A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa Page A

a stall on whose door someone had painted, in rough strokes, the torso of a woman, with a long neck, lit up by a diamond necklace. He knocked. He was met by slim man in a pink jacket and trousers and a livid red tie and hat. His shoes, which were highly polished, shone in the gloom. Little Chief remembered the
sapeurs
Papy Bolingô had introduced him to, years earlier, on a short visit to Kinshasa. Sapeurs are what they call the fashion-mad in the Congo. Guys who dress in clothes that are expensive and showy, spending everything they have, or don’t have, to walk the streets like models on a catwalk.
    He went in. He saw a desk and two chairs. A rotating fan attached to the ceiling was disturbing the drenched air with slow strokes.
    “Jaime Panguila,” the sapeur introduced himself, gesturing for him to sit.
    Panguila was interested in the stones. First he examined them by the light of an oil-lamp. Then he brought them to the window, drew open the curtain, and studied them, turning them around betweenhis fingers under the harsh rays of a sun almost at its peak. Finally, he sat down:
    “These stones, though small, are good, very pure. I don’t want to know how you got hold of them. I’d be risking a lot of trouble by trying to put them on the market. I can’t offer you more than seven thousand dollars.”
    He refused. Panguila doubled the offer. He drew a wad of notes from one of the drawers, put them into a shoebox, and pushed it over toward the other man.
    Little Chief went to sit in a nearby bar, with the shoebox on top of the table, to think about what he was going to do with the money. He noticed the logo on his beer bottle, the silhouette of a bird with wings spread, and he remembered the pigeon. He’d kept the paper in the plastic tube, on which it was still possible to read, albeit with some difficulty:
    Tomorrow. Six o’clock, usual place. Be very careful. I love you
.
    Who might have written that?
    Perhaps a senior official at the Diamang mining company. He imagined a man with a severe expression, scribbling out the message, putting the note into the plastic cylinder and then attaching it to the leg of the pigeon. He imagined him putting the diamonds into the bird’s beak, first one, and then the other, and then releasing it, and it flying off from a residence that was sunk amid tall, leafy mango trees, into Dundo, to the perilous skies of the capital. He imagined it flying above dark forests, the astonished rivers, the many armies pitted in conflict.
    He got up, smiling. He already knew what to do with the money. In the months that followed he devised and established a small deliveryservice, which he named Pigeon-Post. The Portuguese word for pigeon also meant
messenger
in Quimbundo, and the coincidence pleased him. The company prospered, and new projects came along to join it. He invested in several different areas, from hotels to real estate, always successfully.
    One Sunday afternoon, it was December, the air was dazzlingly bright, he met Papy Bolingô at Rialto. They ordered some beers. They chatted without any urgency, slow and chilled, stretched out in the langour of the afternoon as if in a hammock.
    “And life, Papy?”
    “Goes on living.”
    “And what about you, still singing?”
    “Not very much, bro. I haven’t been doing the act. Fofo has been a bit funny lately.”
    Papy Bolingô had been sacked from Rádio Nacional. He’d been surviving, with great effort, by playing at parties. One of his cousins, a hunting-party guide, had brought him a pygmy hippo from the Congo. The guide had found the animal in the forest, when it was still a baby, desperately watching over its mother’s dead body. The guitar player brought the animal to his apartment. He fed it from a baby’s bottle. He taught it to dance the Zaire rumba. Fofo, the hippo, started to join him when he performed at small bars in the outskirts of Luanda. Little Chief had seen the show several times, and he’d always come out feeling