The Book of Chameleons (4 page)

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.

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. Ângela 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. Ângela 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. Ângela 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, Ângela 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.’

Ângela 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?’ Ângela 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!’

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.

(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.

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!' 

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.