The Return

The Phone Call

The news cuts the night in two.

The inevitable phone call

that every middle-aged man

one day will receive.

My father has died.

I got on the road early this morning.

No destination.

The way my life will be from now on.

I stop along the way for breakfast.

Bacon and eggs, toast, scalding hot coffee.

I sit by the window.

A sharp sun warms my right cheek.

A quick glance at the paper.

A bloody image of a car wreck.

Death is sold anonymously in America.

I watch the waitress moving

among the tables.

Busy with her rounds.

The nape of her neck is sweaty.

The radio is playing this country song,

the story of a cowboy

unhappy in love.

The waitress has a red flower tattooed

on her right shoulder.

She turns and gives me a sad smile.

I leave the tip on the newspaper

next to the cup of cold coffee.

Walking toward the car I try to imagine

the loneliness of a man facing death

in a hospital bed in a foreign country.

“Death expires in a white pool of silence,”

wrote the young Martinican poet Aimé Césaire

in 1939.

What can anyone know of exile and death

when they’re not even twenty-five?

I get back on Highway 40.

Little villages numb with sleep

along the frozen river.

Where are they all hiding?

The invisible people.

The feeling of discovering

virgin territory.

For no good reason I take

a country road

that will set me back by an hour.

A vast land of ice.

It’s difficult for me

even after so many years

to imagine the shape

next summer will take.

Ice burns

more fiercely

than fire

but the grass remembers

the caress of the sun.

There are, beneath this ice,

hotter desires

and sharper impulses

than in any other season.

The women here know it.

The men sweat for a living and

the first to open his mouth is a sissy.

Silence is the rule of the forest

if you don’t want to be surprised by a bear.

He nurtured silence so long

that emptiness took hold of him.

The man became a dry branch

that cracked in the cold.

Hunger brings the wolf out of the woods

and drives the woodsman home.

He nods off, after his bowl of soup,

by the fireplace.

His wife tells him what they said on the radio.

It’s always about war and lost jobs.

So go the centuries in these northern villages.

It’s easy to talk when we’re warm,

and binding old wounds.

The wounds we’re ashamed of

never heal.

I always panic when

I can’t hear another human sound.

I am a creature of the city.

My rhythm is the staccato heels

of a woman coming up behind me.

I have lost all direction.

Snow has covered everything.

Ice has burned away the smells.

The realm of winter.

Only a native can find his way through this.

A big bright yellow truck roars past.

The driver, happy to finally

meet someone on the road,

blows his horn wildly.

He’s heading south.

I’m driving into the luminous north

that blinds and enchants me.

I know at the end of this road

a bearded man full of gentle fury,

surrounded by a pack of dogs,

is trying to write the great American novel.

Hunkered down in the sleeping village of Trois-Pistoles

on the edge of the frozen river,

he is the only one today who knows how

to dance with ghosts, madmen and the dead.

This bluish light

sweeping the river

swallows me up in a single breath.

The car begins to skid.

I recover just in time.

To die amid beauty

is not granted to the petit bourgeois man

that I am.

I am aware of being in a world

completely different from my own.

The fire of the South crossing

the ice of the North

produces a temperate sea of tears.

When the road is straight like this,

ice on both sides,

no clouds to help

me find my way under the noonday sky

so completely blue,

I can touch infinity.

I really am among those northern people

who drink till they go mad

dancing a broken jig.

They scream obscenities at the sky

and are astonished to find themselves alone

on a giant sheet of ice.

The feeling of driving

through one of those

cheap paintings hanging

above the fireplace.

Landscape within the landscape.

At the far end of the dirt road,

her feet not touching the ground,

that little girl with the black hair

and the fever-colored yellow dress is dancing.

The one who has lived in my dreams

since the summer I was ten.

A quick glance at the gauges

to see how much gasoline is left.

A breakdown on this road

means certain death.

Magnanimous, the cold numbs before it kills.

The dogs are fighting under the table.

The cats playing with their shadows.

The old goat grazing on the carpet.

The master of the house has gone into the woods

for the day, the old housekeeper tells me.

I turn back as I go out the door

and see the cats tearing apart

a fat manuscript that has fallen from a shelf.

The housekeeper’s indulgent smile seems to say

that here animals come before literature.

Returning to Montreal.

Tired.

I stop by the side of the road.

A quick nap in the car.

Childhood wells up behind closed eyelids.

I wander beneath the tropical sun

but it is cold as death.

The need to piss wakes me up.

A burning sensation before the liquid spurts out.

The same emotion every time

I see the city in the distance.

I take the tunnel under the river.

We always forget that Montreal is an island.

The low-angled light on the smokestacks

above the Pointe-aux-Trembles factories.

The melancholy headlights of the cars.

I make my way to the Cheval Blanc.

The afternoon drinkers have gone.

The late-night ones haven’t shown up yet.

I love this brief moment

when no one is around.

The guy next to me is stretched out on the counter

mouth open and eyes half closed.

They serve me my usual glass of rum.

I think of a dead man whose features

have yet to come together in my mind.

On the Proper Use of Sleep

I got home late at night.

I ran myself a bath.

I always feel at home in water.

An aquatic animal — that’s what I am.

Césaire’s water-warped collection on the floor.

I dried my hands before reaching for it.

I fell asleep in the pink bathtub.

That old fatigue

whose cause I pretend not to know

carried me off

toward uncharted territories.

I slept for an eternity.

That was the only way

to return incognito to the country

with my momentous news.

The night horse that sometimes

I ride at noon knows the path

across the desolate savannah.

Galloping across the mournful plain of time

before discovering

that there is in this life

neither north nor south

father nor son

and that no one

really knows where to go.

We can build our dream house

on the slope of a mountain.

Paint the shutters nostalgia blue.

Plant oleander all around.

Then sit at twilight to watch

the sun sink so slowly into the gulf.

We can do that in each of our dreams

but we’ll never recover the flavor

of those childhood afternoons spent

watching the rain fall.

I remember I would throw myself on the bed

to try to calm the hunger

that devoured me from within.

Today, I sleep

to leave my body

and quench my thirst for the faces of the past.

The little airplane passes steadily

through the great hourglass

that erases the tape of memory.

Here I stand before a new life.

Not everybody gets to be reborn.

I go around a corner in Montreal

and just like that

I find myself in Port-au-Prince.

Like in some teenage dream

where you’re kissing a different girl than the one

you’re holding in your arms.

To sleep and awake again in the country I left

one morning without looking back.

A long reverie made up of unrelated images.

Meanwhile the bathwater has grown cold

and I find I’ve developed gills.

This lethargy always hits me

this time of year

when winter has settled in

and spring is still so far away.

In the midst of the ice at the end of January

I have no more energy to continue

but it’s impossible to turn back.

I’ve started to write again the way

some people start smoking.

Without admitting it to anyone.

And with that feeling I’m doing something

that’s not good for me

but that I can’t resist

any longer.

As soon as I open my mouth, vowels and consonants pour out in a disorderly mess and I have stopped trying to control it. I discipline myself enough to try writing, but after a dozen lines I stop out of exhaustion. I need to find a way that doesn’t demand too much physical effort.

When I bought my old Remington 22, a quarter century ago, I did it to adopt a new style. Tougher, more intense than before. Writing by hand seemed too literary. I wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll writer. A writer of the machine age. Words interested me less than the sound of the keyboard. I had energy to burn. In my narrow room on Saint-Denis Street, I spent all day typing feverishly in the dark. I worked, the windows closed, bare-chested in summer’s furnace-room. With a bottle of cheap wine at my feet.

I return to my trusty pen

which never lets me down.

At the end of a cycle of overwork

we always return to what seems

most natural.

After all these years

there is practically nothing spontaneous left in me.

Yet when the news was announced over the telephone

I heard that short dry click

that can make your heart stop.

A man accosted me in the street.

Are you still writing? Sometimes.

You said you weren’t writing any more. That’s true.

Then why are you writing now?

I don’t know.

He went off, offended.

Most readers

see themselves as characters in a novel.

They consider their lives a tale

full of sound and fury

for which the writer should be

their humble scribe.

There is as much mystery in getting close

to a person as in moving apart.

Between those two points

stretches stifling daily life

with its string of petty secrets.

From which end will I take this day?

By the rising or the setting of the sun?

These days I’ve been getting up

when the sun is going down.

First I need a glass of rum

to dissipate the passion of malaria,

the fever I sometimes confuse

with the energy of life.

I won’t fall asleep until the bottle

is lying on the wooden floor.

When I smile this way in the shadows

it’s because I feel lost

and no one in that case

will make me leave

the pink bathtub

where I curl up in a ball,

a round belly filled with water.

Exile

This morning I picked up the first black notebook

that tells how I came to Montreal.

It was the summer of 1976.

I was twenty-three.

I had just left my country.

Thirty-three years living

far from my mother’s eyes.

Between the journey and the return,

stuck in the middle,

this rotten time

can lead to madness.

That moment always comes

when you stop recognizing yourself

in the mirror.

You’ve lived too long without witnesses.

I compare myself to the photo

of the young man I was before the departure.

The photo my mother slipped

into my pocket just as I

closed the low green gate.

I remember all that sentimentality

made me smile back then.

Today that old photo is my only

reflection to measure passing time.

Sunday afternoon in Port-au-Prince.

I can tell because even the plants

look bored.

We are sitting, my mother and I,

on the gallery, in silence, waiting

for darkness to settle over the oleander.

In the yellowed photo

I am paging through

(no doubt with moist palms and pounding heart)

the summer issue of a woman’s magazine

with girls in bikinis.

Next to me, my mother pretends to sleep.

If I didn’t know then that

I was going to leave

and never return,

my mother, so careworn

that day,

must have felt it

in the most secret part

of her body.

We’re stuck in a bad novel

ruled by a tropical dictator

who keeps ordering

the beheading of his subjects.

We scarcely have time

to escape between the lines

toward the margin that borders the Caribbean Sea.

Here I am years later

in a snow-covered city

walking and thinking of nothing.

I am guided only

by the movements of frigid air

and that fragile neck ahead of me.

Intrigued by the strength

that girl has, so determined,

confronting the harsh

and frigid winds that bring

tears to my eyes

and whirl me around like a dervish.

A child sitting in the middle of the stairway

waits for his father to take him to the arena.

From his sad look I can see

that the game has already started.

I would have given anything

to miss a game

and spend the afternoon watching my father

read his paper in the corner café.

I know that house with a cat in the window.

To enter you have to put

the key in all the way

then draw it back as you turn it

gently in the lock.

The stairs begin to creak

at the eighth step.

A big wooden house.

A long bare table

with a basket of fruit at the end.

On the wall a display

of black-and-white photos

that tell the story

of a man and a woman

in the blaze of love.

A little squirrel climbs the tree at top speed

turning its head in my direction

as if inviting me to follow.

The pale light of three a.m.

when teenage girls walk the streets

on stiletto heels that will break their backs

before they reach thirty.

That girl in the green miniskirt and the cracked lips gets paid at dawn in cocaine cut with baking soda just before the cops come by then she sniffs the stuff right there to face the cold stares of the proper ladies in purple curlers keeping an eye on their brats from the window.

It’s rare that I’m in more of a hurry than a squirrel. But that’s the case today. The animal is amazed that this passerby doesn’t want to feed or play with it. No one’s taught it that it’s just a poor squirrel living in an ordinary neighborhood park. Social classes might not exist among animals. But ego does.

I wait for the café to open.

The waitress pulls up on her bike

despite the cold.

She grabs the two piles of papers

the young delivery boy left earlier

in front of the door.

I watch her go about her business behind the bay window.

Her movements are precise and driven by habit.

Finally she opens the door.

I go in for my first coffee and

read the morning’s editorials

which always make me furious.

She puts on heavy metal at top volume

but she’ll change it to Joan Baez

when the first customers show up.

I always stop in at the bookseller’s next door. She’s at her post behind the counter. Her features are drawn. Winter is not kind to her. She’s about to go to Key West to see a writer friend who has been living there for the past years. Literature, like organized crime, has its networks.

The reader’s bent neck as he stands at the back.

His left profile.

Clenched jaw.

Intense concentration.

He’s about to change centuries.

Right before my eyes.

Without a sound.

I always thought

that books crossed

the centuries to reach us.

Then I understood

seeing that man

the reader does the traveling.

Let us not trust too much in that object covered in signs

that we hold in our hands

and that is there only to attest

the journey really did take place.

I go back to the café next door. The waitress signals that someone has been waiting for me. After Joan Baez, it’s Native singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s turn. I’d completely forgotten the appointment. I beg to be pardoned. The young journalist asks me coldly whether she can record our conversation. I tell her yes, even though I know that the point of conversations is to leave no trace. She works for one of those free weeklies that litter the tables of the local cafés. T-shirt, jeans, tattoos, roseate eyelids, sparkling eyes. I order a tomato salad. She goes for a green salad. Sometime in the 1980s, we moved from the culture of steak to the culture of salad in the hope it would make us more peaceful.

The machine records. So really, you’re just writing about identity? I write only about myself. You’ve already said that. It doesn’t seem to have been heard. Do you think people aren’t listening to you? People read in search of themselves and not to discover someone else. Paranoid, perhaps? Not enough. Do you think one day you’ll be read for yourself? That was my last illusion until I met you. You seem to me different in reality. Why, have we met in a book before? She gathers up her material with that bored look that can ruin even a sunny day.

The only place I feel completely at home is in this scalding water that warms my bones. The bottle of rum within reach, never too far from Césaire’s collection of poems. I alternate mouthfuls of rum and pages of the Notebook until the book slides onto the floor. Everything is happening in slow motion. In my dream, Césaire takes my father’s place. The same faded smile and that way of crossing his legs that reminds me of the dandies of the postwar days.

I have studied that photo of my father for so long.

His well-starched shirt collar.

The mother-of-pearl cufflinks.

Silk socks and shined shoes.

The loose knot of his tie.

A revolutionary is above all a charmer.

The weatherman is calling for twenty-eight below this morning.

Hot tea.

I am reading by the frosted window.

Numbness fills me.

I lay the book on my stomach.

My hands together and my head thrown back.

Nothing else will happen today.

This sunbeam

that warms my left cheek.

A child’s afternoon nap

not far from his mother.

In the shadow of the oleander.

Like an old lizard

hiding from the sun.

Suddenly I hear that dull sound

the book makes as it falls to the floor.

The same sound that

the heavy juicy mangos of my childhood made

as they fell by the water basin.

Everything brings me back to childhood.

That fatherless country.

What’s for sure is that

I wouldn’t have written this way had I stayed behind.

Maybe I wouldn’t have written at all.

Far from our country, do we write to console ourselves?

I have doubts about the vocation of the writer in exile.

The Photo

A man sitting in front of a thatched hut

with a peasant hat on his head.

A plume of smoke rising behind him.

“That’s your father in the countryside,”

my mother said to me.

The President-for-Life’s henchmen were looking for him.

Distant as it is,

that picture comforts me even today.

When it’s noon and I’m too hot

in these tristes tropiques

I will remember my walk

on the frozen lake, near the cabin

where my friend Louise Warren

would go to write.

Cats play on the porch

without concern for passing time.

Their time is not ours.

This kitten slips

into the shadows of my memory.

White socks on the

waxed wood floor.

I’ve lost track of myself.

Memories run together in my mind.

My life is just a small damp package

of washed-out colors and old smells.

It’s as if an eternity had passed

since the phone call.

Time is no longer cut

into fine slices called days.

It’s become a compact mass with a density

greater than the earth’s.

Nothing beyond this imperious need to sleep. Sleep is my only way of dodging the day and the obligations it brings. I have to admit that things have been falling apart for some time now. My father’s death has completed a cycle. It all happened without my knowledge. I had just begun picking up the signs that warned of this maelstrom and already it was carrying me off.

Images from deep in childhood

wash over me like a wave

with such newness

I really feel I am seeing

the scene unfold before me.

I remember another detail

from that picture of my father

but so tiny that my mind

can’t locate it.

All I can recall is the memory

of a moment of pleasure.

I remember now what made me laugh so much when my mother showed me the photo of the peasant in the straw hat. I was six years old. In the left corner, a chicken was scratching at the ground. My mother wondered what I thought was so funny about a chicken. I couldn’t explain what I felt. Today I know: a chicken is so alive it moves even in a picture. Compared to the chicken, everything else looks dead. For me, my father’s face can’t begin to move without my mother’s voice.

The Right Moment

This moment always comes.

When it’s time to leave.

We can always hang around a little,

say useless goodbyes and gather up

things we’ll abandon along the way.

The moment stares at us

and we know it won’t back down.

The moment of departure awaits us by the door.

Like something whose presence we feel

but can’t touch.

In reality, it takes on the form of a suitcase.

Time spent anywhere else than

in our native village

is time that cannot be measured.

Time out of time written

in our genes.

Only a mother can keep that sort of count.

For thirty-three years

on an Esso calendar

mine drew a cross over each day

spent without seeing me.

If I meet my neighbor on the sidewalk

he never fails to invite me in

to taste the wine he makes in his basement.

We spend the afternoon discussing Juventus

back in the days when Juventus was Juventus.

He personally knows all the players

though most have been dead for some time.

I ask Garibaldi (I call him that because he worships Garibaldi) why he doesn’t go back to his country. Mine, I say, is so devastated that it hurts just thinking about seeing it again. But you, just to go back to the stadium to watch Juventus play. He takes the time to go and shut off the television then returns to sit near me. He looks me in the eye and tells me he goes back to Italy every night.

Garibaldi invites me to his place one evening. We go down to the basement. The same ritual. I have to drink his homemade wine. I feel he has something important to tell me. I wait. He gets up, wipes the dust off his books, then produces a signed portrait of D’Annunzio that the writer dedicated to his father. I’m afraid he’s going to entrust me with some scandalous confession. But he just needed to tell me that he’s always hated Juventus, and that his team is Torino FC. Since no one knows that team here and everyone knows Juventus, he says Juventus thinking of Torino. That’s the tragedy of his life. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t think of that betrayal. If one day he ever returns to Italy he isn’t sure he’ll be able to look his old friends in the eye.

I bring back to the country

without a farewell ceremony

these gods who accompanied me

on this long journey

and kept me from losing my mind.

If you don’t know voodoo,

voodoo knows you.

The faces I once loved disappear

with the days of our burned memory.

The sheer fact of not recognizing

even those who were close to us.

The grass grows in, after the fire,

to camouflage all trace of the disaster.

In fact, the real opposition is not

between countries, no matter how different they are,

but between those who have had to learn

to live at other latitudes

(even in inferior conditions)

and those who have never had to face

a culture other than their own.

Only a journey without a return ticket

can save us from family, blood

and small-town thinking.

Those who have never left their village

live unchanging lives

that can prove, with time,

dangerous for their personality.

For three-quarters of the people on this planet

only one type of travel is possible

and that’s to find themselves without papers

in a country whose language and customs

they know nothing of.

There’s no sense accusing them

of wanting to change

other people’s lives

when they have

no control

over their own.

If we really want to leave we have to forget

the very idea of the suitcase.

Things don’t belong to us.

We accumulate them out of the simple need for comfort.

A comfort we have to question

before walking out the door.

We have to understand that the minimum level of comfort

needed to live here in winter

is a dream come true back there.

When I came here, I had one small suitcase into which I could put everything. What I possess today is spread out through my room. I wonder what happened to that first suitcase. Did I forget it in a closet during a quick move? In those days I would slip out, leaving the last month’s rent on the table and a girl sleeping in the bed.

Garibaldi just went by with his grandson, who comes to visit him every Friday after school. He makes him pasta and talks away to him in dialect. The boy is only ten years old, but when you ask him who he hates most of all in the world, he tells you Gianni Agnelli, the owner of Juventus. His son doesn’t want to hear anything about Italy; he likes hockey because it makes him feel closer to the country where he was born. Garibaldi will take revenge on his grandson who will inherit his bottles of bad homemade wine and the yellowed portrait of D’Annunzio.

I fear that an event no matter how great

will never shake

a man from his habits.

The decision is made long before

we actually become aware of it

and for a reason that will always escape us.

The moment of departure has been written

in us so long ago that by the time it comes

it always seems a little banal.

Time in Books

As soon as I moved into a new apartment

I would place my books on the table.

All of them read and reread.

I wouldn’t buy a book unless

the desire to read it was stronger

than the hunger in my belly.

That’s still the case for a lot of people.

When our circumstances change

we think it’s the same

for everyone else.

I know people who constantly

have to choose between eating and reading.

I consume as much meat here

in one winter

as a poor person in Haiti eats

in a lifetime.

I moved very quickly

from forced vegetarian to obligated carnivore.

In my life before, food

was a daily preoccupation.

Everything centered on my stomach.

Once I got something to eat everything was settled.

That’s impossible to understand

if you’ve never experienced it.

Two years ago, after a violent hurricane struck Haiti, I received a letter from a young student who urged me to inform all people of good will who were thinking of sending food to the victims that it would be better if every bag of rice was accompanied by a case of books because, he wrote, “We do not eat to live, but to be able to read.”

One day, I bought a book

without really needing to.

It sat on the little kitchen table

unopened for three months

among the onions and carrots.

Today I realize that a good half

of my library remains unread.

I’m waiting to be in a sanatorium before I read Buddenbrooks by the serious Thomas Mann, or track The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Why do we keep books we’ll never read? For The Leopard, the author’s name justified the expense. I forget what keeps me from reading Thomas Mann’s novel.

I will leave with a little suitcase.

Like the one I had when I came here.

Nearly empty.

Not a single book.

Not even mine.

Stay only one short night in Port-au-Prince

before heading to Petit-Goâve to

see that house again not far

from my grandfather’s old distillery.

Later I’ll cross the rusty old bridge

to visit my grandmother in the cemetery.

I’d just as soon spend the rest of my time here

chatting about everything and nothing

with people who have never

opened a book in their lives.

But sooner or later that essential moment will come

when I confuse the novels I read

with the ones I wrote.

Everything moves on this planet.

Seen from the sky its southern flank

is in constant motion.

Entire populations travel northward

in search of life.

When everyone gets there

we’ll all tip over the edge.

Sometimes a phone call in the middle of the night

turns everything upside down in an instant.

We are lost in restless movement.

It’s always easier to change places

than change lives.

Into a suitcase I throw two or three pairs of jeans, three shirts, two pairs of socks, some underwear, a tube of toothpaste, two toothbrushes, a box of aspirin and my passport. I drink a final glass of water in the middle of the kitchen before switching off the lights for the last time.

In a Café

My head lowered into the frigid wind, I go to the corner. I’ve walked this street for thirty years. I know every smell (the Tonkinese soup with the strips of rare beef from the little Vietnamese restaurant), every color (the graffiti on the walls of the old hotel with rooms by the hour), every taste (the fruit market where I buy apples in winter and mangos in summer) along Saint-Denis. Clothing stores have replaced the used bookstores. Indian, Thai and Chinese restaurants instead of crummy bars where you could spend all day over a warm beer.

I slip into the student café

on the corner of Ontario Street.

The waitress looks my way and doesn’t smile.

I sit at the back, by the radiator.

After a while she comes to take my order.

I can barely hear Arcade Fire.

A quick breakfast before heading to the station.

On the paper placemat I scribble down these quick notes (with little drawings between each scene) for song ideas as I sip my coffee.

SIDE A

Scene 1: I wander the streets with the key to my room in my pocket. I’m afraid of losing the key even as I savor the idea (close at hand) that everything I own at this very moment is in my pocket.

Scene 2: I meet a friend I knew in Port-au-Prince and he invites me to his place. His wife welcomes me with bedroom eyes and a smile that’s too sensual. I don’t stick around because I don’t play that game.

Scene 3: I go by the museum where the Modigliani show is on. I get in without paying. His life is no different from mine: frugal repasts, girls with long necks and cheap wine.

Scene 4: I’m sitting on a park bench, right across from the library. Right next to me two teenagers are kissing as a stunned squirrel looks on. The ducks are indifferent to the whole thing.

Scene 5: I’m making myself spaghetti with garlic sauce while keeping one eye on an old war film on my little black-and-white TV. It stars that German actress with the heavy hands — what is her name again?

Scene 6: From my window, I follow that girl in the summer dress (her legs and shoulders bare) all the way to her door. She turns around, feeling my eyes on the nape of her neck, then goes inside. Two days later, she is in my bathtub.

SIDE B

Scene 7: A well-dressed lady is walking in front of me on Laurier Street. She drops an earring. I try and tell her. She pays me no attention. I thrust the earring in her face. She grabs it out of my hand. And looks at me as if I had tried to steal her jewelry.

Scene 8: In a bar, people are talking about suicide. I’m always impressed by the courage it takes to choose death that way. The guy next to me says he’s already made two serious attempts, but he couldn’t stand a single day of exile. It’s the opposite for me. I don’t think I could survive suicide.

Scene 9: I’m in Repentigny, a small, well-off suburban town. Kids are dreaming of showing their paintings in a Montreal art gallery some day. I advise them to start by showing their work in their living rooms. They’re amazed they haven’t thought of that before. I come from a country where we’re used to making do with what we have.

Scene 10: A bunch of us are out together and the girl I’ve been sneaking looks at comes and kisses me. An endless kiss. Her boyfriend looks on with a smile. We haven’t drunk or smoked anything. Her kiss sets off a small explosion in my brain — which completely changes my view of relations between men and women. In Port-au-Prince, a look would have done the trick.

Scene 11: I go to a resource center for immigrant workers on Sherbrooke Street. If you’re really badly off, they’ll give you twenty dollars to get through the day. We talk politics and the guy wants to know in what circumstances I left the country, and whether I’d been tortured. The answer is no. He insists, because just getting slapped in the face would have been worth 120 dollars. The answer is still no. As I leave the office he slips me an envelope that I open outside, on the street. One hundred and twenty dollars. I feel like I’ve won the one-hundred meter dash without taking any drugs.

Scene 12: The old guy who lived upstairs from me, back when I was on Saint-Hubert. Whenever we crossed paths on the stairway, he made me follow him into his room so I could look at his photo album full of smiling faces. But no one ever came to see him, and I lived in that building two years.

Springtime Song: The first day you can go out without a winter coat on. I go down Saint-Denis. The sun on my skin.

Behind the Frosted Window

On that December afternoon I was just

a shadow behind the frosted window

admiring

one of nature’s most impressive spectacles.

Fascinated, I watched all that snow

endlessly falling.

The poet Émile Nelligan gained immortality

by using the word “snow” twice

in one very brief line:

“Oh, how the snow has snowed!”

Gilles Vigneault reached the same heights by singing

“My country is not a country, it’s winter.”

Here ice is the road to glory.

People of the North seem

so attracted by the sea

while ice frightens people of the South.

Is the seduction of hot weather enough

to explain why the first group

became colonizers much more easily

than the second?

No one saw it the way I did,

the snow falling

in fat gentle flakes.

I escaped the island

that seemed like a prison to me

and ended up encased

in a room in Montreal.

A short yellow dress slipping

through the cornfield

that dips down to the river.

I run behind my cousin.

The long summer vacation

still enchants my memory.

You can hear the song of the washerwomen

from the shack of that man

who lives off snail soup

and attends every funeral.

On my eyelids these images

burned by the sun of childhood.

Time moves at speeds so maddening

it has turned my life to a blur of colors.

That is how the polar night passes.

This sad gaiety always descends on me

at the same time.

When the car lights come on

and their beams sweep my room

and awaken my childhood terror.

I hide under the sheets.

The arrow makes

no noise in the night.

The pain visits

so suddenly

and will not depart

before dawn.

Night Train

In the train.

Time softens.

We let ourselves be lulled.

I awake with a start

when in the night we cross

a phantom train.

The livid faces

make me feel

this train is arriving from 1944.

A nightmare flash created

by fulguration (speed and light)

and my foggy brain.

We’re in the middle of the countryside.

Pale glow lighting the houses.

I picture people gathered around the TV set.

The old man eating alone in his room.

The train won’t slow down until we reach

the next city.

Brightly lit towers. Shadows stretching along the sidewalks. And to think those robust trappers who once sold animal hides to the Hudson’s Bay Company have become elegant city-dwellers drenched in perfume. The smell of eau de cologne can’t quite mask the stubborn scent of the forest — an autumnal mixture of rain, green leaves and rotten wood. The vegetable world isn’t so far away. But yesterday’s backwoodsmen have become today’s captives, glued to the small screen.

I imagine it all happened gradually. A long series of concessions led us to this new way of living. It’s the same with individuals. The crowd absorbs us one by one. Today, at age fifty-six, I answer no to everything. I’ve needed more than half a century to recover the strength of character I had at the beginning. The strength of no. You have to keep at it. Stand behind your refusal. Hardly anything deserves a yes. Three or four things in a lifetime. Otherwise, answer no without hesitation.

The main thing in Protestant America is to make sure you never appear pretentious. Individually people want to slip through the cracks of life, but collectively they think they have a legitimate claim on the world. That kind of tension is not always bearable. Toward the end they can’t stand it anymore and start spitting up all the bile they’ve kept hidden in the heart of their being. A flow of black blood. Too late they realize there were no rules. No paradise. They have sacrificed for nothing. A life wasted. And someone has to pay. Someone weaker they can wail away on with all their might. But just when they think they’ve found the energy to live, it’s the end for them.

I escape into my thoughts

before sleep catches up to me.

The surrender is so sweet.

To fall asleep in one city

and wake up in another.

A Poet Named Césaire

The train pulls into the next station. The girl beside me who was reading a Tanizaki novel gets off. A young man waits for her with a bouquet of mimosas and furtive kisses. The platform empties. The couple is still fused, mouth to mouth now. The train pulls away. The girl forgot her book on the seat. She’s already elsewhere. The book, like the train, served only to carry her to him.

I think back to my first suitcase forgotten in one of the city’s narrow dusty rooms. Luckily I was able to hold onto the only things worth saving. A letter from my mother in which she explains, sparing no detail, how to live in a country she’s never visited, and that dog-eared copy of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. I still have both those things.

That phone call in the middle of the night. Are you Windsor Laferrière? Yes. This is the Brooklyn Hospital. . Windsor Laferrière has died. We have the same name.

They found my phone number in his pocket. The nurse who looked after him is on the line. In a soft, even voice she tells me he would come and see her when he wasn’t feeling well. Sometimes his attacks were serious. No one else but me could get close to him at those times. A very sweet man despite the anger that was so strong inside him. Your father died smiling, that’s all I can say. Lying on my back, I stare at the ceiling for a long while.

I get off in Toronto. A quick stop to see an old painter friend. We go for a drink in a bar near the gallery where he has a show. Since we’re the same age the same things happened to us about the same time. His father died at the beginning of the year; he’d had to flee the country during the same period mine did. We’re a generation of sons without fathers who were raised by women whose voices became even shriller when circumstances got too much for them. We end up drinking rum in his dark little studio. At dawn, he goes with me to the station.

I always travel with Césaire’s collection of poems. I found it dull the first time I read it, nearly forty years ago. A friend had lent it to me. Today it seems strange that I could have read it at age fifteen. I didn’t understand the devotion the book created among young people from the Antilles. I could tell it was the work of an intelligent man filled with terrible anger. I could feel his clenched jaw and imagine his eyes veiled in tears. I saw all those things, but not the poetry. The text seemed too prosaic. Too bare. Now, on this night, as I finally travel toward my father, suddenly I can feel Césaire’s shadow behind his words. I can see how he went beyond his anger to discover new territories in his adventure with language. Césaire’s striking images dance before my eyes. That all-powerful rage arises more from a desire to live in dignity than a will to denounce colonialism. The poet helps me draw the line between the pain that tears me apart and my father’s subtle smile.

There is a photo of Césaire

sitting on a bench.

The sea behind him.

In a flowing khaki jacket

that makes him look like a frail bird.

His faded smile

and his wide eyes so gentle

do not reveal the rage

that changes him, before our eyes,

into a charred tree trunk.

Manhattan in the Rain

Umbrellas of every color. The air is so warm in New York after the freezing weather in Montreal. My uncles are happy for the warmth, though a bit surprised. It’s almost like summer. Manhattan in the tropics. My Uncle Zachée maintains that nature is giving a gift to my father who hated the cold and compared it to the njustice of men. The rain arrived too late in his case.

A crowd in this big Manhattan church

for a man who lived alone

the last years of his life.

He was not forgotten.

Since he didn’t want to see anyone,

people patiently awaited his death

to pay him tribute.

Now that he cannot flee

they burden him with compliments.

The sedentary like to see

the nomad made immobile.

Enclosed in a long box

he must think is a pirogue

that will let him skim across

the Guinaudée of his boyhood.

For many of these old Haitian taxi drivers, accompanied by their wives, most of them nurses’ aids at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, he remained the young man who stood up to the power and abuse of the President-for-Life. The glory of their youth.

It is the first time

I’m seeing him from so close.

I just have to reach out

my hand to touch him.

But I don’t

to respect the distance

he wanted to maintain between us

during his life.

I remember that passage in the Notebook where Césaire demands the body of Toussaint Louverture, arrested by Napoleon, killed by the cold during the winter of 1803 in Fort de Joux, France. His lips trembling with contained rage the poet comes to demand, 150 years later, the frozen body of the hero of the slave revolt: “What is mine a lone man imprisoned in whiteness.”

A woman in a long white astrakhan coat

stands discreetly by the last column.

A ghost of a smile.

The smile of someone who knows

death can never erase

the memory of a certain summer afternoon

in an overheated room in Brooklyn.

Until the end,

even dirty,

even crazy,

my father remained

the dandy he’d always been.

Charm can’t be explained.

I wonder who they’re celebrating

when the one they’re talking about

can’t hear a word.

One of his old buddies is telling a story

that seems to amuse everyone.

I hear their laughter from a distance.

My father, very close by, in his casket.

I keep watch from the corner of one eye.

A star too blinding

to look at straight on.

That’s what a dead father is.

One thing’s for sure: my father won’t have died until that woman hears the news. And right now she is sitting on her gallery in Port-au-Prince thinking, as usual, about him. Which is what she has been doing every day since he left. Does she know the wind has blown so hard these last days that it has carried off the tree of which I am but a branch?

Outside it’s a real tropical storm.

Broken tree branches.

Taxis drift, as if drunk,

down Fifth Avenue.

The hearse, unshakable, glides across the water.

It’s like being in Baradères, my father’s native village

and the Venice of Haiti, or so they say.

A Little Room in Brooklyn

My father lived in a little room that was practically empty. My uncles took me there after the burial in the rain at the Green-Wood Cemetery. Toward the end he had rid himself of everything. All his life he was a solitary man though his political activities put him into contact with other people. Every day for twenty years, summer and winter, he walked from Brooklyn to Manhattan. His life could be summed up in that constant movement. His only possession was the suitcase he had entrusted to the Chase Manhattan Bank.

My father spent

more than half

his life

far from his land

from his language

and his wife.

Several years ago I knocked on his door. He didn’t answer. I knew he was inside the room. I could hear him breathing noisily behind the door. Since I had come all the way from Montreal, I insisted. I can still hear him yelling that he’d never had a child, or a wife or a country. I had gotten there too late. The pain of living far from his family had become so intolerable he had to erase the past from his memory.

I wonder

when he knew

he would never

return to Haiti

and what exactly he felt

at that moment.

What did he think about

in his little room in Brooklyn

on those long frigid nights?

Outside was the spectacle

of the liveliest city in the world.

But in that room there was only him.

The man who had lost everything.

And so early in life.

I try to imagine him in his room, the blinds drawn, dreaming of his city so similar to the one described by an angry young Césaire: “And in this inert town, this squalling throng so astonishingly detoured from its cry as this town has been from its movement, from its meaning, not even worried, detoured from its true cry, the only cry you would have wanted to hear because you feel it alone belongs. . ” The cry is still stuck in the poet’s throat.

My uncles said I should meet his only friend in New York, a barber on Church Avenue. He hadn’t wanted to attend the funeral. I always told Windsor I wouldn’t go to his funeral. For two good reasons. One: I don’t believe in death. Two: I don’t believe in God. . But that being said, I welcome with all due honor the son of my last friend in this shitty life.

A customer wanted to assure him of his friendship. First, you’re not dead, and then you’re not Windsor. He comes and stands in front of me. You look a lot like him. I’m not talking about physical resemblance, that’s for fools who can’t see any farther than their noses. What I mean is that you were carved from the same tree. Let me explain. Everyone laughs. Professor, says my Uncle Zachée, we all understand what you mean. If you say so. . So then, young man, take a chair. And you can scram, he says to another customer waiting to be looked after. I can wait, I say, and go and sit near the washroom. Look, wasn’t I right to say they were carved from the same tree? There are plenty of empty chairs and he goes and sits in the corner, in Windsor’s spot. He used to drink his coffee right there, every morning for forty years. Only I could make it for him — me and no one else. Not even my wife who loved him and did his washing. Don’t listen to people who tell you that Windsor walked around in dirty clothes; that’s not true. His wife, standing next to the big portrait of Martin Luther King, agrees. She went to the funeral because she still believes in God. As if I’m not enough for her. Everybody laughs. Not him. Okay, now it’s your turn, Windsor. Windsor is dead and buried, Professor, a customer says. That’s my name too, I say. Why are they in such a hurry to waste their breath? That’s something I’ll never understand about these people. Only two men have the right to express themselves at all times and they’re both dead. One was a prophet, and that’s Martin Luther King. The other was a madman, and that’s Windsor. So shut up, the rest of you. I told you Windsor isn’t dead. You went to his funeral and the whole time he’s been sitting here quietly. In his spot. That’s how I inherited the chair near the washroom.

My uncles hold hands

as they walk to the bank.

Like children afraid

of losing their way in the forest.

That little act speaks for all their distress.

“Your father,” Uncle Zachée speaks into my ear,

“walked straight ahead

as if he always knew where he was going.”

Several people turn to look as we go by.

The Suitcase

We want to retrieve the suitcase my father deposited at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Since I have the same first name, the employee gives me the key to his safety deposit box and asks me to follow him into the bank’s vault. I step inside quietly with my uncles. That quality of silence exists nowhere but in a bank, a church or a library. Men fall silent only before Money, God and Knowledge — the great wheel that crushes them. All around us, small individual safety deposit boxes filled with the personal belongings of New York, city of high finance and great misery. The employee leaves us alone. I open my father’s box and discover an attaché case inside.

I try to open it before realizing I need the secret code. Numbers and letters. We try everything: his birth date and his different given names, my birth date and my pseudonym. My uncles give me all sorts of possible leads, even the date their childhood friend met a violent death. As a last resort, we try his last telephone number before his mind went adrift. Nothing works. In the end, the employee returns, and we have to put the suitcase back. I could not have taken it with me without first answering a battery of questions that would have unmasked me. I slip the suitcase back into the safety deposit box. The employee closes the great vault of the Chase Manhattan Bank behind us.

My uncles stand in disbelief

in front of the iron door.

I feel light

not having to carry such weight.

The suitcase of aborted dreams.

One of my uncles, the youngest,

suddenly takes me by the arm.

We almost slip on the wet pavement.

Your father was my favorite brother.

He was a very discreet man.

With each of us he maintained

a separate relationship.

Even if he always refused to live with us

he was very present in our lives.

In his own way, he concludes with a wink.

We choose a booth near the window in a restaurant that smells very strongly of fried food, where my father would eat his breakfast in Manhattan. The young waiter rushes over. Can we still have breakfast? my Uncle Zachée asks. We serve breakfast twenty-four hours a day here. And we always will as long as someone in New York wants bacon and eggs and home fries. My Uncle Zachée motions me over. He wants to introduce me to the owner’s wife who knew my father very well. She has very white arms, a little mustache and that light in her eyes. Your father ate lunch here every day. I wouldn’t let him pay once I knew his story. I couldn’t have every exile eating here for free — you can imagine how many there are in New York. But his journey reminded me of my husband’s. Both of them were journalists and ambassadors before they got crossed off the list. My husband was ambassador to Egypt and Denmark. At first they talked about foreign policy the whole time. That was my husband’s passion. I bought this restaurant so he could meet friends from his country and talk politics. Your father always went to the cash before he left. He never took my generosity for granted. I would refuse but he insisted. I handed him back his money as if I were giving him his change. He stuffed it in his pocket — not the type to count it. Did he even know what I’d done? She laughs softly. I didn’t do it out of pity. It was mostly for my husband. I knew your father would never come back if he thought he wouldn’t be allowed to pay. So I arranged it so we’d meet at the cash. And your husband? That’s him by the window. Sometimes he’s okay, sometimes not. He’s been expecting your father all week. I can’t bring myself to tell him he’s dead.

I was four or five

when my father left Haiti.

He was in hiding more often than he was at home.

Here is the man at the origin of my life

and I don’t even know how he tied his tie.

In the stifling loneliness of exile

one day he had the grand idea

of entrusting a suitcase to the bank.

I picture him strolling through the streets

after having put in a safe place

his most precious possession.

The suitcase was waiting for me.

He had faith in his son’s reflex.

What he didn’t know

(shut up, you can’t teach a dead man anything)

is that destiny is not passed on from father to son.

That suitcase belongs to him alone.

The weight of his life.

Last Morning

I don’t know why

this morning I have such a desire to see

my friend Rodney Saint-Éloi at 554 Bourgeoys Street.

Appreciate the irony of this street name

for a modest left-wing publishing house

in the working-class neighborhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles.

Waiting for me at the top of the steep staircase

Saint-Éloi and his wide smile

with a salmon cooking over low heat

on a bed of thin slices

of onion, tomato, lemon and red pepper.

Hanging on the wall the luminous poems

of Jacques Roumain, the young man who sang

so sadly of the fall of Madrid

with a feminine elegance

that reminds us of Lorca.

Here we are sitting,

Saint-Éloi and me.

Face to face.

Both of us from Haiti.

Him, scarcely five years ago.

Me, nearly thirty-five years back.

Thirty endless winters separate us.

That’s the hard road he’ll have to take.

He arrives just as

I’m leaving.

He’s starting

as I finish.

Already the next generation.

So much time has passed.

One day, before him

will stand another man

who will resemble him

like a younger brother.

And he will feel

the way I do today.

The red sofa where this tall dark-haired girl is sleeping so soundly. The night was eventful. Several empty wine bottles, a make-up case, a black-and-yellow bra. The remains of a meal still strewn across the table. Spices in small bottles. Towels on the bathroom floor. Dirty dishes cluttering the sink. I step onto the little balcony that overlooks the grassless yard. The life of an intellectual in a working-class district.

Tiga paintings on the walls. A photo of the poet Davertige (light-colored suit, black bowler hat, big smile) in the vestibule. His smile beneath the pain of a dandy at rest reminds me of my father. Scattered here and there, the most recent books published by Mémoire d’encrier: between the sheets, under the bed, on the fridge, in the bathroom, even on the range where a Creole-style chicken is simmering.

Exile combined with cold

and loneliness.

One year, in those conditions, counts as two.

My bones have dried out from inside.

Our eyes tired from seeing the same scene.

Our ears weary from hearing the same music.

We are disappointed at having become

what we have become.

And we understand nothing

of this strange transformation

that has occurred without our knowledge.

Exile in time is more pitiless

than exile in space.

I miss

my childhood more intensely

than my country.

I am surrounded by books.

I am falling asleep on my feet.

In my dream I see

my father’s suitcase

tumbling through space.

And his judging eyes

turning slowly in my direction.

One last look out the airplane window.

This cold white city

where I’ve known my strongest passions.

Now ice lives inside me

almost as much as fire.