The Return (2 page)

Between the journey and the return,

stuck in the middle,

this rotten time

can lead to madness.

That moment always comes

when you stop recognizing yourself

in the mirror.

You've lived too long without witnesses.

I compare myself to the photo

of the young man I was before the departure.

The photo my mother slipped

into my pocket just as I

closed the low green gate.

I remember all that sentimentality

made me smile back then.

Today that old photo is my only

reflection to measure passing time.

Sunday afternoon in Port-au-Prince.

I can tell because even the plants

look bored.

We are sitting, my mother and I,

on the gallery, in silence, waiting

for darkness to settle over the oleander.

In the yellowed photo

I am paging through

(no doubt with moist palms and pounding heart)

the summer issue of a woman's magazine

with girls in bikinis.

Next to me, my mother pretends to sleep.

If I didn't know then that

I was going to leave

and never return,

my mother, so careworn

that day,

must have felt it

in the most secret part

of her body.

We're stuck in a bad novel

ruled by a tropical dictator

who keeps ordering

the beheading of his subjects.

We scarcely have time

to escape between the lines

toward the margin that borders the Caribbean Sea.

Here I am years later

in a snow-covered city

walking and thinking of nothing.

I am guided only

by the movements of frigid air

and that fragile neck ahead of me.

Intrigued by the strength

that girl has, so determined,

confronting the harsh

and frigid winds that bring

tears to my eyes

and whirl me around like a dervish.

A child sitting in the middle of the stairway

waits for his father to take him to the arena.

From his sad look I can see

that the game has already started.

I would have given anything

to miss a game

and spend the afternoon watching my father

read his paper in the corner café.

I know that house with a cat in the window.

To enter you have to put

the key in all the way

then draw it back as you turn it

gently in the lock.

The stairs begin to creak

at the eighth step.

A big wooden house.

A long bare table

with a basket of fruit at the end.

On the wall a display

of black-and-white photos

that tell the story

of a man and a woman

in the blaze of love.

A little squirrel climbs the tree at top speed

turning its head in my direction

as if inviting me to follow.

The pale light of three a.m.

when teenage girls walk the streets

on stiletto heels that will break their backs

before they reach thirty.

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

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

I wait for the café to open.

The waitress pulls up on her bike

despite the cold.

She grabs the two piles of papers

the young delivery boy left earlier

in front of the door.

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

Her movements are precise and driven by habit.

Finally she opens the door.

I go in for my first coffee and

read the morning's editorials

which always make me furious.

She puts on heavy metal at top volume

but she'll change it to Joan Baez

when the first customers show up.

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

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

His left profile.

Clenched jaw.

Intense concentration.

He's about to change centuries.

Right before my eyes.

Without a sound.

I always thought

that books crossed

the centuries to reach us.

Then I understood

seeing that man

the reader does the traveling.

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

that we hold in our hands

and that is there only to attest

the journey really did take place.

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

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

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

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

His well-starched shirt collar.

The mother-of-pearl cufflinks.

Silk socks and shined shoes.

The loose knot of his tie.

A revolutionary is above all a charmer.

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

Hot tea.

I am reading by the frosted window.

Numbness fills me.

I lay the book on my stomach.

My hands together and my head thrown back.

Nothing else will happen today.

This sunbeam

that warms my left cheek.

A child's afternoon nap

not far from his mother.

In the shadow of the oleander.

Like an old lizard

hiding from the sun.

Suddenly I hear that dull sound

the book makes as it falls to the floor.

The same sound that

the heavy juicy mangos of my childhood made

as they fell by the water basin.

Everything brings me back to childhood.

That fatherless country.

What's for sure is that

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

Maybe I wouldn't have written at all.

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

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

The Photo

A man sitting in front of a thatched hut

with a peasant hat on his head.

A plume of smoke rising behind him.

“That's your father in the countryside,”

my mother said to me.

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

Distant as it is,

that picture comforts me even today.

When it's noon and I'm too hot

in these tristes tropiques

I will remember my walk

on the frozen lake, near the cabin

where my friend Louise Warren

would go to write.

Cats play on the porch

without concern for passing time.

Their time is not ours.

This kitten slips

into the shadows of my memory.

White socks on the

waxed wood floor.

I've lost track of myself.

Memories run together in my mind.

My life is just a small damp package

of washed-out colors and old smells.

It's as if an eternity had passed

since the phone call.

Time is no longer cut

into fine slices called days.

It's become a compact mass with a density

greater than the earth's.

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

Images from deep in childhood

wash over me like a wave

with such newness

I really feel I am seeing

the scene unfold before me.

I remember another detail

from that picture of my father

but so tiny that my mind

can't locate it.

All I can recall is the memory

of a moment of pleasure.

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

The Right Moment

This moment always comes.

When it's time to leave.

We can always hang around a little,

say useless goodbyes and gather up

things we'll abandon along the way.

The moment stares at us

and we know it won't back down.

The moment of departure awaits us by the door.

Like something whose presence we feel

but can't touch.

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

Time spent anywhere else than

in our native village

is time that cannot be measured.

Time out of time written

in our genes.

Only a mother can keep that sort of count.

For thirty-three years

on an Esso calendar

mine drew a cross over each day

spent without seeing me.

If I meet my neighbor on the sidewalk

he never fails to invite me in

to taste the wine he makes in his basement.

We spend the afternoon discussing Juventus

back in the days when Juventus was Juventus.

He personally knows all the players

though most have been dead for some time.

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

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

I bring back to the country

without a farewell ceremony

these gods who accompanied me

on this long journey

and kept me from losing my mind.

If you don't know voodoo,

voodoo knows you.

The faces I once loved disappear

with the days of our burned memory.

The sheer fact of not recognizing

even those who were close to us.

The grass grows in, after the fire,

to camouflage all trace of the disaster.

In fact, the real opposition is not

between countries, no matter how different they are,

but between those who have had to learn

to live at other latitudes

(even in inferior conditions)

and those who have never had to face

a culture other than their own.

Only a journey without a return ticket

can save us from family, blood

and small-town thinking.

Those who have never left their village

live unchanging lives