The Book of Chameleons (8 page)

The Minister was writing a book,
The Real Life of a Fighter
, a dense volume of memoirs that he was hoping to bring out before Christmas. Though to be rather more precise, he’s writing his book with a hired hand – the hand of Félix Ventura. My friend dedicated a good part of his day – and even his night – to this work. As he completed each chapter he would read it to the author-to-be, discussing some detail or other, he’d take note of the criticisms and correct whatever there was to be corrected, and so they would go on. Félix would sew fiction in with reality dextrously, minutely, in such a way that historical facts and dates were respected. In the book the Minister conversed with real people (sometimes with royal people) and it would be most convenient if these people should tomorrow believe that they had indeed traded confidences and opinions with him. Our memory feeds itself to a large extent on what other people remember of us. We remember other people’s memories as though they were our own – even fictional ones.

‘It’s like the Castle of São Jorge in Lisbon – do you know it? It has battlements, but they’re fake. António de Oliveira Salazar ordered that some crenellations be added to the castle to make it more authentic. To him there was something wrong with a castle without crenellations – there was something monstrous about it – like a camel without humps. So the fake part of the Castle of São Jorge is today what makes it realistic. Several octogenarian Lisboans I’ve spoken to are convinced the castle has always had crenellations. There’s something rather amusing about that, isn’t there? If it were authentic, no one would believe in it.’

As soon as
The Real Life of a Fighter
is published, the consistency of Angola’s history will change, there will be even more History. The book
will come to be used as a reference for future work on the struggle for the nation’s liberation, on the troubled years that followed independence, and the broad movement of democratisation the country experienced. Let me give you some examples:

There are people who from early on reveal a great talent for misfortune. Unhappiness pummels at them like a stoning, every other day, and they accept it with a resigned sigh. Others, meanwhile, have a peculiar propensity for happiness. Faced with an abyss the latter are attracted by its blueness, the former by its intoxication. Some people are destined to dream (some, indeed, are paid rather well to do so); some are born to work, practical and concrete and tireless; and there are others who are like a river, who flow effortlessly down from source to mouth, hardly straying from its bed. The case of José Buchmann, though, is I think more unusual: his inclination is to amazement. He likes to astonish people, and to be astonished himself:

‘Once someone said to me,
you’re no more than an adventurer
. They said it with disdain, as though they were spitting at me. And in fact I do think they were right. I seek out adventure, or rather, the unexpected, anything that lifts me out of boredom, in the way that others turn to alcohol or gambling. It’s an addiction.’

Félix Ventura is looking at him with a deliberate expression of disbelief. He wants to ask the obvious question:
Did you find any sign of your mother
?
– but he also knows that this would be giving in. Last time we dreamed he told me about a friend of his – the actor Orlando Sérgio – who when he goes out is often mistaken for the character he plays in a popular television series. People hug him, congratulate him or scold him, approving of what his character has done, or challenging it. Few know him by his real name. Some people even get annoyed when he tries to escape their sermons and reprimands by invoking his condition as an actor:

‘My name is Orlando Sérgio, sir. You’re confusing me with…’

‘Don’t try and kid me, old man, don’t even try. Just listen to my advice, have a little patience – so you think I don’t know who you are?’

Félix feels as though he’s falling into exactly that same trap. José Buchmann arrived yesterday from South Africa. He arrived in a full Colonel Tapioca outfit, dressed all in khaki, with long shorts and a vest covered in pockets. As he talks he takes various things out of these pockets, with just the same assurance as a circus magician pulls rabbits from a top hat:

   a) A little bronze frog.

‘It’s lovely, don’t you think? No? Don’t you like frogs?! Well, my friend, I do like it. Did you know that there are a lot of cultures in which the frog is seen as a symbol of transformation, of spiritual metamorphosis, representing the passing to a higher level of consciousness. This is obviously because of the complicated processes of change that a frog undergoes, but also at least for some indigenous peoples in the Americas, because of the hallucinogenic properties of a poison secreted by certain species. This one is a
Bufo alvarius
, a frog from the Sonora desert. I bought it from an antique dealer in Cape Town. It was on display in the window, and I went in to buy it, as I’ve always been interested in frogs. If I hadn’t been interested in frogs, if I hadn’t gone into the shop, I never would have found this:

   b) A watercolour, only slightly larger than a postage stamp.

‘They’re gazelles in flight. Look at the movement of the grass, the gazelles suspended above the grass, it looks like a ballet. And now look at the signature, here, in this corner – can you read it? Eva Miller. And notice the date: August 15th, 1990. Amazing, isn’t it?’

I could see that Félix was alarmed. He held the watercolour carefully between his fingers, as though he were afraid that the unlikelihood of the object could compromise its solidity.

‘This can’t be.’ He shook his head.‘I don’t know what it is you’re trying to do. I’m amazed you could have gone so far…’

‘Oh, come on! Do you really think I painted it myself? No, it happened just as I’ve told you. I found it on sale in an antiques shop in Cape Town, hidden away among dozens of other pictures of its kind. I spent all afternoon searching for other watercolours signed by her, but, alas, found
nothing. The dealer had bought the whole batch of them from an Englishman who’d decided to leave the country soon after Nelson Mandela’s victory. He’d lost trace of him.’

‘So you weren’t able to find out anything else about Eva Miller?’

José Buchmann didn’t reply right away. From another pocket, inside his vest, he drew:

  c) A slim pile of photos.

‘Look. This building is the one with the address that was on that letter that Eva Miller sent to Maria Duncan. It’s in an area where the white middle-class live. Have you ever been to Cape Town? It’s a funny place. Imagine a big, modern shopping centre, its halls decorated with tall palm trees. Beautiful palm trees. They’re plastic, of course, but you wouldn’t know it unless you touched them. Cape Town reminds me of a plastic palm tree. I tell you, it’s an impressive city – so clean, so tidy. It’s a fraud that it suits us to believe in. This is the fellow who lives in my mother’s old apartment today. You see the scars? In the eighties he lived in Maputo. He was a big-shot in the South African Communist Party. One evening he got into his car, switched on the ignition, and boom! – a massive explosion. He lost an eye and both legs. He was rather nice, I thought. He’s one of those people who, having spent his whole life fighting against apartheid, actually found it hard to adapt to the new rainbow nation. He complains that nowadays nobody defends ideals, that the people have been corrupted by the triumph of capitalism; he gets annoyed with democracy and all its liberal laws, but what he really misses most of all is the youth he’s lost, his eye and his legs. He’d never heard of Eva Miller. But the landlord, here, in this photo, an old Boer, nearly a hundred years old, he had – he remembered my mother perfectly.’

I’d positioned myself directly above them at this point, hanging
upside-down
from the ceiling, in order that I might watch every detail. Félix lit the lamp to study the photographs. The picture of the old Boer (in black and white – as were all the photos, in fact) was excellent. He was sitting in a big, serious, dark wood chair. A delicate light slanted down on to the right half of his face, illuminating the silence inside him. In the bottom right-hand corner you could just make out – almost hidden in the shadows – the nervous silhouette of one of those minute little dogs that
bourgeois women keep for company, and which I’ve always found extremely irritating, looking more like trained rats than dogs.

‘Do you like that photograph? Me too.’ José Buchmann smiled.‘The best photographs aren’t the ones that manage to sum up a character, they’re the ones that manage to sum up an age. In fact this old man received me with a certain amount of distrust, he didn’t waste too many words on me, but to make up for it he did give me an ending to my pilgrimage. Want to see it?’

  d) A cutting from the Johannesburg newspaper,
O Século
.

‘You ready? I think this is what you might call an anticlimax. You tell me. Read it!’

Félix did as he was told:

‘Eva Miller has died – This evening the North American painter Eva Miller died at her home in Sea Point, Cape Town. Having lived in southern Angola, and speaking our language perfectly, Mrs Miller had come to be well respected among South Africa’s Portuguese community. In recent years she had divided her time between Cape Town and New York. The cause of her death remains unknown.’

Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. We watch the dawn light break over the acacia trees, the birds pecking at the morning, as though at a fruit. Further off we see the serenity of a river, and the trees embracing its banks. We see the cattle slowly grazing, a couple running, holding hands, children dancing around a football, the ball shining in the sun (another sun). We see the calm lakes where there are ducks swimming, rivers heavy with water where elephants quench their thirst. These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they’re so far away we can’t touch them. Some are so far, so very far away, and the train moving so fast, that we can’t be sure any longer that they really did happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them? My memory is already failing me, we say, and maybe it was just the darkening of the sky. That’s how I feel when I think of my old incarnation. I remember loose, incoherent facts, fragments of a vast dream. A woman at a party, at the very end of the party, in that vague intoxication of smoke and alcohol and pure metaphysical tiredness, grabbing my arm and whispering in my ear:

‘You know, my life would make a good novel; not just any novel, a great novel…’

I think this happened more than once. I’m sure that most of those people have never read a great novel. I know now – I think I probably already knew then – that all lives are exceptional. Fernando Pessoa transformed the prosaic life story of a simple office worker into a
Book of Disquiet
that might possibly be the most interesting work in all of Portuguese literature. When a few days ago I heard Ângela Lúcia confess the pointlessness of her life, I suddenly wanted to get to know her better.
If a woman had one night taken me by the arm to tell me such a thing –
you know, there’s nothing remarkable about my life, nothing at all, I’m barely here at all
– perhaps I would have fallen in love with her. Despite what some of my enemies may have suggested (supported secretly by many of my friends) I’ve always been interested in women. I liked women. I used to go out with one or other of my close female friends on long walks. When we said goodbye and hugged, the scent of their hair, the feeling of their firm breasts, they all excited me. But if one of them took the initiative and tried to kiss me, or suggested something even more daring than a kiss, I would remember Dagmar (Aurora, Alba, Lúcia) and I’d panic. I lived a prisoner to that terror for many long years.