Free A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa Page A

bread-thrower, since it was a quite considerable distance. That night she fell asleep early. She dreamed an angel had visited her.
    In the morning she found, on the kitchen table, six bread rolls, a tin of guava jelly, and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. Ludo sat down, her heart racing. Someone was coming in and out of her house. She got up. In recent months her eyesight had been getting worse and worse. After a certain time of the day, no sooner had the light begun to fade, than she began to move about just by instinct. She went up onto the terrace. She ran across to the building’s right-hand façade, which faced another block just a few meters away, and which was the only one not to have any windows. She leaned over and saw the scaffolding, which surrounded the neighboring building, right up against her own. That was how the invader had come in. She went down the stairs. It might have been because of her nerves, or because of the lack of light, but whatever the reason, her instinct failed her, she missed a step, and tumbled, flailing. She fainted. No sooner had she recovered her senses than she knew she had fractured her left femur. “So that’s how it’s going to be,” she thought. “I’m going to die not the victim of some mysterious African affliction, not through lack of appetite or exhaustion, not murdered by a thief, not because the sky has fallen on my head, but conspired against by one of the most famous laws of physics:
given two bodies of mass m1 and m2, and a distance r between them
,
these two bodies will be attracted to one another with a force proportional to the mass of each and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them
.” She had been saved
by
her lack of mass. Twenty kilos more and the impact would have been devastating. Pain climbed up her leg, paralyzing the left side of her trunk, preventing her from thinking clearly. She stayed immobile for quite some time, while night twisted about, out there, like a boa constrictor, choking the accosted acacias on the streets and squares. The pain was barking, the pain was biting. Her mouth felt dry. She tried to spit out her tongue, because it was as though it didn’t belong to her, a piece of cork trapped in her throat.
    She thought about the bottle of Coca-Cola. About the bottles of water she kept in the pantry. She would need to drag herself fifteen meters or so. She stretched out her arms, held on to the cement, straightened up her trunk. It was as if her leg were being cut off with the blade of an ax. She yelped. Her own yelp surprised her.
    “I’ve woken the whole building,” she muttered.
    She woke up Little Chief, in the next-door apartment. The businessman had been dreaming about the Kianda. He had been having the same dream for several nights. He would go out onto the veranda in the middle of the night and see a light gleaming in the lagoon. The light increased in volume, a rainbow that was round and musical, and in the meantime the businessman felt his body losing its weight. He awoke at the moment when the light rose to meet him. This time he woke earlier, because the light screamed, or it seemed to him as though the light was screaming, in a sudden explosion of mud and frogs. He sat up in bed, feeling stifled, his heart pounding. He remembered thetime he had spent shut away in that same room. Sometimes he used to hear a dog barking. He would hear the distant voice of a woman chanting old songs.
    “The building is haunted,” Papy Bolingô assured him. “There’s the barking dog, which no one’s ever seen, like a kind of phantom dog. They say it can go through walls. You’ve got to be careful when you’re asleep. The dog comes through the wall, it’s barking, bow-wow-wow, but you don’t see a thing, you just hear its barking, and then it inveigles itself into your dreams. You start having dreams that are really filled with barking. One of the residents, on the floor below, a young craftsman called