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.