The Book of Chameleons (3 page)

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.

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.

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.'

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.

‘Ângela 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?…'