A General Theory of Oblivion Read Online Free Page A

neocolonialism, 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 would light 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 French 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 asleep, and her struggling to remember names. A patch of sun still burning. And the night, bit by bit, and time stretching out aimlessly. Body weary, and the night turning from blue to blue. Tiredness pressing on her kidneys. Her 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 clamor 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 colored ball bouncing back and forth inside her brain:
    Bolingô. Bisô. Matindi
.
    The Prédio dos Invejados started to liven up as new residents began to arrive. People coming from the slum housing on the outskirts of Luanda, countryfolk who had just arrived in the city, Angolans lately returned from neighboring Zaire and real Zaireans, too. None of them used to living in apartment blocks. 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 was still being 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 center, and flowing freely, then finally petering out amid the heaps of rubbish and mud by the walls of the buildings. That was the place where once a lagoon had spread itself out. Orlando liked to remember the thirties, when he, then just a boy, would come to 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 chorizo. Once the cans had been emptied, they moved on to eating bean soups and rice. By this point there were whole days that passed with no electricity. Ludo started making small bonfires in the kitchen. First, she burned the boxes, 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 thedouble 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