A General Theory of Oblivion

AFTER THE END

After the end, time slowed down. At least that was how it seemed to Ludo. On 23 February 1976 she wrote, in the first of her diaries:

Nothing happened today. I slept.

While asleep I dreamed that I was sleeping.

Trees, little animals, a multitude of insects were sharing their dreams with me. There we all were, dreaming in chorus, like a crowd in a tiny room, exchanging ideas and smells and caresses. I remember I was both a spider advancing towards its prey and the fly caught in the web of that spider. I felt flowers blossoming in the sun, breezes carrying pollen. I awoke and was alone. If, while we are asleep, we can dream of sleeping, can we then, when awake, awaken within a more lucid reality?

One morning she got up, turned on the tap and the water didn’t come out. She was scared. It occurred to her for the first time that she might spend long years shut away in the apartment. She took an inventory of what was in the pantry. She wouldn’t need to worry about salt. She also found enough flour for several months, as well as bags and bags of beans, packets of sugar, cases of wine and soft drinks, dozens of tins of sardines, tuna and sausages.

That night it rained. Ludo opened an umbrella and went up onto the terrace, carrying empty bottles, buckets and basins. Early the next morning she cut the bougainvillea and the ornamental flowers. She put a handful of lemon pips in the flowerbed where she had buried the tiny burglar. Four other flowerbeds were used for sowing corn and beans. In another five, she planted her last remaining potatoes. One of the banana trees had borne a huge bunch. She pulled off a few bananas and carried them to the kitchen. She showed them to Phantom:

‘See? Orlando planted the banana trees so they would produce memories. They’re going to stop us going hungry. Or rather, they’ll stop me going hungry, I can’t imagine you’re too keen on bananas.’

The next day, the water was back in the taps. From then on it would often fail, as would the electricity, till finally it went for good. In the first few weeks, the blackouts were more of a problem than the interruptions to the water supply. She missed the radio. She had liked hearing the international news bulletins on the BBC and Radiodifusão Portuguesa. She’d listened to the Angolan stations, too, even if the constant speeches against colonialism, neo-colonialism and the reactionary forces annoyed her. The radio was a magnificent piece of equipment, in a wooden casing, art deco style, with ivory buttons. Press one of the buttons and it lit up like a city. Ludo would turn the knobs in search of voices. Fragments of sentences would come to her in French, English or some obscure African language:

… Israeli commandos rescue airliner hostages at Entebbe …

… Mao Tse-tung est mort …

… Combatants de l’indépendance aujourd’hui victorieux …

… Nzambe azali bolingo mpe atonda na boboto …

Besides this, there was the record player. Orlando collected LPs of chansons. Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Serge Reggiani, Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré. The Portuguese woman would listen to Brel as the sea swallowed up the light. The city falling asleep, and her struggling to remember names. A patch of sun still burning. And the night, bit by bit, time stretching out aimlessly. Body weary, and the night turning from blue to blue. Tiredness pressing on her kidneys. Seeing herself as a queen, believing that someone, someplace, could be waiting for her just as one awaits a queen. But there was no one, not anywhere in the world, waiting for her. The city falling asleep and the birds like waves, and the waves like birds, and the women like women, and her not at all sure that women are the future of Man.

One afternoon, she was woken by a resounding clamour of voices. In a panic she got up, imagining that the house was about to be invaded. The living room was adjacent to Rita Costa Reis’s apartment. She pressed her ear to the wall. Two women, one man, several children. The man’s voice was big, silky, lovely to listen to. They were talking to one another in one of those enigmatic, melodic languages that she would sometimes hear on the radio. The odd word would come loose from the pack and leap about, like a coloured ball bouncing back and forth inside her brain:

Bolingô. Bisô. Matindi.

The Prédio dos Invejados livened up as new residents began to arrive. People coming from the slum housing on the outskirts of Luanda, country folk who had just arrived in the city, Angolans lately returned from neighbouring Zaire, and real Zaireans too. None of them were used to living in an apartment block. One morning, really early, Ludo looked out the bedroom window to find a woman urinating on the balcony of 10-A. On the balcony of 10-D, five chickens were watching the sunrise. The back of the building overlooked a large courtyard, which only months before had still been used as a car park. Tall blocks, to the side and in front, hemmed the space in. The flora had run wild and launched itself over the entire area. There was water rising from some chasm in the centre, flowing freely, then finally petering out amid the heaps of rubbish and mud by the walls of the buildings. That was the place where a lagoon had once spread itself out. Orlando liked to remember the thirties, when he, then just a boy, would play with his friends in the tall grass. They’d find the skeletal remains of crocodiles and hippos. Lion skulls.

Ludo witnessed the revival of the lagoon. She even saw the return of the hippos (the one hippo, if we’re to be completely objective). This happened many years later. We will get there. In the months that followed Independence, the woman and the dog shared tuna and sardines, sausages and chorizos. Once the tins had been emptied, they moved on to eating bean soups and rice. By this point, whole days passed with no electricity. Ludo started making small bonfires in the kitchen. First she burned the boxes, the bits of paper of no use, the dry branches of the bougainvillea. Then the pieces of furniture that served no purpose. When she removed the crossbars from the double bed, she found, under the mattress, a small leather purse. She opened it and, feeling no surprise, watched as dozens of small stones rolled out onto the floor. After burning beds and chairs, she started to pull up the floor tiles. The dense, heavy wood burned slowly, with a fine flame. At first she used matches. Once those had run out, she moved on to one of the magnifying glasses Orlando had used to study his collection of foreign stamps. She would wait for the sun, at around ten in the morning, to flood the kitchen floor with light. Obviously, she could only cook on sunny days.

The hunger came. For weeks, weeks as long as months, Ludo barely ate. She fed Phantom on flour porridge. Nights merged into days. She would wake to find the dog watching over her with fierce eagerness. She would fall asleep and feel his burning breath. She went to the kitchen to fetch a knife, the one with the longest blade there was, the sharpest one, and took to carrying it around, attached to her waist like a sword. She would lean over the animal as he slept. Several times, she brought the knife to his throat.

It got dark, it got light, and it was the same void with no beginning and no end. At some indeterminate moment she heard, coming from the terrace, a loud rustling. She rushed upstairs and found Phantom devouring a pigeon. She approached, resolved to tear off a piece. The dog drove his paws into the ground and showed his teeth. Blood, thick and nocturnal, with feathers and flesh still clinging to it, covered his muzzle. The woman drew back. It occurred to her to prepare a very simple trap. A box turned upside down, tilted precariously, resting on a piece of kindling. A piece of thread tied to the twig. In the shade, two or three diamonds. She waited for more than two hours, crouched low, hidden behind the umbrella, until a pigeon touched down on the terrace. The bird approached with the little tottering steps of a drunk. It backed away. It beat its wings and flew off, lost in the brightly lit sky. Not long afterwards, it returned. This time it walked around the trap, pecked at the thread, moved forwards into the shade of the box. Ludo pulled the thread. That afternoon she successfully trapped two more pigeons. She cooked them and recovered her strength. In the months that followed, she caught many more.

For a long time there was no rain. Ludo watered the flowerbeds with the water that had accumulated in the swimming pool. Finally, there was a rip in the cold curtain of low-hanging clouds, which in Luanda they call cacimbo, and the rain came down again. The corn grew. The bean plants yielded flowers and beans. The pomegranate tree was filled with red fruit. Around that time, the pigeons in the city’s sky became more scarce. One of the last ones to fall into her trap had a ring wrapped around its right leg. Attached to the ring, Ludo found a little plastic cylinder. She opened it and discovered a slip of paper, rolled up like a raffle ticket. She read the line that was written in lilac-coloured ink, in a small firm hand:

Tomorrow. Six o’clock, usual place. Be very careful. I love you.

She rolled the piece of paper back up and replaced it in the cylinder. She hesitated. Hunger gnawed at her stomach. And the pigeon had swallowed one or two of the stones. There were not many left, some of them too big to serve as bait. On the other hand, the note intrigued her. She felt powerful all of a sudden. The fate of a couple was there, in her hands, pulsing in pure terror. She held it firmly, this winged destiny, and threw it back at the big, wide sky. She wrote in her diary:

I’m thinking about the woman waiting for the pigeon. She doesn’t trust the mail — or is there no longer any mail? She doesn’t trust the telephone — or have the phones stopped working now? She doesn’t trust people, that’s for sure. Humanity hasn’t worked out too well. I can see her holding the pigeon, not knowing that before her I’d already held it, trembling, in my own hands. The woman wants to run away. I don’t know what it is she wants to run away from. From this country that is coming apart, from a suffocating marriage, from one of those futures that squeeze your feet like someone else’s shoes? I thought to add a little note of my own: ‘Kill the Messenger’. Yes, for if she killed the pigeon she would find a diamond. Or she would read the note and return the pigeon to the pigeon house. At six in the morning she would go to meet a man I imagine to be tall, with controlled movements and an attentive heart. He is lit by a vague sadness (this man) as he prepares for their flight. A flight that will make him a traitor to the fatherland. He will wander the world, taking support from the love of a woman, but he will never be able to fall asleep at night without first bringing his hand to his left breast.

The woman notices the gesture.

Does something hurt?

The man will shake his head — no. Nothing. It’s nothing.

How to explain that what hurts is the childhood he has lost?

Leaning out of the bedroom window, she would see, on the drawn-out Saturday mornings, one of the neighbour-women on the veranda of 10-D, pounding corn. Then she would see her mashing up the cassava paste. Preparing and grilling fish or, at other times, fat chicken legs. The air would be filled with a thick, scent-heavy smoke that would rouse her appetite. Orlando used to like Angolan food. Ludo, however, had always refused to cook black people’s things. She regretted that very much. These days, what she most fancied was to eat grilled meat. She started to watch the chickens that lived on the veranda, scratching away, as the day broke, at the first grains of sunlight. She waited till one Sunday morning. The city slept. She leaned out of the window and lowered a piece of string, with a slip noose at the end, down to the veranda of 10-D. About fifteen minutes later she managed to loop the neck of a huge black rooster. She gave a sharp tug, and brought it up quickly. To her surprise, the animal was still alive (though only barely) when she set it on the bedroom floor. She drew the knife from her waist, she was going to slit its throat — then a sudden flash of inspiration stopped her. There would be enough corn for the next few months, as well as beans and bananas. With a rooster and a hen she could start breeding. It would be good to eat fresh eggs every week. She lowered the string again and this time she managed to loop one of the hens by a leg. The wretched bird struggled, an appalling uproar, feathers and down and dust flying. A moment later the building was woken by the neighbour’s screams:

‘Thieves! Thieves!’

Then, having ascertained the impossibility of anyone scaling the smooth walls to get to the veranda and steal the poultry, the woman’s accusations were transformed into a terrified wailing:

‘Witchcraft … Witchcraft …’

Then, straight away, with total certainty:

‘A Kianda … A Kianda …’

Ludo had heard Orlando talk about a sea goddess called the Kianda. Her brother-in-law had tried to explain to her the difference between Kiandas and mermaids:

‘A Kianda is a being, an energy capable of good or evil. This energy is expressed through the coloured lights that come from the water, through the waves of the sea and the raging of the winds. Fishermen pay her tribute. When I was a child and I used to play by the lagoon, the one behind this very building, I was always finding offerings. Sometimes the Kianda would kidnap somebody as they strolled past. People would reappear days later, very far away, beside some other lagoon or river, or on some beach. That used to happen a lot. After a certain point, the Kianda began to be represented in the form of a mermaid. She was transformed into a mermaid, but kept her original powers.’

Thus it was, with a vulgar theft and a stroke of luck, that Ludo began a small run of poultry-breeding on her terrace, while simultaneously contributing to strengthening the Luandans’ belief in the presence and powers of the Kianda.