The Book of Chameleons (2 page)

Félix Ventura studies the newspapers as he has his dinner, leafing through them carefully, and if an article catches his eye he marks it with his pen, in lilac-coloured ink. Once he’s done eating he cuts it out and stores it carefully away in a file. On one of the shelves in the library he has dozens of these files. Another is where his hundreds of video cassettes lie. Félix likes to record news bulletins, important political happenings, anything that might one day be useful to him. The tapes are lined up in alphabetical order, by the name of the person or the event they’re about. His dinner consists of a bowl of vegetable broth, a speciality of Old Esperança’s, a cup of mint tea, and a thick slice of papaya, dressed with lemon and a dash of port wine. In his room, before going to bed, he puts on his pyjamas with such an air of formality that I’m always half-expecting him to tie a sombre-looking tie around his neck. But on this particular night, the shrill ring of the doorbell interrupted him as he ate his soup. This irritated him. He folded up his paper, got up with some effort and went to open the door. I saw a tall man come in, distinguished looking, a hooked nose, prominent cheekbones, and a generous moustache, curved and gleaming, the kind people haven’t had these past hundred years. His eyes were small and bright, and seemed to take possession of everything they saw. He was wearing a blue suit, in an old-fashioned cut but which suited him, and in his left hand he was holding a document case. The room darkened. It was as though night – or something even more grief-stricken than night – had come in with him. He took out a calling card, and read aloud:

‘
Félix Ventura. Guarantee your children a better past
.’ And he laughed. A sad laugh, but not unpleasant. ‘That would be you, I presume? A friend of mine gave me your card.’

I couldn’t place his accent. He spoke softly, with a mix of different pronunciations, a faint Slavic roughness, tempered by the honeyed softness of the Portuguese from Brazil. Félix Ventura took a step back:

‘And who are you?’

The foreigner closed the door. He walked around the room, his hands clasped behind his back, pausing for a long moment in front of the beautiful oil portrait of Frederick Douglass. Then he sat down, at last, in one of the armchairs, and with an elegant gesture invited the albino to do the same. It was as though he were the owner of the house. Certain common friends, he said – his voice becoming even gentler – had given him this address. They’d told him of a man who dealt in memories, a man who sold the past, clandestinely, the way other people deal in cocaine. Félix looked at him with mistrust. Everything about this strange man annoyed him – his manners that were both gentle and authoritative, his ironic way of speaking, the antiquated moustache. He sat himself down in a grand wickerwork chair, at the opposite end of the room, as though afraid the other man’s delicacy might be contagious.

‘And might I know who you are?’

Again his question received no reply. The foreigner asked permission to smoke. He took a silver cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket, opened it, and rolled a cigarette. His eyes skipped one way and another, his attention distracted, like a chicken pecking around in the dust. And then he smiled with unexpected brilliance:

‘But do tell me, my dear man – who are your clients?’

Félix Ventura gave in. There was a whole class, he explained, a whole new bourgeoisie, who sought him out. They were businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals – people, in other words, whose futures are secure. But what these people lack is a good past, a distinguished ancestry, diplomas. In sum, a name that resonates with nobility and culture. He sells them a brand new past. He draws up their family tree. He provides them with photographs of their grandparents and great-grandparents, gentlemen of elegant bearing and old-fashioned ladies. The businessmen, the ministers, would like to have women like that as their aunts, he went on, pointing to the portraits on the walls – old ladies swathed in fabrics,
authentic bourgeois
bessanganas
–, they’d like to have a grandfather with the distinguished bearing of a Machado de Assis, of a Cruz e Souza, of an Alexandre Dumas. And he sells them this simple dream.

‘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.

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 second-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?’