The Return (20 page)

In the return match on our home ground we tied with the Italians
zero-zero.
It was one of the strangest games I’ve ever played.
Everything
seemed to be happening in slow motion and in the end the Italians eliminated us.
But overall it was a memorable season.
We won the Spanish League again, Herrera
and I were both selected for our national teams for the World Cup, and Buba went
from strength to strength.
His team won the Italian League (the famous
Scudetto
) and the Champion’s League.
He
was
the
star player.
Sometimes we’d
call him and chat for a while.
Not long before we left for summer vacation (it
was going to be shorter than usual because that year the international players
had to start preparing for the World Cup almost right away) the news hit the
front page of the sports papers: Buba had been killed in a car accident on the
way to the Turin airport.

We were stunned.
What more can I say?
Honestly, we were just stunned.
The World Cup was terrible.
Chile was eliminated in the quarterfinals, without
having won a single match.
Spain didn’t even get to the quarterfinals, although
they did win once.
My performance was appalling as I’m sure you remember.
The
less said the better.
Buba’s team?
No, they were eliminated in the qualifying
round by Cameroon or Nigeria, I can’t remember which.
Even if he’d been alive,
Buba wouldn’t have been able to go to the World Cup.
As a player I mean.

The seasons went by and there were other championships and World Cups
and other friends.
I was in Barcelona for another six years.
And four more years
in Spain after that.
Throughout that time, I had other days and nights of glory,
of course, but it was never the same.
I finished my soccer career with
Colo-Colo, playing as a midfielder, not a left winger (left wingers have an
expiration date).
Then I set up my sports store.
I could have been a trainer, I
did the course, but by then I was tired of it, to tell you the truth.
Herrera
played for a couple more years.
Then he retired at the height of his fame.
He
played more than a hundred international matches (I only played forty) and when
he quit, the Barcelona fans paid him a really exceptional tribute.
Now he has I
don’t know how many businesses there, and he’s doing well, as you’d expect.

We didn’t see each other for many years.
Until recently, when they
made a TV program, a nostalgic kind of show, about the team who won the first
Champion’s League.
I got the invitation, and although I don’t like traveling any
more, I accepted, because it was an opportunity to meet up with old friends.
What can I say?
The city’s just as beautiful as ever.
They put us up in a
first-class hotel and my wife went straight off to see her family and
friends.
I decided to lie down on the bed and take a nap, but after a quarter of
an hour I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Then a kid from the production
company came to get me and took me to the TV studios.
I ran into Pepito Vila in
the makeup room.
He was completely bald and I almost didn’t recognize him.
Then
Delève turned up and that was the killer.
They were all so old.
But my spirits
rose a bit when I saw Herrera, before going onto the set.
Him I would have
recognized anywhere.
We hugged and exchanged a few words, enough to make it
clear that we’d be having dinner together that night, whatever else
happened.

The program was long and detailed.
There was stuff about the Cup, what
it had meant for the club, about Buba and his first year in Europe, but there
was also stuff about Buzatti and Delève, Palau and Pepito Vila, and me, and
especially about Herrera and his long sports career, an example for the young.
There were six ex-players, three journalists and two celebrity fans: a
movie actor and a Brazilian singer who turned out to be the most fanatical
supporter I’ve ever come across.
She was called Liza Do Elisa, though I don’t
think that was her real name, and when the interviews were finished (I said
hardly anything, a few dumb remarks, my stomach was all in knots) she came to
dinner with us, with Herrera and me and Pepito Vila and one of the journalists,
maybe she was a friend of journalist’s, I don’t know, anyhow, suddenly I found
myself in a dimly lit restaurant with all these people, and then in a disco,
which was even darker, except for the dance floor, where I danced, sometimes on
my own, sometimes with Liza Do Elisa, and then, some time after midnight, I
ended up in a bar near the port, sitting at a grimy table, drinking coffee with
a shot, along with Herrera and the Brazilian singer—the others had
gone.

I don’t remember which of them brought it up.
Maybe Liza Do Elisa was
talking about magic, she could’ve been, or maybe it was Herrera who got her onto
it, I think she mentioned black magic and white magic, and then she started
telling stories, true stories, things that had happened to her as a child, or
when she was young and making her way in the world of show business.
I remember
looking at her and thinking she was a formidable woman: she was speaking in the
same forceful, vehement way as she’d spoken in front of the TV cameras.
She’d
had to struggle to make it and she was permanently on guard, as if she could be
attacked at any moment.
She was a pretty woman, about thirty-five, with a
nice rack.
You could tell her life hadn’t been easy.
But Herrera wasn’t
interested in her life story, I realized that straightaway.
Herrera wanted to
talk about magic, voodoo, Candomblé rituals, black people’s business, in short.
And Liza Do Elisa was happy to oblige.

So I finished my coffee and let them talk, and since, to be honest, I
wasn’t all that interested in the topic of their conversation, I ordered a
whiskey and then another, and when daylight was already beginning to shine in
through the windows of the bar, Herrera said he had a story a bit like the ones
Liza Do Elisa had been telling, and he was going to tell it and see what she
thought.
Then I shut my eyes, like I was sleepy, although I wasn’t sleepy at
all, and listened to Herrera telling Buba’s story, our story, but without saying
that Buba was Buba and pretending that he and I were some French players he’d
met a while back, and Liza Do Elisa went quiet (I think it was the first time
she’d been quiet all night) until Herrera came to the end, to Buba’s death, and
only then did she speak up and say yes, it was possible, and Herrera asked about
the blood that the three players spilled into the glass, and Liza Do Elisa said
it was part of the ceremony, and Herrera asked about the music that came from
the bathroom when the black guy shut himself in there, and Liza Do Elisa said it
was part of the ceremony, and then Herrera asked about what happened to the
blood when the black guy took it into the bathroom, and about the sponge and the
bucket of water with bleach, and he also wanted to know what Liza Do Elisa
thought the guy did in the bathroom, and the Brazilian singer replied to all his
questions by saying that it was part of the ceremony, until Herrera started
getting annoyed and said obviously it was part of the ceremony but he wanted to
know what the ceremony was.
And then Liza Do Elisa said, Nobody raises his voice
to me, especially not—and I quote—if he wants to fuck me, to which
Herrera replied with a laugh that reminded me of the good old days—the
Herrera of the Champion’s League and the two Spanish Leagues we won together, I
mean, the two we won with Buba and the five we won overall—and then he said
he hadn’t meant to offend her (Liza Do Elisa took offense at the slightest
little thing), and repeated his question.

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:
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,