Claude de Burine, avant toute autre chose, dit l’amour, l’amour inépuisable, and when Belano reads that, it all makes sense in his overheated brain: someone who dit l’amour could perfectly well disappear at the age of thirty-eight, especially, especially if that person is the double of Little Orphan Annie, with the same round eyes, the same hair, the eyebrows of someone who has seen the inside of a foundling hospital, an expression of perplexity and pain, a pain alleviated to some degree by caricature, but it’s pain all the same, and then Belano says to himself, I’m going to find a lot of pain here, and turns back to the photos and discovers, under the photo of Claude de Burine, between the photo of Philippe Jaccottet and the photo of Jacques Réda, Marc Alyn and Dominique Tron sharing the same snapshot, a lighter moment, Dominique Tron who’s so different from Claude de Burine, on the one hand, the existentialist, the beatnik, the rocker, and on the other, meekness incarnate, a woman forsaken and banished, thinks Belano, as if Dominique lived in a whirlwind while the all-suffering Claude looked on from a metaphysical distance, and again Belano’s curiosity is piqued and he consults the index and then after reading né à Bin el Oidane (Maroc) le 11 décembre 1950, he realizes that Dominique Tron is a man, and he thinks as he brushes a (completely imaginary) mosquito away from his ear, I must be suffering from sunstroke, and reads Tron’s list of publications: Stéréophonies (Seghers, 1965, that is, at the age of fifteen), Kamikaze Galapagos (Seghers, 1967, that is, at the age of seventeen), La Souffrance est inutile (Seghers, 1968, that is, at the age of eighteen), D’Épuisement en épuisement jusqu’à l’aurore, Elisabeth, an autobiographical oratorio, followed by a mystery, Boucles de feu (Seghers, 1968, that is, again, at the age of eighteen), and De la Science-fiction c’est nous à l’interprétation des corps (Eric Losfeld, 1972, that is, at the age of twenty-two), and that’s all there is, largely because La poésie contemporaine was published in 1973, had it been published in 1974 there surely would have been more titles, and then Belano thinks about his own youth, when he used to churn it out like Tron, and was perhaps even better looking than Tron, he thinks, squinting at the photo, but to publish a poem, in Mexico, all those years ago when he lived in Mexico City, he’d had to sweat blood, because Mexico is Mexico, he reflects, and France is France, and then he shuts his eyes and sees a torrent of ghostly, emblematic Mexicans flowing like a gray breath of air along a dry river bed, and before opening his eyes, holding the book firmly in both hands, he sees Claude de Burine again, the photo-portrait of Claude de Burine, in her lonely poet’s tower, watching the adolescent cyclone that is Dominique Tron, who wrote La souffrance est inutile, and perhaps he wrote it for her, for Claude, a book that is a burning bridge, which Dominique himself will not cross, but Claude will, oblivious to the bridge, oblivious to everything, she will cross it and be burnt in the attempt, thinks Belano, as all poets are burnt, even the bad ones, on those burning bridges that are so enticing, so fascinating when you’re eighteen, or twenty-one, but then so dull, so monotonous, beginning and ending so predictably, those bridges that he crossed like Ulysses on his way home, bridges theorized and conjured up before his eyes like fantastic Ouija boards, enormous burning structures repeated over and over into the depths of the screen, which may stop poets at eighteen or twenty-one, but twenty-three-year-old poets can cross them with their eyes closed, like sleepwalking warriors, thinks Belano as he imagines the helpless, the fragile, the terribly fragile Claude de Burine running toward the arms of Dominique Tron, on a course he chooses to imagine as erratic, although there is something in Claude’s eyes, and in Dominique’s, and in the eyes of the burning bridge, that strikes him as familiar, something that — like the changing colors all around the empty village-speaks in a down-to-earth way of the arid, sad and terrible end to come, and then Belano shuts his eyes and keeps still, and opens his eyes again and turns to another page, although this time he’s determined to look at the photos and nothing else, and that’s how he finds Pierre Morency, a good-looking kid, Jean-Guy Pilon, a difficult character, not photogenic, Fernand Ouellette, a man who’s going bald (and remembering that the book was published in 1973, all things considered, it’s pretty safe to assume that he’s completely bald by now), and Nicole Brossard, a girl with straight hair, with a part in the middle, big eyes, a square jaw, pretty, Belano finds her pretty, but he doesn’t want to know how old Nicole is or what books she has written so he turns the page, and suddenly enters (though in the village where he happens to be stranded there is no such thing as a sudden entry) the kingdom of the thousand and one nights of literature and memory, because he has come to the photos of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine and Kateb Yacine and Anna Greki and Malek Haddad and Abdellatif Laabi and Ridha Zili, Arab poets who write in French, and he remembers having seen some of those poets already, many years ago, maybe in 1972, before the publication of the book he is holding, or in 1971, or perhaps he’s mistaken and is seeing them for the first time, with a persistent and as yet unexplained feeling, somewhere between perplexity — a singularly sweet perplexity — and envy, wishing he had belonged to that group, it was 1973 or ’74, he remembers now, in a book on Arab poets or North African poets that a Uruguayan woman carried around with her for a couple of days everywhere she went in Mexico City, a book with an ochre or yellow cover, the color of desert sands, and then Belano turns the page and more photos appear, Kamal Ibrahim (whom he has read), Salah Stétié, Marwan Hoss, Fouad Gabriel Naffah (a diabolically ugly poet), and Nadia Tuéni, Andrée Chédid and Vénus Khoury, and Belano cranes forward, his face almost touching the page, to see the women poets in more detail, and Nadia and Vénus seem truly beautiful, with Nadia he’d fuck until dawn, he thinks (assuming that night will fall again sometime, since where he is, the evenings drag on as if the village were following the sun in its westward march, Belano thinks, with a certain disquiet) and with Vénus he’d fuck until three in the morning, and then I’d get up, light a cigarette and go out for a walk along the esplanade in Malgrat de Mar, but with Nadia he’d go on till dawn, and the things he’d do with Vénus he’d do with Nadia too, but he’d do things with Nadia that he wouldn’t do with anyone else, thinks Belano as he stares without blinking at Nadia’s smile, his nose almost touching the page, and Nadia’s lively eyes, her dark shining abundant hair, a protective cowl of shadow, and then Belano looks up and can no longer see the three solitary clouds in the African sky over the village where he has washed up, a village the sun is dragging westward — the clouds have disappeared, as if they were superfluous now that he has seen the smile of the Arab poet of the thousand and one nights, and then Belano breaks his promise, looks up the name Tuéni in the index and turns intrepidly to the pages in the critical section where he knows he will find her biographical note, a note that says that Nadia was born in Beirut in 1935, which means that when the book was published she was thirty-eight, although the photo is earlier, and the note also says that she has published a number of books, including Les Textes blonds (Beyrouth, Éd. An-Nahar, 1963), L’Age d’écume (Seghers, 1966), Juin et les mécréantes (Seghers, 1968), and Poèmes pour une histoire (Seghers, 1972), and in the paragraphs about her, Belano reads habituée aux chimères, and he reads chez ce poète des marées, des ouragans, des naufrages, and he reads fille elle-même d’un père druze et d’une mère française, and he reads mariée à un Chrétien orthodoxe, and he reads Nadia Tuéni (née Nadia Mohammed Ali Hamadé), and he reads Timidir la Chrétienne, Sabba la Musulmane, Dâhoun la Juive, Sioun la Druze, and he stops reading and looks up because he thinks he heard something, the cry of a vulture or a turkey buzzard, even though he knows there are no turkey buzzards here, but that can be fixed, given time, not necessarily years of time, hours or even minutes would do, at some point you stop knowing what you used to know, it’s as simple and as hard as that, even a Mexican turkey buzzard could turn up in this lousy village, thinks Belano with tears in his eyes, and it’s not the sound of the turkey buzzards making him cry but the physical presence of Nadia Tuéni’s image looking at him from a page in the book with a petrified smile that seems to open out like blown glass in the landscape surrounding Belano, which is also made of glass, and then he thinks he hears words, the words he has just read but cannot read now because he is crying, l’air torride, habituée aux chimères, and a story about Druses, Jews, Muslims and Christians, from which Nadia emerges at the age of thirty-eight (the same age as Claude de Burine) with the hair of an Arab princess, immaculate, perfectly serene, like the accidental muse of certain poets, or their provisional muse, the one who says, Don’t worry, or who says, Worry, but not too much, the one who doesn’t speak in dry and definite words but whispers, whose parting gift is a kind look, and then Belano thinks of the age the real Nadia Tuéni must be, in 1996, and he realizes that now she is sixty-one, and he stops crying, l’air torride has dried his tears once again, and he starts turning the pages, he returns to the mug shots of the Francophone poets with an obstinacy worthy of a higher enterprise, like a scavenging bird he returns to the face of Tchicaya U Tam’si, born in Mpili in 1931, the face of Matala Mukadi, born in Luiska in 1942, the face of Samuel-Martin Eno Belinga, born in Ebolowa in 1935, the face of Elologué Epanya Yondo, born in Douala in 1930, and so many other faces, faces of poets who write in French, photogenic or not, the face of Michel Van Schendel, born in Asnières in 1929, the face of Raoul Duguay (whom he has read), born in Val d’Or in 1939, the face of Suzanne Paradis, born in Beaumont in 1936, the face of Daniel Biga (whom he has read), born in Saint-Sylvestre in 1940, the face of Denise Jallais, born in Saint-Nazaire in 1932 and almost as pretty as Nadia, Belano thinks with a kind of comprehensive tremor, while evening keeps dragging the village westward, and turkey buzzards start to appear in the tops of some small trees, except that Denise is blonde and Nadia is dark, both very beautiful, sixty-one and sixty-four respectively, I hope they’re alive, he thinks, his gaze fixed not on the photos in the book but on the line of the treetops against the sky where the birds are teetering, crows or vultures or turkey buzzards, and then Belano remembers a poem by Gregory Corso, in which the hapless North American poet spoke of his one true love, an Egyptian woman dead two thousand five hundred years ago, and Belano remembers Corso’s street-kid face and a figure from Egyptian art that he saw a long time ago on a matchbox, a girl getting out of a bath or a river or a swimming pool, and the beat poet (the enthusiastic, hapless Corso) is watching her from the other side of time, and the Egyptian girl with long legs senses that she is being watched, and that’s all, her flirting with Corso is as brief as a sigh in the immensity of time, but time itself and its remote sovereignty can also pass like a sigh, thinks Belano as he watches the birds up in the branches, silhouettes on the horizon, an electrocardiogram agitated by the ruffling or spreading of wings as it waits for death, my death, thinks Belano, and then he shuts his eyes for a long time, as if he were thinking or crying with his eyes shut, and when he opens them again the crows are there, the electroencephalogram trembling on the African horizon, and then Belano shuts the book and stands up, still holding it, grateful, and begins to walk westward, toward the coast, with the book of Francophone poets under his arm, grateful, and his thought speeds ahead of his steps through the jungles and deserts of Liberia, as it did when he was an adolescent in Mexico, and soon his steps lead him away from the village.