The Book of Chameleons (10 page)

‘I never forgot you. I never forgot her either – Marta – young Marta Martinho – passing for some sort of intellectual – poetess, painter and God knows what else. She was pregnant, almost at term, a huge belly. Round. So round. It’s as though I can see her now…’

At the door to the corridor, Félix has taken Ângela in his arms, and is watching the scene in silent shock. Pedro Gouveia is crying. I don’t know if he’s listening to what Edmundo Barata dos Reis is saying. The ex-agent of State Security seems to be enjoying himself. His voice echoes, firm, cold, in the silence of the night:

‘It happened a long time ago, didn’t it? During the struggles…’ He gestures to Ângela – ‘The girl hadn’t even been born. The Revolution was under threat. There was a band of nobodies, a gang of irresponsible petits-bourgeois who tried to seize power. We had to be tough.
We’re not going to waste time on trials,
the Old Man said in his address to the nation, and so we didn’t. We did what we had to do. When an orange starts rotting we take it out of the fruit basket and throw it in with the rubbish. If we don’t remove it, all the others will rot. One orange is pulled out, or two or three, and the others are saved. That’s what we did. Our job was to separate the good oranges from the rotten ones. But this guy – Gouveia – he thought that because he’d been born in Lisbon he’d be able to escape. He phoned the Portuguese consul –
Mr Consul, I’m Portuguese, I’m hiding in such-and-such a place, please come and rescue me, and my wife too, she’s a black woman but she’s pregnant with my child
… Ha! And do you know what Mr Portuguese Consul did? He went to meet the two of them, then handed them over to me! HA! I thanked him heartily, the consul, I told him he was a true revolutionary – I embraced him – angry though I was, yes, you mustn’t think I have no scruples, I’d have preferred to spit in his face, but I embraced him, said goodbye and went off to interrogate the girl. She held out for two days. Then she gave birth – right there – to a little girl, like this, so small; blood, blood – when I think about it all I see is blood… And Mabeco, a mulatto from the South – he died a while ago, a stupid way to go, stabbed twice in cold blood in a bar in Lisbon, they never found out who did it – Mabeco cut the umbilical cord with a penknife, then he lit a
cigarette and began to torture the baby, burning it on the back and chest. And the blood! Masses of blood, and the girl, that Marta – her eyes wide like moons – it pains me to dream about it – and the baby screaming, the smell of burning flesh. Even today when I lie down to sleep, the smell is still there, the sound of the child crying…’

‘Shut up!’

Félix, a rough shout, a voice I didn’t recognise in him. Again:

‘Shut up! Shut up!’

From where I’m watching, from here on top of the cupboard, I can see the top of his head lit up in rage – he breaks away from Ângela and advances at Edmundo, fists clenched, shouting:

‘Get out of here! Go!’

The ex-agent struggled to his feet, and straightened himself up. He threw a look of disgust at José Buchmann, letting out a harsh laugh:

‘Now I’m absolutely certain. It really is you – Gouveia – the factionalist. The other day your laugh almost gave you away. You used to laugh a lot in the faction meetings, before the business with the consul, when your own countryman handed you over to me. Not in prison, though – you just cried in prison. You cried all the time – boohoo, like a girl… I watch you crying now and I see that nobody Gouveia. Revenge – is that what you wanted? No, you need passion for that. You need courage! Killing a man, that’s a man’s job.’

And then –

       as

                    in

                                a

                                         slow

                                                       dance…

Ângela crosses the kitchen,

Comes to the table,

her right hand picks up the gun,

her left hand pushes Félix away,

she points at Edmundo’s chest –

                                                   and fires.

Out in the yard, where Félix Ventura buried the narrow body of Edmundo Barata dos Reis, now flowers the ruddy glory of a bougainvillea. It grew fast. It’s already covering a good part of the wall. It hangs down over the passageway, out there, in a cry of praise – or perhaps of accusation – to which no one pays any heed. A few days ago I summoned up the courage to go out into the yard for the first time. I scaled the wall, my heart pounding. The sun was shining on the shards of glass. I slipped carefully between them, and looked out over the world. I saw a big, wide road, muddy red, with tired old houses cluttering up the other side. People passed by, impervious to the bougainvillea’s cries. I was overwhelmed by the vast, cloudless sky, the heavy silence of the light, a flock of birds circling. I hurried back to the safety of the house. Maybe I’ll go back out sometime if the weather clouds a bit. The sun dazes me, hurts my skin, but I would like to take a more leisurely look at those people passing…

Félix has been sad. He’s hardly been talking to me. But today he broke his silence. He came into the house, took off his dark glasses, put them away in the inside pocket of his jacket, then took the jacket off and hung it on the back of a chair. Then he opened a folder and took out a small square yellow envelope.

‘Another photo has arrived – you see, my friend? She still hasn’t forgotten us.’

He opened the envelope with great care, trying not to tear it. A Polaroid. A river lit up by a rainbow. In the top right-hand corner, you could make out the silhouette of a naked youth diving into the water. In the margin, Ângela Lúcia had written in blue ink:
Plácidas Águs, Pará,
and the date. Félix went to get a little box of pins, those little ones with coloured round heads.
He chose one, a bright, ludicrous green, and fixed the photograph to the wall. Then he took three steps back to consider the effect. The living room wall facing the window is now almost completely covered in photographs. All together they make up a kind of stained-glass window; it reminds me of David Hockney’s experiments with Polaroids. Shades of blue predominate.

Félix Ventura turned the big wicker chair towards the wall and sat down. He spent some time there, motionless, silent, watching the fine evening light dying as it met the immortal light of the Polaroids. His eyes filled with tears. With a handkerchief he wiped them away. Then he said:

‘I know. You want me to forgive her. I’m so sorry my friend, but I can’t. I don’t think I can do it.’

The man who has just walked in reminds me of someone. But I still haven’t been able to work out who. Tall, elegant, well dressed. His grey hair, cropped short, gives him an air of nobility, an air which his broad, rather coarse face quickly dispels. I watch him make his way across the sleeping evening light, as a tiger. He ignores the hand Félix proffers him, and then – apparently a little bored – sits down with legs crossed on the leather sofa. He sighs deeply. His fingers drum on the sofa’s arm.

‘I’m going to tell you an improbable story. I’m going to tell you because I know you won’t believe me. I’d like to trade this improbable story, the story of my life, for another story – one that’s simple, and solid. The story of an ordinary man. I’ll give you an impossible truth, and you give me a vulgar and believable lie – OK?’

He’d started well. Interested, Félix sat down.

‘You see this face?’The man pointed to his face with both hands.‘Well, it’s not mine.’

A long pause. He hesitated. Then at last he began:

‘They stole my face. Oh… how can I explain this to you? They stole me from myself. I woke up one day to discover that they’d done plastic surgery on me, and left me in a clinic with an envelope full of dollars and a postcard:
We thank you for the services rendered – consider your job done
. That’s what it said on the postcard. They could have killed me. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me. Maybe they thought that this way I’m even deader… Or rather, that’s what I thought at first, that they wanted me to suffer. And I did, those first days I really did suffer. I considered reporting what had happened. I sought out my friends. Some of them didn’t believe me. Others did believe me, in spite of the mask I now wear, because after all I
know certain things – but they pretended not to believe me. I thought it would be dangerous to insist. And then one evening, an evening like this one, sitting alone at a table outside a bar at the end of the Island, I began to enjoy an amazing sensation – I wasn’t sure what to call it; but I do know now, it was Freedom! I’d been transformed into a free man. I had funds, I had access to accounts abroad that would see me out for the rest of my life. And I had the weight of no responsibilities – no critics, no remorse, no envy, no hatred, no rancour, no court intrigue, still less any fear that one day someone would betray me…’

Félix Ventura shakes his head, troubled:

‘I used to know someone – he was crazy, one of those unfortunates you find wandering around the city, getting in the way of the traffic, and he had a very strange theory. He believed that the President had been replaced by a double. Your story reminds me of that…’

The man looked at him, curious. His voice became more gentle, almost dream-like:

‘All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.’ A sigh. ‘But only a few lunatics – very few of them, and they do have to be very crazy indeed – are able to understand this. Anyway. What I’m after is for you to arrange for me exactly the opposite of what you usually do for people – I want you to give me a modest past. A name with no lustre to it whatsoever. A genealogy that is obscure, and irrefutable. There must be men who are rich but who have no family and no glory, surely? I want to be like that…’

A very tall cage rose up in front of us, broad and deep, out of which from time to time, in faint gusts, burst the happy chirping of birds. Parakeets, waxbills, Long-tailed Tyrants,
peitos-celestes
, touracos, turtledoves,
bee-eaters
. We were sitting on well-worn plastic chairs, in the fragrant shade of a leafy mango tree. To our left ran a low brick wall, painted white. Hugely tall papaya trees laden with fruit swayed beside the wall, languid as a mulatto woman. Looking over to the right, towards the house, were ranks of orange trees, lime trees, guava trees. Further still was a massive baobab which dominated the orchard. It looked as though it had been put there just to remind me that this was no more than a dream. Pure fiction. Chickens pecked away at the red earth, and in the very green grass, dragging their broods of chicks behind them. José Buchmann gave me a clear smile of victory.

‘Welcome to my humble domain.’

He clapped his hands and a slender, shy girl in a short little dress and plastic sandals appeared from the gloom. Buchmann asked her to bring a cold beer for him, a
pitanga
juice for me. Without a word the girl lowered her head, and vanished. Not long afterwards she returned balancing a bottle of beer, two glasses and a jug with the juice, on a tray. Mistrustfully I tasted the juice. It was good, bitter and sweet all at once, very fresh, with a fragrance that could light up even the gloomiest soul.

‘We’re in Chibia – but you know that already, don’t you? However much I thank our dear common friend Félix for having invented this land for me, I can never thank him enough.’

‘Excuse my curiosity. Is there really a plot, in a cemetery near here somewhere, with the name Mateus Buchmann on it?’

‘There is. A lot of the plots had been destroyed, among them – and why not? – my father’s. I had the stone made myself. You saw it. You did see the photograph, didn’t you?’

‘I understand. And Eva Miller’s watercolours?’

‘I really did find those at an antique-dealer’s, in Cape Town – a fabulous shop that sold a bit of everything, jewels and photo albums, right through to old cameras. Eva Miller is a common enough name. There must be several dozen watercolourists in the world with that name. The brief notice of her death that appeared in the Johannesburg
Século,
yes, I did make that one up – with the help of an old Portuguese typesetter friend of mine. I needed Félix himself to believe in my life story. If he believed it, who wouldn’t? And today, I honestly believe it myself. I look back now, back into my past, and I see two lives. In one, I was Pedro Gouveia, in another José Buchmann. Pedro Gouveia died. José Buchmann returned to Chibia.’

‘And did you know that Ângela was your daughter?’

‘Yes, I knew. I left prison in nineteen-eighty. I was destroyed, totally destroyed – physically, morally, psychologically. Edmundo took me to the airport, put me on a plane and sent me to Portugal. There was no one waiting for me there. I didn’t have family there any more, or at least none that I knew of, I had nothing left, no connection at all. My mother – poor woman – had died in Luanda while I was in prison. My father had been living in Rio de Janeiro for years with another woman. I’d never had much contact with him. Yes, I had been born in Lisbon, but I’d gone to Luanda when I was tiny, even before I’d learned to talk. Portugal was my country, they told me, they told me so in prison – the other prisoners, the informers – but I never felt Portuguese. I stayed in Lisbon for two or three years, working as a copy-editor on a weekly paper. It was then, through my contact with the photographers working on the paper, that I began to get interested in photography. I did a quick course, and set off for Paris. From there, I went to Berlin. I began working as a photo-journalist, and spent years – decades – crossing the world from war to war, trying to forget myself. I earned a lot of money – a lot, really – but didn’t know what to do with it all. Nothing appealed to me. My whole life was an attempt to escape. Then one evening I found myself in Lisbon – one of those
in-between
places on the map. In a restaurant in Restauradores, where I’d gone in attracted by the smell of chicken giblets like my mother used to make, I came across an old comrade of mine. He was the first person to tell me about Ângela. That son of a bitch – Edmundo – had derived great pleasure telling me every time he interrogated me of how he’d killed my wife. He told me they’d murdered the baby too. But it turned out they hadn’t killed her. They’d handed her over to Marina, Marta’s sister, and she had brought her up. She’d brought her up as though she were her own daughter. I was disturbed when I heard this. Years had passed, and I’d grown old. I wanted to know my daughter, to spend time with her, but I didn’t have the courage to tell her the truth. I became obsessed. I was overcome by hatred, by a savage bitterness towards those people, towards Edmundo. I wanted to kill him. I thought that if I killed him I’d be able to look my daughter in the eye. Perhaps if I killed him, I would be reborn. I returned to Luanda, with no clear idea of what I was going to do. I was afraid of being recognised. On a table in the bar of my hotel I found a business card for our friend Félix Ventura.
Give your children a better past
. Excellent paper. Very well printed. That was when I had the idea of contracting his services – with another identity it would be easier for me to move around the city without arousing suspicion. I could kill Edmundo, and disappear. But I wanted him to know why he was going to die, I wanted to confront him with his crimes – deep down, yes, I know that I wanted revenge. It was hard to find him, and when I did track him down I discovered that he’d gone mad. Or at least, he seemed that way. I went with him to Félix’s house because I wanted to hear someone else’s opinion of the matter – and Félix thought that – yes – Edmundo was mad. At that point I almost gave up. I couldn’t kill a madman. Then one evening I waited for him to leave the sewer where he used to hide out, and I slipped down into it. And there, in that filthy hole, I found a mattress, dirty clothes, magazines, Marxist literature and – would you believe it? – a set of archives containing the State Security reports for dozens of people. My case was one of the first. And that’s where I was, with a torch in one hand and the file in the other – thrilled, confused – when all of a sudden Edmundo appeared, like a soul condemned. He
jumped in from the gutter, landing two paces from me. He had a knife in his hand. He was laughing. My God, that laugh! He said:
The two of us, face to face again, comrade Pedro Gouveia – but this time I’m going to finish you off
… – and he lunged at me. I kicked him away, drew a gun from my belt – I’d bought the gun just days earlier at Roque Santeiro, believe it or not – and fired. The bullet hit his chest, just grazed it; I dropped the torch, dropped everything, in a panic, and he scrabbled up the hole. I grabbed his legs, held fast, but he shook, wriggled, freed himself, leaving me holding his trousers. I chased after him. The rest you know. You were there. You witnessed everything that happened after that.’

‘And what about Ângela – did she know you were her father?’

‘Yes, she swears she did. She told me that Marina had kept our tragedy hidden from her for years. Until one day – it was bound to happen – someone or other – a classmate, I think, someone from her university – dropped a hint. Ângela reacted very badly. She was furious with Marina and her husband – her parents, her real parents, after all – both wonderful people. She was furious with them, and left Angola. She went to London. She went to New York. She’d learned that I was a photographer, and this led to her becoming interested in photography. She became a photographer, like me; and, like me, she became a nomad. And a few months ago you noticed the coincidence that we were both photographers and both returned to the country at about the same time – and you didn’t believe it was a coincidence. Well, as you see it wasn’t entirely coincidence. Ângela swears that the moment she saw me, that night – you remember, that night in your house? – the moment she saw me, the moment she set eyes on me, she guessed who I was. I don’t know. When I think about that moment, all I remember is the shock of it. It was such a strange meeting for me. I did know who she was. Neither of us said a word. We just sat in silence. Months went by, until that evening when I shot at Edmundo, and he ran for refuge with the only person who could take him in – Félix Ventura, former student of Professor Gaspar, one of his tribe…’

José Buchmann was quiet. He drank down what was left of his beer in a long draught, and then sat, absorbed, his eyes lost in the dense foliage of the mango tree. The big orchard suited him. The shade fell across us like a
burst of fresh water. For a moment the rough passion of cicadas added to the singing of the birds. A drowsiness came over me, I wanted to shut my eyes and sleep, but I resisted it, sure that if I fell asleep moments later I would awake transformed into a gecko.

‘Have you had news from Ângela?’

‘Yes, I hear from her. At this moment she should be going down the Amazon on a big, lazy, slow-boat, one of those boats that at night-time they cover with hammocks. There’s a lot of sky there. A lot of light in the water. I hope she’s happy.’

‘And what about you – are you happy?’

‘I’m at peace, at last. I fear nothing, I yearn for nothing. I suppose you could call that happiness. Do you know what Aldous Huxley used to say?
Happiness is never grand
.’

‘And what will become of you now?’

‘Oh, I’ve no idea. I’ll probably be a grandfather.’