The singer seemed to be deep in thought for a while, then she looked at Herrera and me (but she looked much more intensely at Herrera) and said she didn’t know for sure. Maybe he drank the blood, maybe he poured it down the toilet, maybe he pissed or shat on it, maybe he didn’t do any of those things, maybe he took his clothes off and smeared himself with blood and then took a shower, but it was all speculation. Then the three of us sat there in silence until Liza Do Elisa said that whatever he did, one thing was for sure: the guy had suffered and loved deeply.
And then Herrera asked her what she thought about this black guy who had played in the French team: did his magic work? No, said Liza Do Elisa. He was crazy. How could it work? And Herrera asked, How come his teammates started playing better? Because they were good players, said the singer. And then I weighed in and asked what she meant when she said he’d suffered deeply, how do you mean? And she replied, With his whole body, but more than that, with his whole mind.
“What do you mean, Liza?” I insisted.
“That he was crazy,” said the singer.
The bar’s metal gates had been pulled down. On a wall I noticed various photos of our team. The singer asked us (not just Herrera, me too) if we’d been talking about Buba. Not one muscle in Herrera’s face moved. I might have nodded. Liza Do Elisa crossed herself. I got up and went to take a look at the photos. There we were, the eleven of us: Herrera standing with his arms crossed next to Miquel Serra, the goalkeeper, and Palau, and, in front of them, squatting down, Buba and me. I was smiling, as if I didn’t have a care in the world, and Buba was serious, looking straight at the camera.
I went to the bathroom and when I came back Herrera was paying at the bar, and the singer was standing beside the table, smoothing her close-fitting, deep red dress. Before we left, the bartender, or maybe he was the owner, the guy who’d put up with us until dawn, anyway, asked me to sign another one of the photos decorating the wall. It was a photo of me on my own, taken just after I arrived in the city. I asked him his name. He said he was called Narcis. To Narcis, I signed it, affectionately.
It was already getting light when we left. We walked through the streets of Barcelona, like in the old days. I wasn’t surprised to notice that Herrera had his arm around the singer’s waist. Then we hailed a taxi and they accompanied me back to my hotel.
Photos
When it comes to poets, give me the French, thinks Arturo Belano, lost in Africa, leafing through a sort of photo album in which Francophone poetry celebrates itself, sons of bitches, he thinks, sitting on the ground, a ground of red clay, or something like that, but it’s not clay, not even clayey, though it is red, or rather coppery in color, or reddish, except at midday when it’s yellow, the book lying between his legs, a fat book, nine hundred and thirty pages, so close enough to a thousand pages long, a hardback, La poésie contemporaine de langue française depuis 1945, edited by Serge Brindeau, published by Bordas, a compendium of little texts about all the poets writing in French around the world, be it in France or Belgium, Canada or North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East, so it’s not such a miracle to find the book here, thinks Belano, because if it includes African poets, some copies would have come to Africa, obviously, in the luggage of the poets themselves or the luggage of some tragically naïve bookseller committed to the Francophone cause, though it’s still a miracle that one of those copies should happen to turn up just here, in this village, forsaken by god and abandoned by the human race, where there’s no one left but me and the ghosts of the contributors and not much else except the book and the changing colors of the earth, it’s weird, but the earth does actually change color every so often, dark yellow in the morning, yellow at midday, with watery streaks, like crystallized, dirty water, and who’d want to look at it after that, thinks Belano, looking up at the sky through which three clouds are floating, like three signs in a blue field, the field of conjectures or the field of mystical doctrines, amazed by the elegance of the clouds and their unspeakably slow procession, then looking at the photos, his nose almost touching the page, examining those faces with all their contortions, which isn’t the word exactly, yes it is, Jean Pérol, for example, who looks like he’s listening to a joke, or Gérald Neveu (whom Belano has read), who looks like he’s dazzled by the sun or living in a month that’s a monstrous coupling of July and August, something that only Africans can stand or the poets of Germany and France, or Vera Feyder, who is holding and stroking a cat, as if holding and stroking were one and the same, and they are, thinks Belano, or Jean-Philippe Salabreuil (whom he has read), so young, so handsome, he looks like a movie star, looking at me from the far side of death with a half smile, telling me or the African reader to whom this book belonged that it’s all right, that the constant motion of the spirit is futile and it’s all right, and Belano shuts his eyes without lowering his head, then he opens them again and turns the page and here we have Patrice Cauda, who looks like he hits his wife — what am I saying, his wife, I mean his girlfriend — and Jean Dubacq, who looks like he works in a bank, like a sad bank clerk with little hope left, a Catholic, and Jacques Arnold, who looks like the manager of the bank that employs the unfortunate Dubacq, and Janine Mitaud, large mouth, sparkling eyes, a middle-aged woman with short hair, a slim neck and, to judge from her expression, a subtle sense of humor, and Philippe Jaccottet (whom he has read), who’s thin and has a kind-looking face, though maybe, thinks Belano, it’s one of those kind-looking faces you should never trust, and Claude de Burine, the incarnation of Little Orphan Annie — even her dress, or what the photo shows of her dress, is identical to Little Orphan Annie’s-but who is this Claude de Burine, Belano asks himself aloud, alone in an African village whose inhabitants have all fled or been killed, sitting on the ground with his knees up, while his fingers flick with a singular rapidity through the pages of La poésie contemporaine in search of information about this poet, which he eventually finds: Claude de Burine, he reads, was born in Saint-Léger-des-Vignes (Nièvre), in 1931, and she is the author of Lettres à l’enfance (Rougerie, 1957), La Gardienne (Le soleil dans la tête — good name for a publishing house-1960), L’allumeur de réverbères (Rougerie, 1963) and Hanches (Librairie Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1969), and that’s all the biographical information there is, as if at the age of thirty-eight, after the publication of Hanches, Little Orphan Annie had disappeared, although the author of the introductory note says: