The Return (11 page)

A man's impertinent remark.

The sudden gaiety of the women.

The driver slows down

and all the men lean toward

the singing river far below

where bare-breasted women

are washing the white sheets

of the rich ladies of Pétionville.

A colonial scent.

Where is that young girl going, seething with rage

through a field of yellow flowers

that lie flat as she passes by?

The ability of a girl that young

to produce such anger just might be

the palpable sign that this country still has

some guts.

A woman, under a mango tree,

offers us a coffee.

The river isn't far.

The air is so gentle

it hardly brushes my skin.

The music of the wind in the leaves.

Life is weightless.

A little cat

looking for its mother

finds a dog

of the tolerant sort.

Now both are sleeping

among the flowers.

We get back on the road and find ourselves behind

a long row of cars

full of men wearing ties

running with sweat

and women in black.

The cortege stops

at a modest cemetery decorated

by the local peasants.

Where did they get the idea

to paint death in colors

so brilliant and with motifs so naïve

they make children laugh?

For the naïve painter

death is as ordinary as the sunrise.

A visit to the painter Tiga

who lives close by the cemetery

that so impressed Malraux.

Thin as a reed.

Head like an insect.

Bristling with intelligence.

He sits down, gets up, goes to the window and returns

with an idea so natural

it seems simple.

And what's rare for a mind so inventive:

other people seem to matter to him.

The peasant painters have come together

under the banner Saint-Soleil.

Daily life in this village where people spend

most of their time dreaming and painting

revolves around the solitary star

that so intimidates Zaka, the peasant god.

My life has been adrift since that late-night call

announcing the death of a man

whose absence shaped me.

I let myself go knowing

that this wandering is not in vain.

When we don't know the destination

all roads are right.

The Jeep stops

near the Pétionville market,

the very place

where we met this morning.

At length we embrace,

without saying goodbye,

feeling we won't be seeing each other

again soon.

Tropical Night

I feel as if I know that man sitting on a bench in Saint-Pierre Square, the little plaza by the hotel. He seems so absorbed in his reading. His hair has grayed, but he has that familiar way of stroking his cheek with his fingertips. He is the only person I ever saw read poetry in an algebra class. He was drinking in
Alcools;
a single verse of it soon had me inebriated. I went to his house and stayed until I had read all the poetry books in his father's library. His family read nothing but poetry. Without ever wanting to write any, as his father said proudly. I touch him on the shoulder. He raises his head and without as much as a smile makes room for me next to him. He is still reading Apollinaire.

His father died in prison. They destroyed his library, sup-posedly because it concealed communist books. The man who hated communists because he suspected them of not liking poetry suffered a blow to the head and died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few days later at the military hospital. My friend wasn't at the house when the regime's henchmen visited. Alcools is the only book that wasn't destroyed that day because he had it, as always, with him—he never weaned himself off Apollinaire. And he never wanted to leave the country despite the appeals of his uncle who lives in Madrid and reads nothing but García Lorca.

He is working as a proofreader for the book pages at Le Nouvelliste. Just enough to survive. He could have been a literary critic, but he'll have nothing to do with other people and reads but a single poet (“humble as I am who am nothing worthwhile”). He still lives in the little room he had when I first met him. He closed off the other rooms the day a friend who works at the palace informed him of his father's death. Ever since he's been adding alcohol to poetry. He works at the paper in the morning and spends his afternoons reading on this bench, waiting for nightfall.

Night falls so suddenly in the tropics.

Night black as ink.

Surprised by the darkness all around me

I walk behind the man slowly

reciting Apollinaire.

The smell of ilang-ilang

uses the darkness

to spread over

this poor district.

We slip silently between

two rows of lamps.

The melodious voices

of the women whose silhouettes

are sketched upon the market walls.

Their sung stories were my childhood lullaby

on summer evenings.

The indolent gait

of a cow

on her evening stroll.

The night becomes

a Chagall painting.

Those nubile young girls from the poor parts of town

wearing flimsy sandals slip like geishas

over the asphalt still warm from the sun

on their way to the movie house near the market.

Soon their lovers will meet them.

Young tattooed bandits they kiss

all along their way.

Before I left, that sort of thing didn't exist, working-class girls who kissed in public. The only films were the ones the government bothered to screen ahead of time. The authorities established a morals brigade that spread out through the parks looking for unmarried lovers. They were married on the spot. The inspectors demanded, when the captive was worth it, to try out the goods first. The government figured that the more virtuous the population, the less likely it would rebel.

Raucous voices.

Near the nightclub.

On an out-of-the-way street.

Three pickup trucks crammed full

of peasants in Sunday clothes

come to town for a wedding.

The fragile napes

of the young women

contrast with

their calloused hands.

Our hands always reveal

our class origins.

The laughter of these one-night beauties

in the perfumed night

lets the young tiger on the prowl

locate them easily.

Then choose one,

bring her back to his lair

and devour her at his leisure.

A half-naked woman

preparing for the evening

at the end of a long corridor.

Car headlights

sweep across her glowing breasts.

To protect them from the eyes of predators

she quickly covers them with her hands,

revealing her swelling sex.

His father would spend his evenings at home. He died, he believes, never having known the night. We climb slowly toward the square. I watch him now that there's light to see. He brushes close to people, takes in smells, savors the moment as I have rarely seen someone do. Worried that his precious knowledge of the night will one day disappear along with him, I ask why he doesn't record his nocturnal adventures in a collection of poems or a personal journal. With a weary wave of his hand he lets me know he has no desire to share such emotions.

A pack of dogs ready to fight for a bone that a passerby just threw them. They break into two groups. The bone between them. Suddenly each goes for the throat of the other with no care for the bone. I turn to make a comment about their behavior, which doesn't seem much different from humans but he is gone. Faded into the night that has suddenly grown opaque. I go back to the hotel and hope for sleep.

A swarm of little yellow-and-black motorbikes

like bees in search of pollen

buzzing around Saint-Pierre Square.

So it really is the end of Papa Doc's

sharks in dark glasses.

New barbarians are in town.

A Generation of Cripples

From the hotel balcony, I look onto the square,

the marketplace, the bookstore

and in the distance the dusty road that leads down

toward my mother's house.

Besides the excursion with my friend to his farm

I have not left this secure perimeter.

What is frightening me? Not the Tonton Macoutes who have melted into the population since Baby Doc's departure, afraid of being discovered by someone they once tortured. Not the young guys on motorbikes who descend like locusts on this neighborhood of hotels and art galleries frequented by the few foreigners who risk visiting the country. I don't stray far from this golden circle; I don't want to feel like a foreigner in my own city. I keep putting off that moment of confrontation.

When I was a teenager, Pétionville was the rich suburb we visited on Sunday afternoons. In Saint-Pierre Square we hoped to spot upper-class girls out for a stroll. Things have changed since then. The rich have sought refuge on the mountain. To find out what life is really like, I should go down to Port-au-Prince where a quarter of Haiti's population is squirming like fish out of water. For four decades the landless peasants, jobless people and wretched of this nation have been converging on the city.

I think of my mother who

has never left her neighborhood.

I think of those six million Haitians

who live without the hope of leaving one day,

if only to catch a breath

of cool air on a winter's day.

I also think of those who could have done it

and haven't.

Then I feel badly looking out on my city

from a hotel balcony.

Near Sainte-Anne Square I meet an old friend I haven't seen since I was a teenager. At the time he lived in this workers' neighborhood where he still lives. What amazes me most since I've been back is how almost no one has left their district. They have gotten poorer but keep fighting the wind that wants to blow them into more miserable quarters.

I remember the neat square with the flowering bushes surrounding a tall statue of Toussaint Louverture on horseback. Right across from the school of the same name. Now the bushes are black with mud. People's faces gray and dusty. Houses with filthy entrances. I don't understand how people can get used to such calamity.

I promised myself not to look at the city

with yesterday's eyes.

Images from the past constantly try

to superimpose themselves on the present.

I am navigating through two worlds.

Sometimes we used to follow the train to filch

bits of sugar cane and chew on them

in the shadow of the King Salomon Star.

That crummy hotel became a bordello at night

while during the day it served as the headquarters

for all sorts of wildlife from the countryside

who'd come to the capital to do their dirty deals.

The real traveling salesmen stayed

in a modest hotel near Martissant.

We would lie down on the rails and jump out of the way just before the train came. We'd bet on who would get off the track last. My friend won every time. One day I asked him what his secret was. I close my eyes, he told me, and imagine I'm making love to Juliette. Juliette drove us all crazy back then. Of course he'd want her to be his. I wouldn't have gotten off the track in time. I meet him again: he is a prisoner of his wheelchair. He can't move his legs. First I thought that desire had won out over fear. Once he told me that after his friends left, he would go back and play this Russian roulette all by himself. Can you play that sort of game alone? Who's the winner then? That was his way of having an orgasm. The closer the train came, the clearer Juliette's face would become.

We lived in an electric atmosphere. It was dangerous just to stick our noses outside when the sharks in dark glasses paraded past in their luxury cars with young Dominican prostitutes smoking long menthol cigarettes. Often a machine gun pretended to sleep on the backseat. They spent whole nights gambling at the casino. We had to stay out of their way when they went home at dawn to sleep, because they didn't think twice about firing at anything that moved—just to play another game. Their primary job was the Chief's security. They'd invent some political plot just to throw their weight around in a recalcitrant neighborhood.

My friend got shot in the hip at the casino

by an officer jealous of the way his wife

couldn't take her eyes off him.

The story got into the papers.

The President offered him money.

His father refused.

The opposition wanted to make a hero out of him.

He refused.

I watch him concentrate all the energy

he can summon on the thing

that stokes his desire.

He begins to burn

when a girl in a short skirt

brushes against him not suspecting

the effect of such provocation

on a man in a wheelchair.

He can't move his legs

but the organ in question

still seems quite alert.

I'm afraid to call the roll

to find out what state

my generation is in.

Some work for the government, others are in prison. Some vegetate, others live in luxury. Some still go in for seduction, others have aged prematurely. But those who never could leave the country and who always wanted to, feel, when they meet me again, that it's up to a new generation to dream of that journey.

In Praise of Diarrhea

I went by the pharmacy and on the glass door there was a message scrawled on a piece of cardboard: “Closed for Funeral.” Diarrhea had kept me up all night. I couldn't stop shitting, amazed once again at how much the belly can hold. The night before, I drank some fruit juice from a stall along my way, just to prove that I was still a son of the soil. Nationalism can trick my mind, but not my guts.