The Book of Chameleons

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

  (At least, this is what I thought before I met Félix Ventura.)

  As we get old, the only certainty we’re left with is that we will soon be older still. To describe someone as young seems to me to be rather misleading. Someone may be young, yes, but just in the same way that a glass is still intact moments before it shatters on the floor. But excuse my digression – that’s what happens when a gecko starts philosophising… So let’s get back to José Buchmann. I’m not suggesting that in a few days a massive butterfly is going to burst out of him, beating its great multicoloured wings. The changes I’m referring to are more subtle. For one thing, his accent is beginning to shift. He has lost – he is losing – that pronunciation somewhere between Slavic and Brazilian, that was rather sweet and sibilant, that bothered me so much to begin with. It has a Luandan rhythm to it now, better to match the silk print shirts and sports shoes that he’s taken to wearing. I think he’s become more expansive too. To hear him laugh you’d think he was Angolan. And he’s lost that moustache too. He seems younger. That night he appeared at our door after almost a whole week away, and no sooner had the albino opened the door than he burst out with:

  ‘I’ve been to Chibia!’

  He was almost feverish. He sat in the great wicker throne that the albino’s great-grandfather had brought from Brazil. He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them. He asked for a whisky. My friend, annoyed, poured him one. For God’s sake, what ever made him go to Chibia?

  ‘I went to visit my father’s grave.’

  ‘What?! The other man choked. Which father? You mean the fictional Mateus Buchmann?’

  ‘My father! Mateus Buchmann may just be a fiction to you – albeit woven with tremendous class – but I assure you, the gravestone is quite real!’

  He opened an envelope and took from it a dozen colour photographs that he spread onto the glass top of the little mahogany table. The first picture showed a cemetery; in the second, you could make out the tombstone on one of the graves: ‘Mateus Buchmann / 1905-1978’. The others were pictures of the town.

  a) Low houses.

  b) Straight roads, opening widely into a green landscape.

  c) Straight roads, opening widely into the immense tranquillity of a cloudless sky.

  d) Chickens pecking around in the red dust.

  e) An old mulatto man, sitting at a sad-looking bar table, his gaze resting on an empty bottle.

  f) Withered flowers in a vase.

  g) An enormous birdcage, without birds.

  h) A pair of well worn boots, waiting on the doorstep of a house.

  There was something dusky about all the photographs. It was the end or nearly the end – but who knew of what?

  ‘I insisted, I warned you that you shouldn’t go to Chibia!’

  ‘I know. That’s why I went…’

  My friend shook his head. I couldn’t tell if he was furious, or amused, or both. Slowly he studied the photograph of the tombstone. Then he smiled disarmingly:

  ‘Good work. And I’m saying this as a professional: congratulations!’

  Illusions

  Early this morning I saw two boys in the yard imitating turtledoves. One was sitting astride a plank of wood, on the top of the wall, one leg on either side. The other had climbed into the avocado tree. He was collecting up avocadoes and throwing them over to the first, who caught them with the skill of a juggler and put them away into a bag. Then all of a sudden the one who was up in the tree, partly hidden by the leaves (I could only see his face and shoulders) raised his hands and cupped them to his mouth, and made a cooing sound. The other laughed, and copied him – it was like the birds themselves were right there, one on the wall and another on the highest branches of the avocado tree, the vigour of their song exorcising the last of the shadows. This episode reminded me of José Buchmann. When I saw him arrive in this house he sported the extraordinary moustache of a nineteenth-century gentleman, a dark suit of old-fashioned cut, as though he were a foreigner to all things. But now when I see him, as I do every other day, he comes into the house wearing a silk shirt, patterned in many colours, with the broad laugh and happy insolence of people native to this place. If I hadn’t seen the two boys, if I’d only heard them, I would have sworn that there were turtledoves out there in the humid early morning. Looking at the past, considering it from where I am now, as I might look at a large screen in front of me, I can see that José Buchmann is not José Buchmann, but a foreigner imitating José Buchmann. But if I close my eyes to the past, and see him now, as though I’d never set eyes on him before, I simply would have to believe in him – this man has been José Buchmann all his life.

  My first death didn’t kill me

  Once, when I was in my old human form, I decided to kill myself. I wanted to die, completely. I hoped that eternal life, Heaven and Hell, God, the Devil, reincarnation, all that stuff, was no more than slowly woven superstition, developed over centuries and centuries out of man’s greatest terror. There was a gun shop right by my house but I’d never before set foot in it, and the owner didn’t know me. There I bought a pistol. Then I bought a crime novel and a bottle of gin. Then I went down to a hotel on the beach, drank the gin in big gulps with considerable distaste (I’ve always found alcohol repulsive) and lay down on the bed to read the book. I thought that the gin, in combination with the tedium of a pointless plot, would give me the courage to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. But as it turned out the book wasn’t bad at all, and I kept reading right to the last page. By then it had started to rain. It was as though it were raining night – or to explain myself a little more clearly, it was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course. I kept expecting the stars to fall and shatter on impact with the window, with a flash and a crashing. But they didn’t fall. I turned out the light. I put the pistol to my head,

  and I fell asleep.

  Dream No. 3

  I dreamt that Félix Ventura and I were having tea together. We were having tea, eating toast, and chatting. This was happening in a large art nouveau room, its walls covered in austere mirrors framed in jacaranda. A skylight with a lovely stained-glass window depicting two angels with open wings let in a lovely light. There were other tables around us, and other people seated at them, but they were faceless, or at least I didn’t see their faces – it didn’t matter to me, their whole existence was summed up in the soft murmuring I could hear. I could see myself reflected in the mirrors – a tall man, with a big, long face, well-built but weary, a little pale, with a barely concealed disdain for the rest of humanity. Yes, that was me, long ago, in the questionable glory of my thirties.

  ‘You invented him, this strange José Buchmann, and now he’s begun to invent himself. It’s like a metamorphosis… A reincarnation… Or rather: a possession.’

  My friend looked at me with alarm:

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘José Buchmann – surely you’ve noticed? – he’s taken over the foreigner’s body. He becomes more and more lifelike with each day that passes. And that man he used to be, that night-time character who came into our house eight months ago as though he’d come not from another country but from another time – where is he now?’

  ‘It’s a game. I know it’s a game. We all know that.’

  He poured himself some tea, and took two cubes of sugar, and stirred it. He drank, his eyes lowered. There we were, two gentlemen, two good friends, wearing white in an elegant café. We drank our tea, ate toast, and chatted.

  ‘So be it,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s acknowledge that it’s no more than a game. So who is he?’

  I wiped the sweat from my face. I’ve never distinguished myself by my valour. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been attracted (speaking of my other life, that is) by the stormy destiny of heroes and rogues. I collected flick-knives. And with a pride of which I’m now ashamed I boasted about the exploits of a grandfather of mine who’d been a general. I did befriend s
ome brave men, but unfortunately that didn’t help me. Courage isn’t contagious; fear is, of course. Félix smiled as he understood that my terror was greater, more ancient, than his:

  ‘I have no idea. You?’

  He changed the subject. He told me that a few days earlier he’d been at the launch of a new novel by a writer of the Angolan diaspora. He was an unpleasant sort of character, professionally indignant, who’d built up his whole career abroad, selling our national horrors to European readers. Misery does ever so well in wealthy countries. The man introducing him, a local poet and member of parliament for the ruling party, praised the new novel, its style, the vigour of the narrative, while at the same time criticising the writer for having a bogus take on our country’s recent history. As soon as the discussion was opened up, another poet – he was a member of parliament too, and rather better known for his revolutionary past than for any literary activities – raised his hand:

  ‘In your novels do you lie deliberately or just out of ignorance?’

  Laughter. A murmur of approval. The writer hesitated a few seconds. Then counter-attacked:

  ‘I’m a liar by vocation,’ he shouted. ‘I lie with joy! Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance.’

  Then, more soberly, he added – his voice lowered – that the principal difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is that in the former there exists only one truth, the truth as imposed by power, while in free countries every man has the right to defend his own version of events. Truth, he said, is a superstition. He – Félix – was taken with this idea.

  ‘I think what I do is really an advanced kind of literature,’ he told me conspiratorially. ‘I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality.’

  I have a lot of sympathy for impossible passions. I am – or rather, I was – a specialist in them. Félix Ventura’s slow siege of ngela Lúcia moved me. Every morning he would send her flowers. She would complain about this, laughing, as soon as my friend had opened the door to her. Yes, of course they were wonderful, the porcelain roses with their exaggerated, artificial brilliance that made them seem rather like transvestites – or rather, drag queens; the orchids so lovely, though she preferred daisies, with their rustic beauty and lack of vanity. Yes, she thanked him for the flowers, but asked him please not to send any more because she didn’t know what to do with them all. The air in her room in the Grande Hotel Universo was heavy, overwhelming, with so many discordant scents at once. The albino sighed. If he’d been able to he would have rolled out a rose-petal carpet at her feet. He would have liked to conduct an orchestra of birds to sing as rainbows appeared in the sky, one by one. Women are moved by declarations of love, however ridiculous they may be. ngela Lúcia was moved. She kissed his face. Then she showed him the photographs she’d taken in the previous weeks: clouds.

  ‘Aren’t they like something out of a dream?’

  Félix shuddered:

  ‘I have dreams. Sometimes I have rather strange dreams. Last night I dreamt about him…’

  And he pointed at me. I felt as though I were about to faint. I scuttled away, startled, to hide in a crack by the ceiling. ngela Lúcia screamed, in one of those childish bursts of enthusiasm typical of her:

  ‘A gecko?! How great!…’

  ‘He isn’t just any gecko. He’s lived in this house for years. In the dream he had human form, a serious sort of man, with a face that seemed familiar to me. We were sitting in a café, chatting…’

  ‘God gave us dreams so that we can catch a glimpse of the other side,’ said ngela Lúcia. ‘To talk to our ancestors. To talk to God. And to geckos too, as it turns out.’

  ‘Surely you don’t believe that!?…’

  ‘I most certainly do believe it. I believe in a lot of very strange things, my dear. If only you knew some of the things I believe, you’d look at me like a one-woman freak-show. So what did you talk about, then, you and this gecko?’

  Spirit-scarers

  Out there on the veranda, hanging from the ceiling, are dozens of ceramic charms to ward off spirits. Félix Ventura brought them back from his travels. Most are Brazilian. Birds painted in bright colours. Shells. Butterflies. Tropical fish. The legendary bandit Lampião and his happy band of hitmen. When the breeze makes them tremble they produce a clear murmur of water; this is why whenever the breeze blows, as it always does at this time, thank God, you are reminded of the character of this house:

  A ship (filled with voices) moving up-river.

  Something odd happened yesterday. Félix invited ngela Lúcia and José Buchmann to dinner. I hid right at the top of one of the bookcases, from where I could easily see what was going on but certain that I couldn’t be seen. José Buchmann arrived first. He came in, laughing, he and his shirt (printed with palm trees, parrots, a very blue sea), and like a hurricane he swept across the living room, down the length of the corridor and into the kitchen. He took a bottle of whisky from the drinks cabinet, opened the freezer and took two ice cubes which he dropped into a large tumbler, and poured himself a generous measure of the drink, then returned to the living room, all the while telling the story – shouting, laughing throughout – of how that morning he’d almost been run over. ngela Lúcia arrived in a green dress, silently, bringing the last light with her. She stood opposite José Buchmann:

  ‘Do you two know each other?’

  ‘No, no!’ said ngela, her voice colourless. ‘I don’t think so.’

  José Buchmann was even less certain:

  ‘Oh, but there are ever so many people I don’t know!’ he said, and laughed at his own wit. ‘I’ve never been all that popular.’

  ngela Lúcia didn’t laugh. José Buchmann looked at her anxiously. His voice was back to that sibilant softness it had had in the early days. He told how a few days ago he’d been taking photos of a madman, one of those countless wretches who wander the city streets aimlessly, because he was fascinated by this man’s particular bearing. Very early that morning he – José Buchmann – had been lying on his front in the middle of the tarmac, waiting to get a good shot of the old man as he emerged from a sewer that apparently he’d made his home, when suddenly he spotted a car lurching towards him. He rolled over to the kerb, clutching his Canon, just in time to avoid an appalling death. When he came to develop the film he discovered that in the chaos of his escape the camera had taken three shots. Two of them weren’t any use. Mud. A bit of sky. But the last one clearly showed the stealthy metal of the car, and the indifferent face of the passenger sitting in the back seat. He produced the photos; Félix whistled:

  ‘Pópilas! It’s the President!…’

  ngela Lúcia was more interested in the piece of sky:

  ‘That cloud, do you see? It looks like a lizard…’

  José Buchmann agreed. Yes, it did look like a lizard, or perhaps a crocodile; but of course we all see whatever we want to see in the fleeting image of a cloud. When Félix returned from the kitchen, carrying in both hands a broad, deep clay bowl, the two of them had settled back down. Buchmann wanted the chilli-pepper and the lemon. He praised the consistency of the manioc-paste. Bit by bit he recovered his broad laugh and Luanda accent. ngela Lúcia turned her soft watery eyes on him:

  ‘Félix tells me you’ve spent a lot of time living abroad. Where?’

  José Buchmann hesitated a moment. He turned to my friend, disquieted, in a plea for help. Félix pretended not to notice:

  ‘Yes, yes. You’ve never told me where you were all those years…’

  He smiled sweetly. It was as though for the first time in his life he were experiencing the pleasures of cruelty. José Buchmann sighed deeply. He leant back in his chair:

  ‘I’ve spent the last ten years without any fixed home. Adrift across the world, taking photographs of wars. Before that I lived in Rio de Janeiro, and before that in Berlin, and earlier still in Lisbon. I went to Portugal in the sixties
to study law, but I couldn’t stand the climate. It was too quiet. Fado, Fátima, football… In winter – which could happen at any point in the year, and usually did – a rain of dead algae would fall from the sky. The streets would be dark with it. People died of sadness. Even the dogs hanged themselves. I fled. I went first to Paris, and from there travelled with a friend to Berlin. I washed dishes in a Greek restaurant. I worked as a receptionist in a high-class brothel. I gave the Germans Portuguese lessons. I sang in bars. I modelled for young art students. One day a friend gave me a Canon F-1, the one I still use today, and that’s how I became a photographer. I was in Afghanistan in 1982, with the Soviet troops… In Salvador with the guerrillas… In Peru, on both sides… In the Falklands, again on both sides… In Iran during the war against Iraq… In Mexico on the side of the Zapatistas… I’ve taken a lot of photos in Israel and Palestine – a lot – there’s never any shortage of work there…’

  ngela Lúcia smiled, nervous again:

  ‘Enough! I don’t want your memories to pollute this house with blood…’

  Félix returned to the kitchen to prepare dessert. The two guests remained, seated opposite one another. Neither spoke. The silence that hung between them was full of murmurings, of shadows, of things that run along in the distance, in some remote time, dark and furtive. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they just remained without speaking, sitting there opposite each other, because they simply had nothing to say, and I merely imagined the rest.

  Dream No. 4

  I saw myself wandering along a walkway made of planks of wood laid side by side. The walkway wound along, suspended a metre above the sand, disappearing into the distance between the taller dunes, and then reemerging up ahead, sometimes completely covered by the vegetation of the grasses and bushes, at other times totally exposed. The sea, to my right, was smooth and luminous, turquoise blue, the sort of sea you only find in tourist brochures and happy dreams, and there was a smell rising from it, a hot smell of algae and salt. A man was walking towards me. Even before I could make out his features I knew right away that it was my friend Félix Ventura. I could tell that the sun was bothering him. He was wearing impenetrable dark glasses, coarse linen trousers and a loose shirt – also linen – that flapped in the breeze like a flag. His head was covered with a lovely panama hat, but neither this nor his elegant outfit seemed enough to save him from the torture of the sun.