A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa

Author:José Eduardo Agualusa [Agualusa, José Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448191543
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-06-24T21:00:00+00:00

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 night-time lost the uproarious noise of the frogs. The woman counted the bottles of water. Not many left. The chickens, 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. She and her sister, on the beach, splitting some bread with butter. She bit into it. It was only when she had finished eating that she realised 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 witch doctor, a real champion 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. No sooner had the light begun to fade, after a certain time of the day, 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, the only one without any windows, which faced another block just a few metres away. She leaned over and saw the scaffolding, which surrounded the neighbouring 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. The moment she had recovered her senses 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

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