Little Chief saw that the time had come to help his friend.
‘How much do you want for your place? I need a good apartment, right in the heart of the capital. You need a farm, a big open space, to raise the hippo.’
Papy Bolingô hesitated.
‘I’ve been in that apartment so many years now, I think I’ve become attached to it.’
‘Five hundred thousand?’
‘Five hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand what?’
‘I’ll give you five hundred thousand dollars for the apartment. You can buy yourself a nice farm with money like that.’
Papy Bolingô laughed, amused. Then he noticed the seriousness of his friend’s face and his laughter stopped. He straightened up:
‘I thought you were kidding. You’ve got five hundred thousand dollars?’
‘And several million more. Many million. I’m not doing you a favour, I think it’s an excellent investment. Your building is pretty shabby, but with a good coat of paint, and new elevators, it’ll get its old colonial charm back. Before too long, buyers are going to start showing up. Generals. Ministers. People with a lot more money than me. They’ll pay some paltry sums for people to leave. Those who don’t leave nicely will be made to do it nastily.’
That was how Little Chief ended up with Papy Bolingô’s apartment.
BLINDNESS
I’ve been losing my eyesight. I close my right eye and I can only see shadows now. Everything confuses me. I walk clinging on to the walls. It’s a struggle to read, and I can only do that in sunlight, using stronger and stronger magnifying glasses. I reread my last remaining books, the ones I refuse to burn. I have been burning the beautiful voices that have kept me company over all these years.
I sometimes think: I’ve gone mad.
I saw, from out on the terrace, a hippopotamus dancing on the veranda of the apartment next door. An illusion, I’m quite aware of that, but I did see it just the same. It might be hunger. I’ve been feeding myself very badly.
My weakness, my vanishing eyesight, it means I stumble over letters as I read. I read pages I’ve read so many times before, but they’re different now. I get things wrong, as I read, and in those mistakes, sometimes, I find incredible things that are right.
In these mistakes I find myself, often.
Some pages are improved by these mistakes.
A sparkle of fireflies, fireflying through the rooms. I move about, like a medusa jellyfish, in this illuminated haze. I sink into my own dreams. One might perhaps call this dying.
I was happy in this home, on those afternoons when the sun came into the kitchen to pay me a visit. I would sit down at the table. Phantom would come over and rest his head in my lap.
If I still had the space, the charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.
I realise I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book. After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice.
In this house all the walls have my mouth.
THE COLLECTOR OF DISAPPEARANCES
During the years 1997 and 1998 five airplanes, originating in Belarus, Russia, Moldavia and Ukraine, disappeared from Angola’s skies with a total of twenty-three crew. On 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727 belonging to American Airlines went astray from Luanda airport and was never seen again. The thing hadn’t flown for fourteen months.
Daniel Benchimol collected stories of disappearances in Angola. All kinds of disappearances, though he preferred those of the air. It’s always more interesting being snatched away by the heavens, like Jesus Christ or his mother, than being swallowed up by the earth. People or objects who are literally swallowed by the earth, as seemed to have happened to the French writer Simon-Pierre Mulamba, are, however, very rare.
The journalist classified the disappearances on a scale from one to ten. The five planes that disappeared from the skies above Angola, for example, were categorised by Benchimol as grade-eight disappearances. The Boeing 727, a grade-nine disappearance; Simon-Pierre Mulamba too.
Mulamba disembarked in Luanda on 20 April 2003, at the invitation of the Alliance Française, for a conference on the life and work of Léopold Sédar Senghor. Tall, distinguished-looking, never without his beautiful felt hat, which he wore tilted just slightly to the right with studied indifference. Simon-Pierre liked Luanda. It was the first time he’d visited Africa. His father, a teacher of Latin dance, native of Ponta Negra, had told him about the heat, the humidity, warned him of the dangers of the women, but hadn’t prepared him for this excess of life, for the merry-go-round of emotions, the intoxicating tumult of sounds and smells. On the second night, right after his lecture, the writer accepted an invitation from Elizabela Montez, a young architecture student, to have a drink at one of Ilha’s smartest bars. The third night he spent dancing mornas and coladeiras in the backyard of some Cape Verdeans in Chicala, in the company of two of Elizabela’s girlfriends. On the fourth night he disappeared. The French cultural attaché, who had arranged to meet him for lunch, went in search of him at the lodge where they had put him up, a really lovely place, close to the Barra do Kwanza. Nobody had seen him. There was no answer on his cell phone. In his room, the bedcovers had not yet been pulled back, the sheets still stretched tight, a chocolate on the pillow.
Daniel Benchimol learned of the writer’s disappearance before the police. He only needed two telephone calls to discover, with a considerable amount of detail, where and with whom Simon-Pierre had spent his first nights. Two more calls and he knew that the Frenchman had been seen at five in the morning leaving a disco in the Quinaxixe market, a place frequented by European expats, slutty teenage girls, and poets with rather more interest in pursuing the booze than the muse. That night, Benchimol went to the disco himself. Fat, sweaty men were drinking in silence. Others, half hidden in the dark, stroked the bare knees of girls who were very young. He particularly noticed one of the girls because she was wearing a black felt hat with a thin red ribbon. He was about to approach her when a blond guy with his long hair tied into a ponytail gripped his arm:
‘Queenie’s with me.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve just got a question I want to ask her,’ Daniel reassured him.
‘We don’t like journalists. Are you a journalist?’
‘Sometimes, pal, it depends. I mostly feel Jewish, though.’
The other man let go of him, confused. Daniel greeted Queenie:
‘Good evening. I just wanted to know where you got the hat.’
The girl smiled:
‘The French mulatto who was here yesterday, he lost it.’
‘He lost the hat?’
‘Or the other way round, he’s the one who was lost. The hat found me.’
She explained that the previous night, a group of boys, those ones who live out on the street, had seen the Frenchman leave the club. He had stopped to urinate after a few metres, around the back of a building, and then the earth had swallowed him up. All that was left was the hat.
‘The earth swallowed him up?’
‘That’s what they’re saying, old man. It could be quicksand, it could be 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 improvising the 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: