Dreams packaged as reality
O Vendedor de Passados
José Eduardo Agualusa
2004
Dom Quixote, Lisbon
231 pages
Reviewed by Richard Bartlett
There comes a stage in the fascination of O Vendedor de Passados (The Genealogy Salesman) when the realisation crawls across ones field of vision that the narrator, the instigator of the one-sided conversation with the albino businessman, is a gecko. And no ordinary gecko, but a nocturnal gecko with a translucent skin that makes it as pale as its mentor.
Don’t worry, nothing is lost in knowing this crucial fact before venturing into the interregnum of dreams and history, besides which if the cover is an obvious giveaway. And you won’t be reading this Angolan novel for quite a while yet unless you’re conversant in Portuguese. The opening of the book is accumulatively shocking until the narrator describes itself as object rather than participant.
I was born in this house and grew up in it. I’ve never been outside. As the afternoon grows I press my body against the crystal of the windows and contemplate the sky.
…
‘Goodness! So your lowliness can laugh?! What an extraordinary development…’
He seemed taken aback at me. His face came closer and I saw his blood-shot pupils. His acidic breath [bafo] enveloped my body.
‘What a burden it is, that skin of yours. We could be from the same family.’
I had been waiting for that. If I had been able to talk I would have been rude. My vocal apparatus, however, only allowed me to laugh.
"The unfolding is a journey through the philosphy of life’s meanings, of the importance of names, the clarity of madness, the difficulty of choosing between life and books"
Then suddenly the world is viewed from a different angle. Not as one limited by confinement to a house in Luanda, but freed by its ability to turn fly-on-the-wall drama into riveting adventure. And thanks to the world of dreams the gecko/narrator can experience reality and it is through the dreams that fact and fiction come to be distinguished.
That divide between fact and fiction in the lives of ordinary people is what Agualusa has tackled with O Vendedor do Passados. Yet he has done so in a format that could easily be described as magical realism, one based in southern Africa. As part of this merging of history as story, numerous characters play a part in the narrative, from Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, to South African high court judge Albie Sachs and Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. One of the most striking metaphors comes from the mouth of Felix:
"That’s Eça [de Queiroz, the Portuguese novelist]!" The albino smiled: "I recognise him through the adjectives, in the same way that I would be able to recognise Nelson Mandela just from his shirts…"
The salesman of the title is one Felix Ventura who earns his living in Luanda by creating family histories for those who feel out of place in high society. He turns fiction into fact, as with the case of his country’s Bread and Dairy Products Minister whose past lacks revolutionary credentials . A rather reactionary past of a man who fled independent Angola to seek his fortune in Portugal is transformed into that of one whose ancestors liberated Luanda from the Dutch in 1648 and whose name once graced a high school. "Felix embroiders reality with fiction." But this creation of genealogy takes a step further when Felix is requested by the Minister of Bread and Dairy Products to ghost write his biography, under the title of "A Vida Verdadeira de um Combatente" (‘The True Life of a Combatent’). This is a significant title for its similarity to the novel A Vida Verdadeira de Domingos Xavier by Luandino Vieira, published in English by Heinemann’s African Writers Series as The True Life of Domingos Xavier.
But the illustrious Minister of Bread and Dairy Products is a humorous aside in an otherwise intriguing transformation of forgotten reality into fictitious reality. It begins when a large man with a handlebar moustache enters Felix’s house, requesting a past and offering nothing other than his profession, that of photo-journalist. But José Buchmann, as this photographer comes to be known, does not just require a genealogy, he requires an entire life, including all the documents that permit existence in the modern world. Felix is persuaded to take this step from genealogist to forger with large sums of money. Felix sets to work. In doing so he is forced to address issues that his chosen profession masks, such as the irony of identity in modern Africa:
"No," he managed to say. "That I cannot do. I manufacture dreams, I am not a forger… Besides that, may I be frank, it will be difficult to invent an entire African genealogy for you, sir."
"Now this! And why?!…"
"Well… You are white, sir!"
"And so what?! You are more white than I am!…"
"White, me?!" The albino flabbergasted. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his brow: "No, no! I am black. I am pure black. I am monochrome. Can’t you see that I am black?…"
Agualusa warps our understanding of the interface between truth and lies as the creation of José Buchmann’s new life unfolds. As José uncovers his own story, so Felix becomes more entwined in reality, forced to sacrifice the privileged distance from physical life that being enveloped by books allows. While the narrator is always [almost] from the fly-on-wall-perspective of the gecko, it is through the dreams of the gecko that truth comes to be interrogated. It is also the real world of Felix, whose sustenance is lies, that begins to unravel as Buchmann goes in search of his ‘fictitious’ parents, and finds them between New York, Cape Town and the small Angolan town of Chibia.
The unfolding is a journey through the philosphy of life’s meanings, of the importance of names, the clarity of madness, the difficulty of choosing between life and books, the need for heroes, the ability to dream in colour or the inability to write a novel if you are surrounded by beauty, and the possibilities of reincarnation, as the gecko offers snippets of his life as a person.
Eventually climax is reached as genealogist, his lover, his client and crazed former policemanc refute the purpose of any fiction and add a dose of reality to an already multi-faceted magicalism. O Vendedor de Passados is a work filled with beautiful constructions, images exquisite in their metaphorical disturbances. It is a tale of modern life conducted within the confines of imagined worlds, of indifferent communities, of individuals striving to be remembered for the lies and forgotten for the truths.
Agualusa was born in 1960 in the central Angolan town of Huambo. He lives in Angola and has published 11 books (novels and short stories), only one of which, Creole, has been translated into English. He has been described, by the UK’s Financial Times, as one of the best writers in Africa today. Such a label is entirely deserving and ‘The Genealogy Salesman’ is ample evidence of this.
Richard Bartlett is editor of the African Review of Books
