The Book of Chameleons

In your novels do you lie deliberately or just out of ignorance?" Laughter. A murmur of approval. The writer hesitated a few seconds. Then counter-attacked: "I'm a liar by vocation," he shouted. "I lie with joy! Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance." Then more soberly, he added - his voice lowered - that the principal difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is that in the former there exists only one truth, the truth as imposed by power, while in free countries every man has the right to defend his own version of events. Truth, he said, is a superstition.

Reality is painful and imperfect ... That's just the way it is, that's how we distinguish it from dreams. When something seems absolutely lovely we think it can only be a dream, and we pinch ourselves just to be sure we're really not dreaming - if it hurts it's because we're not dreaming. Reality can hurt us, even those moments when it may seem to us to be a dream. You can find everything that exists in the world in books - sometimes truer in colors, and without the real pain of everything that really does exist. Given a choice between life and books, my son, you must choose books

Só somos felizes, verdadeiramente felizes, quando é para sempre, mas só as crianças habitam esse tempo no qual todas as coisas duram para sempre.

I'm at peace, at last. I fear nothing. I yearn for nothing. I suppose you could call that happiness

Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. We watch the dawn light break over the acacia trees, the birds pecking at the morning, as though at a fruit. Further off we see the serenity of a river, and the trees embracing its banks. We see the cattle slowly grazing, a couple running, holding hands, children dancing around a football, the ball shining in the sun (another sun). We see the calm lakes where there are ducks swimming, rivers heavy with water where elephants quench their thirst. These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they’re so far away we can’t touch them. Some are so far, so very far away, and the train moving so fast, that we can’t be sure any longer that they really did happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them?

What life expects of us is that we celebrate.

- Conheci uma mulher extraordinária. Ah meu caro, faltam-me as palavras certas para a definir – tudo nela é luz! Achei um exagero. Onde há luz, há sombras.

Imagine a young man racing along on his motorcycle, on a minor road. The wind is beating at his face. The young man closes his eyes, and opens his arms wide, just like they do in films, feeling himself completely alive and in communion with the universe. He doesn't see the lorry lunging out from the crossing. He dies happy. Happiness is almost always irresponsible. We're happy for those brief moments when we close our eyes.

Sometimes, she said, she could recognize a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just a little bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the locals instinctively call ‘autumn’, and that the Europeans insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid grayness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens. In the drenched land of the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning, the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing. In the forests of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the light is like a liquid, which sticks to your skin, and has a taste and a smell. It’s noisy in Goa, and harsh. In Berlin the sun is always laughing, at least during those moments when it manages to break through the clouds, like in those ecological stickers against nuclear power. Even in the most unlikely skies, Ângela Lúcia is able to discern shines that mustn’t be forgotten; until she visited Scandinavia she’d believed that in that part of the world during the winter months light was nothing but the figment of people’s imagination. But no, the clouds would occasionally light up with great flashes of hope. She said this, and stood up, adopting a dramatic pose: ‘And Egypt? In Cairo? Have you ever been to Cairo?… To the pyramids of Giza?…’ She lifted her hands and declaimed: ‘The light, majestic, falls; so potent, so alive, that it seems to settle on everything like a sort of luminous mist.

Happiness is almost always irresponsible. We're happy for those brief moments when we close our eyes.

All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.

You can find everything that exists in the world in books – sometimes in truer colors, and without the real pain of everything that really does exist.

Talvez não o faça, para provar as frutas. Creio que o fazem para provar o risco.

um velho festeja o seu centésimo aniversário. Quis saber como é que ele se sentia. O pobre homem sorriu atónito, disse-me, não sei bem, aconteceu tudo demasiado rápido. Referia-se aos seus anos de vida e era como se estivesse a falar de um desastre, algo que sobre ele tivesse desabado minutos antes. Às vezes sinto o mesmo. Dói-me na alma um excesso de passado e de vazio.

Courage isn’t contagious; fear is, of course.

He takes a deep breath, and opens the door. In my other life I used to know people like that -- they're frightened by the sound of wind through the leaves, they can't bear cockroaches, not to mention policemen, lawyers, even dentists. And yet when the dragon bursts into the clearing, opens its mouth and spits fire, they stand up to them. Calm, cool as an angel.

So what do you think, Félix -- it is more important to bear witness to beauty, or to denounce horror?

Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance.

He was evil, and he didn't know it. He didn't know what evil was. That is to say, he was pure evil.

Fortaleza. I don’t think it will be hard for me to find her. If José Buchmann was able to find a fellow countryman, an accorentado, inside a phone box in Berlin, with no point of reference but a traffic light, it’ll be even quicker for me to find a woman who loves to photograph clouds.

By then it had started to rain. It was as though it were raining night – or to explain myself a little more clearly, it was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course. I kept expecting the stars to fall and shatter on impact with the window, with a flash and a crashing. But they didn’t fall. I turned out the light. I put the pistol to my head, and I fell asleep.