A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa Read Free Book Online Page A

of them will be quite the right word.
    Ludo watched the clouds and she saw jellyfish.
    She had got into the habit of talking to herself, saying the same words over and over for hours on end: Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight.Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Chirping. Flocking. Twittering. Hovering. Flight. Good words, which dissolved like chocolate on the roof of her mouth and brought happy memories to mind. She believed that as she said them, as she evoked them, birds would return to the skies of Luanda. It had been years since she’d seen pigeons, seagulls, not so much as one lost little bird. Nighttime brought bats. The flight of the bats, however, had nothing to do with the flight of birds. Bats, like jellyfish, are beings of no substance. See a bat streaking across the shadows and you don’t think of it as a thing of flesh, of blood, concrete bones and heat and sensations. Elusive shapes, quick ghosts amid the ruins, they’re there, now they’re gone. Ludo hated bats. Dogs were rarer than pigeons, and cats rarer than dogs. The cats were the first to disappear. The dogs held out on the city streets for some years. Wild packs of pedigree dogs. Gangly greyhounds, heavy asthmatic mastiffs, demented Dalmatians, disappointed pointers, and then, for another two or three years, the unlikely and despicable mixing of these many and once so noble pedigrees.
    Ludo sighed. She sat down facing the window. From there she could see only the sky. Low, dark clouds, and remnants of a blue almost completely defeated by the darkness. She remembered Che Guevara. She used to see him, gliding along the walls, running across patios and rooftops, seeking refuge in the highest branches of the enormous mulemba tree. It did her good to see him. They were closely related beings, both of them mistakes, foreign bodies in the exultant organism of this city. People used to throw stones at the monkey. Others would throw him poisoned fruit. The animal avoided it. He would sniff at the fruit and then move away with an expression of disgust. Shiftingposition slightly, Ludo could look at the satellite dishes. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of them, covering the rooftops of the buildings like a fungus. For a long time she had seen all of them turned toward the north. All of them, except one – the rebel aerial. Another mistake. She used to think she wouldn’t die as long as that aerial kept its back to its companions. As long as Che Guevara survived, she wouldn’t die. It had been more than two weeks, however, since she’d last seen the monkey, and in the early hours of that morning, as she first glanced out over the rooftops, she saw the aerial turned northward – like the others. A darkness, thick and burbling, like a river, spilled down over the windowpanes. Suddenly a great flash lit everything up, and the woman saw her own shadow thrown against the wall. The thunderclap reverberated a second later. She shut her eyes. If she died there, like this, in that lucid moment, while out there the sky was dancing, triumphant and free, that would be good. Decades would go by before anyone found her. She thought about Aveiro, and realized that she had stopped feeling Portuguese. She didn’t belong to anywhere. Over there, where she had been born, it was cold. She saw them again, the narrow streets, people walking, heads down, against the wind and their own weariness. Nobody was waiting for her.
    She knew, even before opening her eyes, that the storm was moving off. The sky was clearing. A ray of sunlight warmed her face. From up on the patio she heard a whine, a weak complaint. Phantom, stretched out at her feet, leaped up, ran across the apartment to the living room, ran up the spiral staircase tripping over himself, and disappeared. Ludo raced after him. The dog had cornered the monkey against the banana tree, and he was