A General Theory of Oblivion

Free A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa

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Authors: José Eduardo Agualusa
come back.
    The woman is called Sara, I call her Sara
.
    She looks like she’s out of a canvas by Modigliani
.

About God and Other Tiny Follies
    I find it easier to have faith in God, notwithstanding His being something so far beyond our incredibly limited understanding, than in arrogant humanity. For many years, I called myself a believer out of sheer laziness. It would have been hard to explain my nonbelief to Odete, to everyone else. I didn’t believe in men either, but that was something people accepted easily. I have understood over these last years that in order to believe in God, it is essential to have trust in humanity. There is no God without humanity
.
    I continue not to believe, neither in God, nor in humanity. Since Phantom died I have worshipped His spirit. I talk to Him. I believe that He hears me. I believe this not through an effort of the imagination, still less intelligence, but by engaging another faculty entirely, which we might call unreason
.
    Am I talking to myself?
    Perhaps. Just like the saints, by the way, who boasted about talking to God. I’m less arrogant. I talk to myself, believing that I’m talking to the sweet soul of a dog. In any case, these conversations do me good
.

Exorcism
    I carve out verses
    Short
    as prayers
    words are legions
    of demons
    expelled
    I cut adverbs
    pronouns
    I spare my wrists

The Day Ludo Saved Luanda
    On the living-room wall there hung a watercolor depicting a group of Mucubals dancing. Ludo had met the artist, Albano Neves e Sousa, a fun, playful kind of guy, an old friend of her brother-in-law’s. She’d hated the picture at first. She saw in it a distillation of everything she hated about Angola: savages celebrating something – some cause of joy, some glad omen – that was quite alien to her. Then, bit by bit, over the long months of silence and solitude, she began to feel some affection toward those figures that moved, circling around a fire, as though life really deserved such elegance.
    She burned the furniture, she burned thousands of books, she burned all the paintings. It wasn’t until she was desperate that she took the Mucubals down off the wall. She was going to pull out the nail, just for aesthetic reasons, because it looked wrong there, serving no purpose, when it occurred to her that maybe this, this piece of metal, was holding up the wall. Maybe it was holding up the whole building. Who knows, if she pulled the nail out of the wall, the whole city might collapse.
    She did not pull out the nail.

Apparitions, and a Nearly Fatal Fall
    November passed, cloudless. December too. February arrived and the air was cracked with thirst. Ludo saw the lagoon drying out. First it darkened, then the grass turned gold, almost white, and the nighttimes lost the uproarious noise of the frogs. The woman counted the bottles of water. Not many left. The chickens, to which she gave the muddy water from the swimming pool to drink, fell sick. They all died. There was still corn left, and beans, but to cook them used up a lot of water, and she needed to save it.
    She went hungry again. One morning, she got up early, shaking off her nightmares, staggered into the kitchen, and saw a bread roll on the table:
    “Bread!”
    She picked it up, in disbelief, with both hands.
    She smelled it.
    The scent of the bread carried her back to her childhood. Her and her sister, on the beach, splitting some bread with butter. She bit into the dough. It was only when she had finished eating that she realized she was crying. She sat down, trembling.
    Who could have brought her that bread?
    Maybe someone had thrown it through the window. She imagined a broad-shouldered young man hurling a loaf of bread into the air.The bread tracing a slow arc before landing on her table. The person in question might have thrown the bread up into the sky, from the lagoon, which was now almost dry, as part of some mysterious ritual aimed at summoning the rain. A Quimbanda witchdoctor, a real champion

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