At some point during the wait, I think I fell into a brief, uneasy sleep, but it was sleep nonetheless, and I probably dreamed about Luigi and a terrible toothache. The pain was worse than the certainty that the Italian was dead. When I woke up, covered in sweat, I saw Jean-Pierre sleeping with his head on the driver's shoulder while the driver smoked another cigarette, staring straight ahead at the funereal yellow of the deserted square, his rifle lying across his knees.

Finally our guide appeared.

Walking beside him was a thin woman whom we at first took for his mother but who turned out to be his wife, and a boy of about eight, dressed in a red shirt and blue shorts. We're going to have to leave Luigi, said Jean-Pierre, there isn't room for everybody. For a few minutes we argued. The guide and the driver were on Jean-Pierre's side and in the end I had to give in. I hung Luigi's cameras around my neck and emptied his pockets. Between the driver and me we lifted him out of the Chevy and laid him in the shade of a kind of thatch. The guide's wife said something in her language. It was the first time she had spoken, and Jean-Pierre turned to look at her and asked the cook to translate. At first the cook was reluctant, but then he said that his wife had said that it would be better to put the body inside one of the houses on the square. Why? Jean-Pierre and I asked in unison. So silent and serene was the woman that although she was ravaged, she had a queenly air, or so it seemed to us at that moment. Because the dogs will eat it there, she said, pointing to where the body lay. Jean-Pierre and I looked at each other and laughed, of course, said the Frenchman, why didn't we think of that, naturally. So we lifted Luigi's body again and after the driver had kicked in the weakest-looking door, we carried the body into a room with a packed-earth floor. The room was piled with mats and empty cardboard boxes, and its smell was so unbearable that we left the Italian and got out as fast as we could.

When the driver started the Chevy we all jumped, except for the old men who were still watching us from under the eaves. Where are we going? said Jean-Pierre. The driver made a gesture as if to say that we shouldn't bother him or that he didn't know. We're taking a different road, said the guide. Only then did I notice the boy: he had wrapped his arms around his father's legs and was asleep. Let's go where they say, I said to Jean-Pierre.

For a while we drove the deserted streets of the village. When we left the square we headed down a straight street, then we turned left and the Chevy inched forward, almost scraping the walls of the houses and the eaves of the thatch roofs, until we came out into an open space where there was a big, single-story zinc shed, as big as a warehouse. On its side we could read "CE-RE-PA, Ltd.," in big red letters, and below that: "toy factory, Black Creek & Brownsville." This shitty town is called Brownsville, not Black Creek, I heard Jean-Pierre say. The driver, the guide, and I corrected him without turning our gaze from the shed. The town was Black Creek, and Brownsville was probably a little farther east, but for no good reason Jean-Pierre kept saying that we were in Brownsville, not Black Creek, which had been the deal. The Chevy crossed the open space and started down a road that ran through dense forest. Now we really are in Africa, I said to Jean-Pierre, trying vainly to raise his spirits, but he only replied with some incoherent remark about the toy factory we had just passed.

The trip lasted only fifteen minutes. The Chevy stopped three times and the driver said that the engine, with luck, wouldn't make it past Brownsville, and that was if we were lucky. Brownsville, as we would soon find out, was scarcely thirty houses in a clearing. We got there after driving over four bare hills. Like Black Creek, the town was half deserted. Our Chevy, with "press" written on the windshield, attracted the attention of the only inhabitants, who waved to us from the door of a wooden house, long like a factory shed, the biggest in the town. Two armed men appeared on the threshold and started to shout at us. The car stopped a few hundred feet away and the driver and guide got out to talk. As they moved toward the house I remember Jean-Pierre said to me that if we wanted to save ourselves we should run into the woods. I asked the woman who the men were. She said that they were Mandingo. The boy was asleep with his head in her lap, a little thread of saliva escaping from between his lips. I told Jean-Pierre that we were among friends, at least in theory. The Frenchman made a sarcastic reply, but physically I could see the calm (a liquid calm) spread over every wrinkle of his face. I remember it and it makes me feel bad, but at the time I was glad. The guide and the driver were laughing with the strangers. Then three more people came out of the long house, also armed to the teeth, and stood there staring at us as the guide and the driver came back to the car accompanied by the first two men. Shots sounded in the distance and Jean-Pierre and I ducked our heads. Then I rose, got out of the car, and greeted them, and one of the black men greeted me and the other hardly looked at me, busy as he was lifting the hood of the Chevy and checking the irreparably dead engine and then I thought that they weren't going to kill us and I looked toward the long house and I saw six or seven armed men and among them I saw two white guys walking toward us. One of them had a beard and was carrying two cameras bandolier-style, a fellow photographer, that much was obvious, although at that moment, while he was still at a distance, I was unaware of the fame that preceded him everywhere he went, by which I mean that I knew his name and his work, like everyone in the business, but I had never seen him in person, not even in a photograph. The other was Arturo Belano.

I'm Jacobo Urenda, I said, trembling, I don't know whether you remember me.

He remembered me. How could he not? But I was so far gone then that I wasn't sure he would remember anything, let alone me. By that I don't exactly mean he had changed. In fact, he hadn't changed at all. He was the same guy I'd known in Luanda and Kigali. Maybe I was the one who had changed, I don't know, but the point is it seemed to me that nothing could be the same as before, and that included Belano and his memory. For a moment my nerves almost betrayed me. I think Belano noticed and he clapped me on the back and said my name. Then we shook hands. Mine, I noticed with horror, were stained with blood. Belano's, and this I also noticed with a sensation akin to horror, were immaculate.

I introduced him to Jean-Pierre and he introduced me to the photographer. It was Emilio López Lobo, the Magnum photographer from Madrid, one of the living legends of the profession. I don't know whether Jean-Pierre had heard of him (Jean-Pierre Boisson, from Paris Match, said Jean-Pierre without turning a hair, which probably meant that he didn't recognize the name or that under the circumstances he didn't give a damn about meeting the great man), but I'd heard of him, I'm a photographer, and for us López Lobo was what Don DeLillo is to writers, a phenomenon, a chaser of front-page shots, an adventurer, a man who'd won every prize Europe had to offer and photographed every kind of human stupidity and recklessness. When it was my turn to shake his hand, I said: Jacobo Urenda, from La Luna, and López Lobo smiled. He was very thin, probably somewhere in his forties, like the rest of us, and he seemed drunk or exhausted or about to fall apart, or all three things at once.

Soldiers and civilians were gathered inside the house. At first glance, it was hard to tell them apart. The smell inside was bittersweet and damp, a smell of expectancy and fatigue. My first impulse was to go outside for a breath of fresh air, but Belano informed me that it was better not to show yourself too often, since there were Krahn snipers posted in the hills who'd blow your head off. Lucky for us, they got tired of keeping watch all day and they weren't good shots either, though this I only learned later.