The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa

Author:José Eduardo Agualusa [José Eduardo Agualusa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129017
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2011-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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