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.
a) Low houses.
b) Straight roads, opening widely into a green landscape.
c) Straight roads, opening widely into the immense tranquillity of a cloudless sky.
d) Chickens pecking around in the red dust.
e) An old mulatto man, sitting at a sad-looking bar table, his gaze resting on an empty bottle.
f) Withered flowers in a vase.
g) An enormous birdcage, without birds.
h) A pair of well worn boots, waiting on the doorstep of a house.
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!’