Oscar

Oscar is the owner of the Tivoli hotel in Luanda, a figure whose appearances capture the strain of the city’s final days before independence. When the narrator returns, Oscar is among those waiting to see him; later, on the night independence is declared, Oscar produces the bottles he has saved for the occasion, only to find that celebration cannot overcome exhaustion.

Identity and Return

When the narrator comes back to the hotel, Oscar is described as thin and exhausted, and as its new owner. He stands with Dona Cartagina and the doorman Fernando over the sleeping narrator. The group is glad he has returned and keeps asking, insistently and incredulously, whether he is alive. Their anxious welcome makes the hotel seem less like a refuge from the crisis than a place where people measure survival by the return of familiar faces.

The hotel’s surroundings underline the hardship through which Oscar is living. In the same return sequence, the narrator finds the room damp and its ceiling fan broken; the tap yields no water. Felix, dozing at reception, says the city has been without water for three days and that the last wells are running dry. This is the failing urban world in which Oscar owns and inhabits the hotel, though the account does not describe his response to the shortage.

The Hotel and Its Residents

By the time of the independence proclamation, Oscar and the narrator are among the Tivoli’s oldest residents, described together as a crowd of veterans. The phrase gives their shared hotel life the quality of a prolonged campaign: they have remained in place while the city around them has endured fear, privation, and approaching political change. Oscar’s role as proprietor therefore also places him at the center of a small community of people who have stayed on.

Independence and Exhaustion

On 11 November 1975, Agostinho Neto reads the proclamation of the People’s Republic of Angola from a platform in the square. After the ceremony, Oscar goes to the safe and brings out a bottle of champagne and a bottle of whisky that he has kept for the occasion. The gesture recognizes the importance of the day, but the drink does not produce the expected joy: among the hotel’s veteran residents, it intensifies their tiredness instead.

Drunk and at the end of his strength, Oscar cries out, “If this is what independence is like, I’ll blow my brains out!” He then realizes that his outburst is out of place, laughs, grows quiet, and falls asleep with his head on the table among the empty glasses. His abrupt passage from despair to sleep gives the celebration its human scale: independence has been proclaimed, but for those who have lived through the preceding ordeal, the immediate response is not triumph so much as exhaustion.