The Book of Chameleons Read Free Page B

of voices, this ship of mine.’
    Out there I could hear the night slipping by. Something barking. Claws scratching at the glass. Looking through the window I could easily make out the river, the stars spinning across its back, skittish birds disappearing into the foliage. The mulatto Fausto Bendito Ventura, second-hand book collector, son and grandson of second-hand book collectors, awoke one Sunday morning to find a box outside his front door. Inside, stretched out on several copies of Eça de Queiroz’s The Relic , was a little naked creature,skinny and shameless, with a glowing fuzz of hair, and a limpid smile of triumph. A widower with no children, the book collector brought the child into his home, raised him and schooled him, absolutely certain that there was some superior purpose that was plotting out this unlikely story. He kept the box, and the books that were in it too. The albino told me of it with pride.
    ‘Eça,’ he said, ‘was my first crib.’
    Fausto Bendito Ventura became a second-hand book collector quite without meaning to. He took pride in never having worked in his life. He’d go out early in the morning to walk downtown, malembe-malembe – slowly-slowly – all elegant in his linen suit, straw hat, bow tie and cane, greeting friends and acquaintances with a light touch of his index finger on the brim of his hat. If by chance he came across a woman of his generation he’d dazzle her with a gallant smile. He’d whisper: Good day to you, poetry … He’d throw spicy compliments to the girls who worked in the bars. It’s said (Félix told me) that one day some jealous man provoked him:
    ‘So what exactly is it that you do on working days?’
    Fausto Bendito’s reply – all my days, my dear sir, are days off, I amble through them at my leisure … – still provokes applause and laughter among the slim circle of old colonial functionaries who in the lifeless evenings of the wonderful Biker Beer-House still manage to cheat death, playing cards and exchanging stories. Fausto would lunch at home, have a siesta, and then sit on the veranda to enjoy the cool evening breeze. In those days, before independence, there wasn’t yet the high wall separating the garden from the pavement, and the gate was always open. His clients needed only to climb a flight of stairs to have free access to his books, piles and piles of them, laid out at random on the strong living room floor.
    Félix Ventura and I share a love (in my case a hopeless love) for old words. Félix Ventura was originally schooled in this by his father, Fausto Bendito, and then by an old teacher, for the first years of high school, a man subject to melancholic ways, and so slender that he seemed always to be walking in profile, like an old Egyptian engraving. Gaspar – that was the teacher’s name – was moved by the helplessness of certain words. He saw them as down on their luck, abandoned in some desolate place in thelanguage, and he sought to recover them. He used them ostentatiously, and persistently, which annoyed some people and unsettled others. I think he succeeded. His students started using these words too, to begin with merely in jest, but later like a private dialect, a tribal marking, which set them apart from their peers. Nowadays, Félix Ventura assured me, his students are still quite capable of recognising one another, even if they’ve never met before, on hearing just a few words…
    ‘I still shudder each time I hear someone say ‘duvet’, a repulsive gallicism, rather than ‘eiderdown’, which to me (and I’m sure you’ll agree with me on this) seems to be a very lovely, rather noble word. But I’ve resigned myself to ‘brassiere’. ‘Strophium’ has a sort of historical dignity about it, but it still sounds a little odd – don’t you think?’ 

Dream No. 1

     

     
    I’m crossing a road in some alien city, making my way through the crowds of people. People of all races, all creeds, all sexes (for a