THREE STORIES OF FORGETTING

In three long stories, Angola-born novelist Pereira de Almeida explores Portugal’s colonial past.

Captain Celestino in “A Vision of Plants” is a man about whom the neighbors tell hushed, fearful stories: “He cut off a dwarf’s head. He hacked a woman in two. Over in the Congo he set fire to an elephant.…He keeps skulls in chests and charms snakes in the moonlight.” Now old, Celestino potters in his garden as his home slowly crumbles, mirroring his own decline. Though he’s apparently harmless, grandmothers warn their grandchildren, “If you don’t finish your soup, I’ll take you to the captain’s house, where he’ll chop you up like a grouper.” Celestino is none too innocent: He’s a veteran of the slave trade, and in a particularly horrible moment, he suppressed an onboard rebellion by murdering his human cargo. And he still harbors murderous thoughts: “Come to me, children, to me who has slit throats and who sleeps the sleep of the righteous.” In “Seaquake,” one “Boa Morte da Silva the freight forwarder” does soul-sucking odd jobs like watching parked cars to earn a few euros. A former colonial soldier—his name means “Good Death”—he is anonymous, lost in the system; Pereira hints that he may already be a ghost. Bruma, the title character of the final story, is enslaved but unbothered by that fact: “neither servile nor grateful, just happy, he found meaning in things, even if he knew he was imprisoned. His simple life revolves around books and a cabin he built in the woods, knocked down and rebuilt in several incarnations, part of the mystery of being, of the “tunnel between day and night, between wakefulness and dream, between death and life…” The three tales add up to a brilliant, yet understated, critique of a past that Portugal most likely hopes to forget.

Lyrical, enigmatic, and subtle: an accomplished work that considers fraught histories at the most personal level.