José Agualusa - A General Theory of Oblivion

I haven’t had electricity for over a week. So I haven’t listened to the radio. I have no way of knowing what’s going on.

I was woken by gunshots. Later, looking through the living room window, I saw the really thin man, running. Phantom roamed about all day, going round and round his own fear, gnawing on his toes. I heard shouts in the next-door apartment. Several men arguing. Then, silence.

I couldn’t sleep. At four in the morning

I went up onto the terrace.

The night, like a well, was swallowing stars.

Then I saw a flatbed truck go by, laden with dead bodies.

Monte didn’t like interrogations. For years he avoided discussing the subject. He’d even avoided recalling the seventies, when in order to preserve the socialist revolution, certain excesses — to use a euphemism for which we’re indebted to the agents of the political police — were permitted. He confessed to his friends that he learned a lot about human nature while he was interrogating fractionists, and young men linked to the far left, in the terrible years that followed Independence. People with a happy childhood, he said, tend to be hard to break.

Perhaps he was thinking of Little Chief.

Little Chief — who had been baptised Arnaldo Cruz — didn’t like talking about the periods he’d spent in detention. Orphaned at an early age, raised by his paternal grandmother, old Dulcineia, a professional sweet-seller, he’d wanted for nothing. He completed high school, and then, when everyone expected him to go to university and become a doctor, he became involved in political gatherings and got himself locked up. He had been imprisoned in Campo de São Nicolau, a little over a hundred kilometres from Moçâmedes, for four months when the Carnation Revolution broke out in Portugal. He reappeared in Luanda as a hero. Old Dulcineia believed her grandson would be made a minister, but Little Chief had more enthusiasm than actual talent for the intrigues of politics, and just a few months after Independence, by which time he was a law student, he was locked up again. His grandmother could not bear the grief. She died from a heart attack, days later.

Little Chief managed to escape from prison, hiding inside a coffin, a burlesque episode that deserves a lengthier account at a later point. Once out, he disappeared into anonymity. And yet, instead of taking refuge in a dark room somewhere, or even inside a wardrobe in the house of an elderly aunt, like some of his friends did, he chose the opposite solution. It’s easiest to hide in plain sight, he thought. And so he wandered the streets, ragged, his hair in long tangled locks, covered in mud and tar. To make himself disappear still further, to escape the raids of the soldiers who moved about the city day and night, rounding up cannon fodder, he pretended to be crazy. But a person can only pass for insane, they can only make people believe this, if they really do go a bit crazy in the process.

‘Imagine falling half asleep,’ explained Little Chief. ‘Part of you is alert, the other rambles. The part that rambles is the public part.’

It was in this state of social near-invisibility and semidementia, his lucidity travelling like a stowaway, that Little Chief saw the pigeon:

‘Days of hunger. I could barely stand, the slightest breeze would have carried me off. I constructed a slingshot, with a stick and a few strips of rubber, and I was trying to hunt down some rats over in Catambor when a pigeon came down, all aglow, its whiteness lightening everything around it. I thought: it’s the Holy Ghost. I looked for a stone, fixed my eye on the pigeon, and fired. A perfect shot. It was dead before it hit the ground. I immediately noticed the small plastic cylinder attached to a ring. I opened it, took out the little slip of paper, and read: Tomorrow. Six o’clock, usual place. Be very careful. I love you. It was when I gutted the pigeon to grill it that I found the diamonds.’

Little Chief didn’t understand right away what had happened:

‘In my failure to understand, I thought it was God giving me the stones. I even thought it was God who’d written me the message. My usual place was in front of the Lello bookshop. The next day, at six o’clock, there I was, waiting for God to show himself.’

God showed himself, in mysterious ways, via a hugely fat woman with a smooth, shining face and an expression of permanent delight. The woman got out of a small van, an old Citroën 2CV, and approached Little Chief, who was watching her, half hidden behind a dumpster.

‘Hey, handsome!’ cried Madalena. ‘I need your help.’

Little Chief walked over to her, alarmed. The woman said she’d often watched him. It annoyed her to see a man in perfect condition, actually in truly perfect condition, spending his day sprawled out on the street playing the madman. The ex-con straightened himself up, unable to hold back his indignation:

‘But I am extremely crazy, actually—’

‘Not crazy enough,’ the nurse cut him short. ‘A real crazy person would try to appear a bit more circumspect.’

Madalena had inherited a small farm close to Viana that produced fruit and vegetables, which were so hard to find in the capital, and she was looking for someone who could keep an eye on the property. Little Chief accepted. Not for the obvious reasons, that he was broken with hunger and on a farm he’d get to eat every day. That he’d be safe from the soldiers, the police and other predators. He accepted because he believed it was the will of God.

Five months later, well fed, even better slept, he had fully recovered his lucidity. In his case, unfortunately, lucidity proved itself an enemy of good sense. He would have been better off staying insane for five or six more years. Thinking clearly now, his uneasiness returned. The country’s collapse pained him in his soul, as if this were an actual organ with blood flowing through it. The pain was all the greater because of the fate of the companions he had left behind bars. Gradually, he reformed old connections. Together with a young footballer, Maciel Lucamba, whom he had met in Campo de São Nicolau, he constructed an imaginative plan that would entail the rescuing of a group of prisoners, and their escape on a trawler to Portugal. He never spoke to anyone of the diamonds. Not even to Maciel. He meant to sell the stones in order to pay for part of the operation. He didn’t know to whom he might sell them, and he wasn’t allowed the time to give this any thought. One Sunday afternoon, while he was resting, stretched out on a mat, two guys burst in suddenly and he was arrested. It pained him to learn that Madalena had been detained, too.

Monte interrogated him. He was hoping to demonstrate the nurse’s involvement in the conspiracy. He promised to free them both if the young man revealed the whereabouts of a Portuguese mercenary whom Madalena had saved. Little Chief could have told the truth, that he had never heard of this mercenary. He thought, however, that exchanging even a handful of words with the agent would be tantamount to acknowledging his legitimacy, and so he merely spat on the floor. The stubbornness left him with scars on his body.

For the whole time he was detained, he kept the diamonds with him. Neither the guards nor the other prisoners ever suspected that this humble young man, always so concerned about other people, could be hiding a small fortune. On the morning of 27 May 1977, he was woken by a fierce din. Gunshots. A man he didn’t recognise opened the door to his cell and shouted that he could leave if he wanted. A group in revolt had occupied the prison. The young man made his way through the commotion, calm as a ghost, feeling much more non-existent than when he used to roam the streets disguised as a madman. In the yard, sitting in the shade of a frangipani, he found a highly respected poetess, a historic name from the nationalist movement who, like him, had been detained just a few days after Independence, accused of supporting a strand of intellectuals who had been criticising the party leadership. Little Chief asked after Madalena. She had been released weeks earlier. The police had been unable to prove a thing against her. ‘Amazing woman!’ added the poetess. She advised Little Chief not to leave the prison. In her opinion, the revolt would be quickly stifled and the fugitives taken, tortured and shot: