The Return (14 page)

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.