[…] The century-old must of wine, which is sprinkled with water in the cellars.
The power of his arm and his bronze shadow.
The stained glass window which recounts his loves and recalls his last battle darkens a little more each day under the smoke of the lamps nourished with bad oil.
Like the howl of a siren announcing to boats a shoal of scarlet fish is the complaint of the one who loved him more than any other,
the one who left her home to sleep against her saber slipped under the pillow and kiss her a soldier's hard stomach.
Like the sails of a ship that swell or sag, like the dawn that dissipates the fog on the airfields, like the silent walk of a barefoot man in an undergrowth, the news has spread of his death,
the pain of his open wounds in the evening sun, without pestilence, but with all the appearances of spontaneous dissolution.
The whole truth is not in this story. Missing in words is everything that constituted the drunken cataract of his life, the sonorous parade of the best of his days that motivated the song, his exemplary figure, his sins like so many precious coins, his effective and beautiful weapons.

Excerpt from the poem Le Hussard published in Les Elements du Disaster, Editions Grasset. Tribute day to Alvaro Mutis, extraordinary storyteller, immense writer, wonderful friend.