‘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. ‘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 28 April 1988 the Jornal de Angola, the newspaper for which Daniel was working, sent him to a small town called Nova Esperança, where twenty-five women had been murdered under suspicion of witchcraft. He was accompanied by a photographer, the famous Kota Kodak, or ‘KK’. The two journalists disembarked from a commercial airliner at 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 of wandering the skies. ‘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 the mistake, or the illusion, dazed and trembling. They did not find Nova Esperança. A signpost did, however, return them to the highway, which in turn took them back to Huambo. KK was waiting at 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.’
No one on the paper seemed concerned at the news that Nova Esperança had disappeared. The editor-in-chief, Marcelino Assumpção da Boa Morte, just laughed:
‘The village disappeared? Everything’s always disappearing in this country! 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 into his office. He held out a blue envelope:
‘I’ve got something for you here, seeing as you collect disappearances. Read this. See if there might be a piece in it.’
THE LETTER
Dear Managing Director of the Jornal de Angola,
My name is Maria da Piedade Lourenço Dias and I’m a clinical psychologist. About two years ago I discovered an awful truth: I was adopted. My biological mother handed me over for adoption immediately after my birth. I was confused, and decided to investigate why she did it. Ludovica Fernandes Mano — that is my biological mother’s name — was brutally raped by a stranger in the summer of 1955, and became pregnant. Following this tragic event, she always lived in the house of an older sister, Odete, who in 1973 married a mining engineer, based in Luanda, called Orlando Pereira dos Santos.
They didn’t come back to Portugal after Angola’s Independence. The Portuguese consulate in Luanda has no record of any of them either. I’m presuming to write to you in order to find out whether your newspaper might in any way be able to help me find Ludovica Fernandes Mano.
Respectfully yours,
Maria da Piedade Lourenço
THE DEATH OF PHANTOM
Phantom died in his sleep. In his last weeks he had been eating very little. To tell the truth, he had never eaten much — there wasn’t much to eat — which perhaps explains how he had lived so long. Laboratory experiments show that the life expectancy of mice increases considerably when they are given a low-calorie diet.
Ludo woke up, and the dog was dead.
The woman sat down on the mattress, opposite the open window. She hugged her thin knees. She lifted her eyes towards the sky, where, bit by bit, pink, light clouds were forming. Chickens clucked on the terrace. The crying of a child rose up from the floor below. Ludo felt her chest emptying. Something — some dark substance — was escaping from inside her, like water out of a cracked vessel, slipping down onto the cold cement. She had lost the only creature in the world who loved her, and she had no tears to cry.
She stood up, chose a piece of charcoal, sharpened it, and attacked one of the walls, which was still clean, in the guest bedroom:
Phantom died tonight. Everything is so useless now.
The look in his eyes caressed me, explained me and sustained me.
She climbed up to the terrace without the protection of the old cardboard box. The day was unfurling itself, a warm yawn of a day. Maybe it was Sunday. The streets were almost deserted. She watched a group of women walk past dressed in pristine white. One of them, spotting her, raised her right hand in a joyful greeting.
Ludo drew back.
She could jump, she thought. Step forward. She could climb out onto the ledge, so simple.
The women, down there, would see her one moment — a feather-light shadow — hovering a second and then falling. She stepped back, went on stepping back, cornered by the blue, by the vastness, by the certainty that she would go on living, even with nothing to give life any meaning.
Death circles around me, shows its teeth, snarls. I kneel down and offer it my bare throat. Come, come, come now, friend. Bite. Let me go. Oh, you did come today and you forgot me. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Night-time. It’s night-time again. I’ve counted more nights than days. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ The nights, then, and the clamour of the frogs. I open the window and see the lagoon. The night that has split in two. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ It rains, everything overflows. At night, it’s as though the darkness were singing. The night rising up in waves, devouring the buildings.
I think, once again, of that woman to whom I returned the pigeon. Tall, prominent bones, with that slight disdain with which very beautiful women make their way through reality. She walks through Rio de Janeiro, along the bank of Lagoa (I’ve seen photographs, I found several illustrated books about Brazil in the library). Cyclists pass her. The ones who let their gaze linger on her never come back. The woman is called Sara, I call her Sara.