1

I remember that smell very clearly: a mixture of leather and moss coming from one of the kidnappers, as if the moss had just been uprooted from a still damp earth. The strange thing is that at this stage of the negotiation we were in Algiers.

It was a peculiar odour emanating from that man who endeavoured with conviction to impose some impossible demands while chewing one mint sweet after another; and in the instants of silence, between the buzzing of the blowflies, the smell seemed to grow even stronger. We remained impassive. Coldness was something neither they nor we broke at any moment, as if it was a plate of glass we had in front of us at each of the meetings and did our best not to touch. That was fine by me; it was easier and more practical to speak with clarity. When he attempted to go deeper into his more radical political theories, he did so with a nervous tic, a constant cough. His appearance as a somewhat dishevelled, but calm teacher of philosophy was deceptive.

The hotel waiter, a lively, restless middle-aged Arab, was dying to understand some of our movements. He seemed far too active to me, never leaving our sides, always hanging about like one of those insects. He had aroused my suspicions on the very first day – too great a wish to know in a supposedly foreign language. I think this interest of his was merely personal curiosity, that was his character, though I could never be sure. At the sixth and final meeting – perhaps before, but most of all at that last one – I noticed he displayed a certain fondness for us, which I tried to steer to our advantage. I sensed from the outset that he understood our language, simply because he was constantly trying to hide this – always careful not to lose a single detail, his reactions to some of the kidnappers’ proposals gave him away. We acquired a special complicity, he and I, in those meetings, most of all during the breaks, continual and long. We even ended up with our own signals – the strong, black coffee in greater or lesser quantity, the kind of liquor, be it date or the stronger fig one – he knew about the dissensions among them at the other end of the garden or with their interlocutors, the real leaders. I quickly learnt how to interpret his clues – something natural, nothing we agreed upon. He would be surprised a long time afterwards, sixteen years later, by this communication of ours while drinking mint tea, when I returned to discover a new city, white now and happy, and to relive that other period; by then, he had almost completely forgotten our language.

Explosions and sirens could be heard all the time, and sometimes we were left without electricity. Algeria was experiencing an armed conflict with daily massacres. Sunsets over the port seemed to be spattered with the blood of those killings. They were sinister. The kidnappers jumped from cold words, learnt from a textbook, to angry, visceral outbursts, if something agreed upon in a previous meeting hadn’t been fulfilled point by point. Prisoner relocation, open prison regime… and they were always threatening to kill that man. I knew this could happen at any moment – in fact, it had happened in previous kidnappings when the victim had received a shot in the back of the head. In this tug of war, you always had to give them a slight advantage, make sure they at least had the sensation we were advancing, so each day didn’t end with an ultimatum. In reality, I was there to steal time from them – the words were their own; time should be for us. I wasn’t negotiating with them to free a man, but to try to stop him being killed. Everything was against me, I was aware.

At nights, the dust of rubble after explosions in some neighbourhood would mix with the sea air. Lines of army tanks deposited petrol stains in the empty streets. On lamp posts, skulls alternated with images of Che. The sensation was that from inside the buildings tens of thousand of eyes were surely watching us – perhaps aiming at us on the way back to our hotel. Neither they nor we were staying in the establishment where we were negotiating, but nearby. The streets at night and the open windows were alarming. The sensation of danger, constant. The Islamists wanted the government and carried out attacks in the suburbs, set homes on fire and used rifles or machetes to kill women and children who fled in terror like rats.

I used to lie to her. And she to me. Her illness was advancing far too rapidly, and on the phone she would hide the pain and weakness with small, short words, as if in reality it was these thin words that had fallen sick, and not her. She kept trying to make me believe this, and I found this a brave impulse. Other times, we would be silent so as not to become too emotional, so as to lie to the right degree. Something innocent that was also tender. During those days, it seems on the basis of small lies we were constructing a large truth around ourselves. She insisted I continue there. She had pleaded with me. It wasn’t easy – me in the middle of a war, trying to save the life of someone I didn’t know, and she fading away with no one to negotiate with. Even so, we gave each other strength. I needed this long conversation by phone each night just to hear her, that intimacy in the shelter of the latticework in the hotel room. She would have liked the Berber style of the establishment, reminiscent of certain classic black-and-white movies. I talked to her of Édith Piaf, Kipling, Visconti, Jouvet – Louis Jouvet – Jean Cocteau, Baron Rothschild, Guevara himself, Simone de Beauvoir, María Casares, and so many other visitors to the hotel who were celebrated with photographs throughout the lobby; perhaps Piaf met Marcel Cerdan, the boxer with whom she had a passionate relationship and who died in an airplane crash on his way back from New York just to see her, once again in that place, possibly even in that room overlooking the garden. Or María Casares had a rendezvous with Camus. I informed her that I was constantly gorging myself on sweet cakes or aromatic fritters at breakfast with mint tea, and she would laugh. Mint tea, that’s right, with milk, and she would remind me of my intolerance – a few drops, that’s all. We could be like this for almost an hour, never saying all that we wanted to hear. It was a special state, as if time didn’t count while we were silent; I needed that call, and at the same time I feared it; the threats of the kidnappers didn’t cease to hang in the air during some of our silences. Forever barging in. We didn’t discuss the negotiation, not really, or the war. She would ask sometimes; I would confess my state and lie in this as well. I tried to finish with an anecdote about the city, almost always imagined, remembering how Camus described it in his novels, white, very white, and luminous with a succession of squares that reach to the sea, even though I had hardly set foot in it.

Every night, I would jot down reflections in a notebook with secret, rudimentary codes, invented on the spot, so nobody would be able to decipher them, should those pages ever come to light, or at least it wouldn’t be so easy. The small, black pocket notebook so necessary at hours like these. Inside, in technicolour, were the weaknesses and fortitudes of each day, the mistakes and biggest successes, so I could redirect the negotiation from a position of strength. Spirals with more or fewer circles, the line going up at the end, or down, according to the impressions; longer or shorter uprights bending in one direction or the other to obscure interpretation; meaning on the left, sensation on the right. On some nights, those signs on pages resembled a children’s game. One notebook for each of our meetings. The truth is I couldn’t sleep until I had clarified my ideas to unlock aspects that would no doubt arise the next day. Dawn might surprise me in the corner by the latticework or wake me with the notebook on the floor mosaics.

A man had been kidnapped for 531 days; I had been hired for exactly 292 days. Despite my initial surprise, I didn’t hesitate to accept, with her encouragement; in reality, she was the one who was sure, who pushed me in that exceptional state of hers. The news bulletins opened each day with the kidnapping and assorted attacks with victims in our country. I tried not to think about this too much, or about him, the conditions that man might be in. Alive, we were convinced, for now; they still needed him while they weighed up possibilities, certain advantages. That was why I was there, so they would carry on believing. I tried not to let the pressure get to me, especially from politicians, but also from other external elements who inevitably turned up each day and obstructed agreements that might have signified a few more days’ negotiation. The only card I had in my hand – that certainty from the outset – was calm; curious in the midst of so much conflict, even in the middle of that other war. Her illness helped me bear that situation with a certain distance and coldness. I was tranquil, despite the habitual incomprehension of my client in Interior due to his weakness before his superiors’ coercion and haste; by that stage, it no longer obsessed me. The black, exquisite coffees with messages from the waiter throughout the day helped me postpone sleep until I had hit upon other valuable clues in the notebook for prolonging the negotiation the next day.

In the hotel, there was nobody after midnight, or even before – we were the only guests and had been admitted because of the exceptional situation. There might have been one or two employees on night shift sleeping on the premises. The main entrance remained closed; the square was surrounded by soldiers; their conversations could be clearly heard from the window of the room – fleeting terms in Arabic, amid laughter, or angry shouts in French at anyone who strayed into the area. At the slightest suspicion, successive shots would ring out. Because of the high moon, I could see a patch of sea in between the cables and aerials on the roofs, and even it looked old, destroyed almost, a metal sheet.

In the early hours, gunfire always disturbed my sleep.

*   *   *

In the morning, the doves in the square, in front of the hotel, reminded me of the lies I had used on the phone with my partner, at that moment when they spread their wings and disappeared. So light they were, the army watching every street, like ants in a row all along the avenue; even so, the lack of security was tangible, attacks kept on happening. The stalls of florists emphasized the dark, gloomy interior of buildings, replete with dangers. Once again, the memory of Camus, who had lived nearby, in a parallel street. The Outsider, I had brought it with me – Meursault, his coldness and indifference; Marie, I couldn’t believe.

And the call to prayer coming repeatedly from the mosque.

Coded phone messages were constant from breakfast onwards, especially during those last few days, pleading with me – on those occasions when entreaty sounds a lot like an order – to play for time, any which way, we were reaching the dénouement. That was what I was told by the Special Central Unit. They had discovered important data, handwritten notes, on a detainee in France, which they had deciphered already. Days earlier, the government had accepted some of the kidnappers’ demands, albeit publicly they had given the impression they had rejected them as part of a strategy to dampen criticism from the opposition or – what was worse when it came to the negotiation – from prominent leaders in the government’s own party. There were daily demonstrations with blue ribbons in the street. Any action might constitute another obstacle; additional elements like these had to be factored in. The slightest detail could affect dealings, especially at this late hour. I was constantly asking government representatives to publicize political initiatives – consensually, if at all possible – as a way of showing our interlocutors that we were making progress. It was essential to stage the proximity of a possible agreement, as with those snowy peaks that seem close when you climb the mountain, but you know you will probably never reach.

I have the smell of that man who acted as spokesperson stuck in my senses, as if I had brought my nose close to the newly uprooted moss on the morning after the storm. My curiosity to know is still intact after all this time, perhaps that is why this characteristic odour mixed with leather continues. They used to take breaks so they could withdraw to talk and consult – for hours, sometimes. The longer they were, the better we deduced our strategy was working. The waiter always close by, endeavouring to know and transmit his signals with black coffees that were generally small, barely one sip. They returned with excessive impositions, nothing that had been under discussion, radical reversals. They would employ exaggeration, deceit even, to come out with another ultimatum, as in a poker game.

Let them kill him. Let them tell them this, be done with it, if that’s what they were looking for. With coldness and calm, thinking of her while savouring one of those thick coffees like chocolate. For this, there was no need for so many meetings or for theorizing about the country they wanted, let alone for risking our lives before excitable Islamists who disembowelled pregnant women and dismembered children with the moderation of the government forces, and any day now would make mincemeat of us in that central hotel.

The waiter pretended not to understand, but did so badly. I could see he was nervous. The more he approached me with short phrases in Arabic or muttering in French, the more convinced I was. As if he didn’t comprehend my cold manner of behaving. The kidnappers’ spokesperson, aged about fifty, possibly more, returned in an angry mood – contradictions, his disagreement with the orders given, the broken thread of his previous discourse. He didn’t like it; he was a theoretician, the one who had laid the foundations of their political ideas. It wasn’t some kind of big business. He was perfectly aware that if they decided to murder that man, he wouldn’t be able to prevent it. This bothered him – not because of the victim’s life, because of the contempt shown towards him. This insignificance of his. The other two with him, a man and a woman, somewhat younger, barely emitted remarks, murmurings, though she always seemed to declare her opinion at the end. Judgmental, dangerous, I could see she wielded influence over both of them. More calculating, she had a photographic apparatus in her eyes. The other man was the one who put her words into action. The dog who went for the bone in order to bring it back to her hand. Occasional lover, perhaps, during that process – this is what the waiter suggested to me once again with his sharp look and another, very sweet date liquor.

The early morning might catch us in front of some glasses of whisky – even at that hour, our words were still cold, learnt and yet counted, as if they were running out; once again, in that proximity, they revealed their visceral nature, their blood in leaps and bounds. There was nothing to do. It was the moment for placing a card on the table, for confirming an advance, just to complicate their consultations and gain a few hours. I never found out anything personal about them, nor they about me, except for the biographical data that might have appeared in contemporary media and reports we, of course, consulted. Only once, during those long nights, did I see the spokesperson weighed down, uncomfortable, even a little fragile. He stayed away from us, from his own excessively affectionate companions, who left him alone. He muttered something to them about a sick mother. Terminally ill. I asked after her and baffled him; he realized and left so as not to reveal cracks of weakness through which attacks could be made. It was important to keep one’s armour intact. The other two went out after him.

On the penultimate night, the Islamists had slit the throats of hundreds of innocent victims on one of the access roads to the city, as they were fleeing after their homes had been burnt with many of them still inside. An act of savagery nearby – we could see the smoke above the hotel wall and smell the stench of burnt bodies. As we were waiting in the bar for the situation to calm down, more attentive to what was going on outside, their boss became embroiled with a moth that I suppose had emerged from one of the wardrobes in that wide, empty lounge. He caught it in his fingers and stopped to examine it carefully; he forgot about everything, about the conflict outside and us. He delicately unfurled its wings – the moth in contact with his middle finger – and moved the insect from one finger to another with the tiniest of gestures; it was a flower moth, he explained, from the fruit trees that had opened in all their splendour in the hotel garden. He eventually let it fly away. That action after the threat of only a few hours earlier; that absorption of his with the lepidopteran. We all stayed silent; it would have been good to X-ray each person’s thoughts in that instant. To be able to know what was going through their minds. A little earlier, I had made as if to crush it with my fist just to observe his reaction; someone who has kept a man in custody for a year and a half, but who has feelings for an insect. I had not managed to perceive a crack of sensitivity until then – not with sufficient clarity to be able to analyze it – and this detail with the moth had befuddled me.

I remember a strange optimism that night when I phoned her from the room. I told her about the enormous butterflies in the hotel gardens and the city’s lost whiteness in the light of day and, again, about Camus. Lies. White lies like the doves in the morning at the feet of the soldiers. Why that state of mine because of a simple moth? It didn’t make sense; perhaps it was just need. She told me, with serenity and courage, that she had been to the cemetery that afternoon and enjoyed chatting to her mother almost until nightfall, it had given her strength. She had taken her apples – she liked the smell of the apples on the gravestone and would like, she said, on the morrow someone to do the same for her. Apples instead of flowers – one each time, it was enough. She was fine, I wasn’t to worry, and it was true, I could discern it in her clean, fluid voice. She had begun sessions in the hospital; she felt dizzy at times, but it soon passed. These conversations helped me to put everything else into perspective, even the life of that stranger, which was supposedly in my hands. It wasn’t true, not really, but I had to make them believe it. To try, at least.

After we said goodbye, I heard a strange noise; there was nobody else in the hotel. To start with, I thought about an explosion, an attack, perhaps, on the establishment. I looked out of the window, but spotted no particular movements from the soldiers nearby. There was calm, and it was getting hot. I could hear the buzzing of insects in the light. I went out into the corridor; everything appeared dark and quiet; there were luminous emergency points. I scoured the communal areas. It was a venerable establishment with that special Arabic elegance. I paused once again at the photographs of those historical figures who had visited the hotel at different periods for one reason or another and paraded past them; Piaf, the little sparrow, her again with that sweet, absent-minded look always facing upwards. She oozed sensibility in that bombastic hotel with its dusty elegance in the middle of a war. All that sensitivity in the frame of an old black-and-white photo. Like a wound. I shuddered to think it was the look in a photograph that had aroused sentiment, stirred sensations, and not the surrounding barbarity. The moon was low, enormous, orange; the night seemed liquid in the tubes of the fountains by the main entrance and in the gardens. Nothing suspicious; the hotel, as always at that hour, completely locked up. I was just about to go back to my room when I realized mist was seeping out from under the door of the hammam – the guests’ baths, I presumed. It was closed; from time to time, I could hear splashes of water. I looked around; at the end of one of the corridors, a small door, which must have been for staff, had a key in it. I pushed it ajar with supreme caution, but perceived no movement. Under the arches, the large pool was practically in darkness; I could distinguish some soft reflections of sparkling light in an adjoining room, and laughter that turned to sighs. I could see some deformed shadows – a man and a woman, I imagined – pressed together on the marble, one more horizontal, the other upright. The sighs echoed through the empty hammam. I understood they were hotel employees – one, at least – taking advantage of the luxury of having exclusive use of the hammam to indulge a whim. Back in my room, I recalled that other bath, she and I without clothes among seaweed one misty morning at the outset of summer; her dives among the seaweed into the dead water. Naked, eating fruit among the rocks and drinking lots of water, our bodies drawing salty maps on sensitive skin. I had already started resolving conflicts involving common criminals, mostly in prisons in different countries. Those nights in Algiers with our conversations in the hotel at the end of each day were also special parentheses. From outside came the cries of frightened soldiers with beams aimed in the other direction in the vicinity of the hotel and the noise of sirens. I thought about that couple loving each other in the hammam, oblivious, in their own underworld in the midst of war.

I perused the day’s comments in my notebook to see if I could locate a crack, a seam of light. That night, there were only distinct tones of green – such optimism – on those pages that were coming to an end. I thought about the man who had been kidnapped for 531 days with strange cold serenity; I knew I couldn’t think about him in a different state. For us, each day that passed with him still alive was a victory; I couldn’t stop to imagine the hell he was going through, especially at this late stage, because it would have encouraged us to be hasty. That was why sensitivity had no place there. In the last few days, there had been clues that indicated with almost complete certainty where he was being held. Each hour demanded a strategy, a great deal of analysis, and even greater calm; visible advances in the negotiation, it was fundamental this vision came out on top. I went over everything the kidnappers had said that day, word by word. All their proposals. In the early morning, she rang again, a surprise to tell me once more she loved me and couldn’t sleep. I was reminded of Édith Piaf, that look of hers in the old hotel photograph.

That night, as I was studying one of the images of the kidnapped man cut out of newspapers, in a shirt and jacket, pale now and grubby, the letters began to jump about like insects drawing s’s around him. His immobility was captivating. The words were bugs that made me shiver. When the illusion evanesced – probably caused by tiredness – the insects went back to being words forming sentences in a chronicle of one of the mass demonstrations that had been organized in the city where he resided with endless blue ribbons and shouts for his freedom.

That night, I woke in a sweat, my breathing irregular, out of air.

*   *   *

The next day, the sentence as soon as we arrived, before we even had a chance to sit down – they were going to kill him or let him die of hunger and cold and despair. My interlocutor was backlit, motionless. His words flitted about, white in the shadows, like all those insects nearby. They were preceded by that characteristic smell of leather and moss, which was stronger than usual as a result of sweat and nerves, no doubt, but also anger, because the decision belonged to others; I again perceived his malaise, his sense of failure. After all, he was the one in charge of the political negotiation. I was surprised by the decision since nobody in the team that morning had detected alarm signals, even in sympathetic newspapers, which is where they usually embedded their messages in advertisements or reports. The couple weren’t there that morning; perhaps he himself had given them instructions not to attend. The waiter brought two black coffees at the appropriate moment, perfectly calculating his movements as always. Neither of us moved to take the coffee, which had been placed on a table in the middle.

So, there were only two options: murder or political advance in exchange for a man’s freedom. I said no more, reached for my cup, and regained my position with the odd short, chocolatey sip. We had attained achievements and pacts after eight months’ negotiation, some of which were being fulfilled. Partial relocation, a proposal for the liberation of sick prisoners, and another that made it easier for families to visit. Me, with an empty coffee cup in my hand. He, like a statue. I knew in a previous kidnapping of similar characteristics the businessman had been shot to death without further consideration. We both had our doubts at that moment concerning his influence and power in the group. An ideologist’s failure was like the death of a queen bee in the hive. I tried to get him to insist that we were making progress – if they wanted to kill him at this stage, almost at the end of the road, go ahead, but he was only a man, and they were the ones who had asked to negotiate. This was a markedly political kidnapping. The sentence made no sense. I said this, I told him this as if agreeing with him. Two days, three more, like someone asking for a little more sugar with a pretty please. The waiter had come to ask if he should warm up his coffee or bring me another. I nodded, not for the coffee so much as to give him an opportunity to come back at the right time, which he would know how to calculate to perfection.

I really believed they were going to kill him.

*   *   *

I had been teaching courses on the resolution of conflicts for prison officers when the kidnapping took place. Back then, the only experience I had of negotiating was with common criminals. The prison officers’ union decided, however, that my profile was adequate, because of my character as well, and put me forward as negotiator. They were afraid, and I am pragmatic and optimistic – that must have been the reason. They informed me in the penitentiary café; October was coming to an end, and the courtyard had just been littered with hailstones. On the way home, my car broke down before reaching the motorway; during the long wait that ensued, with colours sliding down my windscreen, I had been assailed by doubt – I wasn’t sure I could focus enough on account of her illness, only recently diagnosed, or be sufficiently motivated. With the cold and condensation especially, it seemed that indecision of mine was materializing on the glass. She was the one who encouraged me.

On a morning of demonstrations in the largest cities and numerous public speeches calling for that man’s freedom, I set my client a single condition: they should let me negotiate alone with my team; with the government’s and the intelligence services’ support and advice behind me, but alone. With my trustworthy companions, who were used to dealing with kidnappers. They weren’t all that convinced; I’m not quite sure why they accepted the prison officers’ proposal. In fact, they had already warned me not to publicize the framework of the meetings, which might perhaps be understood as giving way to blackmail.

She and I had decided, before anything else, to take a short trip to Porto and Lisbon. Alone, without our daughter. An impulse, the kind of blood rush we hadn’t felt for a while. Lunch by the Douro, knowing it would most probably be the last; a crack of midday light in the wine as we made our toast. Like our final visit to an old poet, a friend of hers, a health inspector who fed the city’s abandoned cats, which in turn inspired his most sincere poems, it seemed to me. This man’s words, and above all his verses, simple, transparent, which she had underlined with a biro all over the place, gave her an impetus she couldn’t have received from medicine. It was four unforgettable days.

We experienced those eight months, the two of us, with intensity, as if the cold serenity I displayed during the negotiation, in analyses and strategy, even before my client’s habitual incomprehension, turned into sentiment and passion between us. It was the only interval during which, in our own way, we shared a home. We had never done so before, and never would again. Only those days, with the exception of the ones I spent in Algiers. Our relationship was nourished by daily phone calls and short, but frequent visits, and was intimate like this and highly special until the end.

The energy I put into that man’s liberation gave me a vital impulse I had never experienced before. There was lots of adrenalin and emotional baggage that had to be kept under control – I was trying to free a man I didn’t even know, and yet could do nothing to save her. It was as if, by endeavouring to free him, I might also rescue her; that feverish delirium one night in Algiers after we had been vaccinated, the first or second night we were there.

My first contact was with a journalist who laid down some of the guidelines in an indirect manner, that objective style in journalism that describes the action by implying third parties. He talked to me about “them”, committed, but also distant. A special person, short, with a close reader’s or a diver’s thick glasses. A compulsive smoker, he would light one cigarette after another, and drink long American coffees with the same anxiousness, as he explained it to me. The strange thing was he transmitted serenity, as if he needed those additives just to calm down. He never looked in front when he was speaking, and every third word was an oath he lessened by smiling continually, as if this enabled him to let off steam. Since he was the head of the sports section, or so he told me, his political analyses had a certain depth and a reasoned, sincere foundation. We always met in popular, central bars; another time, in a modern art museum; he was honest, I believed in his words. It was obvious from the lengthy manner in which he chose the most suitable ones. A good guy. We had established something we both knew was impossible, inconvenient: friendship. I never judge, I only analyze and try to do so with the requisite distance and coldness. This man had written several well-known books researching the intrigues of relevant figures that ended up in fraud, as I would find out later in the media, and had been prosecuted and even arrested on more than one occasion as a result of these publications. I couldn’t quite believe he was a sports editor. He had jumped about a bit, living badly because of his ideas, and this post was like any other in a sympathetic newspaper he himself had helped to found, where sport was also a political question. One more. I followed his articles on the kidnapping and the attacks that kept on happening, his political arguments with the central State always as an enemy, with attention, even from Algiers. They afforded me more clues sometimes than the secret services. We maintained our friendship, though we eventually stopped exchanging emails, because circumstances had changed and they were no longer necessary. I recently found out he had died and was sorry.

He organized a meeting with a Jesuit archivist, which failed at the first two attempts. I succeeded one grey, stormy day when I approached the sanctuary without too much confidence. I found him at the top of a ladder, cleaning ancient documents with a fine brush. He explained these were volumes from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which were better preserved because the paper was less acidic. “All I do is protect the library from fungi and insects in a permanent battle,” he complained, coming down and showing me fingers with scaly skin. Without touch. He seemed like a peaceful, chubby friar, but with a hint of distrust in his gaze, I couldn’t tell why. He talked to me about temperature and light and, since I’d said he smelled of vaseline, he showed me a tub of special soap for protecting skin layers. He then told me among more recent documents, where he stopped, about the bloody period of the dictatorship and crimes in that same valley so many early mornings, humble people being taken outside, as if trying to get me to understand that all this was still fresh in the local population’s memory. And had to heal with time.

It was in the distillery, among aromatic herbs, macerating fruits and distilled alcohol, where he confessed in the cells, on more than one occasion, some of those youths who still believed they were fighting against the Regime, persecuted for attempting to free their country, had hidden. What he didn’t reveal among the humidity of those stones, the fragrance of so many medicinal herbs, is how those selfsame cells served as a prison for others – businessmen – who refused voluntarily to pay taxes to the revolutionaries. We sampled a wonderful, albeit potent, liquor made from a clump of I don’t know how many plants; the secret of the taste, he said, was in the proportions, which he also couldn’t tell me. The friar was always talking with a double meaning.

I had meetings with politicians from one party and another who were going about the streets and squares, once again demanding that prison officer’s freedom; I assessed their valuations to know who I could count on in the political sphere when it came to undertaking the negotiation. I tried to convince them, when the time came, to put forward concrete initiatives and give the impression agreements were in the offing that might produce some result. Albeit minimal. I confirmed that the collaboration of some, who were opposed to the government, despite the blue ribbons, wasn’t going to be easy.

It was the monk who arranged the first serious meeting to make contact with the kidnappers. For this reason, we met at dawn among snowflakes at the foot of a hermitage. The cold arose white among the holm oaks. In the breath emerging from his mouth, not a word of condemnation for the kidnappers. Or of sorrow for the victim. Those days, calls from the armed political group for negotiation were constantly being issued through the media, while they promoted organized revolts in squares against civil demonstrations for peace and carried out the odd attack. And there was the friar and me, alone in that forest of cawing crows.

A cold roadside motel with international haulage lorries parked in perpendicular rows was the scenery chosen for the first meeting with a young, radical student in his twenties, whose gestures were emphatic without being aggressive and who displayed nervous tics, and an older woman with a girl who kept on coming in to check or ask for something, sometimes with sobs, and who referred to her as “Mummy”. I guessed this was the owner of the establishment, or at least the manager, because she was in the habit of giving orders. Another woman sometimes joined us, a teacher who had been interviewed in the papers on the occasion of the publication of an essay that was halfway between sociological and political. With her theoretical discourse and greater ideological content, she would frequently divert us from a practical script that still had to be agreed point by point.

One night when there was a hailstorm, some civil guards came into the motel bar; they exchanged pleasantries with the girl and her mother; they clearly knew each other, had a few beers, checked the contents of some of the lorries outside, and left. We still hadn’t gone into the private room to talk – a room with chairs and a table, without windows, where the paint was peeling from the walls. There was also a sofa bed.

Those three contacts were the group’s agents, as when you’re going to buy a property from an estate agent, just the same. Certain rules had to be agreed between both parties, and that is what we sometimes managed in the old roadside motel devoured by dampness: to lay down the ground rules. As when buying an apartment, they started by asking too much, and I came in lower down, both sides making use of exaggeration and deceit. The normal thing. The man put on an act, not all that naturally – he didn’t stop waving his arms about, more to impress the woman than to contradict me; in the end, our efforts were aimed at reaching intermediary points. Too impulsive, spontaneous, to be there, but I imagined this was because of her, not me or the negotiation.

I recalled the time I had wanted to buy a single-family house with a garden a few miles from the city: it was perfect, it even had this small pine grove, but nearby was a pig farm that gave off an unbearable stench. I used this to make the estate agent lower the price, though eventually I decided not to buy it, even when the price had fallen almost as low as my opening bid. What I needed was a pig farm in this process as well.

The last time we met was in a country house with a centenarian holm oak; at its foot, we established the definitive points we were going to negotiate, or rather the government should set about fulfilling. There were demands I realized were non-negotiable, but my real purpose was not to free that man, but to make sure they didn’t kill him. My role was that of the conjuror who puts off time. To make believe this exercise was, had to be, certain. And propose a toast to the agreement. There was a celebration nearby that night – they were setting off fireworks. I sensed there was a special relationship between the man and the woman – her gestures were immediately reflected in him; he was very susceptible and dependent; he had gone over the agreement once more until the early hours. He angrily deleted, struck out words while coming out with proclamations learnt by heart, repeated a thousand times. The woman sometimes grew impatient with him, and a look of hers was enough for him to calm down and finish transcribing the agreement.

I then travelled to the Maghreb on up to six occasions.

*   *   *

That final morning in Algiers, I woke at dawn to a call from a senior official; his confidence and my bewilderment, still half asleep. It seemed I had to keep the negotiation going for a few more hours, a day perhaps, by whatever method. I should convey an ambitious and credible political proposal; they were going to undertake an important operation in the coming hours in coordination with the National Court. Me still drowsy, leaning on the pillow. They had located the captors and a possible bunker; there could be no mistake. If necessary, someone in government would confirm the initiative, but not before midday or in the afternoon, so as to gain the time that was needed.

I realized, leaning out of the window, how sinister and yet inspiring dawn in a city at war can be. The lingering black smoke from a final explosion among the yellow and orange dust of summer. The strident call to prayer being repeated over and over in streets that were completely empty; the deliberately loud volume of the speaker in the mosque, next to the fortress, acting as a stimulus for one band or the other. In the dining room, it was only us and a waiter offering sweet cakes and mint tea with a few drops of milk; I wondered whether he was the one from the hammam the night before. The clattering of spoons on bowls and plates, their echo like whistles in that elegant, spacious Arabic lounge. I enjoyed that moment of calm like never before; I felt strangely serene. At the door to the garden, always a cluster of cats miaowing insistently until they got their plate of milk once again. That morning, the sensations were different; I hadn’t even been through the old notebook before we went out. After that call, I had been left with the impression that my work was practically done, concluded; there was only the end to come. Soldiers hung around the hotel premises; I could hear them talking, from time to time a shouted command. I finally saw things I only knew about through Camus’ writing; I had the feeling I was entering his novel. It was a splendid morning, of Mediterranean light, in sharp contrast to the dilapidated buildings and the general desolation. I was holding her hand – it was a moment, and it was fleeting. The city, however, belonged to the military. I was certain it wouldn’t be difficult to present a plan that came close to the kidnappers’ more ambitious proposals and to gain time while waiting for the government’s confirmation.

When we arrived, the waiter’s gestures, his sharp Arabic look, did not portend well; they made me feel distrust. The woman wasn’t there, only the two men. Nor did I ask anything. Before we sat down, they declared, “They are going to kill him.” I carried on stirring the sugar in my black coffee with a degree of indifference and tasted it with short, slow sips. I gazed at the waiter. I reminded them, still savouring the coffee, what we had achieved day by day during those months, at those six meetings. True, it might not have been what they were expecting to begin with, but important concessions had been obtained by them in their struggle and even on the political plane. He didn’t make any gestures, but with his silence I could see this man, the spokesperson, agreed with me; I know from experience there are silences like official documents. Many were sections he himself had put forward and defended during the negotiation, which strategically had been accepted to a high degree in order to prolong the negotiation while the investigation was underway.

Precisely that day, I had confirmation of one of their principal ideas, not all of it, but a significant amount. The nucleus of his ideology. He should call, I insisted; one last time and, if the sentence was definitive, we would pack up that same lunchtime or in the afternoon, when they answered. It was fine; after all, hundreds of women and children were having their throats slit every night in that city in return for nothing. We had to understand what the victim’s life was really worth.

They went to make the call.

The waiter came over with a little white box, possibly one of those boxes used for more elaborate sweets. I was just about to open it when he stopped me; it was he who carefully showed me the yellow and orange butterfly inside. It was beautiful with black borders and white spots, trying to beat its wings in the box. The waiter perceived my surprise, though he tried to hide this.

I had no doubt – he was on our side. The detail of the butterfly was not insignificant, I thought, after the other night with the moth. It was also confirmation that this man, waiter or agent or whatever he was, knew Spanish or had a smattering of our language.

At the time, I think I was more shaken by the butterfly than by the victim’s death sentence, among other reasons because the sentence had been signed from the outset, it was a question of preventing the murder. I entered the garden, oblivious to the passing of tanks and army lorries outside; there was a certain amount of traffic, more than usual at that hour of the day. Guards kept watch from strategic locations, discreet and camouflaged like many of the insects in the vegetation. I searched, I don’t know why, for more butterflies among the fruit trees and those tall plants with flowers; bugs, yes, but I couldn’t see a single butterfly. Where had the waiter obtained this specimen, and what was the motive or message? Nothing was casual – of that I was certain. Was he saying the victim’s freedom was assured?

The two men took longer than usual to return. I noticed the waiter was a little restless during that interval, attentive to every movement of mine from inside the hotel. I guessed they must have been discussing the final decision with the organization; there would have been differences between those who were more theoretical, on the one hand, and those who were more radical and violent, on the other. Everything was picking up pace. I had the box with the butterfly in my hand; I had thought about letting it go, but hadn’t done so, though I had taken a look on three or four or more occasions. A winged worm, its splendid transformation.

It was nearly midday.

When they came back, I was waiting for them at a table with another black coffee and the box before me. Before they could say anything, I nodded to my interlocutor and pointed at the box. I pushed it towards him; this unsettled him. I smiled; nothing was going to happen, this is what I endeavoured to convey with my expression. He lifted the lid, and the butterfly flew out; the man was tempted to stand up and grab it, but stopped himself. The butterfly fluttered around in circles and then disappeared.

No one knew how to react. A negligible detail that departed from the script. “A plain tiger,” I said, as if this wasn’t important. Nor was I sure. “You have until later this afternoon to make the proposal official; it’s not certain,” he added, “they don’t trust your word.” “Mine?” I asked. “Yours,” he repeated.

We arranged to meet at half past six in an attempt to steal a few more hours. We went back to the hotel. I tried to let them know about the recess, but couldn’t get a connection and stood amazed, watching the sunset through all the cables. I could have done with a bath in the hammam. With her. I was about to call her, but opted to wait until the night so as not to alarm her. More explosions could be heard in the distance, another surprise attack by the rebels. It was all very strange in that atmosphere.

The city’s most sinister hour was when night began to emerge from the windows of buildings, spreading its blackness outside. Nights in Algiers, it seemed to me, were born like this. I spotted a note, a folded piece of paper, under the door of my room. Letters traced with difficulty in Spanish informed me, with the odd mistake, that there was no power, it had been cut off halfway through the morning. The street lamps still hadn’t come on, nor was there any light in any of the nearby buildings. Hence, the impossibility of getting a connection. I asked in reception and, in effect, the hotels were running on generators.

The waiter; his predisposition and his Spanish in that note. What was that man really? Who was he working for? In any case, the kidnappers had possibly not made the call that morning; they had almost certainly faked the call, and neither they nor I really knew what had happened to the kidnap victim. Everyone with their cards, playing false. There wasn’t long to go before we resumed the negotiation, and we were still incommunicado. Before getting ready to go out, I asked the hotel employee if he had seen anyone come in, but no; nor did he know when the connection would be restored.

There were blasts with abrupt blazes down by the sea, like fireworks, hardly any different. I opened the notebook, but was at a loss what to write in all this disorder. A puzzle I couldn’t solve, pieces that didn’t seem to go together – or at least, at this point in time, I didn’t know where to put them. The butterfly. The fake call. I had the piece of paper in my hand; there was no power, I laughed, and that letter in Spanish with its Arabic features, that blasted waiter. Everything seemed – was – tragic all around, and ridiculous. What was all this for?

There was a knock at the door; it was the employee offering us some appetizers, some turnovers, cinnamon balls, and cream-filled cakes, he would bring them up to our rooms. He himself had prepared them a little earlier. We had to leave soon, but I accepted; I was hungry. We were eating when we were informed that the power had come back on. Now everything sped up, as in a waterfall. We received a call telling us to hurry and embark on a plane home – it was waiting for us at the airport. The rescue operation had been clearly defined. They were going to arrest the kidnappers that same night. There were no doubts. They had located the warehouse with the bunker. We were in danger. I nibbled on a cinnamon ball and felt a heaviness, I wasn’t sure why. I called to let her know. We left discreetly, as if returning to the negotiation. I was sorry not to say goodbye to the waiter, to talk to him some more, and to leave an open ending with my interlocutors. The journey to the airport was like scratching a wound, the same sensation – the pleasure of itching, followed by pain. I had lost the city by now, and the opportunity to really get to know my interlocutor.

At the airport, after midnight, the order came to board the plane, together with an urgent warning: it seemed they had just freed a businessman who was also being held after his family had paid a ransom. He was alone – there was no sign of our man. The information was slightly contradictory. We should wait. The operation might be mistaken and a failure. The sultry atmosphere in the empty airport at that hour could almost be felt; gusts of hot air that first night in July. Algiers in the distance, the odd explosion, was like a nightmare that had to be believed. I thought about the butterfly, its flight towards the garden window in that hotel, and the look of satisfaction on the waiter’s face. The waiting room, small, poorly illuminated, was like the white box with us inside, still trying to beat our wings.

Text © Miguel Sande

Translation © Jonathan Dunne