The Return (15 page)

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.