The Return (17 page)

An infernal racket on the roof.

We go on talking

as if nothing were happening

then quiet down as we enter Aquin.

Completely drained.

What kind of pride made us want to

challenge the fury of the elements?

The sun returns.

We come to a crossroads and don't know

whether to go right or left.

The chauffeur believes we should turn left.

My nephew thinks we should go right.

A man sitting on his gallery watches us,

drinking his coffee with his dog at his feet.

Without lifting his head, he points us in the right direction.

I'm sure on the way back he'll be

in the same spot.

In two days or ten years.

Meanwhile I keep running.

He sits unmoving on his gallery.

We will meet at least

twice in this lifetime.

On the way out and on the way back.

I am reading Césaire in the shade (“earth great vulva raised to the sun”) when my nephew approaches me as delicately as a cat. What's it like? he asks without preliminaries. What? Living somewhere else. Back there is like here for me now. But it's not the same landscape. I've lost the idea of territory. It happens so gradually you don't realize it, but as time goes by the images you had in your memory are replaced by new ones and that never stops. He sits down next to me with the serious look of a young man who has started thinking too early in life. For us, you're in the lap of luxury up there. Not exactly. Just to be able to express yourself without fear, that's a good start. At first, yes, it was exciting, but after a few years it becomes natural, so you start looking for something else. A human being is a very complicated machine. He's hungry, he finds something to eat and right away he wants something else, that's normal, but other people go on seeing him as the starving man he was when he first showed up. Aunt Ninine says you're the only person who spent three decades in North America and returned home empty-handed. That's the way it is. That's how I am. I can't change things. I'm one of those people who doesn't take money seriously. I know we need it, but I'm not going to be a slave to it. That's not what I mean! So Aunt Ninine put you up to this. Silence. She never abandons her prey. It's all right, I'll leave you alone with Césaire.

We go through a village that's deader than a cemetery. Besides the mangy dog that followed us to the other side of town, no one notices we were there. You didn't see them, the chauffeur says, but the adults were watching us from behind every door and the children were hidden behind every tree. How do you know? my nephew asks. I grew up in a dump like this, the chauffeur retorts.

Since the black hen keeps on clucking,

the chauffeur advises me

to cover her head

with a sock

so she will see nighttime

in the middle of the day.

We stop in a hamlet to buy a straw hat for my nephew who is suffering from heat-stroke. A few huts in a half circle around a tamped-earth yard surrounded by dusty bayahondas. Men play dominos under a broad mango tree. A few women are cooking at the rear of the yard. Naked children run from one group to the other. I feel I've stepped into another time. I didn't know that just by changing locations I could feel this way, as if ten years separated me from Port-au-Prince, though I've only just left it.

The Caribbean Winter

In this region

the famine was so terrible

people had to eat unripe fruit

and the leaves of young plants.

Trees stripped bare along the way.

A kind of Caribbean winter.

The sky has more stars here

than anywhere else.

The night is blacker too.

We move past people

whose voices we hear

though we don't see their faces.

Sometimes I note down

my impressions

long after leaving

a village.

Such destitution leaves me

speechless.

We drive through another dry village.

A small boy runs after the car

waving his hands wildly,

a wide smile on his face.

I watch him fade

into a cloud of dust.

I will never get over

the extreme courtesy of the peasants

who will offer you their bed

with an immaculate white sheet on it

and sleep under the stars instead.

The car stays by the bridge, watched over by a tall, serious young man who confided to me that his greatest dream is to go to Port-au-Prince one day and meet the radio announcers he listens to. The morning he spent with us, he had a transistor radio glued to his ear. When a new announcer came on, he wanted to know if we knew him. Rico? Marcus? And Bob? What about Françoise? Or Liliane? Did you ever meet Jean? He knows them intimately though he has never met them.

We climbed to the top on horseback. Of the three horses, I got the most stubborn. The one that insisted on walking on the edge of the cliff. What is my life worth to an animal that wonders what I'm doing on its back? I suffer from vertigo and don't dare look down. The young peasant guiding me gave me a knowing wink then urged the horse toward the middle of the path.

A small reception under the arbor. We are greeted enthusiastically as if we were honored guests. The people bring us coffee, tea, alcohol. There is a distillery on the plantation. A long table loaded with food. I eat the best meal of my life. Next to me my nephew shovels it in. A half-dozen girls dressed in white serve us. It's like living in a dream world where every desire comes true. The master of the property, a rich farmer, pushes me into the arms of his youngest daughter, a timid, modest beauty who has not budged from her chair underneath a calabash tree. As I get ready to go back down the path, I discover she studied medicine at Harvard, and the feast is to celebrate her return home. I like the idea of her, underneath the coffee tree, in the arms of the young peasant who is looking at her with a desire so intense he seems willing to face death to win her.

At that reception I met an old professor of Greek who was still teaching two years ago in a Port-au-Prince lycée. He had published a collection of poems in the manner of Verlaine and Vilaire. We were talking about Césaire, who left him cold, when one of his friends showed up. They began to converse in Greek. I had forgotten about culture in the provinces, so refined and so musty.

The peasants refuse to take the money I offer for their trouble and since I insist, one of them admits they have done all this for the minister. In the car, the chauffeur tells me we never would have been able to travel so freely if people hadn't recognized the minister's car. If the region enjoys irrigation, it's thanks to him.

I ask the chauffeur why he didn't eat anything at the reception. First he pretends not to hear. I have to remind him that if he fears something it is his duty to tell me, since I am under his protection. In that mysterious tone he takes on from time to time, he tells me there's no risk as long as a person knows nothing. I have to insist and finally I get a clear explanation. We were received with such respect because we represented very powerful gods. Which ones? He doesn't want to answer. And you? For the ceremony to begin, the god had to honor the meal. What kind of ceremony was it? The girl's betrothal to Legba. So I was supposed to be Legba, since the master of the house kept pushing me into her arms? No, it was your nephew. Then why did he take such good care of me? He needed to soothe Ogou, a jealous, wrathful god who could have spoiled the feast at any moment. And you? Since I hadn't taken anything illicit, I was a mere mortal accompanying the gods. I'm not sure he is telling me everything. Mystery is a vital part of voodoo. And when I hear tourists and ethnologists claim they attended “a real voodoo ceremony...” Except there is no real voodoo ceremony—it's like believing you can buy your way into heaven. The real stakes are found in other spheres.

The Son of Pauline Kengué

Monsieur Jérôme, our mysterious chauffeur who has always refused to tell us his last name, comes from a little place that's not on any map. One of those crossroads known only by those who live there. Yet people are born, live and die in places like that, just like everywhere else. No better, no worse. I discover our chauffeur's name when we stop at the local market. People come and gather around him, touching him with great feeling, speaking to him gently. “I never thought I'd see you again before I died, Jérôme,” says a bent old woman selling Palma Christi oil. For her, he is the son of Pauline Kengué, a Congolese woman from Pointe-Noire who arrived in the village one morning and stayed. According to the old woman who was her best friend, the people of Pauline Kengué's tribe believe that those who die in Africa return to earth in Haiti, preferably in a village. Until her death, Pauline spoke endlessly about her son Alain who had remained behind in Africa. She always said she'd come here so Alain would feel Haitian when the time came. We belong to the country where our mother is buried. Was that some mad pronouncement due to the delirium of her last moments? People will know only if the son shows up and goes to pray at his mother's grave in this lost village in Haiti.

I can tell you that she loved you as much as Alain, says the old woman, stroking his cheek. I remember as if it were yesterday when Pauline came to knock on my door and show me the beautiful baby she had found in the market. I had stayed home that day because of a raging fever. Pauline would stop by if she didn't see me at the market by noon. She would bring me soup or a nice cup of clove tea. She was a good woman, serious and honest. That day she was hiding something in a white towel. That something was you, Jérôme. Someone set you down in that towel right next to her. In the light of day. There are a lot of people in a market. She thought she'd seen a woman dressed in white with a red kerchief around her neck, but she couldn't be sure. Everything happened so fast. A gift from above, that's what I told her. She called you Jérôme for her first son who died when he was three months old. That's the way Pauline was, orderly and discreet. A trustworthy friend too. Monsieur Jérôme smiles at the memory of his mother, a woman who never left his thoughts, even for a minute, or so he told us later over lunch. Whatever your age and your personal accomplishments, if people see in you the son of your mother who has long since died, it's a sign you've returned to your native village, the place of all beginnings.

Yet in the same village, someone steals our bag while we are having lunch. We had put it underneath the table, by the hen. Monsieur Jérôme is dying of shame. He keeps saying that things have changed. In his day everyone knew one another. If someone had a problem, they all chipped in to help out. They lived as a single family. So the thief isn't from here? He must come from Zabeau, six kilometers away. I know the refrain. I've heard it everywhere I've been. The cook tells us to make a deposition at the section head's office. When we get there, we are informed that he's always in Vietnam at this time of day. It takes us a while to catch on that “Vietnam” is a whorehouse on the edge of the village. Monsieur Jérôme blushes with shame again. We head there anyway. Sitting at the rear of a dim room, the section head is sipping the house cocktail, the “rarin' to go,” a drink that can keep you galloping till dawn. His attention seems focused on something other than our report about a stolen bag. He keeps his sunglasses on despite the darkness. Suddenly he begins to quiver. He slams the table with his large palm and begins gasping for breath. I am about to offer him my help when a young woman crawls out from under the table, her forehead bathed in sweat. Obviously, this is not the right time to explain our problem. The chief seems ready to move on to the main course. We don't stay, despite his generous offer to share his harem.

The only way to the village of Zabeau is through a cane field. Bare-chested, sweating men. The machete whistles like an angry cobra. The first sharp blow cuts the cane at the base. Catching it in full flight, a second blow takes the top off. The stalk joins the pile a meter away. Monsieur Jérôme tells us how he used to follow his father to go cut cane. He tries, but he's lost his touch. For a moment I watch the men work, and dream of having the same dexterity with sentences. I spot figures moving in the distance. Someone is holding a secret ceremony far from prying eyes. Monsieur Jérôme asks us to get back in the car, and as we drive I hear the melodious voices of men and women singing the glory of Erzulie Freda Dahomey, the goddess no man can resist. The apparent peace of the countryside should not make us forget that these peasants have never stopped battling, first the slave traders of Europe, then the American Army of occupation (from 1915 to 1934). Today, they're fighting the Haitian government.

I have just left one of those small improvised celebrations at the side of the road. One of the few parties in the countryside that involves only mortals. In this case, the ingredients include a guitar, a bottle of rum and a few men who have been friends from childhood. The little group is making its way to the cemetery, to the grave of the guitar player's young fiancée who died at the beginning of last year. Now they are on the far side of the hill. The song is even more poignant when the one singing it is unseen.

We have been driving for a good hour when we hear a noise so startling it sounds like gunfire. Worried, people come out of their houses. A boy points at our left front tire—already flat. We pull onto the side of the road and open the trunk. No spare. “It's my fault,” Monsieur Jérôme murmurs, sincerely sorry. We will have to have the flat tire repaired. Monsieur Jérôme rolls it five kilometers to the next gas station. We wait for him by the car. My nephew uses the time to go swimming in the little river at the foot of the cliff. The water is so cold it shows bluish glints. I hear my nephew laughing as he tries to catch small flying fish. Two peasants coming back from the fields watch him placidly. It's always hard to tell what they are thinking, or find out if we are transgressing a taboo. My nephew recovers the sense of pleasure his body has forgotten. You can't imagine the constant pressure that a city like Port-au-Prince exercises on the nerves of a sensitive young man.