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

witchcraft, I don’t know. The boys pulled the hat out with a stick. I bought the hat from them. It’s mine now.”
    Daniel left the disco. There were two boys watching television, sitting on the pavement in front of a shop window. The sound from the television didn’t reach outside, so the two of them were improvisingthe dialogue for each of the actors in turn. The journalist had seen the film before. The new dialogue, however, had transformed the plot entirely. He spent a few minutes enjoying watching the show. He took advantage of a break to speak to the boys:
    “I’ve heard there was a guy, a French guy, who disappeared near here, last night. They say he was swallowed up by the earth.”
    “Yes,” one of the children confirmed this. “These things happen.”
    “Did you see it?”
    “No. But Baiacu saw it.”
    Daniel questioned other boys in the days that followed, and all spoke of Simon-Pierre’s sad end as though they had witnessed it. Then, when pressed, they acknowledged that they had not been there. Certainly nobody saw the French writer again. The police filed the case.
    There is only one grade-ten disappearance on the Benchimol Scale. The journalist witnessed that remarkable loss himself. On April 28, 1988, the
Jornal de Angola
, the newspaper for which Daniel was working, sent him, accompanied by a photographer, the famous Kota Kodak, or KK, to a small town called Nova Esperança, where twenty-five women had been murdered, under suspicion of witchcraft. The two reporters disembarked from a commercial airliner in Huambo airport. There was a driver waiting to take them to Nova Esperança. Once they were there, Daniel chatted to the chieftain and various members of the tribe. KK took their portraits. It was getting dark when they got back to Huambo. They were due to return to Nova Esperança the following morning, in an air force helicopter. The pilot, however, proved unable to locate the village:
    “It’s weird,” he confessed, troubled, after two hours wandering theskies. “There’s nothing at those coordinates. Nothing down there but grass.”
    Daniel became impatient at the young man’s ineptitude. He hired the same driver who’d first taken them there. KK refused to go with them:
    “There’s nothing to take pictures of. You can’t photograph absences.”
    They went round and round in the car, revisiting the same landscapes, as in a dream, for that infinite length of time that a dream can occupy, until the driver, too, admitted his embarrassment:
    “We’re lost!”
    “We? You’re the one who’s lost!”
    The man turned to face him in a rage, as though he thought him responsible for the lunacy of the world:
    “These roads are more and more muddled.” He was pummelling the steering wheel hard. “I think we’ve had a geographical accident!”
    Suddenly a bend loomed up in the road and they emerged from that mistake, or that illusion, dazed and trembling. They did not find Nova Esperança. A signpost did however return them to the highway, which in turn took them to Huambo. KK was waiting for him in the hotel, arms crossed across his thin chest, a dark expression on his face:
    “Bad news, partner. I developed the film and it’s all burned out. All the gear’s complete crap. Gets worse every day.”
    Nobody on the paper seemed concerned at the news that Nova Esperança had disappeared. The editor in chief, Marcelino Assumpção da Boa Morte, had laughed:
    “The village disappeared? Everything’s always disappearing in thiscountry! Perhaps the whole country is in the process of disappearing, a village here, a village there, by the time we notice there’ll be nothing left at all.”
    In 2003, a few weeks after the mysterious disappearance of the French writer Simon-Pierre Mulamba, to which the Angolan newspapers gave a certain prominence, Marcelino Assumpção da Boa Morte called Daniel to his office. He held out a blue envelope:
    “I’ve got something for you here, seeing as you