The Return (6 page)

Light rain despite the sun.

The little cemetery, hidden behind the marketplace,

is an oasis of peace.

Women in mourning though not widows

move among the dead

telling of their pain

without fear of being interrupted.

It's the only spot

where killers never come.

To live on a deforested island

knowing they'll never

see what is happening

on the other side of the water.

For most people

the hereafter is the only country

they have any hope of visiting.

A dog moves up the street.

Nose skyward.

Tail up.

It runs to the head

of the funeral procession.

I remember the pallbearers of my childhood

who danced with the casket on their shoulders.

Women threatening to throw themselves

into the hole to join their husband.

Frightened dogs running among the graves

while the wind shook the palm trees

like a schoolgirl playing with her braids.

Death seemed so funny to me back then.

Later when I was a teenager

not a day would go by without

the bell tolling for someone.

Each time it made my mother's blood run cold.

Death that people compared to a journey

set my own mind wandering.

Death could come at any time.

A bullet in the back of the neck.

A red flash in the night.

It appeared so quickly we

never had time to see it coming.

Its speed made us doubt its existence.

Life in the Neighborhood (Before and After)

A quiet neighborhood.

Very discreet.

A vendor sets up her stall

near a wall.

Then a second one comes.

Then a third.

A week later

a new market has sprung up.

And life has changed in the neighborhood.

A man running with sweat

with a white plastic water pail.

He hides behind the low wall

and vigorously washes his face,

neck, torso and armpits.

Then returns to the market.

How can anyone think of other people when they haven't eaten for two days and their son is at the General Hospital which doesn't even have enough bandages? But that's exactly what that woman did when she brought me a cool glass of water. Where does she find such selflessness?

That's me in the yellowing photograph,

that thin young man from Port-au-Prince

in the terrible 1970s.

If you're not thin when you're twenty in Haiti,

it's because you're on the side of power.

Not just because of malnutrition.

More like the constant fear

that eats away at you from inside.

I remember the sun beating down on the backs of people's heads. Dusty street, no trees. We all had the same emaciated look (wild eyes and dry lips). That's how you could recognize our generation. We used to meet up in the afternoon in a little restaurant near Saint-Alexandre Square, with a view of the lumpy buttocks of anarchist poet Carl Brouard. This son of the solid bourgeoisie had chosen to wallow in the black mud, in the middle of the coal market, to share the poverty of the working-class people. There weren't just parlor poets tethered to corrupt power back then.

We discussed ad nauseam the absurdity

of this life while avoiding

references to the political situation

that were too obvious

because the poor quarters were crawling

with spies paid by the police.

Sharks in dark glasses

trawling the whorehouses patronized

by political science and chemistry

students who are always the first

to take to the streets.

I've been eating fat for three decades in Montreal

while everyone has gone on

eating lean in Port-au-Prince.

My metabolism has changed.

And I can't say I know what goes on

these days in the mind of a teenager

who doesn't remember

having eaten his fill

one single day.

My hotel is situated

in the center of a market.

At three o'clock in the morning

the vendors arrive.

The trucks full of vegetables are unloaded

and the racket runs nonstop

sometimes till eleven at night.

The power's out.

Impossible to read.

I can't sleep either.

Through the window, I watch the stars

that carry me back to childhood

when I would stay up late with my grandmother

on our gallery in Petit-Goâve.

I look at my poor body lying

on this hotel bed knowing

that my mind is wandering

down the passages of time.

I end up falling asleep.

Sleep so light

I can pick up the slightest sound.

Like those tourists

coming back from a night out.

There are so few tourists in this country

we should pay them to stay.

The high-pitched cry of a cat getting its throat cut.

At night alcoholics have a fondness

for that meat when it's grilled

with no concern for the panicked voice

calling everywhere for Mitzi.

Headache.

I can't sleep.

I go out on the veranda

and sit.

Something is moving up there.

A little girl

climbing the mountain

with a pail of water on her head.

Here we live on injustice and fresh water.

Drawing a Blank

The young man who sweeps

the hotel courtyard every morning

brings me a coffee and a message from my sister.

She didn't want to wake me

but my mother is not doing well.

She has locked herself in her room

and won't open the door for anyone.

Everyone looks pretty happy to me. My sister kisses me as she dances. What's going on? Nothing. What about my mother? That was this morning, now she's fine. It happens sometimes, you know. In Montreal I would fall into an abyss without warning and not surface for hours. The enemy, in Montreal, is on the outside, when it's minus thirty for five days in a row. Here the enemy is within, and the only nature we have to tame is our own.

I hear my mother singing. A song popular in her youth. Radio Caraïbes often plays it on its oldies show, Chansons d'autrefois. My sister whispers that she's often like this after one of her descents into hell.

Marie, her name so simple

it's like

sharing my mother

with all my friends.

When I think about it I don't have any stories

about my mother from when she was young.

She's not the type to talk about herself.

Aunt Raymonde's stories are all

about her own person.

In vain I try to glimpse my mother

behind her.

My mother does not swim

in the great sea of History.

But all individual stories

are like rivers that run through her.

In the folds of her body she keeps

the crystals of pain of everyone

I have met in the street since I came here.

Pain.

Silence.

Absence.

None of that has anything to do

with folklore.

But they never

talk about those things

in the media.

Ghetto Uprising in the Bedroom

In my nephew's little room.

Books on a narrow shelf

next to a Tupac Shakur poster.

I spot one of my novels

and a collection of poems by his father.

My eyes seek out every detail

to help me travel back through the stream of time

and recover the young man

I was before my sudden departure.

We are sitting on the unmade bed

watching a documentary about violent gangs

battling each other in the lower reaches of the city.

Gunshots ring out.

From time to time, my mother comes in

and gives us a suspicious look.

My nephew is at the age when death

is still something esthetic.

From close range a Danish television crew is following

the violent confrontations that have been raging

for months in this miserable district.

Graffiti on a wall shows an empty stomach

and a toothless mouth holding a gun

heavier than the weight of the average adult

in that part of town.

A young French woman

has entered this seething slum.

Close-ups on the two brothers as sensitive

as cobras in the sun.

Each heads his own gang.

The young woman travels back and forth

between the two brothers.

One loves her.

She loves the other.

A Greek tragedy in Cité Soleil.

Bily is obsessed by his younger brother

who took on the name Tupac Skakur.

Fascination with American culture

even in the poorest regions

of the fourth world.

I watch the two brothers

strolling through the Cité.

Undernourished killers.

Emaciated faces.

Cocaine to burn.

Weapons everywhere.

Death never far.

I wonder what my nephew

thinks about all this.

It's his culture.

The new generation.

Mine was the '70s.

We're all cloistered in our decades.

These days the murderer strikes at noon

in this country.

Night is no longer the accomplice of the killer

who dreams of adding his star to the firmament.

To reach the heavens nowadays

they have to kill with their face uncovered

and trumpet their acts on the
TV
news.

The Tonton Macoutes of my era had

to hide behind dark glasses.

Serial killers.

Papa Doc was the only star.

Tupac, the young leader who looks so much like Hector,

has conquered the Foreign Woman.

Tonight their savage kiss

on a reed mat on the floor

will drive all the warriors crazy

under the Cité ramparts.

Now Tupac is making political speeches.

He moves through Cité Soleil in a car.

Thinking he's a real leader.

A loud voice and an itchy trigger finger.

Suddenly he becomes lucid and

sees himself for what he is: a loser.

Facing the camera.

Sitting in the shadows.

Tupac: “If I stop, I'm a dead man.

If I go on, I'm a dead man.”

I feel my nephew shiver as if

he were facing the same choice.

This is a city where the killers

all want to die young.

Tupac falls at the height of his glory

in the dust of Cité Soleil.

Like his brother Bily.

Both killed by a frail young man

who suddenly stepped from the shadows.

The girl leaves with the
TV
crew.

On the cassette there's blood, sex and tears.

Everything the viewer wants.

Roll the credits.

An Emerging Writer

My nephew wants to be a famous writer.

The influence of the rock-star culture.

His father is a poet who gets death threats.

His uncle, a novelist living in exile.

He has to choose between death and exile.

For his grandfather it was death in exile.

Before you begin

you have time to think about fame

because once you write the first sentence

you're up against

this anonymous archer

whose real target is your ego.

Later on.

In a comfortable armchair.

By the fireside.

Fame will come.

Too late.

The hope then will be

for a day without suffering.

The worst stupidity, it seems,

is to compare one era

to the next.

One man's time

to another's.

Individual times

are parallel lines

that never touch.

In the little room, my nephew and I

look without seeing each other.

We try to understand

who the other is.

On the narrow shelf I notice

some Carter Brown novels that once belonged to me.

To write a novel, I tell my nephew

with a sly smile,

what you really need is a good pair of buttocks

because it's a job

like the seamstress's

where you spend a lot of time sitting down.

You also need a cook's talents.

Take a large kettle of boiling water,

add some vegetables

and a raw piece of meat.

You'll put in the salt and spices later

before lowering the heat.

All the flavors will blend into one.

The reader can sit down to the feast.

It's like a woman's job,

my nephew points out, worried.

It's true you have to be able to change

into a woman, a plant or a stone.

All three realms are necessary.

Watching the vein in his temple beat that way, I know he's thinking fast. But you haven't explained the most important thing to me. What would that be? It's not just the story, it's how you tell it. Then what? You have to tell me how to do it. You don't want to write something personal? Of course. No one can tell you how to be original. There must be tricks that can help. It's always better if you discover them yourself. But I'll waste time. That's the point: time doesn't exist in this job. I feel like I'm all alone. And lost. What good is having an uncle who's a writer if he tells you he can't help you out? At least you know that much. A lot of young writers think they can't write because they aren't part of a network. Maybe I don't know how to write. You can't say that if you haven't spent at least a dozen years trying to find out. What do you mean? A dozen years to find out I can't write? Well, believe me, that's a conservative figure. So what good is the experience then? I can't tell you any more than that, Dany.