A General Theory of Oblivion Read Online Free Page B

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 a flour porridge. The nights merged into the days. She would wake to find the dog watching over her with a 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, too, would lean over the animal as he slept. Several times she brought the knife to his throat.
    It would get dark, it would get 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. Then 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 there formore than two hours, crouched low, hidden behind the umbrella, until a pigeon touched down on the patio. 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 afterward, it returned. This time it walked around the trap, pecked at the thread, moved forward 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 the trap had a ring wrapped around its right leg. Attached to the ring Ludo found a little plastic cylinder. She opened it and found a slip of paper rolled up like a raffle ticket. She read the line that was written in lilac-colored 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. As well as this, 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, that note intrigued her. She felt powerful all of a sudden. The fate ofa couple was there, in her hands, pulsing in pure terror. She held it firmly, this winged fate, 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 too well. I can see her holding the pigeon, not knowing that before her I’d 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