One day in the 1990s, we were walking down the street, we were leaving the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, and Alvaro Mutis ¹ stopped short. We were almost at the corner of the rue de Grenelle, and he said to me: “Emmanuel, I have the impression that we walked like this together a long time ago in a street in Cadiz. And we were having the same discussion. I confess that I no longer remember our remarks. I am certain that if Alvaro Mutis were still alive, he would remember it.

Alvaro Mutis had a special relationship with life. He lived by handling memory and immediate reality. He always put one foot in one and one foot in the other. With him, these two worlds never left each other, they were close, went hand in hand, like conjoined twins, like a one-way life, for the better. Alvaro Mutis was living his life and other lives, lives he had lived before, or would live later. Above all, Alvaro Mutis lived, at all times, accompanied by a young boy, this still child was called Alvarito, he was always with us. Carmen, Alvaro's wife, accepted his presence even though it was not her son. I have never met someone like Alvaro Mutis. I mean there was something terrifying and intriguing about his presence, his presence as a child next to the same middle-aged adult. I told him that often. I told him that Bernanos, whom he loved, also had to live like this with the incarnated afterglow of a young self by his side.

I come here to tell what I know of Alvaro Mutis, Maqroll el Gaviero and a few others… These last years have been slow and long. We corresponded much less. He no longer wrote. He hadn't written for so long. The tremors had taken over. A certain emptiness too. Everything was doomed to disappear like the stump of a dead tree that disappeared in a week in the damp furnace of the Amsud. Everything had to pass, and this spectacle of life in action never ceased to amaze Alvaro Mutis throughout the ninety years he spent on this earth.

What would I say of him? Walking through the streets of Paris alongside Alvaro Mutis was like going back in time, reliving the Paris of Henri VI, the Paris of Louis XIV, the Paris of his childhood which brought together all eras. A few steps were enough to believe that we had of course experienced this scene in a street in Cadiz or Constantinople a few centuries earlier. Alvaro Mutis advanced his strong and enveloping voice and told about life for having lived it a lot. One breath would be enough to think that life cannot be told. But when Alvaro Mutis told, he lived. He had this special talent, without borders, to live and think about life. Thus, he lived with this young man, him, at his side. Thus, in the middle of the Jardin du Luxembourg, it transported us in a few minutes to the warm lands, and Maria, the young coffee picker, came to meet us. We leaned against the family hacienda in Coello, in Tolima. The hot land of Colombia. Omnipresent plantations. And in a jiffy, in a few minutes, we found ourselves walking the alleys of Bruges, Antwerp, or on a tub going up the Mississippi.

How many times did Alvaro Mutis want to end Maqroll el Gaviero? The topman, his kind of double adventurer and backpacker, was embodied in poetry. One day, Alvaro Mutis decided to give new life to his hero. One day, somewhat in spite of himself, he left the armor of a great South American poet to become a prose writer. But that wasn't his biggest challenge. His biggest challenge was to expose Maqroll to prose, to give him this new life, a life that Alvaro thought was simpler. Would the gabier survive the novel which took over from poetry? Alvaro Mutis admitted that he had transformed the poetic Maqroll into a character in a novel to get closer to it, he was only going to distance himself from it. It was the strength of the novel where a character becomes autonomous, where the character takes flesh and suddenly lives his own life that nothing seems to be able to disturb ² . “I don't accept that what happens to me is imposed on me by fate in this way. I want to instantly decipher its meaning, subject it all to my own will, to my delirium and then we'll see what happens. » Maqroll el Gaviero or the embodiment of freedom.

I remember the day when I found him in Saint-Malo during the Étonnants Voyageurs . We hadn't seen each other for a few years and my first interview was for L'Action Francaise which had given him so much joy, he, the convinced monarchist talking to the French royalists. I was waiting for him in a room full to bursting and he entered surrounded by a cohort of more or less official people. I slipped as he passed by my side: “Alvaro, it's Emmanuel”. He stopped like a Swiss guard, and the whole cohort was confused, and we fell into each other's arms. As if we had parted a few weeks earlier… What would I say about Alvaro Mutis, there are so many qualities to mention? The most beautiful is also the one he immediately perceived in his interlocutor: nobility of heart.

Alvaro was very fond of the term despair. It contains despair, hope and wandering. It contains possibility. From poems to novels, Alvaro Mutis has been an itinerant, and of course an amazing traveler. In Saint-Malo, a city of which he had become a pillar and honorary citizen as he embodied the festival of Michel le Bris, he gave a conference on Simenon, on Belgium, on the king, on literature, with a crazy intensity. Wherever Alvaro intervened, he amazed. Wherever you read it, it captivated. Alvaro Mutis was like that. And Maqroll el Gaviero could not have done better. Perhaps only in recent years when illness plagued Alvaro. But only at times, when the latter let his guard down to heal himself. And then Maqroll was getting old too, since Bergen, he was feeling the blow. I still remember an afternoon spent exploring the spirits and especially the rums in my bar. Alvaro plunging his nose into the different nectars of the Caribbean. Alvaro had a passion for the Caribbean. He had translated Edouard Glissant. And there, we were helpless in front of such a profusion of excellence and we spent more time smelling the aromas than tasting them. We were listening to Carlos Gardel, Enrique Morente… I wanted him to read a book on General Mihailovic ³ which had come out some time before. I gave him the book. He was indeed a hero for him, I told myself that he would find poetry there.

In everything that Alvaro Mutis said, modesty breathed. Because Alvaro Mutis knew that only modesty allows intimacy, he placed it, for himself and for his characters, above everything. She was omnipresent at Maqroll, at Abdul Bashur, at Ilona, ​​at Flora. She was always embodied differently by these characters, different facets of the same quality. It was always about modesty, but expressed with care and science, and this extreme refinement was enough to distinguish him as a writer.

One day at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, we shared a delightful moment with Eduardo Garcia Aguilar ^{4 5} whom you introduced to me and Françoise Verny, seated at a nearby table, joined us in praising you. She loved you so much that she invited me to come and see her whenever I wanted. Of course, I've never been there. And you blamed me for it. I remember you saying to me, “Go see her! What are you waiting for ? I always knew you knew the answer. We shared this acceptance of life, which was also a form of modesty, or which, at the very least, was born of modesty. We shared this acceptance of life… I don't know if this sentence is understandable to everyone. It is about feeling the course of events like the course of a river. There are some things you fight against and some things you have to accept. It is not possible to navigate without knowing the strength and direction of the wind, without knowing the currents, the sandbanks, the tides. And every sailor knows he has to choose his battles. Sometimes he has to hunker down, other times he has to face the Titans… Total acceptance of life has nothing to do with fatalism. It does not prevent you from fighting and deploying your energy for a cause; on the other hand, it absorbs negative energies and allows life to develop without fear and without prejudice. A long life. Desperation was also a way of naming this long course. She was the disease and the treatment. We are talking about a life of trust. Because the young man by our side is never worried about starting a new adventure. Because the young man knows that “Poetry is made to teach men what they are without knowing it. »

Very dear Alvaro, you liked so much to tell this experience that you had lived and recounted in La Neige de l'Amiral : one day while walking in the Krak des Chevaliers Hospitaliers, you read a short and powerful epitaph on an anonymous grave: "This was not here. The certainty of this epitaph has never ceased to haunt you. Your disappearance makes me realize that this definition fits your life. It wasn't here … I remember precisely that you gave me this definition one foggy morning, very early, in a street in Cadiz, it was August 25, 1472. It was your birthday.