The Return

From the Hotel Balcony

From the hotel balcony

I watch Port-au-Prince

on the brink of exploding

by the turquoise sea.

In the distance, the island of Gonâve

like a lizard in the sun.

That bird that crosses

my field of vision

so quickly — barely eight seconds.

Here it comes again.

The same one?

As if that mattered.

The young man sweeping

the hotel courtyard so energetically,

so different from the old man yesterday morning,

seems to have his mind elsewhere.

Sweeping, because it lets you dream,

is a subversive activity.

This morning it’s not Césaire

I feel like reading

but Lanza del Vasto

who was able to be satisfied

with a cool glass of water.

I need a man of serenity

not some guy seething with anger.

I don’t want to think.

Just see, hear and feel.

Note it all down before I lose my head,

drunk on this explosion of tropical

colors, smells and tastes.

I haven’t been part of a landscape like this

for so long.

In the slum called Jalousie (because of how close the luxury villas are, which tells us something about the sense of humor you need to live there) the little girl woke up before the others to go fetch water. I follow her with the binoculars the hotel owner lent me. She climbs the mountainside like a young goat, with a plastic bucket on her head and another one in her right hand. I lose sight of her as I scan the neighborhood waking up. There she is again. Her wet dress flat against her thin young body. The guy with the mustache and the tie sipping coffee on his gallery watches her too.

Let us carefully observe the scene.

Close-up on the face of the mustached guy.

His intense concentration

on the dance of the girl’s hips.

The slightest movement of that wonderfully supple body

is absorbed by his greedy little eyes.

The nose awakens to the scent.

The cat leaps.

Claws buried in the back of her neck.

The girl’s arched back.

Not even a cry.

Everything happened

in his head

between two sips of coffee.

I sit on the veranda

and gently place the binoculars

at the foot of the chair.

Warmed by the sun

already strong at six in the morning

I soon slip into sleep

both light and deep.

Almost asphyxiated

by the smell of warm blood

that goes to my head.

The butcher is cutting

beneath my window.

The machete whistles.

A red rainbow in the air.

The cut throat of a young goat.

The animal seems to smile in its pain.

Its eyes, soft green, find mine.

What is there beyond such sweetness?

Its neck breaks

like a cane field bent low by the breeze.

Behind me the owner

smiles with her eyes.

Her long experience

of pain

should be taught

in these days

when we learn everything

except how to face

the storms of life.

The Human River

I step into the street

to bathe

in the human river

where more than one swimmer drowns

each day.

The crowd chews over the naïve fresh meat

of all those exiles who hope to recover

the years of absence in their energy.

I’m neither the first nor the last.

On the sidewalks.

In the parks.

In the middle of the street.

Everyone buying.

Everyone selling.

They try to trick poverty

through constant movement.

My eyes take in the scene.

Peasants listening to their transistors.

Hoodlums on motorbikes.

Girls working the street by the hotel.

The music of flies

above green mud.

Two bureaucrats slowly crossing the park.

Zoom in on that girl laughing on the sidewalk across the street with a cell phone jammed in her ear. A car stops next to her. Strident honking — as if the driver’s hand were stuck on the horn. The girl pretends not to hear. The driver goes on his way. Laughter from the fruit vendors who witness the scene.

Primary colors.

Naïve motifs.

Childlike vibrations.

No space left empty.

Everything full to the brim.

The first tear will cause

this river of pain in which

people drown, laughing, to

overflow.

Proud carriage.

Empty belly.

The moral elegance of the girl

who walks past me

for the third time in five minutes.

Without a look in my direction.

Attentive to my slightest move.

Have you ever considered a city

of more than two million people

half of whom are literally starving to death?

Human flesh is meat too.

How long can a taboo

stand up to sheer necessity?

Fleshly desires.

Psychedelic visions.

Sidelong looks.

They’d like to devour

their neighbor for lunch.

Like one of those mangos

with such smooth skin.

A man whispers something into the ear

of his friend who smiles discreetly.

A gentle breeze lifts the woman’s dress

as she runs laughing to hide behind a wall.

Drops so fine

I didn’t realize it was raining.

Pain takes a time out.

This undecided lizard,

after much thought,

jumps from its branch.

A grass-green flash

cuts through space.

I am in this city

where nothing

for once

happens besides

the simple pleasure of being alive

under the blazing sun

at the corner of Vilatte and Grégoire Streets.

Hundreds of paintings covered in dust hang on the walls, all along the street. They look as though the same artist painted them all. Painting is as popular as soccer in this neighborhood. The same luxuriant landscapes remind us that the artist doesn’t paint the real country but the country of his dreams.

I ask that barefoot painter

why he always paints trees bending low

under the weight of ripe heavy fruit

when everything around him is desolation.

You understand, he tells me with a sad smile,

who would want to hang in his living room

what he can see out the window?

What Happened to the Birds?

When I see that teenager sitting by himself

on the branch of a mango tree

strumming away on a battered old guitar,

I understand that amateur musicians

have taken over from the birds.

All that boy needs

is a pair of transparent wings.

A man who knew me thirty-five years ago comes up to me, arms open. With abundant details and flying spittle, he conjures up memories I’d completely forgotten and, worse, that don’t interest me. I try to avoid his eyes as we speak. What started as a wonderful reunion has turned into torture. I’m waiting for him to get to the point: money. In the end he moves on without asking anything of me. I might have underestimated him. As I walk, I try to retrace the thread of his story. Why didn’t I listen to him more carefully? Because of his dirty clothes, his black fingernails, his toothless mouth? If he had been cleaner and more prosperous, would I have paid him more attention? Even if he opened the photo album of my teenage years before my eyes.

This old gentleman slightly bent at the waist

sweeping dry leaves

that have fallen into the courtyard of the city hall.

An activity that must take him all day.

From time to time, he sits down

but gets up with every breath of wind

that brings with it more dry leaves.

Not far away, on a yellow sofa that a little girl has just finished cleaning, two businessmen are chatting as they wait to see the mayor. People’s voices cover the hushed tones of negotiation between these men who have always lived in a world protected by cash.

You have no idea

of the effect that new bills have

on people’s eyes

in a country

where a worker makes

less than a dollar a day.

Last night, in front of the discotheque,

a teenage girl in a red miniskirt

and a tiny yellow blouse

screamed that she wasn’t a whore

because “I don’t want money,

I just want what you can buy

with money.”

I am sitting under the hotel’s almond tree

during the afternoon siesta.

A low pink wall

separates me from the street.

Life is on the other side.

Standing on the bench, I look over the wall at three young women in front of a pyramid of brightly colored fruit. They are talking among themselves so fast I can’t make out what they are saying. Their words interest me less than the beauty of the scene.

What I see in the marketplace

is no different from what I see

in the little painting I just bought.

I look at the two scenes

unable to say

which one imitates the other.

A bird flies swiftly

into the clear hard noonday sky.

So thin but with an astonishing

determination to get as close

as possible to the sun.

It goes so far up

my eyes abandon the quest.

Death Doesn’t Exist Here

A well-groomed young woman.

Black skirt below the knee.

She crosses the little square quickly

on her way to the phone booth

whose wire has been cut.

She sits down on a bench next to the phone.

Her head between her hands.

Men in black.

Women in tears.

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.

My sister’s son is called Dany.

We didn’t know you were going to come back, my sister told me.

The exile loses his spot.

He goes and gets himself a glass of juice, then he’s back on the subject. One last question: is it better to write by hand or on a computer? It’s always better to read. Okay, I can see I’m not going to get anything out of you, he says, then takes a Carter Brown novel from the shelf and heads for the bathroom.

On the little gallery.

I am sitting.

He is standing.

A respectful distance.

You never talk about your times.

I don’t have a time.

We all do.

I’m sitting here with you, that’s my time.

The cry of a bird that can’t stand

the noonday heat.

My aunt takes me aside,

in a dim room

where the furniture is covered with white sheets,

and rattles on and on about some

endless family saga

whose protagonists

are unknown to me and whose claims

are so confusing

that even she gets lost.

It’s like being in a novel

by a sloppy writer.

My nephew goes to meet a friend

by the gate.

I watch them talking.

Their affection

for each other.

They share the same tough choice:

stay or go.

City of Talk

This man sitting alone,

his back against the gate,

is soon joined by a stranger

who begins telling him all sorts of things

that make absolutely no sense.

Hunting down the solitary man

is a collective passion

in any overcrowded city.

A tank truck parked

on the sidewalk across the way.

I watch my mother

favoring one leg

cross the street to

buy bottled water.

I never knew crossing a street

required so much willpower.

Christian, a nine-year-old neighbor

who spends a lot of time at our house,

comes and sits next to me.

We go almost an hour without talking.

A good breeze blows through the leaves.

I soon drift off.

The boy slipped away so quietly

I thought I’d dreamed him up.

My nephew tells me

he burned his first novel.

All good writers start by

being pitiless critics.

Now he has to learn

a little compassion for his work.

My nephew and I sit together on his squeaky narrow bed. I read detective novels, that’s how I relax after a day at the university. A lot of hard work? Actually, we don’t do anything at all. What do you do? Everyone is waiting for their American visa, and once they get it, even if it’s in the middle of an exam, they take off.

A leaf, near me,

falls.

No sound.

What elegance!

A dull thud.

The noise a fat lizard makes

as it falls by my chair.

We consider each other a moment.

In the end it gets interested

in a spinning fly.

I listen to the radio.

A silky voice like a veil

that obscures the truth without managing to hide it.

People always have some story to tell

in a country where words are

the only thing they can share.

The music dies suddenly.

No sound.

Emptiness.

A power failure?

Endless silence in the street.

Then a cry of pain from the young girl next door.

To be able to hear silence this loud

in a city of talk

means so many people had to

keep quiet at the same time.

The radio announces

the death of a young musician

beloved by the public.

My nephew knew him well

having shared with him

for a brief moment

a girl’s heart.

My nephew changes clothes quickly. My mother’s worried look. The banged-up Chevrolet parks on the sidewalk across the way. Five of them are inside. Two girls in back. My nephew slips in between them. His face immediately transformed. The car pulls away. On the radio is the singer who just died. My sister looks straight ahead without a word. Now I see what my mother’s face looked like when I went out like that on a Saturday night. We would cross paths near Saint-Alexandre Square, on Sunday morning, as she was going to church and I was coming back from a party.

My Mother’s Song

We are on the gallery.

By the oleander.

My mother is speaking to me softly of Jesus,

the man who replaced her husband

in exile for the last fifty years.

In the distance the voice of a woman selling baubles.

Every family has its absent member in the group portrait. Papa Doc introduced exile to the middle class. Before, such a fate was reserved only for a president who fell victim to a coup or one of those rare intellectuals who could also be a man of action.

I took all possible precautions

before announcing to my mother

that my father had died.

First she turned a deaf ear to me.

Then took it out on the messenger.

The distance is so slight

between lengthy absence and death

that I didn’t take enough care

to consider the effect the news would have on her.

My mother won’t look at me.

I watch her long delicate hands.

She slides her wedding band

on and off her finger

and hums so softly

I have trouble understanding the words of her song.

Her gaze is lost in the clump of oleander

that reminds her of a time

when I did not yet exist.

The time before.

Is she recalling those days when she was

a carefree young woman?

Her fleeting smile moves me more than tears.

I hear my mother singing

from the room next door.

The news of my father’s death

has finally reached her consciousness.

Sorrow is her daily escort,

the empty days

alternating with the magic of the first smile.

Everything resurfaces.

I finally catch a few words

of my mother’s song

that speaks of panicked sailors,

rough seas

and a miracle just when

all hope seems lost.

She likes to listen to the radio on the little set I sent her a few years back. Tuned to the same prayer station. She listens only to sermons and religious music except for Chansons d’autrefois, the show where the singers hit notes so high they make the old dog whimper from under the chair where it sleeps.

I go back and forth from the hotel

to the house hidden behind the oleander.

My mother is surprised I won’t stay

with her.

It’s because I don’t want to give her the illusion

we’re living together again

when my life has gone on without her

for so long.

I keep coming back to her

in everything I write.

I spend my life interpreting

the slightest shadow on her brow.

Even from a distance.

Her Sadness Dances

As I get dressed I think of that woman

who spent her life taking care of other people.

It’s a way of hiding too.

Now for the first time she is laid bare.

My mother in her naked pain.

I’m in a friend’s car on the way to her house. I remember we never listened to music back then. The radio was just for the news. All it played were the same speeches celebrating the glory of the President. They went so far we sometimes wondered whether he didn’t smile at all that flattery. He was compared to the greatest men, even to Jesus once. My mother reacted with a burst of dry laughter. We had to pretend we were listening so the neighbors wouldn’t suspect us of not supporting the regime. We turned up the volume. Our neighbors did the same. An atmosphere of collective paranoia. Those were dark years. Our blood ran cold every time we heard classical music. Right after, they would announce a failed coup, which was always a pretext for carnage. I ended up associating classical music with violent death.

Every morning, on the radio, a stentorian voice

would remind us of our oath to the flag

followed by the nasal voice of Duvalier

himself who would declare “I am the flag, one and

indivisible.” I’ve been allergic to political speeches

ever since.

I picture my mother dancing

with a chair

in the shadows of the little living room.

She dances her sadness at five o’clock

in the afternoon.

Like a Lorca poem

about Franco’s bloody nights.

My mother loved numbers. Every morning she made her budget of the day’s expenses in a school notebook. Since she was always short of money, having lost her job right after my father left, she spent hours counting and recounting the few coins she had. Endless calculations. I do the same thing today, but with words. The bank was farther from my mother than the dictionary is from my hand.

The neighbor boy lets me know with a nod of his head

that my mother has fallen asleep again

still humming her song about the sailors

lost at sea to whom an angel appeared.

I use the break to talk with my sister

in the room at the back

where it’s as hot as an oven.

My sister is even more secretive than my mother.

Seeing her constant smile it’s hard to imagine

she lives in a country ravaged by dictatorship

like a hurricane

that has been punishing the island for twenty years.

She tells me about her life at work where people call her a snob because she makes a point of buying a novel as soon as she gets paid and because she wears perfume to the office. The more she treats people with respect, the more they plot against her. As if she reminded them of that precious thing they have lost along the way: their own self-respect.

My sister talks calmly

without looking at me.

She is like a little girl forgotten

by her parents in the dark woods

who wonders how long it will take

before the pack catches up to her.

Back at the house, she discovers her mother sitting on the gallery, silent and sad. My mother who was once so lighthearted. Of course I look after her expenses, but my sister has to face the travails of daily life. She’s forced to watch my mother’s health deteriorate, and struggle through her dark days: “I’m afraid one day I’ll be too worn out to go get her at the bottom of the well.” This time she looks at me, and I see the years of my absence written on her face. We remain silent for a time. Then slowly a smile blooms. The dark cloud has passed.

Sitting in the darkened living room with my sister, I watch my mother go about her evening business. She inspects the kitchen down to the last crumb before lighting the lamp and placing it in the middle of the table. Then she scrapes the remains of the meal into a blue plastic bowl. Only then does she sit down to eat. That’s her ritual.

Why is she eating from this plastic bowl when I sent her a new set of dishes? From underneath the sofa my sister pulls out the big box of silverware that has never been removed from its packaging. She doesn’t like it? On the contrary — it’s her treasure. She takes it out once a month and cleans it. In the lamplight, her face is serene. She is still beautiful. She is wearing her face for special days. As soon as you leave, my sister tells me, she’ll put her dark-day face back on.

I am overcome with such a feeling of remorse.

The feeling that everything is wasted.

My mother, and then my sister.

The women have paid the price in this house.

I go out to see my nephew on the gallery. He was listening to the news on my mother’s transistor radio. I sit next to him. Do you ever dream? Yes, but I don’t remember. I used to dream every night when I was young, and every morning I would tell my grandmother my dream. Why? At the time, we would tell our dreams. Anyway, I always dreamed the same dream. Actually, I had two kinds of dreams. In the first, I had wings. I flew over the town. And I slipped through the window of certain houses to watch girls I was in love with sleep. My nephew laughs. And the second kind? I dreamed of the devil. The same thing every time. All of a sudden we heard a terrible racket. The devils were coming. We hurried to get inside before they showed up. You never knew that house, I say to my nephew. My mother talks about it all the time. It was a big house with lots of doors and windows. It feels like a century ago. . We tried to close them. But the devils were everywhere. When we closed a door, they came in through the window. Nowadays, those devils have been replaced by real killers in the light of day. But I keep having the same dreams wherever I go. In hotel rooms all around the world. That’s the only thing that hasn’t changed with me. I have the same ritual: I lie down between white sheets, read a while, then turn off the light and drop into a universe full of devils. You should keep holy water in your suitcase. That’s what my grandmother used when I had nightmares. But I treasure those dreams. They’re the only thing that’s left of my life from before.

My mother and my sister

come out to be with us

on the gallery.

A choir singing religious music on the radio.

My mother accompanies them.

Evening falls.

A Social Problem

A cold face in the pale early morning light.

A young shark in a Cardin shirt

striding swiftly to his car

seems as insensitive to life as to death.

To survive if only morally

in this city where the rules change

according to the customer’s looks,

the rich man has to avoid

meeting the poor man’s eyes.

Every hour

the exchange rate for the gourde changes.

Even if money is concentrated

in the same hands.

What can such financial frenzy mean

on an island abandoned by the birds?

He rushes from his house to his car,

from his car to his office,

from his office to the restaurant

and from the restaurant to his seaside house

where he’ll meet his mistress of the month.

He may know nothing of the poor man

but the poor man is watching his every move.

The rich man is a creature of habit.

What good is being rich in a country

constantly at the mercy of a bread riot?

The chances of losing a fortune

overnight are high.

A can of gas and the whole neighborhood goes up.

The game changes so fast.

One starving guy with a match

calls the shots.

Why stay in this mudhole mixed with shit trampled by crowds hemmed in by malarial anopheles when you could lead a dream life somewhere else? Here the rich man must collect the poor man’s money. And he can’t delegate an operation like that, considering the country’s current moral state. People have no scruples about keeping money for themselves that they figure is stolen. The debate raging these days in the poor districts where Christian morality has gotten its hooks in can be summarized by this mighty question: is it theft to steal from a thief? The State says yes. The Church does too. But what if just once the question wasn’t put to them? The pressure is strong on the ill-paid office clerk who has to deliver to the boss, down to the last penny, all the money gathered in the poorest districts of the hemisphere. All those houses with neither roof nor door rented to large needy families by usurers representing the rich who live in the luxury villas set high up the mountain. We’re really living in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

When I went North, I had to rid myself

of the heavy reality of the South

that oozed from every pore.

I spent thirty-three years adapting

to that winter country where everything is so different

from what I’d known before.

Returning South after all these years

I am like someone

who has to relearn what he already knows

but had to forget along the way.

I admit that it’s easier

to learn than to relearn.

But harder still

is to unlearn.

The Blind Archer

Noise was the path the Caribbean used

to enter me.

I had forgotten the racket.

The bellowing crowd.

The overabundance of energy.

A city of beggars and rich men

awake before dawn.

You can find the same energy

in a naïve painting

where the vanishing point

is not at the back of the canvas

but in the solar plexus

of the viewer.

When you look at a market scene

by any street painter

you don’t feel you’re entering

the marketplace but that

instead the market

is entering you, overwhelming you

with smells and tastes.

Which is why you step back

faced with these strong primary colors.

People die faster here than elsewhere,

but life is more intense.

Each person carries the same amount

of energy to burn

except the flame is brighter

when the time it has to burn

is briefer.

Behind me, the blue mountains

that surround the city.

This dawn sky with its rosy hue.

A man is still sleeping

under a truck packed with melons.

In the international media

Haiti always appears deforested.

Yet I see trees everywhere.

As a child I hated trees

so much I dreamed of covering the planet in asphalt.

People always wanted to know why

a child wouldn’t like trees.

It was that feeling they were looking down on me.

Two hearses cross paths

on this dusty street

at the foot of the mountain.

Each one is carrying its customer

to his resting place.

The last taxi costs the most.

Death, that blind archer.

As busy at midnight as at noon.

Too many people in this city

for him, even once,

to miss his target.

All I need is to start the rumor

that I’ve returned to live there

without saying which there it is

and in Montreal people will believe

I’m in Port-au-Prince

and in Port-au-Prince they’ll be sure

I’m still in Montreal.

Death would mean not being

in either of those cities.

To Die in a Naïve Painting

I like to climb up the mountain, early in the morning, to get a closer look at the luxury villas set so far apart one from the other. Not a soul around. Not a sound, except the wind in the leaves. In a city this populous, the space you have to live in defines who you are. In my random walks, I discover that these vast properties are inhabited only by servants. The owners reside in New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan or even Tokyo. Like in the days of slavery when the real masters of Hispaniola lived in Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle or Paris.

They built these houses hoping their children studying abroad would return to take the family business in hand. Since those children refuse to return to a country cast into darkness, the parents have moved closer to them and settled in some metropolis with a museum, a restaurant, a bookstore or a theater on every corner. The money harvested from the mud of Port-au-Prince is spent at Bocuse or La Scala. In the end the villas are rented out for a fortune to the directors of non-profit international aid organizations whose stated goal is to lift the country out of poverty and overpopulation.

These envoys from humanitarian organizations show up in Port-au-Prince with the best intentions. Lay missionaries who look you straight in the eye as they recite their program of Christian charity. In the media they are prolix about the changes they intend to create to ease the terrible conditions of the poor. They make a quick tour of the slums and the ministries to take the pulse of the situation. They learn the rules of the game so quickly (allow themselves to be served by a host of servants and slip part of the budget allocated to the project into their pockets) you have to wonder whether it’s in their blood — an atavism of colonial times. When confronted with their original project, they escape by saying that Haiti is incapable of change. Yet in the international press, they go on denouncing corruption in the country. The journalists passing through know they have to stop in for a drink poolside to gather the solid information they need from honest and objective people; the Haitians, everyone knows, can’t be trusted. The journalists never ask themselves why these people are living in villas when they say they’ve come to help the wretched of the earth throw off the shackles of poverty.

Haiti has undergone thirty-two coups

in its history

because people have tried to change

things at least thirty-two times.

The world is more interested by the military men

who engineer the coups

than by the citizens who overthrow

those men in uniform.

Silent, invisible resistance.

There is a balance in this country

based on the fact

that unknown people

in the shadows

are doing everything they can

to put off the arrival of night.

When there’s a power failure,

people light their houses

with the energy of sexually charged bodies.

The only fuel this country has

in industrial quantities

can also send

the demographic curve soaring.

When you arrive in this city set on the shores of a turquoise sea and surrounded by blue mountains, you wonder how long it will take before it all becomes a nightmare. In the meantime you live with the energy of someone waiting for the end of the world. So said a young German engineer who’s been working for the last ten years rebuilding the road network.

We were having a drink at the bar at the Hotel Montana. When did you first understand that this particular hell wasn’t for you? He gazed at me a while. My father came here for the New Year’s holiday, and he made me see it. My father is an old military man. His job is to look at things as they are and say what he thinks in no uncertain terms. What did he say to you? That we were all bastards in this well-protected luxury hotel, all the while thinking we were living a dangerous and difficult life. And so? And so ten years later I’m still here. But at least I’m not telling myself any more lies. We can even use cynicism to keep from dying of shame.

The headquarters of foreign journalists.

A hotel set on the heights so they can see

what’s boiling over down below

in the great stewpot of Port-au-Prince

without actually having to go there.

For the details just listen to the local radio station.

The bar is stocked well enough to resist a month-long siege.

I’ve been watching this cameraman at the end of the bar for a while. His arm resting lightly on his camera. I move down to his end because I like people whose job is to look. But I don’t see anything, he tells me. I see only what I’m filming. I look down a very narrow field. People are incredible here. They participate in everything, they’re so enthusiastic. I’ve been to a lot of countries with the job I do, but this is the first time I’ve seen anything like it. You can ask someone whose family has just been killed to reenact the scene, and they’ll play the whole thing for you with complete attention to detail. The murderer too: just ask him and he’ll play the murderer for you. It’s a real pleasure working here. Wherever I go people ask for money, but not here. Okay, friends of mine told me the market ladies want to be paid if you take their picture, but that’s only if they don’t like you. That’s because some photographers don’t know how to go about it. They want to go too fast. Here, you can’t hurry people. They have their dignity. They can feel it right away if you respect them, and if they feel you’re making fun of them then I can tell you your life is in danger. Otherwise, they’re cool. And the setting is magnificent, not too green so it doesn’t look like a postcard, it’s great, I really can’t complain. Excuse me, it’s your country and I’m talking this way, I’m not insensitive to what’s happening, I see the poverty and everything, but I’m speaking as a professional. All jobs are like that; if you could hear the surgeons when they operate on you, they opened me up three times, and it’s curious but hearing them talk about what they had for dinner the night before as they were slicing me up, that reassured me because I knew they were doing it to relax. I’m not insinuating that people are insensitive to their own misfortune, it’s just that they like to play, to act, they’re born comedians, and what does a comedian do when the camera goes on? He acts. The kids, especially the kids — they’re so natural. And in a setting like this. It’s like nothing is real here. I listen to the big shots talking, I cover the press conferences at the palace, receptions at the embassies, and I can tell you, if you don’t mind, that the only thing that will get this country out of the state it’s in is the movies. If the Americans forgot about Los Angeles and came and shot their blockbusters here and if the Haitian government was smart enough to demand a quota, yes, I said a quota of Haitian actors on every film, in less than twenty years you’d see this country get out of this mess, and the money would be clean money too because these people are fabulous actors. And the sets too, they’re so colorful, very, very alive. I never thought you could die in a landscape like this.

Hunger

I woke up

in the middle of the night.

My nerves jangling.

My pajamas completely soaked.

As if I had swum

through a sea of noise.

From that tiny house,

just three rooms

protected only by walls as thin

as fine paper,

I saw no fewer than thirty-six people

come out

in less than an hour.

Not a millimeter left unoccupied.

Not a second of silence, I imagine.

We search for life

among the poor

in absolute uproar.

The rich have bought up the silence.

Noise is concentrated

in a clearly defined perimeter.

Here trees are scarce.

The sun, implacable.

Hunger, constant.

In this space teeming with people.

First comes the obsession with the belly.

Empty or full?

Sex comes right after.

And after that, sleep.

When a man prefers

a plate of beans and rice

to the charming company of a woman

something has happened

to the hierarchy of taste.

The pattern has become common. The rich who flee the poor leave the city behind and go to live in ever more secluded parts of the countryside. It’s not long before the news spreads through the overpopulated zone. The siege begins. A little hut in a ravine. Another at the foot of the pink villa. Two years later a whole slum has sprung up, asphyxiating the new upper-class quarter. The goal of all wars is the occupation of territory.

The space of words can be occupied as well. For the last hour, this toothless old woman has been telling me a story of which I understand nothing. Yet I feel that it’s hers and it is worth, in her eyes, as much as anyone else’s.

A day here lasts a lifetime.

You’re born at dawn.

You grow up at noon.

You die at twilight.

Tomorrow you change bodies.

The horn has a variety of uses. Sometimes it replaces the cock’s crow. It alerts the absent-minded pedestrian. It announces a departure or an arrival. It expresses joy or anger. It carries on an endless monologue in traffic. To outlaw the horn in Port-au-Prince would be censorship.

I walked into an Internet café and discovered a friend I hadn’t seen for some time. My old comrade Gary Victor with his moon-like face always makes me think of sweet-tempered Jasmin Joseph, the man who painted nothing but rabbits. Every time, Gary Victor pulls out of his hat a novel full of devils, thieves, zombies, mocking spirits and carnival bands painted in the cheerful colors of a naïve painting. But so loaded down with obsessions that in the end it becomes as dark as a teenage nightmare. I talked with him for a while about what the subject of the great Haitian novel might be. First we reviewed the obsessions of other nations. For North Americans, we thought it was space (the West, the Moon landing, Route 66). For South Americans, it’s time (One Hundred Years of Solitude). For Europeans, it’s war (two world wars in a century alters the mind). For us, it’s hunger. The problem, Victor told me, is that it’s difficult to talk about it if you haven’t known it. And those who’ve seen it up close aren’t necessarily writers. We’re not talking about being hungry just because you haven’t eaten for a while. We’re talking about someone who has never eaten his fill in his entire life, or just enough to survive and be obsessed by it.

Still, it’s very surprising how hunger is absent, considering that artists are always looking for subjects. Very few novels, plays, operas or ballets have hunger as their central theme. Yet there are a billion starving people in the world today. Is the subject too harsh? We don’t mind exploiting war, epidemics and death in every possible shape. Is the subject too raw? Sex is stretched across every screen on the planet. So what’s going on? The problem is that hunger concerns only people who have no buying power. Starving people don’t read, don’t go to museums, don’t dance. They just wait to die.

Food is the most terrifying of drugs. We always go back to it: three times a day for some, once in a while for others. Gary Victor told me he never knew the great famine. Me neither. Which made us think we’d never be the authors of the great Haitian novel whose subject can only be hunger. Roumain touched upon it by making drought the subject of Masters of the Dew. Drought is thirst. The earth that is thirsty. I’m talking about a man who is hungry. Of course the earth feeds man. I tried to console Victor by bringing up subjects that could be as interesting, like exile, but that theme doesn’t stand up to a man who is hungry. When we parted, he had a certain sadness in his eyes.

But it’s not just the subject of a novel.

We can be impassive

faced with our own hunger but what do we do

when a child is hungry

and reaches out his hand

as happened this morning near the market?

We give him a few pennies

knowing full well the problem

will return in less than three hours.

This man sitting in the shade

by the wall of the hotel.

On a handkerchief he sets

a large purple avocado next to a long loaf of bread.

He slowly produces his jackknife.

This is his first meal of the day.

Such pleasure is unthinkable

for those for whom eating

is not the primary goal of existence.

At ninety-eight this lively, joyful old lady

who runs the Hotel Ifé

and who still fights every day

to keep her head above water

with a smile that never fades

is the mother of a poet friend.

In this country the poet’s mother

has to work till her dying day

so that roses can flower

in her son’s verses.

He preferred to go to prison

than to work.

Here we are wedged into a corner of a little restaurant in my old neighborhood. A simple meal: rice, avocado, chicken. I like restaurants that serve just one dish. You get there, you sit down and you talk until the food arrives. I was eating, head down, when I spotted a beggar watching me from behind the window with wide liquid eyes so much like my mother’s.

My Nephew’s Version

My nephew is doing the talking tonight.

Back against the wall.

Calm and resolved.

We listen to what he has to say.

He is telling today’s life story.

How does he see things?

What does he feel?

We want to know.

He knows that too and embellishes.

Once I was in his position.

Standing by the door,

my mother smiles.

She has listened to three generations of men,

if we count my father,

each telling

a new version

of the same facts.

My grandmother Da. My mother Marie. My sister Ketty. These women don’t concern themselves with History but with daily life, which is an endless ribbon. No time to look back when every day means serving three meals to the children, rent to pay, shoes to replace, medicines to buy, money for Friday afternoon soccer, Saturday night movies and the Sunday morning church fair. Just because you’re crushed by dictatorship doesn’t mean you have to live poorly.

The most subversive thing there is,

and I’ve spent my life repeating it,

is to do everything possible to be happy

under the dictator’s nose.

The dictator insists on being the center of your life

and what I did best in mine

was to banish him from my existence.

I admit, to do that sometimes I had to throw

the baby out with the bathwater.

So I left and then returned. Things haven’t changed a bit. Going to see my mother this evening, I crossed the market. The lit lamps made me feel I was traveling through a dream. A little girl in a short pink jersey dress was sleeping in the arms of her mother who was counting the day’s receipts. This tenderness that lets you accept the rest exhausted me and will soon exhaust my nephew.

The people in this neighborhood,

in these modest houses on both sides of the ravine,

earn a salary

on which

it is impossible to live.

By “live” you must understand:

the simple ability to feed oneself.

The other features of life,

like going to the movies

or buying an ice cream

on a Sunday afternoon,

have grown so distant

they no longer concern them.

If they are mentioned it’s only out of nostalgia.

When a few Dior-soaked gentlemen

mix every day

with a dense crowd stinking of piss:

the war of the smells.

I know the solution

is not to go for your neighbor’s jugular.

At least that’s what’s said

in certain parlors.

But just how long

can this kind of tension last?

My nephew doesn’t put it that way

but in his head I can hear

a familiar wave of background noise.

He doesn’t want to worry my mother

whose husband and only son had to go into exile

for the same reasons.

It’s up to the third generation

to ask the question that has no solution.

A leaf falls from the tree

onto the notebook where

I am writing these things down.

I save the leaf.

I can’t keep my eyes off

that black bird

with the long yellow beak.

I don’t see things the way I used to, my nephew tells me. How did you used to see them? I ask without trying to figure out what things he’s talking about. Like things that are happening in my life. And now? Like things that are happening around me. What do you mean? I feel more distance between me and reality. Maybe that’s your space for writing.

The Dead Are among Us

My nephew drives me back to the hotel. We are in his friend Chico’s car, and we have to keep our feet directly below our legs because there’s no floor. We can see the asphalt go by and puddles of greenish water. The car is like a convertible in reverse. His brother left him the car when he went to Miami, and four of them use it. Put some gas in it and it’s yours. When it breaks down, they chip in and take it to a mechanic. Chico is set to go next week and he’ll leave the car to his friends. They take turns using it but they all have to go to the same club on Saturday night. With their girlfriends that makes eight. A pretty tight squeeze. The girls insist on paying the Saturday night gas.

I turn around to see

my mother standing near the big red gate.

She must have woken up suddenly and gotten dressed

in a hurry when she understood I was leaving.

That tense face I know so well.

As if she sensed constant danger.

The last image of my mother

as the car goes around the curve:

I see her take the hand of the little boy next door,

her last confidant.

My nephew drops me off near the square.

I feel like watching the evening

settle over Pétionville.

Those who haven’t wandered through a city

at night don’t really know it.

I sit down across from city hall

to listen to Wagner’s tetralogy

that the mayor has played every evening.

A man sits down quite close to me.

He talks to me through half-closed eyes,

his hands hang between his legs.

His conversation is punctuated

by long conspiratorial silences.

It takes him half an hour

to realize we don’t know each other.

He puts his hat back on before disappearing

into the shadows.

My mother told me this afternoon

in the voice of someone

who knows she’s being listened to

that the dead walk among us.

You can recognize them by the way

they appear and disappear

without us knowing why they were there.

Lost Things and Lost People

The worker’s day is so well regulated he no longer feels the day’s heat. We can understand why the first thing the silk workers did in their rebellion was to shoot at the cathedral clock. They recognized their ancestral enemy. Every second is a drop of blood.

I can’t really make out objects.

The sleep that comes to me

between two explosions of noise

is like an uppercut.

This isn’t sleep.

This is a knockout.

I’ve been awake for a while, and I feel like I’ve been put through the mill. My body is suffering an adaptation process that’s beyond my will. I am the master of nothing. Everything I banished from my mind back there in order to live without the bonds of nostalgia has a concrete presence here. Those things sought refuge in my body where the cold froze them in place. Now my body is slowly warming. My memory is thawing: that little puddle of water in the bed.

Breathing is difficult. Memories come back to me in three dimensions with their colors, smells and tastes. The cold preserved all their freshness as if I were seeing this fruit or that red bicycle for the first time. The sapodilla with its velvet peel so soft to the touch. The yellow-eyed dogs wandering through the night. The little girls jumping rope while screaming in voices so high-pitched they sound like a flock of birds. The old man at the window of the big wooden house by the Paramount movie theater. The plume of smoke on the mountain. Things today replaced by others of the same density, so that every traveler can make himself a store of images and emotions he can recover at his return.

I also remember the picture

in the living room in the house in Petit-Goâve.

A little uninhabited island

overgrown with fruit trees

where young felines played together.

That’s where I spent my afternoons

when things got too heavy for my young life.

Intolerable heat.

A white bowl filled with water

in the shadows of the bedroom.

Three mangos next to it.

I eat them all, bare-chested.

Then wash my face.

I’d forgotten what mangos taste like at noon.

I go out on the veranda.

A great coconut palm

planted right in the middle

of a house under construction

is dancing in the furious wind.

I watch the scene from the hotel balcony.

For a war correspondent,

that’s not much action.

This city awakens so early

that by two o’clock in the afternoon

it’s on its knees.

In the shade of their broad hats

the ladies who sell melons

are taking their nap.

Their backs against the hotel wall.

Their voices so shrill they break your heart

the women hawking baubles

desperate to sell off their trinkets

and the aggressive horns of the drivers

going from the office to the restaurant

can’t quite cover the lullaby

this woman is softly singing to her daughter

sleeping between two sacks of vegetables.

I receive an urgent summons to the phone. I slip on a pair of pants and rush down to the reception desk. It’s a guy who says he’s a childhood friend of mine. All he wants is money to pay his daughter’s hospital bills. I hesitate but he tells me he’s just on the other side of the gate, calling from a cell phone. I’m about to go looking for him when the receptionist motions me to forget it. “I know the fellow, he always tries that with my guests,” she lets on with a wide smile.

I’ve been away so long I can scarcely remember the faces that flash past me so quickly, demanding to be recognized. “Don’t you remember me?” A feeling of shame. “Your cousin introduced us the night before you left.” So we met once, thirty-three years ago. I’m alone in the middle of eight million people with shared family and personality traits jammed onto half an island, and they all want me to recognize them. They all come with a story that I’m a part of. Apparently we once went to the movies together, forty years ago. I was the best friend of that guy’s older brother. Surely I must know the cousin of the other guy who lives in Montreal. My head is spinning. Sometimes I put a voice to a face but they don’t belong together. It took me a while but I understand that in this thirst to be recognized, they are looking for confirmation that they’re not dead.

I was paging through

the paper on the couch

when I noticed his shadow

pacing in front of the gate.

Now I don’t dare go out.

Through the Window of the Novel

The hotel owner points out that all the information in today’s paper is at least a week old. For the news of the day, you’re better off with the radio. The delay, in an area in which the ability to deliver information rapidly is more important than the information itself, acts as a buffer between the event and ourselves. That way we’re protected from the bad news, which comes to us with a few days’ lag. By the time it reaches us, the shock wave has been absorbed somewhat by the dense sweating crowd. These few days between the event and ourselves are enough to maintain our equilibrium.

The news of the week concerns both the upper-class neighborhoods and Cité Soleil. A rare occurrence. A young man “from a good family” who’d been kidnapped several months ago has become one of the country’s most pitiless gang leaders. The family’s lawyer declared on the radio that “he didn’t want to get kidnapped anymore and that’s why he became a kidnapper.” In the poor districts they’re still laughing about what the editorialist called the “Stockholm syndrome.” The answer wasn’t long in coming: it appears in graffiti painted on the walls of Cité Soleil. If a rich kid who gets kidnapped by a gang becomes a gang leader after two weeks because of the Stockholm syndrome, then how come a criminal who spends years in prison doesn’t become a cop when he gets out?

We learn that most kidnappings are carried out between people who know each other well — sometimes they belong to the same family. That’s where hatred is most deep-rooted. That’s where everyone knows the exact amount of money the victim has in his bank account. The ransom demands become more precise and there’s less negotiation. Kidnapping has become such a lucrative business that the rich weren’t going to miss out on the action for long. Unlike the photos of the hoodlums at the young man’s side, the paper took the trouble to blur his picture.

Since the government can’t throw impertinent journalists in jail the way it used to, the upper classes have picked up the slack by buying them off at rock-bottom prices. They buy off the corrupt journalist with money. They buy off the poor but honest journalist with considerations. They buy off the perverse journalist by letting him breathe in the subtle perfume of the very young woman who leans toward him during a classy cocktail party.

I just saw the vendor

who wakes me up every morning.

Her high-pitched voice rises above the rest.

I can still hear her when I come back in the evening.

The newspaper vendor who works in front of the hotel tries to get me to pay the price of a whole monthly subscription for one issue. I show him my photo on the front page. He’s not impressed and names me the same exorbitant price. I grab a copy from his hand and give him fifteen gourdes. That’s the price people who live in gourdes pay, he snaps. How do you know I’m not from here? You’re at the hotel. That’s my business. For me you’re a foreigner like any other foreigner. How much do you ask from people who go by in their fancy cars? He walks away, muttering. It’s a good thing the newspaper vendors only read the headlines. Otherwise we’d be prisoners of the fifth estate.

That banal incident

makes me limp

as if I had

a stone in my heart.

To be a foreigner even in the city of your birth.

There are not many of us

who enjoy such status.

But this small cohort

is growing ever larger.

In time we will be the majority.

Climbing the gentle slope

that leads to Saint-Pierre Square,

suddenly I think of Montreal

the way I would think

of Port-au-Prince when I was in Montreal.

We always think of what’s missing.

I wander into a new bookstore called La Pléiade. At the end of the ’60s, I used to go to Lafontant. He was always sitting by the door: an affable man despite the bushy eyebrows that gave him a surly look. He didn’t speak much. We would go straight to the back to look for the books that interested us — never more than one at a time. We chose them from the famous Maspero collection, which was censored by the paranoid powers of the day. Old Lafontant took a chance selling something besides detective novels and trivial magazines displayed on a table by the entrance. We calculated the price and, moving past the cash register, put the exact amount on the counter. Without a look back, we made our way to the exit. The entire operation had to be carried out seamlessly. We would practice at home.

We would get together afterward,

my friends and I,

in our little restaurant

across from Saint-Alexandre Square,

each of us with the book he’d bought.

We would put all the books on the table.

Then draw straws to see who would read what.

We were so serious at twenty

that a girl practically had to rape me

before I understood

what was happening around me.

The girls who listened to The Rolling Stones on the radio

had already progressed to the sexual revolution

while we were still reading the New China News Agency.

We were desperately seeking

in the speeches of our idol Zhou Enlai,

that severe, elegant Party strategist,

the scent of a woman

the glimpse of a leg

or the downy nape of a neck

that would have given us the gift

of erotic dreams.

I opened my eyes and realized we were just a tiny group busy making the revolution in our minds, which mainly meant commenting on the political essays we purchased at Lafontant’s store. The rest of the world lived in carefree pleasure and was no worse off for it. I was ready for my first intellectual vacation.

Suddenly I was terribly attracted to the very guys I’d had such contempt for a short time earlier. Guys who lived for dressing sharp, wearing the right cologne and dancing to slow songs by The Platters. Guys who’d never opened a book. And who didn’t care about the feelings of those inaccessible princesses who filled our dreams, but only about their graceful slender bodies under their Saturday night dresses. Guys into whose arms those princesses melted, the ones who never considered us. Guys whose bloody faces on page one of the newspaper (they always ended up in a fatal sports car crash) got more press at the Girls’ College than Davertige’s latest volume of poetry.

Old Lafontant bequeathed his bookstore to his two daughters (Monique and Solanges) who split it into two parts. One store in Port-au-Prince, a little bigger than the one in Pétion-ville. I converse a while with Monique who runs the Pétionville branch. She points to a girl paging through one of my novels. I am fascinated by the back of her neck (the nape speaks volumes about a woman reading). I go into the courtyard, under a tree, to keep from embarrassing her in case she turns and recognizes me. I never imagined that one day I’d find myself at La Pléiade as a writer.

As I move through this universe (the city, the people, the objects) that I’ve described so often, I don’t feel like a writer, but more like a tree in its forest. I realize I didn’t write those books to describe a landscape, but to continue being part of it. That’s why the newspaper vendor’s comment hit me so hard. In Port-au-Prince at the beginning of the seventies, I became a journalist to denounce the dictatorship. I was part of the little group that bared its teeth to power. I didn’t ask any questions about myself until that sexual crisis at the very end. I grew aware of my individuality in Montreal. At minus thirty, I quickly developed a physical sense of myself. The cold lowers the mind’s temperature. In the heat of Port-au-Prince the imagination is so easily enflamed. The dictator threw me out the door of my own country. To return, I had to slip in through the window of the novel.

The Red Jeep

The crowd pushes me into the street.

Cars brush past me.

I’m already running with sweat.

Suddenly a red Jeep stops next to me.

The door swings open.

I get in.

A second later I’m not part of the prey anymore.

My friend drives through the crowd.

He saw my picture in this morning’s paper.

He called Le Nouvelliste and his friends

to find out what hotel I was staying at.

No one could tell him.

And now, just like that, here I am in his car.

He gets on the phone to his wife.

You’ll eat with us?

I nod yes.

In the red Jeep with chrome wheels.

The music loud.

We talk over it.

On the side of the mountain

a small yellow airplane skims the treetops.

The pilot sticks his head out the window to wave

to the young boy who pulls off his shirt as he dances.

My childhood cuts through me like a knife.

My friend and his insouciance are just like before.

Here, he tells me, we live intensely

since we can die at any time.

Those who live in the lap of luxury

speak most casually of death.

The rest are simply waiting for death,

which won’t disappoint them.

The women descend in single file.

Along the cliffs.

Mountains of fruit on their heads.

Their backs straight.

Their necks sweaty.

Elegant in their effort.

A truck breaks down

on the narrow road to Kenscoff.

The women climb down.

The merchandise is already on the ground.

The men have to push the truck

onto the side of the road.

A low chant rises up.

The voices of men working.

The higher we climb, the fewer people we see.

That brightly colored little house

on the mountain is

hidden in the morning fog.

Settle in there and write

that long historical novel in five volumes.

Mistaking myself for Tolstoy late in life.

The red earth produces such beautiful onions.

The vendors hoist their baskets up to our level.

My friend lowers the window to buy

carrots and onions.

The smell of rich earth makes me dizzy.

The voices of the peasants

coming down the river.

Barefoot in the water.

Straw hats.

Each with a fighting cock under his arm.

And a bottle of alcohol

in his back pocket.

They are going single file

to the Sunday fights.

A dog looks for a sunny spot

then ends up lying down by the wall.

Its muzzle moist.

Its eyes half-closed.

The siesta comes early.

Everything grows here.

Even what no one has planted.

The earth is good.

The wind scatters the seeds.

Why do people gather

where it smells of gasoline and shit?

Where it’s always too hot?

Where it’s so dirty?

Even as they admire beauty

some prefer to live in ugliness,

often richer in contrasts.

I can’t breathe

when the air is too pure.

The landscape too verdant.

The living too easy.

The urban instinct is sharp within me.

From the other side of the cliff,

a horse slowly turns in my direction

and casts a long look at me.

Even the animals have started to recognize me.

Maybe that’s what a country is:

you think you know everyone

and everyone seems to know you.

The Jeep swings suddenly to the left.

For ten minutes or so, we follow

a narrow unpaved road

then come to a farm with a green roof

in the middle of wide fields.

My friend’s wife, a tall redhead,

is waiting for us at the door.

I have the feeling, in front of this Irish flag

hoisted in the pasture among the cows,

that I’m in another country.

Some time after I left Haiti,

he went to Ireland

where he lived for twenty years.

He brought Ireland back with him

to this green hamlet set upon

the heights of Pétionville.

When I was in Ireland, he said to me, I lived as if I were in Haiti. Now that I’m in Haiti, I feel totally Irish. Will we ever know who we really are? That’s the kind of question that makes us feel intelligent even under a blazing sun. Such vanity is no match for a second rum punch.

Like a flight of wild birds

we left almost at the same time.

We scattered across the planet.

Now, thirty years later,

my generation has begun its return.

We talk underneath the mango tree, with so much passion, about the years abroad: a whole life. His wife listens with a tired smile as she sips her coffee. She has come to sit with us. Her only demand is that we speak Creole when she’s around. The language touches me here, she says, pointing to her round belly.

As she walks me to the car, while her husband goes to give orders to the staff, her voice is determined. I’m going to make sure my child’s mother tongue is Creole. If mother tongue means the mother’s language, then it’ll be English. No, it’s the language the mother chooses to teach her child: I want to raise him in Creole.

I decide to tell her a story. Back in Petit-Goâve, when I was eight years old, I met a woman who came from some unknown place. She was white and walked barefoot through the dust of Haiti. She was the woodworker’s wife. They had a son my age who was neither black nor white. I never understood how someone could live in a culture other than their own. Despite the thirty-three years I spent in Montreal the mystery remains. As if I were talking about someone else.

In that little room in Montreal,

I read, drank wine, made love

and wrote without fearing the worst every morning.

But what can I say about this woman

who came from a free country and chose

to live in a dictatorship?

She tells me this story.

One of her girlfriends who lived all her life in Togo

and who she asked for advice before leaving Belfast

explained to her that people are not necessarily

from the country where they were born.

Some seeds are carried elsewhere by the willful wind.

My friend comes back. He kisses his wife’s neck; she squirms and moans under the sun. Nothing is more sensual than a pregnant woman. We get into the Jeep and circle the Irish flag before coming back to her. She moves toward the door. They smile at each other with their eyes. She touches his forearm. He starts up the car again. She stands in the sun a while before going back into the house. If ever he gets it into his head to return to Ireland, she won’t go with him.

A Little Cemetery Decorated Like a Naïve Painting near Soissons-la-Montagne

Already we’re at the stop, at Fermathe,

where they sell grilled pork

and fried sweet potatoes.

A truck full of people eating.

The anticipation in the air

before the long descent

into the deep South.

It takes as much time

to travel to another country

as it does to go from one city

to another in this country

over the broken roads

and along the edge of dizzying cliffs.

We run a gauntlet of screaming vendors

who jam their fruit baskets in our face.

Laughter rises above the racket.

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.

The young pharmacist with icy hands

recommended Buscopan

and amoxicillin three times a day.

Next door I bought a bottle of water

and began the treatment immediately.

I run to the hotel bathroom and settle in comfortably. I might be in for quite a stay. I look around and on the window ledge I discover an old issue of Historia that tells me everything about Himmler’s ascension through the Third Reich and the court rivalry, at the end, when they were done in like rats in the bunker. It was understood that the war was lost when Nazi officers started dressing without first taking a shower. I thought of my teenage years, when those stories fascinated me, which threw my mother into despair since she was scared silly of everything that had to do with politics in any form. Strangely she stopped worrying about me once I published my first article in Le Nouvelliste. It was a long literary commentary about Ficus, a novel that had just come out. In any other country, literary criticism would not have been a dangerous vocation, except for the risk of getting slapped by a parlor poet offended by some unflattering comment about his latest volume. But not in Haiti. My article provoked two reactions that were decisive for my career. The first came from Professor Ghislain Gouraige, the author of the monumental History of Haitian Literature (from independence to the present) that we studied in school, and who congratulated me for the originality of my opinions even as he pointed out a dozen errors of fact. That was followed the same day by a summons to the barracks of Major Valmé. According to established criteria, I had arrived.

My mother, trembling but determined, accompanied me to the office of the fearsome Major Valmé. I was exceedingly calm. The Major called for a coffee for my mother but did not allow her to attend the interrogation that was to be “a friendly conversation between two true lovers of literature.” My mother insisted, but the Major asked a non-commissioned officer to look after her. All this kind attention, instead of reassuring her, only increased her anxiety. But the conversation with the Major went well and did not go much beyond the subject of literature. As for the novel by Rassoul Labuchin, his opinion differed from mine. For him, Labuchin’s real project was not literary but political. Did I know that the author had spent time in Moscow? And that he was the confidant of the communist writer Jacques Stephen Alexis? In my opinion, General Sun, My Brother by Jacques Stephen Alexis is one of the most beautiful novels in Haitian literature. Quite spontaneously he replied that his preferences leaned toward Romancero aux étoiles. Mauriac was his favorite writer. Mauriac’s description of the bourgeoisie of Bordeaux reminded him of his own adolescence in the provinces. He ended the conversation by congratulating me on my “clear and readable style so unlike the usual Haitian manner.” I was impressed by the man’s elegance and culture, though I did not forget that he ran Papa Doc’s torture chambers. At times we heard screams coming from nearby rooms. Still, I continued to believe that literature would save me from all harm. On our return, my mother, too overwrought to ask me what was said in the office, took me out for a sandwich and a Coca-Cola and even wanted to buy me cigarettes. I wrote a literary column in the weekly Le Petit Samedi Soir until my colleague Gasner Raymond was murdered by the Tonton Macoutes on June 1, 1976, on the beach at Léogâne. I went into exile immediately afterward, in Montreal.

Learning of my intestinal misadventures

the hotel owner advises a rigorous diet.

I should stay in my room for the time being.

If only to be close to the bathroom.

Bored with the prison of my room,

I go down to the hotel bar.

A little TV perched on a shelf

is broadcasting the funeral of that young musician

killed last night in a car crash.

People are no longer used to

death by natural causes

if a spectacular collision

can be considered

as a natural not a political cause.

I read in the paper

that there were five of them in the car

but we’ll remember the one whose

fiancée killed herself when she heard the news.

To remain in popular memory

events must have brutal connections.

Love riding on death.

It’s true I pay attention only to the

apocalyptic images that cross my field of vision.

I don’t listen to rumors and I’m indifferent to ideology.

Diarrhea is my only involvement

in Haitian reality.

From time to time the old servant woman, not as old as the owner but more workworn, brings me a very bitter liquid to drink. The older the women are, the more unpalatable their remedies. The owner whispers to me to pour it down the sink and go on taking my medicine. She recommends rest — the country won’t disappear in a week. How can I explain to her that time has become an obsession for me? We are not living in the same time frame even if we are in the same room. The past, though it defines how we make sense of the present, does not have the same weight for everyone.

I turn in circles in this room.

My security perimeter

is shrinking ever smaller.

I’ll write a book about life

around the hotel.

A man by the hotel entrance

looks at me a while

though he can’t quite remember who I am.

He reminds me of someone too.

It takes us five minutes to

bring blurry images from the past to the surface.

To think we were inseparable at one time.

We smile, then say goodbye.

As if we had never seen each other.

The only way to preserve the little that’s left.

This narrow street

was a wide avenue

in my memory.

Only the thick bougainvillea bush

remains the same.

I used to hide behind it

to watch Lisa who

I was already in love with.

I notice that some details

change into emotion

depending on the color of the day.

I see yellow like a drunk man.

That’s the state of someone with a fever too.

I make myself a rum punch and lie down.

In the darkness, I feel a hand on my forehead.

I pretend to sleep.

The two old ladies are close by.

They evaluate the situation.

Nothing too serious.

The fever has broken, one of them says.

I hear them go slowly down the stairs.

Galloping Rain

Suddenly the first raindrops fall and everyone runs for shelter under the marquee of the Paramount movie house. For a while, the guy at the ticket counter must think that Godard has become the star of Port-au-Prince. Once the danger passes, I am the only one who stays to watch La Chinoise in the giant theater filled with red staved-in seats.

After the film, I want to walk in the rain.

Up ahead, kids dance

naked under a curtain of water.

The rain gallops toward me.

I hear its music.

An emotion that rises up from childhood.

I go to those kids

playing soccer

in the rain.

Time is fluid.

It’s not that easy

to be in the same place

as your body.

Space and time united.

My mind begins to find rest.

Recovered is the primitive energy

I thought I’d lost

and the wonderment

I felt so long ago

watching the red top

that consumed my childhood

as it turned so fast before my wondering eyes.

Early in the morning

the little girl tries

to light the fire

to make the coffee

that will begin the day

for so many.

We climbed and climbed

the flank of this deforested mountain.

Our necks sweaty.

Noon beating in our throats.

Then at the summit, we discovered

the sea languorously

stretched out along the bay

like a courtesan

on her day off.

Nature immobile.

The sky

the sea

the sun

the stars

and the mountains.

I’d see the same thing

if I returned in a century.

I stand for a while

in this fine drizzle,

my face lifted to the sky.

Naked children from nearby streets

come and encircle me

as if I were a strange apparition.

I speak to them in Creole but that doesn’t work.

Their astonishment keeps me at a distance.

That’s when I understand

that speaking Creole is not enough

to become a Haitian.

In fact it’s too vast a name

to apply to real life.

You can be Haitian only outside of Haiti.

In Haiti people try to find out

if they’re from the same city

the same sex

the same generation

the same religion

the same neighborhood as others.

Those young boys who danced naked

in the rain, I decide

as I go back to the hotel,

did not want any adults to join their game.

Childhood is an exclusive club.

A Carefree Young Woman

I arrive at the hotel completely soaked and find my sister deep in conversation with the owner. We go up to my room so I can change. She stopped by after work to check up on me because my mother was starting to worry. In a dream she pictured me in some danger. That’s because now I’m in her sensitive zone. During the years I spent in Montreal, she never seemed so concerned as she is now when I’m only ten minutes away. You’re wrong, my sister tells me, she’s been worrying ever since you left. I’ll go see her tomorrow. My sister isn’t fooled by my mother’s subtle emotional blackmail. She knows her well. She has to come home at the same time every day, otherwise my mother gets it into her head to go looking for her in the streets of Port-au-Prince. How do you search for someone in a city of more than two million? My mother does just that. And nine times out of ten, she’ll find my sister.

One of my aunts told me that back when my father was still there, my mother was a carefree young woman. Capricious even. She lost her job after her husband left. She expected as much, but she always thought she’d find something in the private sector. But the dictator had erased the line between public and private. There was nothing but Duvalier, everywhere. Even behind closed doors. People whispered that he could hear what was being said in the bedroom. All territories belonged to him. That was the beginning of my mother’s long descent. It took decades of anxiety, frustration, humiliation and daily struggle to turn this proud and resistant woman into the fragile, worried little bird she has become.

My father always wanted my mother to join him. Despite her wild need to see him again, she did not want her children to grow up in exile. She wanted to give us a sense of country. One night when I was sleeping near her, I heard her murmur in a soft voice that she’d love to touch his face one last time. My father’s features were imprinted on her retina. She missed the weight of his body. She held fast for nearly half a century, divided between her man, her children and her country. She had all of them at once for only a brief time.

I can’t seem to have a personal conversation with my sister. We understand each other too well. I can follow the arc of her life even if I don’t know the events that shape it. Our relationship moves between the closeness of our adolescent years and the distance forced on us by exile. A good deal of that oscillation is due to the fact that we didn’t spend our childhood years together. She stayed in Port-au-Prince with my mother, while I was sent to my grandmother’s in Petit-Goâve. We spent our nights telling ourselves stories. We go about it differently. She tells; I analyze. I give importance to a minor event by tying it to a chain of events that are just as minor. I believe that stories aren’t necessarily big or small but that they’re all linked together. The ensemble forms a hard and compact mass that we can call, for convenience’s sake, life.

My sister and I form a single person. The only thing we can’t share is my father. I’ve always suspected her of hoarding images of my father in action. If anyone could remember his face, it would be her, even if she’s a year younger. I was in Petit-Goâve when my father was in Port-au-Prince. He lived with my mother and my sister in a big wooden house on Magloire-Ambroise Avenue. My sister was three years old and I was four. She’s always maintained she can remember my mother’s voice when she was nursing her. And I’ve always been the only one in the family who believes her. As for me, I remember nothing, except what my mother has told me. Knowing my sister’s exaggerated sensitivity to detail and absolute olfactory abilities, I’m willing to bet she remembers my father’s smell. We can’t speak of his death because we shared nothing of his life.

Aunt Ninine takes me aside. She carefully closes her bedroom door. We stand in the middle of the room. Suddenly, she attacks. You have to save Dany. I have to save myself from what? I’m talking about your nephew, you have to save Dany. From what? You have to do something for him. I don’t understand. He has to leave this place. We decide people’s destinies here? He’s twenty-three years old but his opinion doesn’t count. His life doesn’t belong to him. He absolutely has to leave this place, my aunt repeats. What’s the point, I think, if it only means returning thirty-three years later like me? My mother comes into the room wearing her mischievous smile. Aunt Ninine immediately begins talking about her health. My mother can feel that something is going on and she leaves us to our discussion. I head for the door to escape what’s coming. Just as I’m about to cross the threshold, Aunt Ninine grabs me by the arm. Something tells me that, even if my nephew’s future is important for her, it is not her only concern. Zachée called about your father. Your mother needs your support now. Even if he did disappear, your father was the only man in this house. Her way of blaming me for my absence these last few days, or would that be the last three decades?

Can anyone know what goes on in the head of a man who has lost his mind? I wish I’d inherited his ideas of social justice, his intransigence toward power, his disdain for money and his passion for other people. And what would your mother get? What she was always able to hold onto above and beyond her pain. Our eyes meet in silence. Then Aunt Ninine finally opens the door.

The Killer on the Motorbike

In the theater of Port-au-Prince

everything comes at you live.

Even death which can show up

at any moment

on a Kawasaki.

Death imported from Asia.

A young man in dark glasses

revving his little yellow Kawasaki

shows off on the square.

“A bad seed,” declares

the lady sitting next to me.

We find out later

that a young man on a motorbike,

without even stopping, shot at

two doctors

going into their clinic.

Right close by.

Death at top speed.

The witness (a man of about sixty): “I was right there, next to the doctors who were talking. I heard a motorbike. I turned around to see where it was coming from. Bang. Bang. Two shots. The two doctors fall. One’s shot in the throat, the other in the heart. He didn’t even stop.”

A crowd quickly gathers around the only witness to the two murders. The ambulance hurries to pick up the wounded. One is already dead. The other who was shot in the throat doesn’t stand much of a chance. His wife rushes up and starts talking about having him transferred to Miami by helicopter.

The same witness: “I admire people who are good at their job. He hardly slowed down at all. Such precision! Not everybody can do that, I mean, I rode a motorbike for ten years. It was a Kawasaki, a new model. Compact but reliable. Obviously if you’ve got a bike that breaks down, as often happens, then it’s more risky. You can see he takes his job seriously.”

A policeman comes up to him. The crowd parts in front of the man who is still admiring the killer’s precision work.

Policeman: You’re coming with me.

Witness: Why?

Policeman: You seem to know what’s going on here. I think you’re going to be able to help us.

Witness: I happen to live around here. . I’m just a motorbike fan.

Lady: Maybe he likes motorbikes but he doesn’t live around here. I’ve been in this neighborhood for forty-six years and it’s the first time I’ve seen him.

Policeman: You’re going to come with me.

Witness: I live in Jalousie, just up the mountain.

Lady: All the hoodlums who terrorize us live up there.

Witness: I’m not an accomplice. . I simply appreciate a job well done.

Policeman: Come with me or I’ll put the handcuffs on you.

Witness: This is a democracy…

Other Lady: Maybe he’s telling the truth, maybe he just likes motorbikes. . Some people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut. When faced with death, we must simply bow our heads.

Policeman: Come with me. And you, Madame, you’re a witness too?

First Lady: No, I was eating when it happened.

Policeman: All right, break it up, move on, everybody…

When everyone

runs every which way through the market

it means there’s someone

for whom time has stopped.

Lying on the ground in his own blood.

The last spasms of life.

The sound of a motorbike speeding off.

The young guy on the bike got away easily.

But they’ll catch up to him soon enough.

The slum where he lives is crawling with

police informants

most of whom are killers too.

According to a New York Times investigation most of the murders are ordered by powerful businessmen who live in the luxury villas high on the mountain slope. Right across from the slums where the killers live.

The contracts are negotiated by cell phone, from one ghetto to the other. The starving masses and the upper classes have always been interested in technological progress. The latter for security reasons. The former to remain in the battle.

Near the University

Since I’m here I take a look around. I like to scout out the locations and know where I am, to avoid ending up in a blind alley if ever I have to run. I come across a little park filled with former students who can’t find work. Those who haven’t yet understood that only ten percent will get a decent job when they get out of school. And that their studies aren’t enough. To work in this country, a bitter but lucid student told me, you have to come from a good background or ally yourself with a powerful political family.

The unemployed lying on park benches

with white handkerchiefs over their faces.

A few prostitutes in miniskirts

trying to pass themselves off

as modern literature students.

A dozing policeman,

his gun and nothing else between his legs.

Rest for the wretched.

A girl accompanies her mother

who is herself so young she could

be her older sister.

They accost me quickly

to inquire after my desires.

They say that a mother and daughter in the same bed

can still excite an old senator.

I’m not there yet.

They go off with their arms around each other’s waist.

From behind, I can’t distinguish the mother from the daughter.

The young man sitting next to me watches the van full of police from the international squad go by. The more cops there are, the more thieves. What do you mean? I ask. They’re all the same. I don’t get it. The ones who are supposed to be protecting us are in business with the killers when they’re not killers them-selves. How do you defend yourself? We walk in the shadows and stay at home as much as we can. I’m telling you only a dictator can save this country. How old are you? Twenty-three. I bet you never knew the dictator. No, but I’m telling you all the same: this country needs a leader, otherwise it’s total disorder. And where is the chaos? He gives me a stunned look. I see order everywhere. The powerful keep everything for themselves. Since the little guys have nothing, they tear each other apart for the few crumbs that are left. If we name a dictator, we’ll simply make the way things are official. I still believe we need a leader in this country. These days, every neighborhood is controlled by armed gangs that constantly fight each other and terrorize everyone else in the process.

We take a few steps into the park. What are you studying? Political science. And you want a dictator? Yes, sir, anything but this untenable situation. We could always protest against the dictator on the international scene or even try to topple him. The one I knew, if you add the father’s regime to the son’s, ran from 1957 to 1986, twenty-nine years. What you’re seeing now is their legacy. A dictator would only give them legitimacy. And order serves only to enrich one particular group. Disorder begins when other groups start demanding their share. You don’t live here? I came from Montreal. And there’s no dictator there if I understand correctly. No, but there’s winter. It’s not the same thing. Of course not, I was joking. His face darkens. Is the winter so terrible up there? You have to go through it to understand. So it’s subjective then? More like democratic. Everybody suffers. Not everybody: those who can get away, do. It’s like here: people who have the means don’t have to suffer the rigors of dictatorship. I’d like to go up there and see one day. You don’t just go and see. You go for a while and end up spending your life there.

I leave him, hoping he won’t end up like the people he is denouncing. Still, he’s got the right profile. The feeling of being looked down on by a certain class, the enormous financial difficulties that keep him from satisfying his most primal needs, and to that you have to add an immoderate taste for flowery language and the loneliness (sexual hunger is part of it) of someone who was orphaned at an early age. Not so different from the young François Duvalier when he wrote his poem “Les Sanglots d’un exilé” whose main theme is the resentment that would later serve as his political platform.

I continue my walk

trying to remember

the dictator’s poem I had to

learn by heart at school.

“And the black of my ebony skin was lost

in the shadows of the night.

When, that night, as hideous as a madman,

I left behind my cold student room.”

Everything is there. Frankenstein let loose.

At the far end of the park, there is a small market where the ladies selling tea entertain themselves with no heed for the few customers. One of the women is telling a sex story with all the appropriate gestures. She shakes her big round butt in the youngest woman’s face to tease her. The other women look on and smile, their heads resting on sacks of tea. Now and again laughter rises in the perfumed air.

A skinny young man

tries to load a long rifle

while slipping on a khaki cape.

His friend also plays the role

of security guard in a supermarket

across the street.

A city ready for war.

Crazy about rap music.

Reads only mangas.

Eats only pasta.

Quiet by day.

Talkative by night.

That’s my nephew.

We understand each other easily.

Looking at him I think of those times

when everything exasperated me.

I avoid preaching to him

and slip him some money

when his mother is looking elsewhere.

Money is to boys

what perfume is to girls.

It makes them euphoric.

The young woman at the cash in this little restaurant near the university has a way of smiling at me. A few students are wolfing down a mountain of rice. The old waiter ambles over with our plates, his shuffling feet barely leaving the floor. Everyone has the same meal (chicken in a sauce, white rice and potato salad). We eat with our heads down. A tall glass of soursop juice. Close by, my black notebook where I write down everything happening around me. The smallest insect visible to my eye.

If there is one thing I like about my nephew, it’s how he isn’t in a hurry to talk. He hasn’t opened his mouth since he got here, but when he does, it’s for real. That part of town isn’t too dangerous? Sometimes it is. When the government decides that we’re too quiet, it sends in agents disguised as students to stir things up. How do they do that? They show up a week before the police. They start by recruiting the leaders. Then they wait for the right time. We know they’ve started their game when on a Monday morning tires are burning in the courtyard of the school. Then the government sends in a squad of cops to supposedly restore order. The TV is in on it too. Standing at the windows, the provocateurs pretend to fire at the police hidden in the park. They end up wounding one or two of them but never seriously, which gives the squad the excuse to charge. Five minutes later, the tanks arrive. What do you guys do? At first, nothing, we sucked it up, but finally we figured out their technique and invented a little system that so far seems to be working. As soon as we see the flaming tires, we slip away and let them face off against each other. They fire at one another thinking we’re still in the area. Luckily they’re pretty stupid, but they’ll end up catching on sooner or later. His calm even voice frightens me. He seems unimpressed by what could happen to him. No more than a slight smile that reveals a subtle appreciation of the facts. In any case, he continues, I don’t know why they go to such trouble to screw up our plans when nobody wants to stay here anyway. If they don’t want us around, they should just hand out American visas and the university would empty out in a minute. The students seem even more desperate than in my day. Still, that was Duvalier. The Tonton Macoutes. The black years. The bloodthirsty police force of a barbarous regime. The bitterness may well spring from the fact that they believed a change would come after Baby Doc’s departure. Nothing worse than hope betrayed.

I always dreamed of living on a campus back when I was in Port-au-Prince. My main activity would have consisted of assiduous library attendance because of that girl who was doing research on the slave trade and its impact on the European economy of the period. I would have participated half-heartedly in the interminable discussions about the Wajda and Pasolini movies screened by the film club at the back of the yard. And in the accusation of censorship leveled against the rector who would have prevented the first-year students from watching Deep Throat. And in stormy protests against the government that would have confiscated the copy of State of Siege. The first kiss with the girl from the library the evening before a major exam. The feeling of having to choose between her and my future. And of screwing up my life no matter what choice I made.

The Ancient Caribbean Wind

My mother takes me aside

to give me a little photo

of my father with my sister on his lap.

And me standing beside him.

My sister is crying.

My father and I have the same serious face.

My mother tells me the photo was taken by a friend of my father’s, a “comrade in arms.” They tried to take another picture to have a happier memory of that sad time, since my father and his friend had made a quick visit before heading for the hills, but my sister wouldn’t stop crying all afternoon.

Her voice becomes even softer as she remembers that afternoon. My father’s friend was called Jacques. He was so full of life. He played guitar and loved to dance. After the photograph, he played a Spanish song in fashion at the time and my mother danced in the kitchen. Since my father and Jacques were being hunted by the President-for-Life’s men, they disappeared once night fell. Later my mother found out that Jacques had been caught and had died in prison.

People who have lived under several regimes change mood depending on whether they are remembering happy or unhappy periods. The happy periods, like tropical rains, are intense and short-lived. They are often followed by long tunnels in which no one sees any light for decades. When my mother looks at today’s young people dancing in the streets after a government falls, she gets sad, knowing they will soon change their tune. But as she always says, “at least they got that much.”

My mother is looking for something in the armoire.

At the very back I see

a large black-and-white photo

of a young man who looks like me.

It’s the only photo I’ve seen of them together

at the time they met.

When I look at this photo, my mother says,

I feel like I’m with my son and not my husband.

The last time she saw him

he was still in his twenties.

My mother asks me how I managed to survive back there. Her question comes as a surprise since it’s the first time she has come so close to the edge of the precipice. I seem to be leading a good life, but my mother isn’t interested in whether I’ve succeeded or not. Her question is about how it happened. How what happened? Then I understand she isn’t expecting me to describe the obstacles I faced in order to make a way for myself in my new country, the usual business you tell journalists. She wants to know how I felt about it. She’s waiting for my answer. It’s a question I’ve long avoided, and coming here is a way of finally facing it. Only a mother would insist on descending into an abyss like that with you.

I might have been ten years old.

I had just left my grandmother

to come live with my mother in Port-au-Prince.

For the first days I slept with her

until they bought me a mattress.

My mother had a toothache.

I heard her whimpering very quietly

for fear of waking me up.

These days when I tell her to take some medicine,

she replies that a small pain

keeps her from thinking about the larger one.

My sister comes back from work.

Everyone wants something from her.

She escapes by disappearing into the bathroom

with a magazine.

We hear her turning the pages.

The family waits for her to come out

so they can devour her whole.

This insatiable appetite for attention.

I go out on the gallery to be with my mother. Her universe, so dreary at first sight, is actually very rich. She knows the two birds that meet here every afternoon, at the same time. She has named the lizards after her dead brothers and sisters: Jean, Yves, Gilberte, Raymonde, Borno, André. Dead or in exile. That way I can remember their names. Otherwise I forget a name, then the face that goes with it. That’s how you lose a part of your life. She even has a name for the wind, this gentle breeze that comes to rock her to sleep when it’s time for her nap. If you’re quiet, a new world appears. Little things take on life. Sometimes she is eager to join them. Other times her anger with life is so strong she refuses that illusion. She will stay in her room for a week. Finally, she comes out, and all those things are there, waiting for her return, patient as always. She tells me they don’t show themselves unless they feel our despair.

The Death of Benazir Bhutto

The death of Benazir Bhutto comes to me while I am in the bathroom. The final spasms of on-and-off diarrhea. From another room, I hear the high-pitched voice of BBC’s female correspondent in Pakistan repeating the name Benazir Bhutto. In general, when someone speaks the name of a public personality more than three times in a sentence, that person has just died and the death was violent. Before the journalist’s commentary comes to an end, I hear a series of explosions. Screaming. Sirens. A terrible uproar. I can’t move because my diarrhea has returned with a vengeance. The noise of the crowd covers the journalist’s voice. I imagine at that very moment, all around the world, people are feeling the same sense of surprise, though no death was more predictable than hers.

It’s strange that the Middle East

in a certain way gives the impression

that the dice aren’t always loaded in politics.

People still risk their lives there.

All that anyone risks losing here

is their reputation.

What moves me

in this story of bloodshed

is the return of Benazir Bhutto

for her funeral,

to her native village of Larkana.

We always return in the end.

Dead or alive.

The wooden chamber.

Benazir, who wanted

to run a vast and populous country,

must feel cramped in there.

And very alone in that room

though it was made to measure.

We’re born somewhere.

If we can

we take to the road.

See the world, as they say.

Spend years out there sometimes.

But, in the end, we return to our point of departure.

The Wild West

Coming back to the hotel, I pass five kids straddling a low wall under a mango tree. They are playing cowboys and Indians. Four decades ago I was one of the Indians. We would rush down the hill, brandishing our tomahawks. The cowboys were waiting for us, hiding behind their stagecoaches. At the last moment they would shoot us down in full stride, like birds. One afternoon, I refused to show myself in plain sight like a fool, since the Indians knew the terrain better than the cowboys, and there was no reason why they wouldn’t use their experience. I was immediately made a cowboy. An Indian who protests becomes a cowboy. I understood there and then that being a cowboy or an Indian simply depends on how the guy organizing the game feels. Or who is telling the story. There’s no use complaining about the role we’re given; we just have to take the one we want. These little frustrations, accumulated over the years, end up erupting one day in bloody revolt.

A friend stopped by unannounced,

and we talked all evening.

That’s quite a change from life up North

where everything is arranged by phone.

If we eliminate all surprise from life

we strip it of all interest too.

And die without realizing it.

I seem to think

everything is good here

and everything is bad back there.

It’s just the swing of the pendulum.

For there was a time

when I hated everything about this place.

Men can’t hide anything

for long.

Observe them

and they will strip naked before you.

A cocktail of sex and power

and soon they’re dead drunk.

I’m holed up in my room, fascinated by the documentary I already saw once with my nephew. It’s running twenty-four hours a day on a local channel. Besides the violence, what makes the story successful is its clarity. Dazzling sunlight, dusty streets and two brothers ready to cut each other’s throats for the love of a woman. A real western. At last death has found an esthetic form.

Bare-chested, wearing jeans.

Gun in hand.

Close-up on Tupac.

The young prince of Cité Soleil.

His carnivore’s laugh must arouse

the girls as they watch

cloistered in their wealthy manors

high on the mountainside.

Rarely does a local legend

get us interested

in faces

and not just landscapes.

Here come the final images.

The music that tells you the end is near.

Death at the end of the day that will turn

these young men into heroes of the Cité.

The story takes me back to the beginnings of this country

when our heroes went barefoot

in the golden dust of twilight.

In the distance I hear that irresistible music.

I picture people drinking,

flirting, dancing and laughing.

Who could imagine that not far from the party

a man lying on his back

is seeking out his path through the Milky Way?

At fifty-six, three-quarters of the

people we’ve known are dead.

The half-century is a difficult border

to cross in a country like this.

They move so quickly toward death

that there’s no sense speaking of life expectancy.

It should be death expectancy instead.

If the bullet goes wide.

If even hunger spares you.

Disease won’t miss its mark.

All three together if you are

the chosen of those perverse jesting gods

who grimace in the darkness.

In my early evening sleep

I wonder where that sports car is going

at full throttle through the darkness.

The triumphant roar continues as far as the wall

of the blind alley.

If my ears serve me well

a wealthy young man has just met

that implacable god his father’s

money could never buy off.

I am here watching

what I have seen before,

even without having seen it,

and dwelling on what I already know.

A strange sense of immobility

in the midst of my feverish activity.

Is this what the cat feels

just before it leaps?

The Ex-Revolutionary in His Buick 57

An old doctor, a former minister of Public Works I met at a gallery opening, invited me to his house in Kenscoff, on the heights of Pétionville. We have been driving through the darkness for a while now. A well-maintained Buick 57 is the Rolls-Royce of the Caribbean. I am Gérard of the Gang of Four, he says, turning in my direction. I was a very close friend of your father’s. My blank look reminds him I don’t know much about my father’s life. And he is not at all surprised. The four of us were inseparable: your father, obviously, Jacques. . I’ve heard of him. Of course, he says, sad suddenly, he was the best one of all of us. My mother liked him. He was Marie’s friend, but your mother kept an eye on me. Why is that? Since I had a lot of girlfriends, she thought I’d introduce one of them to her husband, but Windsor had his own stable. And the fourth was François. Is he dead too? No. He’s holed up in the countryside. That guy was so brilliant and now he’s some kind of peasant. There are times when I don’t understand this country, as if we all had a suicidal virus. We just can’t seem to enter modernity. You think you know a guy because you’ve seen him every day for years and suddenly he announces he has to return to the shadows because a household god is demanding his presence there. Is that what happened with François? I don’t know if it was some kind of voodoo business, but in his case, what a waste! Where does he live? The last time I came across him, it was in Artibonite. He was involved in growing rice. I was on my way to Cap-Haïtien when I saw a peasant up to his waist in water. I told my driver to stop. The peasant was François. And to think the guy could have been minister of Agriculture in any government. I did everything in my power to bring him back to Port-au-Prince, you can imagine, the guy loved Brecht and Genet, but to each his own path. Monsieur François is in Croix-des-Bouquets now, the chauffeur says. I know, the ex-minister replies with a note of irritation, I’ve been told he’s raising chickens. The Buick 57 speeds through the night. The chauffeur seems to know every pothole in the pavement. He avoids them with such dexterity it’s like driving on a perfectly paved road.

As we get close to Pétionville

the girls seem younger.

Their skirts shorter.

Their gazes more meaningful.

This war is as ferocious

as the one between the Cité Soleil gangs.

Girls have always paid

a higher price when the city

turns into a jungle

and the night becomes a trap.

A hungry cock

spares no one

in its path.

Though the hour is late, we detour onto the Delmas road to go see Frankétienne. The doctor wants to buy a painting in his latest style. Frankétienne is so prolific an artist he can ruin a collector. He welcomes us so uproariously he must have woken up the whole neighborhood. The ogre in his lair. Despite the doctor’s rich praise, Frankétienne is reticent about selling him a painting from his personal collection. The rich doctor lets him know money is no object, but the painter digs in his heels. Coffee arrives — Frankétienne hasn’t touched alcohol since his illness. Right now he is working on a novel whose voluminous manuscript stretches across his wide worktable in spectacular disorder. Everything is larger than life with him. Bare-chested. Gargantuan appetite. Face as red as a boiled lobster. The wild enthusiasm of a man obsessed with literature and painting. He has painted several thousand canvases and his first great novel, Ultravocal, has metastasized into some thirty volumes over forty years. Urban turbulence is the only setting for this ogre. Seeing how perplexed I am by this expanse of paper scribbled with obscure signs that look more like musical notes than letters of the alphabet (I wouldn’t put it past him to invent a new vocabulary and grammar in order to write a truly original book), he announces that his next work will be an opera-novel. What’s an opera-novel? asks the chauffeur who seemed to be dozing in the corner. Frankétienne turns to him abruptly: you’re the first one who ever dared ask me that question. Everyone else pretends to understand. I can’t explain it, but when I finish the book, you’ll see, and in the meanwhile, allow me to give you a painting. He disappears into his storehouse and returns with an enormous canvas we’ll never be able to get into the car. He disassembles the frame with such energy he nearly rips apart the painting. He throws it into the trunk of the Buick 57 as the doctor-collector looks on in astonishment, empty-handed, his pockets still stuffed with money.

On the highway a desperate woman waves at us to stop. The doctor orders the chauffeur to drive on. Apparently it’s the bandits’ latest trick for robbing travelers. She’s the bait, and the thieves are hiding in the thicket. But what if it was true? If she really did need help? I’ll read about it in the paper.

For the scene to be believable

they kidnap a poor woman

and promise to set her free

if she manages to trap

one of those luxury automobiles whose owner

has a villa on the mountainside.

In Le Nouvelliste I read about the tragic story of a woman who ended up by the side of the highway after an accident, with her son. No one wanted to stop. The boy bled to death. Months afterward, the mother, having lost her mind, was still asking motorists for help. Even the murderers who have set up shop in this desolate region avoid her. They’re afraid of looking her in the eye.

For every hand that points

a revolver at you

another hand will offer you a fruit.

The hateful words of one

are erased by the other’s smile.

We can’t seem to move

between these two extremes.

How Do You Live at Seventy inside a Museum?

We leave the lights of Pétionville behind.

Already there are peasant huts

lit by lamps

the wind is trying to blow out.

What I need

is a little room

with a window

from which I can see the green countryside.

There I could write the book

I have been ruminating on for so long.

We drive down a road made of ocher earth

and stop at the red gate.

The servants arrive rubbing their eyes.

Three cars, in lieu of farm animals,

are sleeping in the yard.

The doctor, his wife and their numerous domestics

are the only ones living here.

The children have scattered across the planet.

This man lives in a veritable museum. Three salons filled with works by major Haitian painters. The pioneers: Wilson Bigaud, Rigaud Benoît, Castera Bazile, Jasmin Joseph, Préfète Duffaut, Enguerrand Gourgue, Philomé Obin and even a Hector Hyppolite. Then the generation of Cedor, Lazare, Luce Turnier, Antonio Joseph, Tiga, and contemporaries like Jérôme, Valcin, Séjourné, and the Saint-Soleil group with Levoy Exil, Denis Smith and Louisiane Saint-Fleurant. An entire room is devoted to Frankétienne. Almost everyone is there. The doctor follows behind me, smiling. I’m impressed by the choice of painters, and the choice of certain works intrigues me just as much. And even more so the way they are hung. I can hear their dialogue in the night. Why no Saint-Brice? He lowers his eyes. My wife is afraid of Saint-Brice. Most of Saint-Brice’s paintings are of heads without bodies, and they frighten my wife. I did own a small Saint-Brice that I had the misfortune of putting in the bedroom. My wife woke up in the middle of the night, saw the picture shining in the darkness and started screaming like a madwoman. I took it down immediately and put it in the hallway, but that was worse. She refused to leave the bedroom, even to go to the toilet. I had to exchange my only Saint-Brice for two Séjournés. It’s hard to imagine what a collector feels when he has to give up a major piece. Well, I had to get rid of it. Shall we have a drink?

We move into the small salon — a figure of speech because it is much bigger than any normal room of its kind. Two servants magically appear bearing plates loaded down with cold cuts. I like the rich when they know how to receive guests. Food: cheeses, ham, pâté, smoked salmon. Drink: rum, wine, whisky. I don’t dare ask him where the wealth comes from. I know what you’re thinking. If you were my father’s friend, then how could you be rich? He begins to laugh. We never knew if we’d have anything to eat back then. But your father managed to overcome even the most difficult obstacles. He knew how to get himself invited by rich women who are always intrigued by insolent young men. Your mother suspected me of pushing him into the arms of other women. But he was the seducer, and like any good seducer he never tried to seduce. Sometimes he wasn’t even aware of the chaos he created along the way. How many times did I have to point out to him that some woman was feasting on him with her eyes? But he had politics on the brain — for him, that meant getting his ideas out into the world. For him, women were just potential party militants, though they were bewitched by that powerful energy he gave off. His incandescence attracted us. I saw things, but I suppose that’s not what you want to talk about. . I don’t expect anything. I’m happy just to listen to someone who knew my father when he was twenty. Your father hated General Magloire for clinging to power despite the Constitution: that was the basis of everything. Either we were in prison or hiding out in the country. And then? The results, like everything our generation did, were disastrous. Jacques died, your father went into exile and François retired to the country. I was the only one who stayed, and guess what you do in Port-au-Prince? You make money. No, he said, smiling, not so fast. First we were in politics. The revolution, you mean? We made the revolution when we were twenty. A pause. For fifteen years I was minister of Commerce; that’s a good place to make money. Most of the merchants downtown are smugglers who shower the minister with gifts so he’ll turn a blind eye to their clandestine operations. I closed one eye and kept the other open. Because those same merchants won’t think twice about denouncing you as soon as things get a little hot.

Later, he escorted me into his office for a serious discussion. Since the latest riots, no one trusts the domestics any more. Unlike the rest of the house, his office is almost monastic. That’s where he plots his master strokes. He moves his armchair close to mine so our knees touch. He pours himself a shot of rum and fills my glass to the brim. Let me explain a few things to you that you don’t seem to understand, which is normal for someone who’s been away for more than thirty years. You may think we’re living under a new regime since the one you knew isn’t operative anymore, and its children are all overseas. But they’ve been replaced by their former enemies who are a lot worse than they were. They are frustrated and starved, and they panic at the thought that they might not be able to devour everything before they croak. But really they’re just puppets that other people are manipulating from behind the scenes. We never see the true masters of this country. For them, the story has been running without a break. A single straight line. They’ve been keeping watch over things since the end of the colonial period. It’s always been the same business: one group replaces another, and so it goes. If you think there’s a past, a present and a future, you’ve got another thing coming. Money exists; time doesn’t. He takes a long sip of rum and gazes at me through bloodshot eyes. I’m going to do something for you because Windsor was my best friend. I’m going to let you have my car and my chauffeur so you can move around the country in complete security, since you haven’t seen the place in a while. I’m falling asleep on my feet. Now, if you’ll permit, I will go off to confront my childhood monsters.

The Men Who Thought They Were Gods

I decided to bring along my nephew

who was bored silly

in a house

full of nervous old aunts

and rosaries blessed by drunken priests.

I see a lot of pregnant women.

An endless flow of newborns

insidiously urging

the old folks toward the cemetery.

Always keep a black jacket close at hand

after you hit fifty.

You’ll need it to attend the funerals of childhood friends.

The open gate of the art center

where I spent time when I was seventeen.

More for the painters

than the paintings.

This morning there is no one but Mademoiselle Murat

who’s been the director forever.

She greets me with mocking eyes

softened by a disarmingly guileless smile.

She has lived so long among paintings

that she’s become a character in a novel.

I tour the dark empty rooms

of the art center feeling as if the tenant

has just left without daring to take along

the many paintings that come to life

in this wooden building with creaky floors,

as I drink a cup of coffee

served by Mademoiselle Murat

with the disturbing but warm-hearted Robert Saint-Brice

and the big baby-faced boy named Jean-Marie Drot.

I should write a story from the point of view of the dog

wandering through the purple painting by that painter

who disappeared one day without a trace.

That was back when a man was no more than

a rabbit in Papa Doc’s black hat.

I realize as I go by a small crowd praying

that people here talk about Jesus

in a normal everyday tone,

as if he were

someone they could

always meet

on the street corner.

They expect everything of him,

but in the end settle for very little.

The slightest surprise is welcomed

like a miracle.

Mental stability depends on being able

to move, without a transition,

from a Catholic saint to a voodoo god.

When Saint James refuses

to grant a certain favor

they quickly direct the same prayer

to Ogou, the secret name given

to Saint James when the priest began enjoining

the faithful to renounce voodoo

in order to enter the Church.

If they accept the gods so easily

it’s because people believe

they are gods themselves.

Otherwise they’d be dead already.

In those places where people tell each other

their dreams every morning

over the first cup of coffee,

turning day into a simple extension of night,

the traveler wonders if this sense of tranquility

in the face of death springs from the fact that

time is not used to measure life here.

That little girl, not even nine,

feeds her younger brother

and goes without food herself.

Where does such precocious maturity come from?

A Man Sitting under a Banana Tree

I used to like going to Jean-René Jérôme’s little studio in the crowded suburb of Carrefour. I would spend hours watching him paint women with lovely curves and a red flower behind their ear, which he did to support his bohemian lifestyle. He worked very quickly, with scarcely a glance at the canvas. Since we weren’t far from the sea, at noon we would go eat fish on the beach. Years later his wife sent me a small photograph of him and me drinking coffee in his studio, packed with paintings, seashells and dusty sculptures. Today he looks so young in the photo. I can’t remember what we talked about. I just remember my pleasure as I watched him dance as he painted those lighthearted, sensual women. As for the paintings that really mattered, he would hide in order to paint them.

That fog in the distance

is rain moving in on us.

Chaos already. People running everywhere.

How is it that people

who on a daily basis

face disease, dictatorship and death

panic when it comes to getting wet?

I treasure the radiant face of the peasant

walking into the rain.

We stop by the side of the road for this old gentleman who seems to be returning from mass. Where are you going? I’m going to see a sick lady friend, just at the bend of the road. Climb in, you’ll get there faster. I’m almost there as it is. I insist, and he gets into the car. I’m not used to automobiles. I consider I’m an automobile myself, he says, laughing at his own joke. Sure, but sometimes they can help if you’re in a hurry. I don’t see what could make me go faster than my own two feet. You can leave me here. I watch him climb a little path snaking upward. I bet he’s going to the other side of the mountain, the chauffeur laughs. When he reaches the top he’ll still have another good hour’s walk. Why didn’t he tell me where he was going? His world is not ours.

If we return to the point of departure

does that mean

the journey is over?

We won’t die as long as we’re moving.

But those who have never crossed beyond

their village gate

await the return of the traveler

to figure out whether it’s worth

the trouble of leaving.

The poor peasants pay taxes

without expecting anything from the government.

Things would be all right

if it let them live in peace.

The State doesn’t like being judged in silence.

I think of that as I see them bent over in the fields.

Near the old Port-au-Prince cathedral, I bought a magazine that had a long interview with Lazare the painter. He spent a good part of his life in New York before returning to Haiti. After a very brief stop in Port-au-Prince to say hello to a few friends, he moved on to the little hut tucked away on a banana plantation. The image of that place, almost religious, brightened his loneliness in New York. He awoke one morning in a sweat, with the feeling that his last day in this hard, cold city had come. He knew he would suffocate if he didn’t return immediately to Haiti. He grabbed his passport, emptied out his account at the Chase Manhattan Bank and took one final taxi ride to JFK. That evening, he was back in a small café in Pétionville with what was left of the old gang of painters and poets who once dreamed, as he had, of changing the world at the beginning of the sixties. But his journey wasn’t over, and wouldn’t be until he reached the hut that had kept him alive during his long years of depression in New York. In the magazine photo, Lazare sits bare-chested under a banana tree; in the background is a little thatched hut with blue windows.

We’ve been driving blind for a while.

A truck is raising a great cloud of white dust

ahead of us.

A long line of trucks

carrying sand stretches out behind us.

Blaring, urgent horns.

We roll up the windows to keep from swallowing

that penetrating dust.

After a few hours of driving, we have to pull over to the side of the road. Smoke is pouring out from under the hood. The chauffeur leaves with an empty can to get water from a peasant who lives on the side of the bare mountain. Water, so rare in this dry region, is offered to us even before the chauffeur can ask. The peasant says he will come down with his family to help us push the car. The chauffeur spends the evening cleaning every grain of sand out of the motor. Night falls. The man offers us a place to stay. We climb the mountain holding each other by the hand to keep from getting lost in the darkness.

The house where we sleep

has no roof.

I spend the night strolling through the Milky Way.

And I think I recognize my grandmother

in a lonely star

I spot for the first time,

not far from the Big Dipper.

A Window on the Sea

Bare mountains on the right.

Giant cactus on the left.

The asphalt road from a distance

looks like a quiet lake.

The trucks that used to carry

animals to the slaughterhouse

are now used for humans

who travel standing,

their heads covered with dust,

their mouths filled with mosquitoes.

We near the famous cliffs

that provoked the

worst nightmares

of my childhood.

Reality is much more modest.

At the bend the blaring horn

of a red truck coming in the opposite direction.

Childhood fears surface again.

You have to wonder whether the country’s highways aren’t all one-way because the peasants who travel to Port-au-Prince never go back. First they are sucked in by the center of the metropolis, then they’re soon thrown back toward the overcrowded periphery. Where it is impossible to survive without at least a knife.

Beyond a certain number

people’s lives don’t have the same value.

They’re used as cannon fodder

or they do the dirty work.

Some manage to make a way for themselves

without being too compromised

by general corruption

and everyday murder.

We arrive late in Ville-Bonheur where

two virgins reign.

The Christian one is called

Mary of the Immaculate Conception.

Her twin, who sits on the throne in the voodoo pantheon,

is Erzulie Freda Dahomey.

Thirsty virgins.

One, for blood,

the other, for sperm.

The chauffeur pays tribute to both.

At the end of the road

we find a small hotel,

completely rickety,

where food is being served.

The bedbugs are waiting for us between the sheets.

How can we convince this woman

who is so proud of having been to New York

that all we want is fresh fruit juice

and not warm Coca-Cola?

For her, the local fruit is good only

for poor people and pigs.

The young man who seemed

so dangerous with his scarred

face turns out to be sweet-tempered.

His wounds were caused

by a thief he caught in his field.

As so often happens we

confused the victim and the criminal.

Everything is a miracle

in this little place.

Starting with the mere fact of existing.

A pig made it possible

for the young man to study agronomy

in Damien, near Port-au-Prince.

He speaks of it like a member of the family.

The pig is the peasant’s bank account.

When after an epidemic

they asked the peasants in the region to kill

all the pigs to avoid putting

people’s lives in danger

they hid them in the mountains.

In the eyes of a peasant a pig

may be worth less than his family

but certainly more than the advice of the minister

of Agriculture.

We stop at a snack bar by the sea. Thatched roof. No door. Everything exposed to the elements. Six bare tables. The sea literally beneath our feet. On the menu: grilled fish, salted fish, threadfin in hot sauce. My nephew can’t abide fish. The chauffeur and I tuck in. He even agrees to loosen his tie.

I watch my nephew eating oysters with his face to the sea. From time to time a truck goes by, without stopping, its passengers covered in dust. The feeling that in this country you don’t go from one city to another but from one world to another. The horizon is completely empty. Except for the lady selling coconuts who is at the mercy of the truck that stops sometimes, but few of them do at this time of day.

Just as we get back in the car

we change our minds

dive naked into the warm sea

and stay there

till nightfall.

The chauffeur sits on the hood of the car

and waits patiently.

The strange poise that men in the tropics have.

I felt

I was

lost to the North when

in the warm sea

in pink twilight

time suddenly became liquid.

My Father’s Other Friend

Return to Croix-des-Bouquets where, this time, I catch up with the painter I used to see all the time before I left. He is a skillful colorist who used to paint nothing but landscapes filled with pigeons and overripe fruit. We talk a little and drink a lot in his darkened studio. Rum for me. Milk for him since his illness. A bunch of bananas rotting in the shadows reminds us of his odd obsessions. His heavy body. His sleepy voice. We slip into lethargy. The fact that the studio is also a voodoo temple adds to the paintings’ poisonous charm. The strange way of looking he has and the enigmatic way he speaks put me ill at ease. I always feel we are communicating between two parallel universes: the master of this place and me. Once we leave, the chauffeur admits he felt strong negative vibrations in the room. My nephew had spent the whole time watching the young vendors in the yard next door.

A large basin of cold water

where young women selling mangos

bathe as they cover their breasts

and scream in shrill voices.

Their dresses plastered to their bodies.

The painter emerges from his studio

to show me the road

that leads to my father’s friend.

He lives, he told me, behind the market.

We had to make a long detour.

It is impossible to drive through the market.

The chauffeur parked under a tree

then went to look at the stalls.

Some malangas had caught his eye.

My nephew stayed with him.

I have to meet my father’s friend by myself.

I find him feeding his chickens. He seems even more frail than in the photo I saw at the ex-minister’s house. His piercing eyes and firm handshake tell me it would be a mistake to underestimate him. A strong personality. He goes and fetches two chairs and sets them under the arbor. So he’s dead. Who’s dead? I ask like an idiot. Your father. He recognized me. Someone told you. I don’t see anyone besides my chickens and the peasants who come and ask me to write letters for them. How do you know then? You’re his spitting image. And that’s the only reason you’d come all this way to see me here. You want something? All I drink now is tafia. I’ll have a little glass too. In this heat it’s not advisable for someone who comes from the cold. Something cool then? He nods discreetly to a girl washing clothes under the mango tree. That’s my granddaughter, Elvira. Since her mother died she lives with me. . So, Windsor K is dead. He died in Brooklyn. I don’t give a damn where he died. You don’t die somewhere, you just die. He retreats into memory for a moment. Our history teacher had to absent himself for one reason or another, and Windsor took his place. He got up in front of the class. And immediately demanded silence from the bunch of stubborn mules that we were. Then he told us the history of our country, according to him. We all sat there, stunned. Never seen anything like it. He was seventeen — we all were. I watched him go through his paces and I said to myself that I’d follow that guy anywhere. And that’s exactly what I did. I wasn’t the only one, but I was the closest to him.

Elvira comes back barefoot

in the warm dust

with the drinks on a little platter.

Piercing eyes.

A shy smile.

Long graceful legs.

Her modesty can’t

hide the explosive energy

she got from her grandfather.

We drink in silence. I couldn’t have said what my drink is made of, but with an effort I recognize papaya, grenadine, lemon, soursop and cane syrup. In any case it’s cold. I look around as I listen to the voices of the mango vendors. We’re in no hurry here, he tells me with a mocking but friendly smile. Windsor knew a lot of people, but we were the Gang of Four. The inner cell. What we wanted was simple: revolution. Windsor got the idea to start a political party. We were twenty years old. “The Sovereign,” because it was the party of the people and the people are always sovereign. We didn’t follow any rules. We had no qualms about using our fists. We went into the offices and kicked out the pencil-pushers and replaced them on the spot with honest and competent employees who didn’t necessarily belong to our group. We had one list of dishonest employees and another list of competent, honest citizens who couldn’t find work, which meant we had plenty to do putting things right. We didn’t have a job; we had a mission. We wanted a country run by citizens, not cousins. We were for action. What about Jacques?

Elvira comes back with a basin of water

and places it on a rickety little table.

François gets up to wash his hair,

his armpits and his torso.

She dries him tenderly

with a big white towel.

The young vestal virgin

caring for her grandfather.

His face transfigured now. Suddenly he’s twenty years younger. I am a plant that needs watering from time to time, otherwise I dry out. I like water too. He sits down again. You said Jacques…? Jacques! Jacques! It was like a punch in the gut and I’ve never gotten over it. Neither did your father. Marie told me because no one could know what he felt. I say no one, and I was his lieutenant. No one except for your mother. She told me he cried. Do you have any news of Gérard? He tosses some grain on the ground and a few seconds later we are surrounded by a flock of chickens. Here I will speak only of Windsor and Jacques. You speak only of the dead? I speak only of people I know. I thought I knew Gérard. That’s all I can say. I feel it’s my turn to talk now. My father put a suitcase in a safety deposit box. It’s certainly not money — your father wasn’t the type to save. What do you think it is? I ask him. Oh, he says, scattering the chickens, I have no idea. I have gotten rid of everything that once weighed me down and the past was the heaviest part. When I left Port-au-Prince, all I brought was my own corpse. But your father was a historian; maybe they’re documents, but let’s forget about it. He takes a long breath as if preparing to say one last thing before falling into silence. All I know is that I loved Windsor and that Jacques is the wound in my life. Now I live here with my granddaughter, surrounded by insatiable chickens I have to feed every hour, illiterate peasants I help to write letters of protest, and noisy women who don’t stop chattering from morning to night, and I have all that I desire.

We leave the market area

and are already heading south

when I notice behind the car

Elvira, running in long strides,

bringing me a hen,

a gift from her grandfather.

Instead of my father’s suitcase

that stayed behind in a Manhattan bank,

my inheritance is a black hen

from his best friend.

My nephew couldn’t breathe

the whole time

Elvira was standing by the car.

And the silence that

followed her departure.

Like the plains after a wildfire.

A Green Lizard

I go for a walk in

the peaceful cemetery of Petit-Goâve.

Graves scattered in the tall grass.

On my grandmother Da’s headstone,

a green lizard looks at me

for a long while

then slips into a break in the rock.

It isn’t far from the des Vignes River

where I caught crayfish

with my cousins

during my rainy childhood.

A girl from the North came

to this cemetery

a few years ago,

with a modest bouquet of flowers for Da

whose grave she sought in vain.

That’s because Da lives

in my books.

She entered head held high

into fiction.

The way others elsewhere

enter heaven.

For the simple bouquet placed that day

on the nearest grave

I promise, Pascale Montpetit,

you’ll always have a spot

in the modest cemetery in Petit-Goâve,

where the gods converse

unsmiling with women.

A man napping

in the shade of a banana tree.

Lying on a tombstone

by the cemetery exit.

Is it more restful

to be that close

to eternal sleep?

I walk up Lamarre Street to number 88, the old house where I spent my childhood with my grandmother Da. As I move up the street, I recognize it less and less. It takes me a while to locate the house. The little field where Oginé kept horses for ten centimes while their owners sold vegetables in the market has changed places. Mozart’s store has done the same. Mozart died before Da. I manage to find the house only because of the building across from it. It has remained intact, the way it was in my memories. The pink-and-white doors and the long walkway where a black dog stood guard. One evening, it went for a thief’s throat.

I picture Da sitting on the gallery and me at her feet watch-ing ants go about their business. People greet Da and she offers them a cup of coffee. In her yellow dress, Vava goes up the street with her mother. My friends Rico and Frantz will pick me up and we’ll go stand before the sea. That afternoon will never end.

Heading South

Just before Carrefour Desruisseaux

and the cutoff toward Aquin,

we stop at Miragoâne to

fill the car with gas.

I recognize the gas station guy.

We had our first communion together.

He hasn’t changed a bit.

He’s the same forty-five years later.

He still has that foolish smile that

has protected him from the sting of time.

The rain has been pelting down since Miragoâne.

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.

A lady comes to offer me a well-sweetened cup of coffee, as is the custom. I drink it sitting on the car’s hood. A boy who lives nearby brings me a chair. A little girl wants me to admire her skill as she spins pirouettes with her jump rope. Evening is just beginning to fall and already I hear the hum of mosquitoes preparing to attack. And now Monsieur Jérôme is coming back with the tire repaired and a swarm of children buzzing around him.

It took him a while to return because he knows a woman in the area. Attentive to the unfolding of his story, I understand they have two children together. Is she your wife? No. The children are from him, but they’re not his. What does that mean? He tries to explain a highly embarrassing situation. The mystery deepens the more details he provides. If I understand correctly, his father had to acknowledge the two boys because he was a minor at the time of their birth. So they must be adults by now? His face brightens. They’re good workers, and most of all they’re honest. One is a shoemaker in Les Cayes, the other’s a mechanic in Port-au-Prince. So what’s the problem? The story is complicated, I’m afraid. The woman’s father never forgave him for spoiling his plans. He had other ideas for his daughter. Her father swore he would chop off his head if he came near the house again. Even now? He’s old, but he’s still strong and still angry. People never forget anything around here. Monsieur Jérôme arrives at the most sensitive part of the story: he wants me to go and say hello to the woman for him and discreetly slip her an envelope. What if her father catches me and chops off my head? Monsieur Jérôme’s face darkens but then he assures me that the man would never do that, since he is really quite courteous. Except when it comes to him, Jérôme. He thanks me with profuse expressions of regret for having to ask such a favor.

I doze off a little

despite my sore back.

Two nights in a row I’ve slept

curled up in a ball in the car.

I’d like to stretch out on a real bed.

I would have gladly accepted

the wealthy farmer’s invitation to stay

if I hadn’t been so afraid to end up with

his daughter in my bed, caught

in a complicated tale of dishonor

that would have been settled with one swift blow of a machete.

A necklace of red pearls.

It’s not that I am

such a prize catch.

But it’s an obsession among some rich farmers

to have an intellectual in the family.

The way the middle class

bought up ruined aristocrats

so their grandchildren could carry

a noble name.

Night has fallen. I knock timidly at the door. An old man shuffles over to open it. Excuse me for disturbing you at such a late hour, but I have a message for Madame Philomène. Did Jérôme send you? he asks with a smile in his eyes. Yes. Tell him he’s welcome here. And that he can stay the night. I go back and give Monsieur Jérôme his envelope. When we get there, the beds are already made up. Monsieur Jérôme spends the rest of the night conversing in low tones with his father-in-law. The next morning, we get back on the road after a strong cup of coffee. Suspecting that business is bad, Monsieur Jérôme does not want his father-in-law to go to any extra trouble. When it is time to leave, the older man declares that “this whole business was just a terrible misunderstanding.” On the road, Jérôme tells us that the friend who was supposed to build bridges between him and his father-in-law had lied to both of them, and that during the negotiations he kept asking for Philomène’s hand for himself, which the old man always refused.

The Farewell Ceremony

My nephew sits down next to me

on the hood of the car.

A pink sky edged in darkness

above a vast desolate landscape.

In a moment it will appear,

bringing the world to life as we watch,

the star that novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis

called General Sun, My Brother.

The only reason to wake up in so poor a place.

Every detail I notice

that others do not see

brings fresh proof

that I am not of this place.

I long for the coolness

of primitive dawn.

I would like to lose

all awareness

of my being

to blend

into nature

and become a leaf,

a cloud

or the yellow of the rainbow.

We piss, my nephew and I,

off the edge of the cliff.

Two continuous streams.

Pure arcs.

A slight smile on both our faces.

I hear a man singing

but do not see his face.

Someone tells us he is crippled

and never leaves his room.

A song so desperate

it has lost all humanity.

The coffee arrives. The taste of Césaire immediately comes into my mouth. Césaire who spoke of “those who explored neither the seas nor the sky but those without whom the earth would not be the earth.” Now they are walking past me, in this little market that’s slowly coming to life.

People here are not

in the habit of complaining.

They have the ability to change

all pain into song.

The tobacco the women

chew at noon

shaded by their broad hats

makes the bitter taste of life tolerable.

I slip the old water-warped copy

of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

into my nephew’s bag.

We need it before we leave.

Not when we return.

In his own way, he seems very happy with this trip that has helped him understand the difference between the big city and peasant life. But I can feel he is beginning to miss his friends from university and wants to be back in the urban dirt and violence. That’s what he’s made of. A person doesn’t change his nature in a few days.

In the end I decide to go ahead on my own. With no other protection than the blood that runs in my veins. I give the rest of my money to Monsieur Jérôme who refuses it at first, but I convince him he will make better use of it than I. Two letters hastily scribbled on the car’s burning hood. The longest to my mother and the other to the former minister who willingly let me use his car. A final hug for my nephew and I climb into this shuddering jalopy, with my black hen as sole companion. Destination Baradères, my father’s native village.

I watch the Buick 57 pull away in a small cloud of dust as I negotiate the fare with the driver. You were in good company, he tells me with a conspiratorial smile. My nephew and the minister’s chauffeur. That’s what you think, but I recognized Zaka. Zaka, god of peasants. How did you recognize him? A throaty laugh that signifies the end of the conversation. I find a spot in the back of the truck.

And Now Baradères, My Father’s Village

Sacks of green bananas.

Cans of oil.

Coal and flour.

Chickens, goats and even a donkey.

A fat man snoring in the back.

Rumbling breath issuing from the bottom of his belly.

I banish all reflection

even the most intimate

and give in to the embrace of this crowd

where the boundary between man and animal

is so narrow as the truck

makes its way through the arid landscape.

A soft voice behind me. A woman in black whose husband has just died. The mother and the son lived in Brooklyn, though the father stayed in Haiti. She tells her story. The first time she saw him was at the door to the lycée. Her girlfriends made fun of him. But he was so sweet she immediately fell in love with him. He was shy, even in their private life, and he remained that way till the end. He was a delicate man. He died of throat cancer, without a complaint. His name was Séraphin.

The coffin is at the back. Securely tied to a bench. Taking up space for six passengers. Since he is dead the widow paid for four seats only. She wouldn’t have had to pay anything if she had agreed to have the coffin tied to the roof of the truck. She decided, whatever the price, Séraphin would not ride up there with the dust and the goats and the chickens. They would make their last journey together.

His young son is wearing a white shirt

and a black tie.

His head leans on his mother’s shoulder.

Somber and silent.

I hear a lady whisper,

“The spitting image of his father.”

She knew him well.

Actually, I’m in the same situation.

Except I have no body with me.

And almost no memory of the departed.

This journey is to bring him back

to his village that I will be discovering at the same time.

A funeral without a body.

A ceremony so intimate

it concerns only me.

Father and son, for once,

alone face to face.

To disappear without a trace.

Or anyone to remember you.

Only a god deserves such a destiny.

Here is Baradères in the rain.

It’s been raining for two days.

Water rises fast here.

Houses on stilts.

The truck turns carefully behind the church.

We come upon a modest cemetery

under water where small golden fish

swim into the cavities

of freshly buried bodies.

A small group is waiting

at the foot of the tall cross.

Soaked to the skin.

The gravity of death.

The boy in the black tie

is not so sure he wants to get out of the truck.

He doesn’t know all these relatives

who have stepped out of another age.

Or this town drowned by the rain.

Or this cemetery where his father will be buried.

In Brooklyn it’s hard to imagine Baradères.

In every cemetery there is

a large black cross by the gate.

And an empty grave that belongs to no one.

That’s where Baron Samedi lives,

that funereal and dissolute god

who is the guardian of the cemetery where

no one may enter without his permission.

We stroll along the brightly lit streets

of the world’s great cities

with our urbane airs and our educated politeness

not knowing that our lives are filled

with secret feelings and sacred songs

we have lost somewhere inside ourselves

and that resurface only at funerals.

We have two lives.

One belongs to us.

The other belongs

to those who have known us

since childhood.

The mother’s tongue.

The father’s country.

The son’s bewildered look

as he discovers in a single day

his own legacy.

They rush the coffin

toward the far end of the cemetery.

Past the last graves with flowers on them.

A few stones this way and that in the tall grass

where fat pink fish swim.

The best spots, by the entrance,

are reserved for those who

have never left Baradères.

This wild kid who wreaks

havoc in Brooklyn

suddenly discovers

his origins

in a lost village.

He bends over to catch bare-handed

a pink fish with an electric charge.

It sends him hopping on one foot.

The fish makes its getaway

to the sound of the laughing crowd.

I stand at the edge of the group

to attend the ceremony,

not wishing to disturb them.

No one seems to notice I am there.

That’s what they want me to think.

I have learned how discreet

people are in this part of the world.

A man comes up to me, his formal manner from another era. It would give us great pleasure were you to remain with us afterward, he tells me. Later I learned he had worked for UNESCO as a translator and after he retired, he returned to live here. The continuous movement between urban and rural worlds strengthens the bonds between culture and agriculture.

The house where the funeral reception takes place stands on the slope of a deforested hill. The kids, along with a few young goats, keep rushing down it. To dry my clothes, I sit by the fire where ears of corn are being smoked in the coals. A little girl in a pretty blue dress and sparkling eyes brings me a cup of coffee. She curtsies by way of greeting. I kiss her on the forehead. She opens her eyes wide then runs off. In a storm of saliva, the retired polyglot confides in me that finally he has time to reread the Aeneid.

No one asks me

where I came from nor where I am going.

My past counts no more than my future.

They accept me in the gravity of the present

without demanding explanations.

A starry sky

that makes me dream

of hot evenings on the gallery

with my mother

and of course Baudelaire whose

“The Balcony” was my father’s

favorite poem.

I also recall the picnics

Aunt Ninine organized at the beginning of July.

And other precious memories

that convince me, now,

that my childhood was but an

endless season of sunshine,

though the rain did fall.

Nothing is more brilliant than sunlight in the rain.

Suddenly I feel so light.

The sky is no farther

than that banana leaf

that brushes my head.

A Dandy Dies Like a Dandy

I push my way through the banana plantation

divided by a stream

whose song I heard

before discovering in the shadows

its shining back

lit by moonlight.

I come upon an old man

sleeping under a banana tree.

What kind of life

has he lived

to go on smiling

in his dream?

I suppose it was different from

the former minister’s who spends his nights

in a museum, where most of the paintings

reproduce the bucolic setting where this peasant is sleeping.

One is living in the other’s dream.

I go through the little cemetery.

The earth has drunk up all the water from the sky.

The dead were thirsty

though they do prefer

something stronger.

I just need to look up

to see Sirius

on the collar of Canis Major.

I will spend the night

with this brightest of stars.

I sit down

in the night

on a headstone

to smoke a cigarette.

And think of my father.

That teenager who yesterday was running

nearly naked in the rain

through the streets of Baradères

could have lived out his life

like his friends

who never left their native village.

And never have known

such a strange destiny.

The path trampled through the grass crosses the cemetery and hits the rocky track that leads to the paved road. He started out on that path on his way to Port-au-Prince. And years later, to Havana, Paris, Genoa, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Rome, the world’s great cities. And then New York where I recently saw him stiff in a black alpaca suit with a magnificent tie of the same color. Always elegantly dressed. The way his generation was. The only personal feature: that smile pinned to his face, witness to the final burst of pain.

My mother questioned me at length

about what he wore for the funeral.

Every detail of his appearance

counted for him — and now for her.

All I remembered were his hands

and his smile.

In the end, once a dandy, always a dandy. Especially when the dandy has stopped taking care of himself. The form can change. The personality, never. If personality never changes, then that Baradères teenager knew everything back then. All the roads he was to take were already laid out inside him.

On a night like this, he must have

looked into the sky at

that great life-size map and seen

all the hospitals, prisons, embassies,

feigned celebrations and lonely nights

that one day he would face.

And if the moon was full and bright

he must have seen my life too,

an extension of his

so similar to it.

We each have our dictator.

For him it was the father, Papa Doc.

For me, the son, Baby Doc.

Exile without return for him.

For me, this enigmatic return.

My father has returned

to his birthplace.

I brought him back.

Not the body

burned to the bone by ice.

But the spirit that made it possible

for him to face

the deepest solitude.

To stand up to that solitude

all those gray days

and cold nights,

how many times did he

picture in his mind

the primitive images

of Baradères in the rain?

He in Baradères.

I in Petit-Goâve.

Then each followed his path

through this wide world.

To return to our point of departure.

He gave me birth.

I take care of his death.

Between birth and death,

we hardly crossed paths.

I have no memory

of my father that I can trust.

That belongs to me alone.

There is no picture

of us alone together.

Except in my mother’s memory.

A Son of the Village

Even before the new day dawns

I can hear

the sounds of the town

awakening like a servant girl.

On her tiptoes.

A woman brings me coffee.

The white cup.

The embroidered cloth.

She waits until I have finished drinking it.

The way they say good morning in Baradères.

The man appears soon after. With his hat over his heart. I make room for him next to me. He sits down. For some time he says nothing. That’s my grave, he murmurs. My whole family has been buried there for four generations. I immediately get to my feet. Stay. It’s an honor for us. Again this silence I have no intention of breaking. My wife recognized you. You know me? Legba. He is confusing me with the god who stands at the border between the visible and invisible worlds. The one who allows us to move between them. I’ve been out of the country. We know that. I’ve come to bury my father, and now I am being welcomed like a god in his native village. We were waiting for you, he says solemnly. But I am not Legba. You are the son of Windsor K, my classmate. We went to grammar school together here. I am amazed, astonished. If we didn’t know who you were, you wouldn’t be alive now. You’re not the first to return to bury a family member. I see. But you’re the first I’ve seen without a body. And you are accompanied by Legba. And Legba chose to spend the night on our grave. We don’t deserve such an honor. What sign spoke to you of Legba? The black hen. The hen? Yes, the black hen. Of course, the black hen. Sometimes you have to pretend to understand, because here no one will explain to you what you are supposed to know.

A large but skinny and mangy dog

comes and rubs himself against his leg.

I wonder if he

isn’t a god too.

The dog star I saw last night.

Children cross the cemetery

on their way to school.

As they go past they run their palm

over their ancestors’ graves.

That way they keep daily contact

with the other world.

Last Sleep

By road or by sea?

I choose the sea.

It so happens, the man tells me, there’s a sailboat

about to leave the harbor.

It’s my cousin Rommel’s boat.

A village of cousins.

First we go to La Gonâve for wood

that we’ll deliver to Pestel.

Several women get on board the Epiphany.

They need oil, salt and flour.

They impose the rhythm of daily life

on the sailboat.

We fish along the way.

On the great salty highway.

Mostly threadfin.

The women never look at the water.

Half the crew doesn’t know how to swim.

The sea was off limits to the slave.

From the beach, he could dream of Africa.

And a nostalgic slave

isn’t worth much

on a plantation.

He would be killed so his sadness

would not spread to others.

The brilliant sun

in a cloudless sky

and the turquoise sea lined with coconut palms

is just a Northern reverie

for the man trying

to escape the leaden cold of February.

From where I stand I note:

Ferocious beauty.

Eternal summer.

Death under the sun.

We put in at every bay, where various female cousins await the merchandise in noisy marketplaces. We use the stops to pick up the necessities of life. New vendors climb aboard, and the fire in their bodies means they’re members of Erzulie Freda Dahomey’s family. The men watch them sleepily. Start something with one of those women and, at the next bay, a new machete will be waiting in the sun.

Before getting off, a woman wanted to buy my hen to sell it, she said, at the next market. Just to take it off my hands because she’d pay market price for it and wouldn’t make any profit. The lady next to me stepped in. Later, she made me swear never to sell the black hen whatever happened. But I knew that already.

The men are farmers

who work close to their huts.

The women know every one

of the tiny villages where

they sell their vegetables.

Jealous husbands make their wives

stay at the local market.

That gazelle with the slender ankles

accompanies her mother.

Her head down.

A sidelong glance.

She’s studying everything

for the day when it’s her turn

to make the trip alone.

Up ahead, a small group

of people on the shore.

A sign announces “Les Abricots.”

The Indians thought

it was paradise.

I finally get there.

Tall trees whose

branches bend low

to touch the sea.

Big pink fish

still flopping in

the fishermen’s boat.

Kids with navels like flowers

devouring perfumed mangos.

The sweet life before Columbus.

I’m not so sure whether

I am in real time

as I move toward

this dreamed landscape.

I’ve read too many books.

Seen too many paintings.

One day, learn to see things

in their naked beauty.

Always too much hope ahead.

And too much disappointment behind.

Life is a long ribbon

that ceaselessly unfolds

in changing variations

of both.

I go my way

toward a small thatched hut

deep in the banana plantation.

The coffee is prepared

by an Indian princess

with high cheekbones

and the pure breath

of highland women.

In the hammock,

a pre-Columbian invention

that says much

about the degree of refinement

in this society,

you can spend your life

in horizontal meditation.

Three months

to escape the urban intensity

that once gave my life its rhythm.

Three months sleeping

protected by an entire village

that seems to know the source

of that sweet sickness of sleep.

This is not winter.

This is not summer.

This is not the North.

This is not the South.

Life is spherical now.

My former life seems so distant.

That life when I was a journalist, an exile,

a worker, even a writer.

And when I met so many people

for whom now I am no more

than a slowly fading shadow.

Humble houses scattered in the landscape.

Nothing here to recall the Indian genocide

so expertly orchestrated by the Spanish.

His hand on his Alcantara cross

Nicolás de Ovando gave the signal for the massacre

that Arawak memory refuses to forget.

A gentle hand

on my forehead cools my fever.

I doze between dawn and twilight.

And sleep the rest of the time.

Rocked by the music

of the ancient Caribbean wind

I watch the black hen

unearth a worm

that squirms in its beak.

And so I see myself in the jaws of time.

Someone has seen me smile

in my sleep too.

Like the child I was

in the happy times with my grandmother.

A time at long last recovered.

The journey is over.