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 Ângela 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.