The Book of Chameleons Read online

  ‘Perfect, perfect.’ The foreigner smoothed his moustache. ‘That’s what they told me. I require your services. But I’m afraid it may be rather a lot of work…’

  ‘Work makes you free …’ Félix muttered. It may be that he was just saying this to try and get a rise out of him, to test out the intruder’s identity, but if that was his intention it failed – the foreigner merely nodded. The albino got up and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. A moment later he returned with a bottle of good Portuguese wine that he held with both hands. He showed it to the foreigner, and offered him a glass. And he asked:

  ‘And might I know your name?’

  The foreigner examined the wine by the light of the lamp. He lowered his eyelids and drank slowly, attentively, happily, like someone following the flight of a Bach fugue. He put the glass down on a small table right in front of him, a piece of mahogany furniture with a glass cover; then finally straightened himself up and replied:

  ‘I’ve had many names, but I mean to forget them all. I’d rather you were the one to baptize me.’

  Félix insisted. He had to know – at the very least – what his clients’ professions were. The foreigner raised his right hand – a broad hand, with long, bony fingers – in a vague gesture of refusal. But then he lowered it again, and sighed:

  ‘You’re right. I’m a photojournalist. I collect images of wars, of hunger and its ghosts, of natural disasters and terrible misfortunes. You can think of me as a witness.’

  He explained that he was planning to settle in the country. He wanted more than just a decent past, a large family, uncles, aunts and cousins, nephews and nieces, grandfathers and grandmothers, including two or three bessanganas, now dead, of course (or perhaps living in exile somewhere?); he wanted more than just portraits and anecdotes. He needed a new name, authentic official documents that bore out this identity. The albino listened, horrified:

  ‘No!’ he managed to blurt out. ‘I don’t do things like that. I invent dreams for people, I’m not a forger… And besides, if you’ll pardon my bluntness, wouldn’t it be a bit difficult to invent a completely African genealogy for you?’

  ‘Indeed! And why is that?!…’

  ‘Well – sir – … you’re white.’

  ‘And what of it? You’re whiter than I am…’

  ‘White? Me?!’ The albino choked. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead.‘No, no! I’m black. Pure black. I’m a native. Can’t you tell that I’m black?…’

  From my usual post at the window I couldn’t help giving a little chuckle at this point. The foreigner looked upwards as though he were sniffing the air. Tense – alert:

  ‘Did you hear that? Who laughed just then?’

  ‘Nobody,’ the albino replied, and pointed at me. ‘It was the gecko.’

  The man stood up. He came up closer and I could feel his eyes on me. It was as though he were looking directly into my soul – my old soul. He shook his head slowly, in a baffled silence.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘It’s a gecko, yes, but a very rare species. See these stripes? It’s a tiger gecko – a shy creature, we still know very little about them. They were first discovered half a dozen years ago in Namibia. We think they can live for twenty years – even longer, perhaps. They have this amazing laugh – doesn’t it sound like a human laugh?’

  Félix agreed. Yes, to begin with he’d also been disturbed by it. But then having consulted a few books about reptiles – he had them right there in the house, he had books about everything, thousands of them, inherited from his adopted father, a second-hand book dealer who’d exchanged Luanda for Lisbon a few months after independence – he’d discovered that there were certain species of gecko that produce sounds that are strikingly like laughter. They spent some time discussing me, which I found annoying – talking as if I weren’t there! – and yet at the same time it felt as though they were talking not about me but about some alien being, some vague and distant biological anomaly. Men know almost nothing of the little creatures that share their homes. Mice, bats, ants, ticks, fleas, flies, mosquitoes, spiders, worms, silverfish, termites, weevils, snails, beetles. I decided that I might as well simply get on with my life. At that sort of time the albino’s bedroom used to fill up with mosquitoes, and I was beginning to feel hungry. The foreigner stood up again, went over to the chair where he’d put the briefcase, opened it, and took out a thick envelope. He handed it to Félix, said his goodbyes, and went to the door. He opened it himself. He nodded, and was gone.

  A Ship Filled with Voices

  Five thousand dollars in large-denomination bills.

  Félix Ventura tore open the envelope quickly, nervously, and the notes burst out like green butterflies – fluttered for a moment in the night air, then spread themselves all over the floor, the books, the chairs and sofas. The albino was getting anxious. He even went to open the door, meaning to chase after the foreigner, but out in the vast still night there was no sign of anyone.

  ‘Have you seen this?!’ He was talking to me. ‘So now what am I supposed to do?’

  He gathered the notes up one by one, counted them and put them back in the envelope – it was only then that he noticed that inside the envelope there was also a note; he read aloud:

  ‘Dear Sir, I will be giving you another five thousand when I receive the material. I’m leaving you a few passport-style photos of myself for you to use on the documents. I’ll come by again in three weeks.’

  Félix lay down and tried to read a book – it was Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin, in the Portuguese Quetzal edition. After ten minutes he put it down on the bedside table and got up again. He wandered round and round the house, muttering incoherent phrases, until dawn broke. His little widow’s hands, tender and tiny, fluttered randomly about, independently, as he spoke. The tightly curled hair, trimmed down now, glowed around him with a miraculous aura. If someone had seen him from out on the road, seen him through the window, they would have thought they were looking at a ghost.

  ‘No, what rubbish! I won’t do it…’

  […]

  ‘The passport wouldn’t be hard to get, it wouldn’t even be that risky, and it would only take a few days – cheap, too. I could do that – why not? I’ll have to do it one day – it’s the inevitable extension of what I’m doing anyway…’

  […]

  ‘Take care, my friend, take care with the paths you choose to follow. You’re no forger. Be patient. Invent some sort of excuse, return the money, and tell him it’s not going to happen.’

  […]

  ‘But you don’t just turn down ten thousand dollars. I could spend two or three months in New York. I could visit the second-hand book dealers in Lisbon. I’ll go to Rio, watch the samba dancers, go to the dancehalls, to the second-hand bookshops, or I’ll go to Paris to buy records and books. How long has it been since I last went to Paris?’

  […]

  Félix Ventura’s anxiety disturbed my cynegetic activity. I’m a creature that hunts by night. Once I’ve tracked down my prey I chase them, forcing them up towards the ceiling. Once they’re up there mosquitoes never come back down. I run around them, in ever decreasing circles, corral them into a corner and devour them. The dawn was already beginning to break when the albino – now sprawled on one of the living room sofas, began to tell me his life story.

  ‘I used to think of this house as being a bit like a ship. An old steam ship heaving itself through the heavy river mud. A vast forest, and night all around.’ Félix spoke quietly, and pointed vaguely at the outlines of his books.‘It’s full of voices, this ship of mine.’

  Out there I could hear the night slipping by. Something barking. Claws scratching at the glass. Looking through the window I could easily make out the river, the stars spinning across its back, skittish birds disappearing into the foliage. The mulatto Fausto Bendito Ventura, second-hand book collector, son and grandson of secon
d-hand book collectors, awoke one Sunday morning to find a box outside his front door. Inside, stretched out on several copies of Eça de Queiroz’s The Relic, was a little naked creature, skinny and shameless, with a glowing fuzz of hair, and a limpid smile of triumph. A widower with no children, the book collector brought the child into his home, raised him and schooled him, absolutely certain that there was some superior purpose that was plotting out this unlikely story. He kept the box, and the books that were in it too. The albino told me of it with pride.

  ‘Eça,’ he said, ‘was my first crib.’

  Fausto Bendito Ventura became a second-hand book collector quite without meaning to. He took pride in never having worked in his life. He’d go out early in the morning to walk downtown, malembe-malembe – slowly-slowly – all elegant in his linen suit, straw hat, bow tie and cane, greeting friends and acquaintances with a light touch of his index finger on the brim of his hat. If by chance he came across a woman of his generation he’d dazzle her with a gallant smile. He’d whisper: Good day to you, poetry… He’d throw spicy compliments to the girls who worked in the bars. It’s said (Félix told me) that one day some jealous man provoked him:

  ‘So what exactly is it that you do on working days?’

  Fausto Bendito’s reply – all my days, my dear sir, are days off, I amble through them at my leisure… – still provokes applause and laughter among the slim circle of old colonial functionaries who in the lifeless evenings of the wonderful Biker Beer-House still manage to cheat death, playing cards and exchanging stories. Fausto would lunch at home, have a siesta, and then sit on the veranda to enjoy the cool evening breeze. In those days, before independence, there wasn’t yet the high wall separating the garden from the pavement, and the gate was always open. His clients needed only to climb a flight of stairs to have free access to his books, piles and piles of them, laid out at random on the strong living room floor.

  Félix Ventura and I share a love (in my case a hopeless love) for old words. Félix Ventura was originally schooled in this by his father, Fausto Bendito, and then by an old teacher, for the first years of high school, a man subject to melancholic ways, and so slender that he seemed always to be walking in profile, like an old Egyptian engraving. Gaspar – that was the teacher’s name – was moved by the helplessness of certain words. He saw them as down on their luck, abandoned in some desolate place in the language, and he sought to recover them. He used them ostentatiously, and persistently, which annoyed some people and unsettled others. I think he succeeded. His students started using these words too, to begin with merely in jest, but later like a private dialect, a tribal marking, which set them apart from their peers. Nowadays, Félix Ventura assured me, his students are still quite capable of recognising one another, even if they’ve never met before, on hearing just a few words…

  ‘I still shudder each time I hear someone say ‘duvet’, a repulsive gallicism, rather than ‘eiderdown’, which to me (and I’m sure you’ll agree with me on this) seems to be a very lovely, rather noble word. But I’ve resigned myself to ‘brassiere’. ‘Strophium’ has a sort of historical dignity about it, but it still sounds a little odd – don’t you think?’

  Dream No. 1

  I’m crossing a road in some alien city, making my way through the crowds of people. People of all races, all creeds, all sexes (for a long while I used to think there were just two…) pass me by. Men dressed in black, with dark glasses, carrying briefcases. Buddhist monks, laughing heartily, happy as oranges. Gossamer women. Fat matrons with shopping trolleys. Skinny adolescents on skates, slight birds slipping through the crowds. Little boys in single file, in school uniforms, each holding hands with the one in front, one teacher in the lead and another behind. Arabs in djelabas and skullcaps. Bald men walking killer dogs. Cops. Thieves. Intellectuals lost in thought. Workers in overalls. Nobody sees me. Not even the groups of Japanese, with their video cameras, and narrow eyes alert to everything around them. I stop right in front of people, I speak to them, I shake hands with them, but they take no notice of me. They don’t speak to me. I’ve had this dream the last three nights. In an earlier life, my life still in human form, the same thing used to happen to me quite frequently. I remember waking up afterwards with a bitter taste in my mouth, my heart filled with anxiety. Back then I thought it was a premonition. Now I think it may be a confirmation. Either way, it no longer upsets me.

  Alba

  When she woke up, she was called Alba, or Aurora, or Lúcia. In the evening, she was Dagmar. At night: Estela. She was tall, very white – not that opaque, milky sort of white so common in northern European women, but with the light whiteness of marble, translucent, under which you could follow the impetuous flowing of her blood. Even before seeing her I was already afraid. When I did see her, I was speechless. Trembling, I handed her the folded envelope on the back of which my father had written For Madame Dagmar, in that ornate calligraphy that made any note, however simple, even a recipe for soup, look like a Caliph’s decree. She opened it, and with her fingertips took out a small card, and as she looked at it she couldn’t hide her laughter:

  ‘You’re a virgin?!’

  I felt I was about to faint. Yes, I was turning eighteen, and I’d never had a woman. Dagmar led me by the hand through a maze of corridors, and I realised then that the two of us were now in an enormous room, haunted with sombre mirrors. Always smiling, she raised her arms and her dress slipped with a murmur to her feet:

  ‘Chastity is a pointless agony, kid. And one I’m happy to fix…’

  I imagined her with my father in the burning gloom of that same room. In a lightning-flash, in a revelation, I saw her, multiplied by the mirrors, undo her dress and release her breasts. I saw her wide hips, I felt her heat, and I saw my father, I saw my father’s powerful hands. I heard his grown-man’s laugh slapping against her skin, that vulgar language. I’ve lived that precise moment thousands, millions of times, with terror and revulsion. I lived it to the very end of my days.

  I sometimes think of an unhappy line, I can’t remember who it’s by – I probably dreamed it. Maybe it’s the chorus of a fado, or a tango perhaps, or some old samba I used to hear when I was a child.

  ‘The worst of sins is not to fall in love.’

  There were many women in my life – but I fear I didn’t love any of them. Not passionately. Not, perhaps, as nature requires. I’m horrified to think of it. My current condition – and it torments me to believe this – is some sort of ironic punishment. Either that, or it was no more than a careless mistake.

  The Birth of José Buchmann

  This time the foreigner announced his arrival in advance – he telephoned and Félix Ventura had time to prepare himself for the meeting. By 7:30 he was dressed as though he were about to go to a wedding at which he himself were the groom, or father of the groom, in a light suit of coarse linen, on which a ruby-red silk tie glistened like an exclamation mark. He’d inherited the suit from his father.

  ‘Are you expecting someone?’

  Yes, he was expecting him. Old Esperança had left his fish soup in the oven so it wouldn’t get cold. Early that morning she’d bought a lovely snapper, fresh from the Island fishermen, and three smoked catfish from the São Paulo market. A cousin had come from Gabela bringing some chilli-scented berries – solid fire, the albino explained to me – as well as manioc, sweet potato, spinach and tomatoes. No sooner had Félix put the dish out on the table than a powerful scent filled the room – warm as an embrace – and for the first time in ages I lamented my current condition. I’d like to be able to sit at the table too… The foreigner ate with a glowing appetite, as though he weren’t tasting the firm flesh of the snapper but its whole life, the years and years slipping between the sudden explosions of a shoal, the whirling of the waters, the thick strands of light that on sunny evenings fall straight down into the blue abyss.

  ‘It’s an interesting exercise,’ he said, ‘to try and see things from the victim’s point of view. This fish
we’re eating, for example… a fine snapper, isn’t it?… Have you tried seeing our dinner from his point of view?’

  Félix Ventura looked at the snapper with an attention that until that moment the fish hadn’t deserved from him – then, horrified, he pushed his plate away. The other man continued uninterrupted:

  ‘Do you think life expects us to be compassionate? I don’t believe so. What life expects of us is that we celebrate. Let’s return to the fish: if you were this fish, would you prefer me to be eating you with sadness or with delight?’

  The albino kept his mouth shut. He knows he’s a snapper (as we all are) but I think he’d rather not be eaten at all. The foreigner continued:

  ‘Once I was taken to a party. There was this old man, and he was celebrating his hundredth birthday. I wanted to know how he was feeling. The poor man gave me an astonished smile, and said I don’t really know, it all happened so quickly… He talked about his hundred years as though they were some disaster that had befallen him in the last few minutes. Sometimes I feel the same way. My soul hurts with too much past in it, and so much emptiness. I feel like that old man.’

  He raised his glass:

  ‘And still I’m alive. I’ve survived. I began to understand this – strange as it may seem to you – when I got off the boat in Luanda. To life! Angola has rescued me for life. To this propitious wine, which celebrates and unites.’