Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
José Eduardo Agualusa (1960–). Considered one of Africa’s most important writers, Agualusa was born in Huambo, in modern-day Angola. He studied agronomy and silviculture in Lisbon. Both as a novelist and a reporter Agualusa has become an important voice of his country. He has a weekly column in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo. In 2007, Agualusa and his translator won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Book of Chameleons. His novel A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and won the International Dublin Literary Award 2017. His books have been published in almost thirty countries and he now lives on the Island of Mozambique, where he works as a writer and journalist. He also has been working to establish a public library on the island.
For Miguel Petchkovsky and Paula Tavares
Nicolau Alicerces Peshkov had an enormous head, or maybe it had simply caused the rest of him to shrivel away, but either way, it definitely looked as though it had been attached to the wrong body by mistake. His hair, what was left of it, was weedy and red, his face covered in freckles. His unlikely name, his even more extraordinary physiognomy, the whole lot was due to the travels through the Huambo highlands of an itinerant Russian, who in his alcoholic ravings boasted of having served as an officer in Nicholas II’s cavalry. Besides the name and the freckles, Nicolau Alicerces Peshkov had inherited his father’s passion for cinema and his old projector. It was precisely that name, those freckles, and that projector, which is to say, his Russian heritage, that nearly landed him in front of a firing squad.
He had just spent two days and a night hiding in a crate of dried fish. He’d been woken with a start by a crackle of gunfire. He didn’t know where he was. This was always happening to him. He sat up in his bed and tried to remember, as the gunfire outside grew: he had arrived at dusk, pedalling his old bicycle, he’d rented a room in the boarding house run by a Portuguese man, he’d said goodbye to little James, who had family in the village, and gone to bed. It was a small room. The bedstead was iron, with a wooden board across the top and no mattress. A sheet, which was clean but threadbare, flimsy, covering the board. An enamel chamber-pot. On the walls, somebody had painted a blue angel. A good picture. The angel looked straight at him, looked at something that wasn’t there, with the same luminous and hopeless aloofness as Marlene Dietrich.
Nicolau Alicerces Peshkov, whom the Mucubal people called The Man with the Light, opened the window of his room, hoping to discover the reasons for the war. He peered out and saw that all along the road an armed mob was moving, some of them soldiers, mostly young civilians with red ribbons round their heads. One of the young men pointed, shouting, and another opened fire in his direction. Nicolau still didn’t know what war this was, but he did know that, regardless, he was on the wrong side – he was the Indian here, and he had nothing better than a little tomahawk with which to defend himself. He left the bedroom, in his underpants, went into the kitchen, opened a door and discovered a long and narrow back yard, blocked at the far end by a high adobe wall. He managed to jump the wall, by climbing a pathetic-looking mango tree that grew alongside it, and found himself in another yard, this one broader, more run-down, next to a wattle-and-daub hut that looked like it was used as a storeroom. He thought about James Dean. What would the kid do in this situation? He’d definitely know what to do, James was an expert in getting away. He saw a laundry tank, filled to the top with water, covered by a tarp. James Dean would climb inside the tank, and stay there for as long as necessary, waiting to grow scales. He, however, would not fit into this prison. His body might, actually, but not his head. It was in this state of despair that, hearing the mob getting closer, he noticed the crate of fish. The smell was appalling, a strong stench of rotting seas, but there was just enough space for a crouching man. And so he climbed into the crate and waited.
Looking through a gap in the crate, he saw the mob with the ribbons arrive. They were dragging by the neck five poor guys whose only crime, it seemed, was speaking Umbundu, urging them on with kicks and blows from their rifle-butts. They lay the men down on their backs and resumed their beating, with their weapons, their belts, heavy sticks, shouting that this was just for starters. Soon after this, a woman with a pistol appeared and, with a glance, forced the aggressors aside, pressed the gun to the neck of one of the poor wretches and fired. Then did the same to the other four. Next, they brought forward two young boys and four older women, one carrying a small child on her back, all crying and wailing. When they saw the bodies, their screaming grew louder. One of the soldiers cocked his rifle: ‘Anyone who mourns the dead dies too.’
The others began raining down blows on the group, not even sparing the child, while a guy with a video camera danced around them.
Nicolau Alicerces Peshkov turned away from the gap, and squeezed his eyes shut. It was no good: even with his eyes closed, he saw two of the beribboned young men rape one of the women; he saw them kill the child, with blows from their rifle butts, and the rest of the group with bullets and kicks.
He emerged from the box on the evening of the following day. He was so exhausted, and such was the torment in his puny breast, that he didn’t notice the soldier who was sitting right next to the crate, watching over the corpses. The man looked at him with surprise, as happy as a little boy who’d just found the lucky charm in the fruitcake, and led him by the hand to the police station. At the door, a very tall, thin man with a full beard seemed to be waiting for them. They took him to a windowless room, sat him on a chair. The tall man asked his name.
‘Peshkov? Nicolau Peshkov?! You’re Russian, comrade? That’s very convenient – I studied in Moscow, at the Lubyanka, I speak Russian better than Portuguese.’
And he unleashed a stream of impenetrable gibberish that seemed to amuse everybody. Seeing the others laugh, Nicolau Peshkov laughed, too, but only out of politeness, because what he really needed to do was cry.
The tall man abruptly turned serious. He pointed to a leather case on his desk. ‘Do you know what this is?’ Nicolau Peshkov recognised it as the case in which he kept his projector and his movies. He explained who he was. For forty years, he had been travelling the country with this contraption. He was proud to have brought the seventh art to the most remote and hidden corners of Angola – places forgotten by the rest of the world. In colonial times, he’d travelled by train. Benguela, Ganda, Chianga, Lépi, Catchiungo, Chinguar, Cutato, Catabola, Camacupa, Munhango, Luena. Wherever the train happened to stop, he would get out. He would unfurl the screen, put the projector on the tripod, set out half a dozen canvas chairs for the dignitaries of the town. People would come from far away, from the surrounding bush-country, from places with secret names, even places with no names at all. They would offer him goats, chickens, eggs, game. They would sit on the other side of the screen, facing into the projector’s light, and watch the movie back to front.
The war that followed independence destroyed the railroad and he was restricted to the outskirts of the big cities. He soon lost everything he had managed to earn in the twenty previous years. He concentrated on the south. He travelled by bicycle, with his assistant, the young James Dean, between Lubango and Humpata, between Huíla and Chibia. Sometimes he ventured as far south as Mossâmedes. Maybe Porto Alexandre. Baía dos Tigres. Never anywhere else. He would bring a white sheet, pin it to the wall of a hut, any wall would do, set up the projector and run the movie. James Dean would pedal the whole time to generate the electricity. On a tranquil, moonless night, there was no cinema better.
The tall man listened with interest. He took some notes.
‘And you can prove you really are the individual you claim to be?’
Prove it? Nicolau Peshkov took a yellowing piece of paper from his shirt pocket and carefully unfolded it. It was a cutting from the Jornal de Angola. An interview published five years earlier: ‘The Last Cinema Hero’. In the photo, which was black and white, Nicolau Alicerces Peshkov was posing next to his bicycle, hands on the handlebars, his enormous head slightly out of focus.
The tall man snatched the cutting, turned it over and started to read some article or other about the importance of manioc flour. ‘Not that one, chefe,’ groaned Nicolau Peshkov, ‘please, read the story on the other side. Look at the photo. That’s me.’ The tall man looked at him with contempt:
‘Comrade Peshkov, a man like you, who can’t even speak his father’s language, you’d tell me what I should and shouldn’t read?!’
He read the article to the end. No, not right to the end, because it was cut off halfway.
‘Where’s the rest of this article?’
Nicolau Alicerces Peshkov spoke slowly.
‘Please, chefe – that’s not the right article. The relevant article, the one that means I can prove that I am my own person, that article is on the other side.’
The tall man lost his patience.
‘Fuck! You think we’re all stupid here?! I’m asking where the rest of this article is. If you don’t answer I’ll have you shot for withholding information. I’m going to count to ten.’
Maybe he doesn’t know how to count to ten, thought Nicolau Peshkov. But unfortunately, he did. The man counted to ten, slowly, then turned his chair around and sat for a few long moments facing the wall. Then he turned back, opened the case on his desk and took out the projector.
‘Right, you little stooge – show us this movie, then. I want to see what it is you’ve been filming. Military targets, I’ll bet.’
Nicolau Peshkov asked for a clean sheet, a hammer and some nails. He stretched the sheet taut and nailed it to the wall. He set the projector up on a chair. He didn’t say a word. He had learned a lot in these past few hours. The movie was, in its way, his own work. The work of a lifetime. He had pieced it together, almost frame by frame, using what remained of his father’s movies. He asked for the light to be turned out. One of the soldiers climbed onto a stool and carefully unscrewed the bulb from the ceiling.
Peshkov plugged the machine into the electricity and an utterly pure light fell onto the sheet. The first scene showed a family being attacked by birds inside their own home. This episode had a real impact on the audience (it always did). The tall man spoke for all of them: ‘Did you see that?! Like wild dogs, those birdies are.’ Then they saw an old man perched on a roof playing a violin. ‘It’s to drive away the birds,’ concluded one of the guards. ‘The guy’s a sorcerer.’ There was also a cowboy kissing his girlfriend in front of a waterfall. Finally, a man with sad eyes, hat on his head, saying goodbye to a couple at an airport. When the couple boarded their plane, another guy appeared with a gun, but the one in the hat was quicker and shot him. Most likely the couple were running away from those birds. The End.
The projector light trembled, went out, and there was a great silence. Finally, the tall man stood up, climbed onto the stool and screwed the ceiling bulb back in. He sighed.
‘You can go, Peshkov. Get out of here. The movie stays.’
Nicolau Alicerces Peshkov went out into the street. An enormous moon shone over the sea. He drew a comb from the back pocket of his trousers, and with it smoothed down the last of his red hair.
He straightened up and went in search of James Dean. The kid would know what to do.