34

34

Koli Lem was dead, but everywhere my travels took me, I would see him in other bodies and other eyes. In the cities I passed through, I had a habit of wandering the streets, and after I had honoured my commitment for lectures or workshops, I would roam the urban jungle in search of my friend. Since I hadn’t seen his cold body, he couldn’t be dead, so I searched for him from Port Said to Durban, and one morning in Bamako, there he was, a newspaper hawker on a sidewalk of the city. He was alone, and his skin was burnished by the Sahel wind. As thin as he was, he was holding his head high. In the street, the plaintive notes of a kora somewhere must have been celebrating our reunion. I introduced myself to the stranger and invited him for tea. It was Koli, for sure. We talked for a good hour on the patio of the café. At first reticent, he told me about his life as a pedlar in that part of Africa. He spoke with the vigour of his forty years, and I wanted to touch him to be sure he was real, to feel his face again and his nearly hairless chest. The next day, I invited him to my hotel room to rediscover the atmosphere of the four walls of the cell we had once shared. He brought me a gift, an amulet that was supposed to protect me from evil spells, and in return I gave him my first published play. He looked at the volume with an indifferent eye and stuffed it into his canvas bag, as if books were unfamiliar objects to him. He had Koli’s thick hair and regular features.

He finally took his leave, and from my window, I saw him pulling his newspaper cart in the crowded street. A few months later, I found him again in Gibraltar—no, it was actually in Salvador de Bahia. His body was not as thin, and he was fishing in the waters of the Baía de Todos-os-Santos, dressed in wide white pants, his bare chest gleaming. In the distance, another fisherman had started singing a song. I sat down on the bank and watched the Brazilian, with his heavy muscles, hauling the net up from the depths, slowly, patiently. It was Koli. The man introduced himself, “My name is Zumbi,” and continued, “Do you want me to show you Bahia?” I accepted, and the whole next day, we walked on the black cobblestones of the city. He was a fisherman, and a capoeira dancer in his free time. He took me to a backyard where he trained with other, younger guys, because he was already going on fifty, solid and agile in spite of his age. After the dancing, he wanted us to go back to the hotel for a shower. At the hotel, I left him alone under the stream of water, but he asked, “Are you coming?” I backed away, and he got mad and said something like, “I don’t understand you!” He came out of the shower furious, threw his towel on the ground, got dressed, and left the room, slamming the door.

Through the course of my travels, I pursued the shadow of blind Koli, and one evening he was in the Paris metro, big sunglasses covering his dead eyes. He was playing the trumpet, and the rare notes that he managed to get out mingled with the rumble of the trains and the noise of the footsteps of the passersby, who threw coins at his feet. The man was playing a mournful solo. I stood to one side to listen to him, and when the spectators from the subway vanished, I went over to him and invited him to Rue des Lombards to a discotheque that offered cautious jazz, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker.

After the concert, we separated, but I was to see him again in New York, in Havana, in a bar in Amsterdam, where smoke from the fat spliff he was smoking momentarily masked his features, the same ones, and in Mexico City, Toronto, and, a few weeks ago, in the bar in our little city of Hull where I’m a regular now. Very often, I would buy him a drink and we would talk late into the night and I could reassure myself that my friend was not dead.