The Book of Chameleons

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

  How old was he? Sixty perhaps, but if so he had looked after himself well – or forty, forty-five, but then he’d gone through some years of terrible despair… Looking at him as he sat there, I thought he looked as solid as a rhino. Those eyes of his seemed much older, filled with disbelief and fatigue, even though at certain points – like now when he was lifting his glass to drink a toast to Life – they lit up with the light of the dawn.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Please allow me to be the one asking the questions. Were you able to do what I asked of you?’

  Félix looked up. He had. He had an identity card, a passport, a driver’s license, all these documents in the name of José Buchmann, native of Chibia, 52, professional photographer.

  The town of São Pedro da Chibia, in the Huíla province to the south of the country, had been founded in 1884 by Madeiran colonists. But there were already half a dozen Boer families who were prospering there, raising cattle, farming the land, and praising God for the grace of having made them white in a country of black people – that’s what Félix Ventura said, I’m just quoting him, of course. The clan was led by commander Jacobus Bothas. His lieutenant was a grim red-haired giant, Cornélio Buchmann, who in 1898 had married a Madeiran girl, Marta Medeiros, who gave him two sons. The elder of the two, Pieter, died in childhood; the younger, Mateus, was a famous hunter, who for years acted as guide to groups of South Africans and Englishmen who came to Angola in search of thrills. He was past fifty when he married an American artist, Eva Miller, and they had one son: José Buchmann.

  Once they were done with dinner, and once he’d drunk his mint tea – José Buchmann preferred coffee – Félix Ventura went to fetch the cardboard folder and opened it onto the table. He showed the passport, the ID card, the driving license. There were various photos too. There was one, sepia-toned and well weathered, that showed a huge man with an absorbed air, sitting astride a gnu.

  ‘This,’ said the albino by way of introduction, ‘is Cornélio Buchmann. Your grandfather.’

  There was another showing a couple in an embrace, beside a river, with a broad, endless horizon in the background. The man had his eyes lowered. The woman, in a floral print dress, smiled at the camera. José Buchmann held the photo, and stood up so he was directly in the light of the lamp. His voice trembled a little.

  ‘And these are my parents?’

  The albino confirmed that yes, they were. Mateus Buchmann and Eva Miller, one sunny evening, beside the Chimpumpunhime river. It must have been José himself – then eleven years old – who’d captured that moment. He showed him an old issue of Vogue, with a report on big game hunting in southern Africa. The article was illustrated with a watercolour showing a wildlife scene – elephants bathing in a lake – signed by Eva Miller.

  A few months after that photo had been taken, with the river rushing serenely towards its destination and the grasses high in the middle of the solemn evening, Eva left for Cape Town, on a trip which was due to last a month, and she never came back. Mateus Buchmann wrote to common friends in South Africa asking for news of his wife, and when he had no luck he left his son in the care of a servant, a blind old tracker, and set off to find her.

  ‘And did he?’

  Félix shrugged his shoulders. He gathered up the photographs, the documents, the magazine, and put them all away in the cardboard folder. He closed it, tying it with a thick red ribbon as though it were a gift, and handed it to José Buchmann.

  ‘Forgive me for having to warn you,’ he said. ‘You really should keep away from Chibia.’

  It’s been nearly fifteen years that my soul has been trapped in this body, and I’m still not used to it. I lived for almost a century in the skin of a man, and I never managed to feel altogether human either. To this day I’ve known some thirty geckos, of five or six different species – I’m not sure exactly, I’ve never been all that interested in biology. Twenty of them grew rice, or built buildings, in vast China, or noisy India or Pakistan, before each one awoke from this first nightmare into this other which he or she (it hardly matters much) may find rather less appalling. Seven did the same – or something similar – in Africa; one was a dentist from Boston; one sold flowers in Belo Horizonte, in Brazil; the last had been a cardinal. He still missed the Vatican. Not one had read Shakespeare. The cardinal liked Gabriel García Márquez. The dentist told me he’d read Paulo Coelho. I’ve never read Paulo Coelho myself. But I’d gladly exchange the company of all the geckos and lizards for Félix Ventura and his long soliloquies. Yesterday he confided to me that he’d met an amazing woman. Though, he added, the word ‘woman’ doesn’t quite do her justice.

  ‘ngela Lúcia is to women what humankind is to the apes.’

  What an unpleasant phrase. But her name awoke in me memories of Alba, and all of a sudden I was alert and serious. His memory of this woman made him talkative. He talked about her like someone trying to give substance to a miracle…

  ‘She’s…’ – he paused, his hands palms-up, eyes screwed shut in fierce concentration, finding the words – ‘… pure light!’

  This seemed perfectly possible to me. A name can be a curse. Some are dragged along by their name, like muddy river waters after a heavy shower, however much they may resist they’re propelled towards their destination… Others, on the contrary – their names are like masks that hide them, that deceive. Most have no power at all, of course. I recall my human name without any pleasure – but without pain either. I don’t miss it. It wasn’t me. José Buchmann was a regular visitor to this strange ship. One more voice to add to all the others. He wanted the albino to add to his past. He didn’t spare him any questions:

  ‘What happened to my mother?’

  My friend (for I believe I can now call him that) began to get fed up with his insistence. He’d done his job, and didn’t feel any duty to do any more. But sometimes he’d acquiesce. Eva Miller – he said – never came back to Angola. An old client of his father’s, from a southern family like the Buchmanns – old Bezerra – found her one evening, quite by chance, on a street in New York. A frail woman, already of some age, she moved through the throng of people with anxious slowness, ‘like a little bird with a broken wing’, Bezerra had said. At the corner she fell into his arms – literally fell into his arms – and the shock of it made him blurt out an expletive in Nhanheca. With a broad smile, the woman protested:

  ‘That’s not the sort of language you should be using with a lady!’

  It was only then that he recognised her. The two of them sat at a café frequented by Cuban immigrants and talked until nightfall. At this point in the story, Félix paused.

  ‘In New York night doesn’t really fall – it lowers itself – here, yes, here it dives down from the sky.’

  My friend set a lot of store by precision. Night dives down from the sky, he repeated, adding ‘like a bird of prey’. Interruptions like this unsettled José Buchmann, who wanted to know how the story went on…

  ‘And then?’

  Eva Miller worked as an interior decorator. She lived alone in Manhattan, in a little apartment with a view of Central Park. The walls of the tiny living room, the walls of the sole bedroom, of the narrow corridor, were all covered with mirrors.

  José Buchmann interrupted him…

  ‘Mirrors?!’

  Yes, my friend went on. But according to what old Bezerra had said, they weren’t just ordinary mirrors. He smiled. I could tell that he was being pulled along by the force of his own story now. They were artefacts from the Hall of Mirrors at the funfair, warped panes each created with the cruel intention of capturing and distorting the image of anyone who dared to stand before it. A few had been given the power to transform the most elegant of creatures into an obese dwarf, others to stretch them out. There were mirrors that could reveal a secret soul. Others that reflected not the face of the person looking into them, but the nape of their neck, their back. Glorious mirrors, and dreadful mirrors. In this way, whenever Eva Miller stepped
into her apartment she didn’t feel alone. When she appeared, a crowd appeared with her.

  ‘Are you in touch with this Mr Bezerra?’

  Félix Ventura looked at him, surprised. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say – well, if you want me to go there I will… And he recounted how the old man had died in Lisbon just a few months earlier.

  ‘Cancer,’ he said. ‘Lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker.’

  They sat in silence, the two of them, thinking about Bezerra’s death. The night was warm and humid. A calm breeze was blowing through the window. It brought with it many delicate, gentle mosquitoes, which flew about randomly, driven wild by the light. I was getting hungry. My friend looked over to the other man and smiled:

  ‘I ought to be charging you overtime, damn it! Who do you think I am – Scheherezade?…’

  Dream No. 2

  There was a young man waiting for me, crouched by the wall. He opened his hands and I could see that they were filled with a furtive green glow, some enchanted substance that quickly disappeared into the darkness. ‘Glow-worms’, he whispered. There was a river flowing behind the wall, opaque and powerful, panting wearily like a watchdog. Beyond it the forest began. The low wall, in rough stone, allowed a view of the black water, the stars running along its back, the thick foliage in the background – as though in a well. The young man reached up to the top of the stones effortlessly, and after a moment’s stillness, his head lost in the night, he climbed over to the other side. In the dream I was a man, still young, tall, but beginning to run to fat. I found it a bit of an effort getting up onto the wall. Then I jumped. I knelt down in the mud and the river came to lap at my hands.

  ‘What’s this?’

  The boy didn’t reply. He had his back to me. His skin was even darker than the night, smooth and lustrous, and on him too – as on the river – a whirligig of stars. I saw him advance towards the metallic waters, and disappear. He re-emerged, moments later, on the other bank. The river, lying at the feet of the forest, had finally gone to sleep. I remained, just sitting there, for some time, quite sure that if I could concentrate, if I could keep perfectly still, alert, if the brilliance of the stars could touch my soul – oh, I don’t know – in some particular way, I would be able to hear the voice of God. And then I did really start to hear it, and it was hoarse and hissed like a kettle on the fire. I was struggling to understand what it was saying when out of the shadows – right in front of me – appeared a dog, a skinny setter, with a little radio, one of those pocket-radios, attached to its neck. It was badly tuned. A man’s voice – deep, underground – was struggling against the storm of electric sounds:

  ‘The worst of sins is not to fall in love,’ said God, with the soft voice of a tango-singer: ‘This broadcast has been sponsored by the Marimba Union Bakeries.’

  The dog moved away then, limping slightly, and everything was silent again. I climbed the wall and left, heading towards the lights of the city. Before I’d reached the road I saw the young man again, crouched by the wall, his arms around the setter. The two of them looked at me as if they were a single being; I turned my back to them but I could still feel the challenging stare of the dog and the young man, as though there were something dark coming at me from behind. I awoke, startled. I was in a damp fissure in the wall. There were ants grazing between my fingers. I went out in search of the night. My dreams are almost always more lifelike than reality.

  Splendorium

  From the brilliant – but succinct – description my friend gave, I imagined a kind of illuminated angel. I imagined something with the brightness of a chandelier. I think Félix may have exaggerated a little. If she’d been at a party, lost amid the smoke and chaos, I wouldn’t even have noticed her. ngela Lúcia is a young woman, with dark skin and fine features, black braids falling loose on her shoulders. Vulgar. But yes, I must admit, occasionally – especially when she is moved or delighted – her skin does indeed sparkle with copper, and at these moments she’s transformed, she’s truly beautiful. But most of all I was struck by her voice, husky, but still humid, sensual. Félix arrived home that evening bringing her in with him like a trophy. ngela Lúcia looked carefully at the books and the records. She laughed at the austere haughtiness of Frederick Douglass.

  ‘And this guy, what’s he doing here?’

  ‘He’s one of my great-grandfathers,’ the albino replied. ‘Great-grandfather Frederick, father to my paternal grandfather.’

  The man had made his fortune in the nineteenth century selling slaves to Brazil. When the slave trade was ended he bought a farm in Rio de Janeiro where he lived many happy years. He returned to Angola an old man, bringing with him his two daughters, identical twins, then still young. Gossipers were soon spreading doubts about the likelihood of his paternity. The old man put paid to their lies quite happily by getting a servant-girl pregnant; and this time he did it with such talent that she gave birth to a son with eyes identical to his father’s. He was even scared to look at him. The portrait was the work of a French painter. ngela Lúcia asked whether she might be allowed to take a photograph of it. Then she asked whether she might be able to take a photograph of him – of my friend – sitting in the big wicker chair that his slave-trader great-grandfather had brought back with him from Brazil. The last of the evening light was dying softly on the wall behind him.

  ‘I can’t believe this light,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  Sometimes, she said, she could recognise a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just a little bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the carioca locals instinctively call ‘autumn’, and that the Europeans insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid greyness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens. In the drenched land of the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning, the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing. In the forests of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the light is like a liquid, which sticks to your skin, and has a taste and a smell. It’s noisy in Goa, and harsh. In Berlin the sun is always laughing, at least during those moments when it manages to break through the clouds, like in those ecological stickers against nuclear power. Even in the most unlikely skies, ngela Lúcia is able to discern shines that mustn’t be forgotten; until she visited Scandinavia she’d believed that in that part of the world during the winter months light was nothing but the figment of people’s imagination. But no, the clouds would occasionally light up with great flashes of hope. She said this, and stood up, adopting a dramatic pose:

  ‘And Egypt? In Cairo? Have you ever been to Cairo?… To the pyramids of Giza?…’ She lifted her hands and declaimed: ‘The light, majestic, falls; so potent, so alive, that it seems to settle on everything like a sort of luminous mist.’

  ‘That’s Eça!’ The albino laughed.‘I recognise him just by his adjectives – just like I can recognise Nelson Mandela just by his shirts. Presumably those are the notes he wrote during his trip to Egypt.’

  ngela Lúcia whistled happily, impressed; she clapped her hands. So was it true what they said about him, that he’d read the Portuguese classics from end to end, all of Eça, the inexhaustible Camilo? The albino coughed, flushed red. He changed the subject. He said he had a friend who like her was a photographer, and who – also like her – had lived many years abroad and had just returned to the country. A war photographer. Wouldn’t she like to meet him?

  ‘A war photographer?’ ngela looked at him with horror. ‘What does that have to do with me? I’m not even sure that I am a photographer. I collect light.’

  She took a plastic box out of her purse and showed it to the albino.

  ‘It’s my Splendorium,’ she said. ‘Slides.’


  She always carries with her a few samples of these numerous kinds of splendour, gathered in the savannahs of Africa, in the old cities of Europe, or in the mountain ranges and forests of Latin America. Lights, flashes, faint glows, caught within a little plastic frame, which she uses to feed her soul in dark days. She asked if there was a projector somewhere in the house. My friend said yes, and went to fetch it. A few minutes later we were in Cachoeira, a little town in the Bahian Recôncavo.

  ‘Cachoeira! I arrived there on a rickety old bus. I walked a little, my rucksack on my back, looking for a hostel, and found myself in this deserted little square. It was getting late. There was a tropical storm building in the east. The sun skimmed close to the earth, copper-coloured, until it clashed with that great wall of black clouds over beyond the old colonial mansions. It’s a dramatic setting, don’t you think?’ She sighed. Her skin was alight, her lovely eyes filled with tears: ‘And that is when I saw the face of God!’

  A Gecko’s Philosophy

  Now, I’ve been studying José Buchmann for weeks. Watching him change. He isn’t the same man who came into this house six, seven months ago. Something – something of the powerful nature of a metamorphosis – has been at work deep inside him. And perhaps it’s like you see with a chrysalis, and the secret buzz of enzymes has been eating away at his organs. You could argue that we’re all in a constant state of change. That’s right, I’m not quite the same as I was yesterday either. The only thing about me that doesn’t change is my past: the memory of my human past. The past is usually stable, it’s always there, lovely or terrible, and it will be there forever.