I thought it was a nice dream and that's why I remember it. Arturo was an Arab boy who goes hand in hand with his little brother to an Indonesian outpost to launch a transoceanic communications cable. Two Indonesian soldiers wait on him. Arturo is dressed like an Arab. In the dream he must be twelve years old, his little brother maybe six or seven. His mother watches from a distance, but then her presence fades. Arturo and his little brother are left alone, although both are wearing those wide, short, sharply curved Arab knives on their belts. Together they haul the cable, which looks handcrafted or homemade. And they're also carrying a barrel of a thick, greenish-brown liquid, which is the money to pay the Indonesians. As they wait, Arturo's little brother asks him how many feet long the cable is. Not feet, says Arturo, miles! The soldiers' hut is built of wood and it's on the shore. As they wait, another Arab, an older guy, cuts in front of them in line, and although Arturo's first impulse is to insult him or at least accuse him of being rude, first checking to see whether his curved sword is in place, he soon gives up the idea when the older Arab begins to tell a story to the Indonesian soldiers and to anyone else who wants to listen. The story is about a party in Sicily. Arturo told me that when he and his little brother heard it they felt happy, they felt thrilled, as if the other man was reciting a poem. In Sicily there's a glacier made of sand. A motley crowd of spectators watch it from a safe distance, except for two men: the first climbs to the top of a hill where the glacier is balanced, and the other stands at the foot of the hill and waits. Then the one on top starts to move or dance or stamp on the ground and the top layer of the glacier begins to crumble, sending down big masses of sand that fall toward the man below. He doesn't move. For a moment it looks as if he'll be buried in sand, but at the last instant he leaps aside and is saved. That was the dream. The sky in Indonesia was almost green, the sky in Sicily almost white. It had been a long time since Arturo had such a good dream. Maybe the Indonesia and the Sicily he dreamed of were on another planet. In my opinion, I said, that dream means your luck is about to change. From now on, things will go your way. Do you know who your little brother in the dream was? I can guess, he said. It was your son! When I said that, Arturo smiled. Days later, though, he brought up the Andalusian girl again. I wasn't feeling well and I told him to fuck off. Now I know I shouldn't have, even if it didn't really matter. I think I talked to him about life's responsibilities, the things I believed in and clung to in order to keep breathing. It must have seemed like I was angry at him, but I wasn't. He didn't get angry at me. That night he didn't come home to sleep. I remember because it was the first night that Juanma Pacheco came to see me. He had time off every fifteen days and he came to Malgrat wanting to make the most of it. We went into my room and tried to make love. I couldn't do it. I tried several times, but I couldn't. Maybe it was because of Juanma's muscles, which were flabby since he hadn't been to the gym for so long. Whatever it was, it was probably my fault. I kept getting up to go into the kitchen for a drink of water. One of those times, I don't know why, I went into Arturo's room. On the table was his typewriter and a neat stack of paper. Before I flipped through the sheets I thought about The Shining and it gave me the shivers. But Arturo wasn't crazy, I knew that. Then I walked around the room, opened the window, sat on the bed, heard footsteps in the hall. Juanma Pacheco's face appeared around the door. He asked me if anything was wrong. Nothing, it's all right, I said, I'm thinking, and then I saw the packed suitcases and I knew he was going to leave.

He gave me four books that I still haven't read. A week later we said goodbye, and I went with him to the station.

25

Jacobo Urenda, Rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris, June 1996. This is a hard story to tell. It seems easy, but scratch the surface and you realize it isn't easy at all. Every story about that place is hard. I travel to Africa at least three times a year, usually to the hot spots, and when I get back to Paris it's as if I'm still dreaming and I can't wake up, although you might think that Latin Americans were less affected by horror than anyone else, at least in theory.

That was where I met Arturo Belano, in the Luanda post office, on a hot afternoon when I had nothing better to do than spend a fortune on calls to Paris. He was at the fax window going head to head with the guy acting as manager, who was trying to overcharge him, and I backed him up. By coincidence, it turned out we were both from the Southern Cone, him from Chile and me from Argentina, and we decided to spend the rest of the day together. I might have been the one to suggest it, I've always been a sociable person, I like to talk and get to know other people, and I'm not a bad listener, although sometimes when I seem to be listening I'm actually thinking my own thoughts.

We soon realized that we had more in common than we expected. At least I realized it, and I guess Belano did too, not that we said anything, or patted each other on the back. We'd both been born around the same time, we'd both split from our respective countries when what happened happened, we both liked Cortázar, we both liked Borges, neither of us had much money, and we both spoke shitty Portuguese. Basically, we were the typical forty-something Latin American guys who find themselves in an African country on the edge of the abyss or the edge of collapse, whichever you want to call it. The only difference was that when I finished my work (I'm a photographer for the La Luna Agency) I was going back to Paris, and when poor Belano finished his work he was going to stick around.

But why, man? I asked him at some point during the night, why don't you come with me to Europe? I even went so far as to offer to lend him the money for the ticket if he didn't have it, which is the kind of thing you say when you're very drunk and the night is not just foreign but also big, very big, so big that if you don't look out it'll swallow you up, you and everyone around you, but that's something you wouldn't know anything about, you people who've never been to Africa. I do know. Belano did too. Both of us were freelancers. I worked for La Luna, as I've said, Belano as a stringer for a Madrid newspaper that paid him next to nothing for his pieces. And although he didn't tell me just then why he wasn't going to leave, we sat there comfortably together until we were carried by the night or by inertia (so to speak, since real inertia in Luanda made you hide under your cot) to a kind of private club belonging to this guy João Alves, a two-hundred-fifty-pound African. There we ran into some people we knew: reporters and photographers, cops and pimps, and we kept talking. Or maybe not. Maybe we went our separate ways there, maybe I lost sight of him in the cigarette smoke like so many people you meet when you're out on a job, people you talk to and then lose sight of. In Paris, it's different. People drift away, people dwindle, and you have time to say goodbye, even if you'd rather not. Not in Africa. People talk there, people tell you their problems, and then they vanish in a cloud of smoke, the way Belano vanished that night, without warning. And you never even consider the possibility of running into X or Y again at the airport. The possibility exists, I'm not saying it doesn't, but you don't consider it. So that night, when Belano disappeared, I stopped thinking about him, stopped thinking about loaning him money, and drank and danced and then I fell asleep in a chair and when I woke up with a start (more out of fear than because I was hungover, since I was afraid I'd been robbed, not being in the habit of going to places like João Alves's) it was already morning and I went outside to stretch my legs and there he was, in the yard, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me.