The Savage Detectives (66 page)

Then I was at a bodybuilding championship, a minor championship in La Bisbal, where I came in second, which made me really happy, and I hooked up with this guy Juanma Pacheco, who was from Seville and worked as a bouncer at the club where the championship was held and used to be a bodybuilder. When I got back to Malgrat, Arturo wasn't there. I found a note on his door informing me that he would be gone for three days. He didn't say where, but I assumed he'd gone to see his son. Later, thinking about it, I realized that he didn't need to be gone for three days to see his son. When he got back four days later, he looked as happy as I'd ever seen him. I didn't want to ask him where he'd been, and he didn't tell me. He just showed up one night at La Sirena and we started to talk as if we'd just seen each other that morning. He stayed at the pub until closing time and then we walked home. I felt like talking and I suggested that we go have a couple of drinks at a bar that a friend of mine owned, but he said he'd rather go home. Still, we didn't hurry. At that time of night there's hardly anyone on the Paseo Marítimo and it's nice out, with the breeze from the sea and music drifting from the few places that are still open. I felt like talking and I told him about Juanma Pacheco. What do you think? I said when I was finished. He has a good name, he said. His real name is Juan Manuel, I said. I guessed that, he said. I think I'm in love, I said. He lit a cigarette and sat on a bench on the Paseo. I sat down beside him and kept talking. At that moment I even understood, or thought I understood, all of Arturo's insanities, the crazy things he'd done and the things he was about to do, and I would've liked to go to Africa too that night while we were watching the sea and the lights in the distance, the little trawlers; I felt capable of anything and especially of leaving for somewhere far away. I wish it would storm, I said. Don't say that, he said, it could start raining any minute. I laughed. What've you been doing for the last few days? I asked him. Nothing, he said, thinking, watching movies. What movies did you see?
The Shining
, he said. What an awful movie, I said, I saw it years ago and afterward I couldn't sleep. I saw it years ago too, said Arturo, and I was up all night. It's a great movie, I said. It's very good, he said. We were quiet for a while, watching the sea. There was no moon and the lights of the fishing boats were gone. Do you remember the novel that Torrance was writing? Arturo said suddenly. Torrance who? I said. The bad guy in the movie, in
The Shining
, Jack Nicholson. That's right, the son of a bitch was writing a novel, I said, although the truth is I hardly remembered. More than five hundred pages long, said Arturo, and he spat toward the beach. I'd never seen him spit. Excuse me, there's something wrong with my stomach, he said. Don't worry about it, I said. He'd written more than five hundred pages and all he'd done was endlessly copy a single sentence, in every possible way: capitalized, lowercase, double-columned, underlined, always the same sentence, nothing else. And what was the sentence? Don't you remember? No, I don't, I have a terrible memory, all I remember is the ax, and that the boy and his mother are saved at the end of the movie. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, said Arturo. He was crazy, I said, and at that moment I stopped watching the sea and turned toward Arturo, beside me, and he looked like he was about to collapse. It might have been a good novel, he said. Don't scare me, I said, how could it be a good novel when it was just one sentence repeated over and over again? That shows a lack of respect for the reader. Life is shitty enough without being stuck buying a book where all it says is "All work and no play…" It would be like me serving tea instead of whiskey, it would be false advertising but it would just be rude too, don't you think? Your common sense amazes me, Teresa, he said. Have you looked at what I write? he asked. I only go into your room when you invite me in, I lied. Then he told me about a dream, or maybe it was the next morning, while he watched me doing my daily exercises, sitting at the table with his chamomile tea and with that look on his face as if he hadn't slept for a week.

I thought it was a nice dream and that's why I remember it. Arturo was an Arab boy who goes hand in hand with his little brother to an Indonesian outpost to launch a transoceanic communications cable. Two Indonesian soldiers wait on him. Arturo is dressed like an Arab. In the dream he must be twelve years old, his little brother maybe six or seven. His mother watches from a distance, but then her presence fades. Arturo and his little brother are left alone, although both are wearing those wide, short, sharply curved Arab knives on their belts. Together they haul the cable, which looks handcrafted or homemade. And they're also carrying a barrel of a thick, greenish-brown liquid, which is the money to pay the Indonesians. As they wait, Arturo's little brother asks him how many feet long the cable is. Not feet, says Arturo, miles! The soldiers' hut is built of wood and it's on the shore. As they wait, another Arab, an older guy, cuts in front of them in line, and although Arturo's first impulse is to insult him or at least accuse him of being rude, first checking to see whether his curved sword is in place, he soon gives up the idea when the older Arab begins to tell a story to the Indonesian soldiers and to anyone else who wants to listen. The story is about a party in Sicily. Arturo told me that when he and his little brother heard it they felt happy, they felt thrilled, as if the other man was reciting a poem. In Sicily there's a glacier made of sand. A motley crowd of spectators watch it from a safe distance, except for two men: the first climbs to the top of a hill where the glacier is balanced, and the other stands at the foot of the hill and waits. Then the one on top starts to move or dance or stamp on the ground and the top layer of the glacier begins to crumble, sending down big masses of sand that fall toward the man below. He doesn't move. For a moment it looks as if he'll be buried in sand, but at the last instant he leaps aside and is saved. That was the dream. The sky in Indonesia was almost green, the sky in Sicily almost white. It had been a long time since Arturo had such a good dream. Maybe the Indonesia and the Sicily he dreamed of were on another planet. In my opinion, I said, that dream means your luck is about to change. From now on, things will go your way. Do you know who your little brother in the dream was? I can guess, he said. It was your son! When I said that, Arturo smiled. Days later, though, he brought up the Andalusian girl again. I wasn't feeling well and I told him to fuck off. Now I know I shouldn't have, even if it didn't really matter. I think I talked to him about life's responsibilities, the things I believed in and clung to in order to keep breathing. It must have seemed like I was angry at him, but I wasn't. He didn't get angry at me. That night he didn't come home to sleep. I remember because it was the first night that Juanma Pacheco came to see me. He had time off every fifteen days and he came to Malgrat wanting to make the most of it. We went into my room and tried to make love. I couldn't do it. I tried several times, but I couldn't. Maybe it was because of Juanma's muscles, which were flabby since he hadn't been to the gym for so long. Whatever it was, it was probably my fault. I kept getting up to go into the kitchen for a drink of water. One of those times, I don't know why, I went into Arturo's room. On the table was his typewriter and a neat stack of paper. Before I flipped through the sheets I thought about
The Shining
and it gave me the shivers. But Arturo wasn't crazy, I knew that. Then I walked around the room, opened the window, sat on the bed, heard footsteps in the hall. Juanma Pacheco's face appeared around the door. He asked me if anything was wrong. Nothing, it's all right, I said, I'm thinking, and then I saw the packed suitcases and I knew he was going to leave.

He gave me four books that I still haven't read. A week later we said goodbye, and I went with him to the station.

Jacobo Urenda, Rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris, June 1996
. This is a hard story to tell. It seems easy, but scratch the surface and you realize it isn't easy at all. Every story about that place is hard. I travel to Africa at least three times a year, usually to the hot spots, and when I get back to Paris it's as if I'm still dreaming and I can't wake up, although you might think that Latin Americans were less affected by horror than anyone else, at least in theory.

That was where I met Arturo Belano, in the Luanda post office, on a hot afternoon when I had nothing better to do than spend a fortune on calls to Paris. He was at the fax window going head to head with the guy acting as manager, who was trying to overcharge him, and I backed him up. By coincidence, it turned out we were both from the Southern Cone, him from Chile and me from Argentina, and we decided to spend the rest of the day together. I might have been the one to suggest it, I've always been a sociable person, I like to talk and get to know other people, and I'm not a bad listener, although sometimes when I seem to be listening I'm actually thinking my own thoughts.

We soon realized that we had more in common than we expected. At least I realized it, and I guess Belano did too, not that we said anything, or patted each other on the back. We'd both been born around the same time, we'd both split from our respective countries when what happened happened, we both liked Cortázar, we both liked Borges, neither of us had much money, and we both spoke shitty Portuguese. Basically, we were the typical forty-something Latin American guys who find themselves in an African country on the edge of the abyss or the edge of collapse, whichever you want to call it. The only difference was that when I finished my work (I'm a photographer for the La Luna Agency) I was going back to Paris, and when poor Belano finished his work he was going to stick around.

But why, man? I asked him at some point during the night, why don't you come with me to Europe? I even went so far as to offer to lend him the money for the ticket if he didn't have it, which is the kind of thing you say when you're very drunk and the night is not just foreign but also big, very big, so big that if you don't look out it'll swallow you up, you and everyone around you, but that's something you wouldn't know anything about, you people who've never been to Africa. I do know. Belano did too. Both of us were freelancers. I worked for La Luna, as I've said, Belano as a stringer for a Madrid newspaper that paid him next to nothing for his pieces. And although he didn't tell me just then why he wasn't going to leave, we sat there comfortably together until we were carried by the night or by inertia (so to speak, since real inertia in Luanda made you hide under your cot) to a kind of private club belonging to this guy João Alves, a two-hundred-fifty-pound African. There we ran into some people we knew: reporters and photographers, cops and pimps, and we kept talking. Or maybe not. Maybe we went our separate ways there, maybe I lost sight of him in the cigarette smoke like so many people you meet when you're out on a job, people you talk to and then lose sight of. In Paris, it's different. People drift away, people dwindle, and you have time to say goodbye, even if you'd rather not. Not in Africa. People
talk
there, people tell you their
problems
, and then they vanish in a cloud of smoke, the way Belano vanished that night, without warning. And you never even consider the possibility of running into X or Y again at the airport. The possibility exists, I'm not saying it doesn't, but you don't consider it. So that night, when Belano disappeared, I stopped thinking about him, stopped thinking about loaning him money, and drank and danced and then I fell asleep in a chair and when I woke up with a start (more out of fear than because I was hungover, since I was afraid I'd been robbed, not being in the habit of going to places like João Alves's) it was already morning and I went outside to stretch my legs and there he was, in the yard, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me.

Yes, it was quite the gesture.

After that, we saw each other every day. Sometimes I'd buy him dinner and sometimes he'd buy dinner for me. It was cheap, he wasn't the kind of person who ate much. Each morning he'd have his little chamomile tea and when there wasn't any chamomile he'd order linden or mint or whatever herbal tea they had, he never touched coffee or black tea and he didn't eat anything fried. He was like a Muslim, he wouldn't touch pork or drink alcohol and he always carried around lots of pills.
Che
Belano, I said to him one day, you're like a walking drugstore, and he gave this bitter laugh, as if to say don't hassle me, Urenda, I'm not in the mood. As for women, he got along without them, as far as I know. One night the American reporter Joe Rademacher invited some of us to a dance in the neighborhood of Pará to celebrate the end of his mission to Angola. The dance was behind a private house, in a courtyard of packed dirt, and it was wonderful how many girls were there. Like modern men, we had all brought plenty of condoms, except for Belano, who joined us at the last minute, mostly because I insisted. I won't say he didn't dance, because in fact he did, but when I started to ask him whether he had condoms or if he wanted some of mine, he cut me off, saying: Urenda, I have no need of such things, or words to that effect, which leads me to believe he limited himself to dancing.

When I went back to Paris, he stayed in Luanda and was planning to head for the interior, which still seethed with armed, lawless gangs. We had one final conversation before I left. His story didn't really hang together. On the one hand, I got the sense that life meant nothing to him, that he'd taken the job so he could die a picturesque death, a death that was out of the ordinary, the usual bullshit. My generation all overdosed on Marx and Rimbaud. (I don't mean this as an excuse, at least not the way you think, and I'm not here to judge anyone's reading habits.) On the other hand, and this is what puzzled me, he took good care of himself. He took his little pills religiously each day. Once I went with him to a drugstore in Luanda in search of something resembling Ursochol, which is ursodeoxycholic acid, and which was more or less what kept his sclerotic bile duct functioning, as I understood it. When it came to these things, Belano behaved as if his health were extremely important to him. I watched him go into that drugstore speaking his abysmal Portuguese and scan the shelves, first in alphabetical order and then at random, and when we left, without the lousy ursodeoxycholic acid, I said to him
che
Belano, don't worry (because he had such a dire look on his face), I'll send you some as soon as I get to Paris, and then he said: you can't without a prescription, and I started to laugh, and I thought this man wants to live, there's no way he's planning to die.

But it wasn't as simple as that. He needed medicine, that was a fact. Not just Ursochol, but also mesalazine, and omeprazole, and the first two had to be taken daily, four mesalazine for his colitis and six Ursochol for his sclerosis. He could do without the omeprazole, I'm not sure whether he took it for a duodenal ulcer or a gastric ulcer or acid reflux or what, but he didn't take it every day. The funny thing, if this makes any sense, is that he
worried
about getting his medicine, worried about eating something that might bring on an attack of pancreatitis (he'd had three already, in Europe, not Angola; if he had an attack in Angola he would die for sure), I mean, he actually worried about his health, and yet when we talked, talked man to man, I guess you'd say, which sounds terrible but what else do you call a dismal conversation like that, he insinuated that he was there to get himself killed, which I suppose isn't the same as being there to kill yourself or to commit suicide, since you aren't taking the trouble to do it yourself, although in the end it's just as disturbing.

When I got back to Paris, I told Simone about it-that's my wife's name, she's French-and she asked me what Belano was like, asked me to describe him physically, in full detail, and then she said she understood him. How can you understand him? I didn't understand him. It was my second night back, we were in bed with the lights out, and that was when I told her everything. So what about the medicine, have you bought it? said Simone. No, not yet. Well, buy it first thing tomorrow and send it right away. I will, I said, but I kept thinking that there was something wrong with the story. In Africa you're always coming across strange stories. Do you think it's possible that someone could travel to such a faraway place in search of death? I asked my wife. It's perfectly possible, she said. Even a forty-year-old man? I said. If he has a spirit of adventure, it's perfectly possible, said my wife. Unlike most Parisian women, who tend to be practical and thrifty, she's always had a romantic streak. So I bought him the medicine, sent it to Luanda, and soon afterward received a postcard thanking me. I calculated that what I'd sent would last him twenty days. What would he do after that? I supposed he would return to Europe or die in Angola. And that was the last thought I gave it.

Months later I ran into him at the Grand Hotel in Kigali, where I was staying and where he came every once in a while to use the fax. We greeted each other effusively. I asked whether he was still working for the same paper in Madrid and he said he was, plus a couple of South American magazines, which brought in a little more money. He'd stopped wanting to die, but he was too broke to get back to Catalonia. That night we had dinner together at the house where he was living (Belano never stayed at hotels like the other foreign journalists, he'd rent a room or a bed or a corner of some private house where they'd let him stay for cheap) and we talked about Angola. He told me he'd been in Huambo, he'd traveled the Cuanza River, he'd been in Cuito Cuanavale and in Uíge, the pieces he'd written had gone over well, and he'd made it to Rwanda overland, first heading from Luanda to Kinshasa and then on to Kisangani, sometimes along the Congo River and other times along the treacherous forest roads, and then on to Kigali, in total more than thirty days of nonstop traveling. The terrain itself would have made this next to impossible, never mind the political situation. When he was done talking I couldn't tell whether to believe him or not. On the face of it, it was incredible. Also, he told it with a half smile that inclined you to doubt him.

I asked about his health. He said he'd come down with diarrhea in Angola, but now he was all right. I told him that my photographs were selling better and better. If he wanted, I said, and this time I think I meant it, I could lend him money, but he wouldn't hear of it. Then, despite myself, I asked him about the great death quest and he told me it made him laugh now to think about it and that I'd see real death, the beall and end-all, up close the next day. He was, what's the word, changed. He could go for days at a time without taking his pills. He seemed calmer. Happy too, when I saw him, because he'd just received medicine from Barcelona. Who sent it to you? I asked him, a woman? No, he said, a friend. His name is Iñaki Echevarne, we had a duel. A fight? I said. No, a duel. And who won? I don't know which of us killed the other, said Belano. Fantastic! I said. Yes, he said.

Meanwhile, he'd clearly taken charge of his surroundings, or begun to, which is something I could never do. Nobody can, really, except the big media correspondents who have plenty of backup, and the rare freelancer who does without by making lots of friends and by simply
getting
it, how to maneuver in the African environment.

Physically, he was thinner than he'd been in Angola, skin and bones, in fact, but he looked healthy, not sick. Or that's how he looked to me, anyway, in the middle of so much death. His hair was longer, he probably cut it himself, and he had on the same clothes he'd worn in Angola, though they were filthier now and falling apart. He'd picked up the lingo, I could tell that right away, the language of a country where life was worth nothing and talk-along with money-was ultimately the key to everything.

The next day I went to the refugee camps and when I got back he was gone. At the hotel there was a note wishing me luck and asking me, if it wasn't too much trouble, to send him medicine when I got back to Paris. His address was included with the note. I went looking for him. He wasn't there.

My wife wasn't surprised at all when I told her. But Simone, I said, there was one chance in a million that I would see him again. These things happen, was all she said. The next day she asked whether I was planning to send him the medicine. I already had.

That time I didn't stay long in Paris. I went back to Africa, sure I'd run into Belano, but our paths didn't cross, and although I asked the veteran correspondents about him, none of them knew him. The few who remembered him had no idea where he might have gone. And the same thing happened on the next trip, and the next. Did you see him? my wife would ask when I got back. I didn't see him, I would reply, maybe he went back to Barcelona or back home. Or somewhere else, said my wife. Could be, I'd say, we'll never know.

Until I ended up in Liberia. Do you know where Liberia is? That's right, on the west coast of Africa, more or less between Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. Good. But do you know who rules the country? the right or the left? I'm willing to bet you don't.

I got to Monrovia in April on a ship from Freetown, Sierra Leone. It had been chartered by a humanitarian organization, the name of which escapes me now, on a mission to evacuate hundreds of Europeans who were waiting at the American embassy-the only reasonably safe place in Monrovia, according to anyone who'd been there or gotten firsthand news of what was going on. These ultimately turned out to be Pakistanis, Hindus, North Africans, and the odd black Englishman. The other Europeans, if I can put it that way, had gotten out long before, and only their secretaries were left. For a Latin American it was odd to associate an American embassy with safety, it seemed a contradiction in terms, but times had changed, and why shouldn't the embassy be safe? I figured I might end up there myself. Still, the information struck me as a bad omen, a clear sign that everything would go wrong.