Read Online The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa - Free Book Online Page B

knew only their name and profession. Sixty people agreed to take part in the challenge. Three succeeded. When he came to analyse the results, Milgram realised that there were on average just six contacts between the originator and the target. If his theory was correct, I’m now just two people away from my mother. Everywhere I go I bring with me a cutting from the U.S. edition of Vogue, the one you gave me, which reproduced an Eva Miller watercolour. The report was signed by a journalist by the name of Maria Duncan. She left the magazine years ago, but the Editor still remembered her. After a lot of hunting around I was able to track down a telephone number for her in Miami, where Maria lived when she still worked for Vogue. My call was answered by a nephew of hers, who told me his aunt no longer lived there. After the death of her husband she’d gone back to the city of her birth, New York. She gave me the address. And would you believe the irony? – it’s a block from the hotel where I was staying. I went to see her yesterday. Maria Duncan is an elderly lady with scrawny gestures, purple hair, and a strong, certain voice that seems to have been stolen from a much younger woman. I suspect that loneliness weighs heavily on her – it’s an ill that befalls old people, and so common  in big cities. She welcomed me with some interest, and when she learned of the reason for my visit became even more excited. A son looking for his mother – bound to touch any feminine heart.‘Eva Miller?’ – no, the name didn’t mean anything to her. I showed her the cutting from Vogue and she went off to fetch a box of old photographs, magazines and cassettes, and the two of us spent hours rummaging through it all, like two children in their grandparents’ attic. It paid off. We found a photo of her with my mother. And more importantly, we found a letter that Eva had written to her to thank her for sending the copy of the magazine. The envelope bore an address in Cape Town. I imagine Eva had been based in Cape Town before settling in New York. But I fear that in order to find her here – or wherever she now is – I’ll have to retread her whole tortured path. I fly to Johannesburg tomorrow, on my way back to Luanda; it’s just a step or two from Johannesburg to Cape Town. It may be a most important step for me. Wish me luck, and receive an affectionate greeting from your true friend,
    José Buchmann

The Scorpion

     

     
    Out of habit, and out of genetic predisposition (because bright light bothers me), I sleep during the day, all day. Sometimes, however, something will wake me up – a noise, a ray of sunlight – and I’m forced to make my way across the discomfort of the daytime, running along walls till I find a deeper crack, a deeper damper crack where I can, once again, rest. I don’t know what it was that woke me this morning. I think I was dreaming about something severe (I can never remember faces, only feelings). Perhaps I was dreaming about my father. The moment I awoke I saw the scorpion. He was just a few centimetres away. Motionless. Closed in a shell of hatred like a mediaeval warrior in his armour. And then he fell upon me. I jumped back, climbed the wall, in a flash, until I was up at the ceiling. I could hear quite clearly the dry tap of the sting against the floor – I can hear it still.
    I remember something my father said once when we were celebrating – with only pretend joy, I like to think – the death of someone we disliked:
    ‘He was evil, and he didn’t know it. He didn’t know what evil was. That is to say, he was pure evil.’
    That’s what I felt at precisely the moment that I opened my eyes and the scorpion was there.

The Minister

     

     
    After the episode with the scorpion I wasn’t able to get back to sleep. This meant that I was able to witness the arrival of the Minister. A short, fat man, ill at ease in his body. To watch him you’d think he’d been shortened only moments