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.