A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa Page B

assailed by these memories, incredibly clear ones, of things that have happened. As if someone were inside my head, someone who had been passing the time leafing through an old photo album.”
    They had been walking for hours along the dry riverbed. Monte had been summoned by a general, one of his companions from those fighting days, who had bought a huge estate near there to pass on to his daughter. He’d had a solid barrier put up around the property, cutting off the traditional grazing routes of the Mucubal shepherds. Gunshots were exchanged. A shepherd was wounded. The following night a group of young Mucubals attacked the farm, making off with a fourteen-year-old boy, the general’s grandson, as well as some twenty head of cattle.
    Monte took two steps toward the old man:
    “May I see your wrist? Your right wrist?”
    The old man was wearing a simple piece of cloth, tied at his waist, in a variety of shades of red and orange. He wore dozens of necklaces, his wrists adorned with bright, broad copper bracelets. Monte held his arm. He was about to push aside the bracelets when the blow knocked him down. The lad sitting beside the old man had leaped to his feet, throwing a violent punch in his chest. The detective fell on his back.He turned. He crawled away a few meters, coughing, trying to recover his breath, as well as his poise, while behind him a fierce argument was breaking out. Finally he managed to get back up onto his feet. The commotion had brought people over. Young people with lustrous, rust-colored skin were emerging from the splendor of the evening, like a miracle, gathering around the old man. They were shaking long sticks. They were rehearsing dance steps. They were leaping about. Shouting. The guide drew back, terrified:
    “This is getting ugly, man. Let’s get out of here!”
    Back in Luanda now, sitting at a bar table, in between gulps of beer, Monte was summarizing the humiliating defeat, resorting to an image that was expressive, if inelegant:
    “We were run out of there like dogs. I swallowed so much dust I’ve been crapping bricks ever since.”

In Which a Disappearance Is Cleared Up (Almost Two), Or How, to Quote Marx:
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
    Magno Moreira Monte woke up, on a lightless morning, feeling like a river that had lost its source. Out there, a gentle rain was dying. His wife was combing her hair, in panties and sandals, sitting on the bed.
    “It’s over,” said Monte. “I can’t take it anymore.”
    Maria Clara looked at him with a mother’s calm:
    “That’s just as well, my love. So we can be happy now.”
    That was in 2003. The new directions being taken by the party appalled him. He didn’t approve of the abandoning of the old ideals, the surrender to market economics, the cozying up to capitalist powers. He quit the intelligence services and restarted his life as a private detective. Clients sought him out, on the advice of common friends, in search of information about competing firms, substantial thefts, missing persons. He received visits, too, from desperate women, looking for evidence of their husbands’ betrayal, and jealous husbands, offering him considerable sums to watch their wives. Monte didn’t accept these kinds of commissions, which he called, contemptuously, “bed business.” He would recommend other colleagues.
    One afternoon the wife of a well-known businessman appeared in his office. She sat down, crossed and uncrossed her magnificent legs, like Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
, and shot out in a single breath:
    “I want you to kill my husband.”
    “What?!”
    “Slowly. Very slowly.”
    Monte leaned forward in his chair. He looked at her in silence, for a long moment, expecting to break her. The woman didn’t lower her eyes.
    “I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars.”
    Monte knew the businessman in question, an unscrupulous opportunist, who had begun to fill his pockets back in the Marxist days, stealing, here and there, from