the door behind him. He returned in the evening, drier, sharper, a man with a close kinship to a thorn bush. He went up to the terrace, Phantom with him, took a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of whisky, and there he stayed. He returned when night was drawing in, bringing the darkness with him, and a strong smell of alcohol and tobacco. He stumbled over his own feet, shoving into the furniture, with harsh whispers against this whole fucking life.

The first gunshots signalled the start of the big farewell parties. Young people were dying in the streets, waving flags, and meanwhile the settlers danced. Rita, their neighbour in the apartment next door, traded Luanda for Rio de Janeiro. On her last night, she invited two hundred friends round for a dinner that went on till daybreak.

‘Whatever we can’t drink we’ll leave for you,’ she said to Orlando, pointing at the pantry stacked high with cases of the finest Portuguese wines. ‘Drink them. The important thing is that there mustn’t be anything left over for the communists to celebrate with.’

Three months later, the apartment block was almost empty. Ludo, meanwhile, didn’t know where to put so many bottles of wine, crates of beer, tins of food, hams, pieces of salt cod, and kilos of salt, sugar and flour, not to mention the endless supply of cleaning and hygiene products. Orlando had received from one friend — a collector of sports cars — a Chevrolet Corvette and an Alfa Romeo GTA. Another had given him the keys to his apartment.

‘I’ve never been a lucky man,’ Orlando complained to the two sisters, and it was not clear whether he was being ironic or speaking in earnest. ‘Just when I start collecting cars and apartments, the communists show up wanting to take everything away from me.’

Ludo would turn on the radio and the revolution would come into the house. ‘It’s the power of the people that is the cause of all this chaos,’ one of the most popular singers of the moment kept repeating. ‘Hey, brother,’ sang another, ‘love your brother / Don’t look to see what his colour is / Just see him as Angolan / With the Angolan people united / Independence will soon be here.’ Some of the tunes didn’t really go with the words. It was as though they were stolen from songs of another age, ballads that were sad like the light of an ancient dusk. Leaning out of the window, half hidden behind the curtains, Ludo could see the trucks pass by, loaded up with men. Some of them were flying flags. Others had banners with slogans:

Full Independence!

500 years of colonial oppression are enough!

We want the Future!

The demands all ended in exclamation marks. The exclamation marks got mixed up with the machetes the protesters were carrying. There were also machetes shining on the flags and the banners. Some of the men were carrying one in each hand. They were holding them up high. They were striking the blades against one another in a mournful clamour.

One night, Ludo dreamed that beneath the streets of the city, under the respectable mansions in the lower town, there stretched an endless network of tunnels. The roots of the trees wound their way, unimpeded, down through the vaults. There were thousands of people living underground, sunk deep in mud and darkness, feeding themselves on whatever the bourgeoisie tossed into the sewers. Ludo was walking amid the throng. The men were waving machetes. They were striking their blades against one another and the noise echoed down the tunnels. One of them approached, brought his dirty face right up close to the Portuguese woman’s face and smiled. He whispered in her ear, in a voice that was deep and sweet:

‘Our sky is your floor.’