A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Author:Jose Eduardo Agualusa [Agualusa, José Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-914671-32-9
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2015-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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