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.
A band of Liberian soldiers, none of them over twenty, escorted us to a three-story building on New Africa Avenue, the Liberian version of the old Ritz Hotel or the old Crillon. It was run now by an organization of international journalists I'd never heard of. The hotel, called the Center for Press Correspondents, was one of the few things that worked in the capital, thanks in no small part to the presence of five U.S. marines. They stood guard now and then but spent most of their time in the lobby, drinking with the American TV correspondents and playing go-between for the journalists and a group of young Mandingo soldiers whom the journalists employed as guides and bodyguards on outings to Monrovia's hot zones, or, rarely and on a whim, to areas outside the capital, the nameless villages (though they all had names and had once had people, children, work) which, mostly according to hearsay or the reports we saw each night on CNN, were a faithful reflection of the end of the world, human insanity, the evil nestled in every heart.
The Center for Press Correspondents also functioned as a hotel, which meant we had to sign the register our first day there. I was already drinking whiskey and talking to two French friends when my turn came, and I don't know why, but I found myself flipping back, looking for a name. With no surprise, I found Arturo Belano's.
He'd been there two weeks. He had arrived at the same time as a group of Germans, two men and a woman from a Frankfurt newspaper. I tried to get in touch with him immediately and couldn't find him. A Mexican reporter told me that it had been seven days since he showed up at the Center. If I wanted news of him I should ask at the American embassy. I thought back on our now-distant conversation in Angola, about his death wish, and it occurred to me that he might be about to get what he wanted. The Germans, I was told, had already left. Reluctantly, knowing inside I had no other choice, I went looking for him at the embassy. No one could tell me anything, but I got a few photos out of it. The streets of Monrovia, the embassy courtyards, some faces. On my way back to the Center I ran into an Austrian who knew a German who'd seen Belano before he left. This German, however, spent all day out, making the most of the daylight, and there was nothing to do but wait. I remember it was around seven when some French colleagues and I got a poker game going, and that we stocked up on candles in preparation for the blackouts that usually came at sunset, or so we were told. But the lights didn't go out and the players soon sank into a general state of apathy. I remember we drank and talked about Rwanda and Zaire and the last movies we'd seen in Paris. The German got back at midnight, by which time I was alone in the lobby of that ghost-filled Ritz, and Jimmy, a young mercenary (but in whose pay?) serving as doorman and bartender, let me know that Herr Linke, the photographer, was on his way to his room.
I caught up with him on the stairs.
Linke could speak only the most rudimentary English, didn't understand a word of French, and had a decent face. When I was able to make him understand that I was looking for news of my friend Arturo Belano, he asked me politely (more or less, despite the faces he made to get his message across) to wait for him in the lobby or the bar, informing me that he needed to shower and would be down right away. He was gone for more than twenty minutes and when he came back he smelled of lotion and disinfectant. We talked for a long time, in fits and starts. Linke didn't drink, and he said this was why he'd noticed Arturo Belano, because back then the Center for Press Correspondents was swarming with journalists, many more than now, and they all got deliberately drunk each night, including some famous talking heads, people who should behave responsibly and set an example, according to Linke, and who ended up being sick from the balconies. Arturo Belano didn't drink and that led to their striking up a conversation. Linke remembered him spending three days total at the Center, going out each morning and coming back at midday or dusk. Once, but this was in the company of two Americans, he spent the night away trying to interview George Kensey, Roosevelt Johnson's youngest and bloodiest general, an ethnic Krahn, but the guide accompanying them was a Mandingo who not unreasonably got scared and abandoned them in the eastern part of Monrovia, and it took them all night to get back to the hotel. The next day Arturo Belano slept until very late, according to Linke, and two days later he left Monrovia with the same Americans who had tried to interview Kensey. Presumably they went north. Before Belano left, Linke gave him a little packet of cough drops made by a natural products company in Bern-at least I think that's what he was trying to say. He hadn't seen him since.