‘I’ve met a remarkable woman. Oh, my friend, I don’t have the words to describe her – everything about her is Light.’
I thought he was exaggerating. Where there is light, there are shadows too.
Dream No. 5
José Buchmann was smiling. A faint, mocking smile. We were in the luxury car of an old steam train. There was a canvas hanging on one of the walls, which lit the air with a faint copper-coloured glow. I noticed a chessboard, dark wood and marble, on a little table between us. I didn’t remember having moved any of the pieces, but the game was clearly progressing. The photographer was doing rather better.
‘At last,’ he said, ‘I’ve been dreaming of this for several days. I wanted to see you. I wanted to know what you were like.’
‘So do you think this conversation is real?’
‘The conversation, certainly; it’s just the setting that is rather lacking in substance. There is truth – even if there isn’t realism – in everything a man dreams. A guava tree in bloom, for instance, lost in the pages of a good novel, can bring delight with its fictional perfume to any number of real rooms.’
I was forced to agree. At times, for example, I dream that I’m flying. And I’ve never flown so truly, with such authority, as in my dreams. Flying on a plane – in the days when I used to fly by plane – never gave me the same feeling of freedom. I’ve cried in dreams over the death of my grandmother, but it was better than my waking crying. And in truth I’ve shed more authentic tears for the deaths of literary characters than I ever did for the disappearance of many of my friends and relatives. What seemed least real to me was that canvas on the wall behind José Buchmann, a melancholy composition, not because of its subject – it wasn’t clear what its subject was, which may be the greatest virtue of modern art – but because of the glow of its colours. Through the windows, evening was drawing in, quickly. We saw beaches rush by, and trees laden with coconuts, the big uncombed mane of the casuarina tree. We even saw the sea, out there in the distance, burning in a massive fire of indigo blue. The train slowed to climb an incline, it panted like an asthmatic, an old mechanical beast, almost breathless. José Buchmann moved his queen forward, threatening my king’s knight. I sacrificed a pawn, which he looked at, absent-mindedly.
‘The truth is improbable.’
A lightning smile.
‘Lies,’ he explained, ‘are everywhere. Even nature herself lies. What is camouflage, for instance, but a lie? The chameleon disguises itself as a leaf in order to deceive a poor butterfly. He lies to it, saying Don’t worry, my dear, can’t you see I’m just a very green leaf waving in the breeze, and then he jets out his tongue at six hundred and twenty-five centimetres a second, and eats it.’
He took my pawn. I was silent, dazed by the revelation and by the distant brilliance of the sea. I could only remember someone else’s phrase:
‘I hate lying, because it’s inexact.’
José Buchmann recognised the words. He considered them a moment, assessing their solidity and their mechanism, their efficiency:
‘Truth has a habit of being ambiguous too. If it were exact it wouldn’t be human.’ As he spoke he became increasingly animated. ‘You quoted Ricardo Reis. Allow me, then, to quote Montaigne: Nothing seems true that cannot also seem false. There are dozens of professions for which knowing how to lie is a virtue. I’m thinking of diplomats, statesmen, lawyers, actors, writers, chess players. I’m thinking of our common friend Félix Ventura, without whom you and I would never have met. Name a profession – any profession – that doesn’t sometimes have recourse to lying, a profession in which a man who only tells the truth would be welcomed?’
I felt hemmed in. He moved a bishop. I responded, moving my knight. A few days ago I saw a basketball player on television, a naïve sort, complaining about journalists:
‘Sometimes they don’t write what I mean, they just write what I say.’
I told him this, and he laughed with pleasure. I was already beginning to find him less disagreeable. The train gave a long whistle, then a bewildered, long drawn-out howl, like a red ribbon stretched across the seafront. A group of fishermen on the beach waved to the train. José Buchmann responded to their wave with a bold gesture. Just a few minutes earlier, when the train had made a brief stop, he’d leaned out of the window to buy mangoes; I heard him speaking to the fruit sellers in a tight, sing-song language which seemed to me to be composed exclusively of vowels. He told me that he spoke English – in its various accents – and a number of German dialects, Parisian French and Italian. He assured me, too, that he was able to discourse with as much self-assurance in Arabic or Romanian.
‘I can also speak Groan,’ he joked, ‘the secret language of the camels. I speak Grunt, like a true-born wild boar. I speak Buzz, and the Chirp language of the crickets – and even the Caw of the crows. On my own in a garden I could discuss philosophy with the magnolias.’
He peeled one of the mangoes with a Swiss army knife, cut it in half, and gave me the larger piece. He ate his piece. He told me about a small island in the Pacific where he’d spent a few months, in which lying is considered the most solid pillar of society. The Ministry of Information, a revered, almost sacred institution, was charged with creating and propagating inaccurate news. Once this information is on the loose among the crowds, it grows, takes on new forms, eventually forms that contradict one another, generating copious popular movements and making society more dynamic. Let’s imagine that unemployment reached levels that were considered dangerous. The Ministry of Information – or simply, The Ministry – would start circulating the story that there had been a discovery of deep-sea petroleum within the country’s own territorial waters. The possibility of an imminent economic boom would revive trade, expatriate technicians would return home, keen to be a part of the reconstruction, and before long new companies and new jobs would be created. Of course, things don’t always pan out as the technicians predict. There was this one time, for example, when The Ministry (who whatever their name may suggest have always been a politically independent body) launched an attack on an opponent, hoping to destroy his career, spreading a suspicion that he’d been having an extramarital affair with an English singer. The rumour grew in size and strength, so much so that the opponent ended up divorcing his wife and marrying the singer (whom he’d never met before this had all started), earning him massive popularity and seeing him elected some years later to the Presidency.
‘The impossibility of controlling rumours,’ he concluded, ‘is the main virtue of such a system. That’s what gives the Ministry its near-divine nature. Check!’
I could see that I had lost the game. I decided to take a risk and offer him up my queen.
‘Félix Ventura says that he believes in things when they seem impossible – and that’s why he believes in you…’
‘He said that?’
‘He did. But I don’t believe in you. In you or in ngela Lúcia. Whenever two or more events stumble into each other and we don’t know why, we call it chance, coincidence. But what we call chance we should perhaps call ignorance. Aren’t you surprised that two photographers – a man and a woman – both of whom have lived in exile for so long, should return to the country at exactly the same time?’
‘I’m not, no. After all, I’m one of those photographers. But I do think it’s quite natural that you should be surprised. You see, my friend, coincidences produce amazement in just the same way, and with the same carelessness, as trees produce shade – checkmate.’
I knocked over my king (the white king), and awoke.
Real Characters
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:
1) In the early seventies the Minister was a young man employed in the Luanda postal services. He played drums in a rock band who called themselves The Un-namables. He was more interested in women than in politics. That’s the truth – or rather, the prosaic truth. In the book the Minister reveals that even at that time he was already dedicating himself to political activity, secretly (very secretly indeed) fighting against Portuguese colonialism. Driven by the bold blood of his ancestors (he makes several references to Salvador Correia de Sá e Benevides) – he created within the postal services a cell supporting the liberation movement. The group specialised in distributing pamphlets within letters aimed for colonial functionaries. Three of their number, the Minister among them, were turned in to the Portuguese political police and arrested on April 20th, 1974. It may be that the Carnation Revolution saved their lives.
2) The Minister left Angola in 1975, a few weeks before independence, and sought refuge in Lisbon. He was still more interested in women than in politics. Pursued by hunger he took out an advertisement in a popular newspaper: ‘Master Marimba: cures for the evil eye, envy, ills of the soul. Guaranteed success in love and business.’ It wasn’t an ad so much as a prediction. Within months he was (by magic indeed) a rich man. Women by the dozen made their way to his consulting room. Most were hoping to recover their husbands’ attentions, distance them from their mistresses, rebuild a failed marriage. Others just wanted someone to listen. He listened. His clients would pay, the Minister explained, according to their respective abilities. The women he cured offered him knitted cardigans to withstand the winter cold, and fresh eggs, and preserves. The wealthier ones handed him hefty cheques, they had electrical appliances delivered to him, good shoes, or designer clothes. A very beautiful blonde – the wife of a famous footballer – offered him herself. And eventually left him her car keys, the boot of the car filled with bottles of whisky. After the first elections the Minister returned to Luanda, and with the money he’d accumulated from so many years of consoling unfortunately-married women, he set up a chain of bakeries – the Marimba Union Bakeries. That is the truth that the Minister told Félix. The story Félix had the man tell in his true History was that in 1975, disillusioned with the course of events, and because he refused to participate in a fratricidal war (‘That hadn’t been what we’d planned’) the Minister went into exile in Portugal. Inspired by the teachings of his paternal grandfather, the wisest of men, well versed in the medicinal herbs of Angola, he founded in Lisbon a clinic dedicated to African alternative medicine. He returned to his country in 1990, once the civil war had come to an end, determined to contribute towards the reconstruction of the country. He wanted to give the people our-daily-bread. And that is exactly what he did.
3) The Minister’s return also signalled the beginning of his involvement in politics. He began by buying favours from certain people in the so-called ‘structures’ in order to accelerate the licensing of his bakeries, and it wasn’t long before he was a frequent visitor to the houses of ministers and generals. In just two years he himself was named Secretary of State for Economic Transparency and Combating Corruption. In The Real Life of a Fighter the Minister explains how – driven exclusively by great and serious patriotic motives – he accepted the burden of this first challenge. Today he is Minister for Bread-Making and Dairy Produce.
Anticlimax
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 th
e 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.’
The Book of Chameleons Page 7
