12/09/2025
🌙 THE CHAMELEON WHO WHISPERED TO THE SHADOWS
By Giulio M. Bianco — The Hypnotist of Chicago
There are memories that arrive before words, before the ability to make sense of them, even before you know that one day they will return and ask to be told. Mine begin in Saudi Arabia, in the mountains of Abha, when life carried the dry rhythm of the winds and the scent of goat’s milk, and childhood walked barefoot through a world that was never truly silent. My father — I call him papà, though I mention his name, Angelo, only once because that is how he signed his projects — was a civil engineer, one of those men who don’t just build structures but possibilities, who read mountains the way one reads a face, who know exactly where to place a bridge so the earth will receive it, where a school will stand protected from the wind, and how to cross a plateau without challenging what must not be challenged. He designed roads, including Road 18, which at that time was not yet a road, just a carved corridor, a fresh scar in the rock.
Our Toyota was the color of sand, so the world swallowed it without noticing. We had our own home in Abha, but our heart lived each day in the houses of Ahmed, the patriarch who embraced us as his own. He had a stable of children: Salah, my closest friend; Khaled, quick as a bird; Amid, always moving; Zarah, the sister; and other siblings who ran in and out like the afternoon wind. Their mother belonged to all of us — a woman who cooked karuf with rice and goat cheese, who brought order where no order was needed, and let things go when letting go was right. They were our adopted family, and we were theirs. They never came with us to Jeddah; they stayed in Abha, among shaded terraces and the singing of the minarets. We, instead, sometimes followed papà on trips that felt longer than life itself.
And the sound of those days — the soundtrack that still moves through me now — was the call to prayer. It wasn’t someone near us singing; it was the air itself that sang. It rose from rooftops, climbed the mountains, crossed the streets, slipped into houses like an inevitable breeze. What I remember most is the beginning, that tone that shaped the world:
“Allāhu akbar…
Ashhadu an lā ilāha illa Allah…”
It was the musical theme of my childhood, and everything seemed to move in answer to it: the camels, the market, the dusty inclines, even the red-eyed hyenas that appeared at night at the edge of the track.
One evening, descending from Taif along that sand-and-rock road papà was helping to create, something happened that even today I don’t know whether to call a memory or a threshold. The dunes shifted like sleeping animals, the Ghibli blew flour-fine sand against the windows, my brother and sister slept curled up, and papà drove with the calm certainty of someone who knows the grammar of the desert by heart. We were approaching the point that remains engraved in my memory: the crossroads where the track from Taif descends, where the road to the right leads toward Mecca and then Medina, and where ahead there is nothing except the open desert, unfolding like a question.
Papà slowed down. On certain nights he would turn off the engine right there. And that night he did. The wind softened, almost as if it wanted to listen too. I looked outside and I saw him. A young man. Motionless at the edge of the dunes. His cloak moved by a breath that was not wind. He did not look like a Bedouin, nor a traveler, nor a lost man. He looked… present. A fixed point in a world that never stays still. He wasn’t looking at us. He seemed to be listening to something that didn’t come from this side of the world. When I tell this to Salah today, he says it’s impossible, that no one walks there alone. And yet I saw him. And I also know — without being able to explain why — that the young man carried a shadow that resembled mine. That perhaps he was me, in a time I don’t know. Or a version of me that was still arriving. The desert doesn’t explain these things. It simply shows them.
And it is about him that the story which follows now speaks, because the chameleon belonged to him. I tell it now exactly as I remember it, whole and untouched, as if the desert had kept it safe ever since.
There was not yet a name for that young man. He moved through the world like a footprint freshly drawn in the sand, ready to vanish at the first breath of wind. Some might have called him a beggar, some a pilgrim, some a son of the desert, but no one knew he was only searching for the place where his shadow would finally stop trembling. One starless night, while the sky hung like a mourning veil, he was forced to shelter between two rocks marked with graffiti from long-gone days. He listened to the desert breathe — a long, low breath that was not wind and not beast — and understood that something was watching him.
Then the chameleon appeared. It no longer carried the colors of life. It was a small relic of shadow, a scrap of twilight with two liquid-gold eyes that looked too deeply, as if they could read the thoughts one avoids confessing even to oneself. The creature spoke with a voice that did not come from its throat, but from those inner places where questions no one dares to say aloud are stored.
“Protect me for one night,” it said.
“And I will teach you the art of becoming what you were separated from long ago.”
The young man didn’t answer. There was no need. Some words are understood only through the skin, not the ears. He picked it up. The chameleon’s body was cold as the far side of the moon. Outside, the storm scratched the world; inside his cloak, the young man felt an unnatural calm rising, like when a hypnotic healer lightly touches the back of a hand and the breath changes before one knows why.
At dawn, the sky bled light. The chameleon slipped out of the cloth and said:
“To vanish does not require dying.
It is enough to remember the path back to the place from which every form originates.”
The young man didn’t understand until his own skin began to liquefy into the colors of the air. It was not transformation; it was disappearing into the truth of things. Seeing without eyes, breathing without lungs, stretching out like a shadow among the shadows of the world. The chameleon added:
“Every gift is a debt.
And every debt asks for a fire.”
It was the beginning of his apprenticeship.
The desert watched them travel in the hours when men sleep. The young man learned to move like a falcon unafraid of height, to remain still like a stone that keeps the stories of the wind, to roar like a wild dog who obeys no master, to dissolve into the silent water where the moon hesitated to see itself, to follow the step of camels, to perceive the world with the patience of creatures that feel no urgency. Every metamorphosis was a teaching and a wound. Every power a liberation and a chain. The more he became something else, the more his original form receded like a mirage. Sometimes, beneath the murmuring dunes, he felt a name whispered by a motherly voice… a name he could no longer remember.
One night he asked the master:
“Why me? Why not another wanderer?”
The chameleon, now pale as lunar ash, replied:
“Because you bear the Spiral Mark.
The sign of those who can become a thousand forms and still remain faithful to the one that generated them.”
The young man looked at his wrist. The spiral was no longer a stain; it was an eye. An eye that was opening.
The master’s decline was slow, like sand slipping through an hourglass. The young man noticed when the chameleon began losing its color, until it became transparent like a childhood memory. Its words arrived as short, broken breaths. One morning, as the sun rose like a blade, the chameleon said:
“Listen to my last lesson.
What you have searched for in all forms
is not outside you.”
Its body dissolved into a luminous powder floating around him like a thousand tiny lanterns. In the silence that followed, its voice spoke one last time, not into the air but into that secret place where every truth rests before it begins to grow:
“The greatest transformation is not fleeing from what you are.
It is remembering it.”
The young man remained alone. He sat. Closed his eyes. Inhaled as if drinking the world. Exposed the spiral to the sun. And understood that he no longer needed to change to protect himself, no longer needed to disappear to survive, no longer needed to imitate stone, falcon, dog, water, camel. He needed to return to the form hidden beneath all masks.
When he rose, the wind paused for an instant. He was no longer a wanderer. No longer a shapeshifter. He was the one who remembers. And from that day on, whenever danger approached, the air around him sparked with colors never seen before, as if the master still walked inside his shadow — not to guide him, not to protect him, but to remind him that every human being carries within a form no fear can erase.
The form of return.
And perhaps for this reason, on that night along the roads papà carved into the desert, I saw that young man at the crossroads. Perhaps he was only a wanderer. Perhaps a shadow from the future. Or perhaps — in the way the desert speaks to those who listen — he was a version of me still learning how to come home.
