The Return (3 page)

that can prove, with time,

dangerous for their personality.

For three-quarters of the people on this planet

only one type of travel is possible

and that's to find themselves without papers

in a country whose language and customs

they know nothing of.

There's no sense accusing them

of wanting to change

other people's lives

when they have

no control

over their own.

If we really want to leave we have to forget

the very idea of the suitcase.

Things don't belong to us.

We accumulate them out of the simple need for comfort.

A comfort we have to question

before walking out the door.

We have to understand that the minimum level of comfort

needed to live here in winter

is a dream come true back there.

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

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

I fear that an event no matter how great

will never shake

a man from his habits.

The decision is made long before

we actually become aware of it

and for a reason that will always escape us.

The moment of departure has been written

in us so long ago that by the time it comes

it always seems a little banal.

Time in Books

As soon as I moved into a new apartment

I would place my books on the table.

All of them read and reread.

I wouldn't buy a book unless

the desire to read it was stronger

than the hunger in my belly.

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

When our circumstances change

we think it's the same

for everyone else.

I know people who constantly

have to choose between eating and reading.

I consume as much meat here

in one winter

as a poor person in Haiti eats

in a lifetime.

I moved very quickly

from forced vegetarian to obligated carnivore.

In my life before, food

was a daily preoccupation.

Everything centered on my stomach.

Once I got something to eat everything was settled.

That's impossible to understand

if you've never experienced it.

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

One day, I bought a book

without really needing to.

It sat on the little kitchen table

unopened for three months

among the onions and carrots.

Today I realize that a good half

of my library remains unread.

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

I will leave with a little suitcase.

Like the one I had when I came here.

Nearly empty.

Not a single book.

Not even mine.

Stay only one short night in Port-au-Prince

before heading to Petit-Goâve to

see that house again not far

from my grandfather's old distillery.

Later I'll cross the rusty old bridge

to visit my grandmother in the cemetery.

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

chatting about everything and nothing

with people who have never

opened a book in their lives.

But sooner or later that essential moment will come

when I confuse the novels I read

with the ones I wrote.

Everything moves on this planet.

Seen from the sky its southern flank

is in constant motion.

Entire populations travel northward

in search of life.

When everyone gets there

we'll all tip over the edge.

Sometimes a phone call in the middle of the night

turns everything upside down in an instant.

We are lost in restless movement.

It's always easier to change places

than change lives.

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

In a Café

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

I slip into the student café

on the corner of Ontario Street.

The waitress looks my way and doesn't smile.

I sit at the back, by the radiator.

After a while she comes to take my order.

I can barely hear Arcade Fire.

A quick breakfast before heading to the station.

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

SIDE A

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIDE B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind the Frosted Window

On that December afternoon I was just

a shadow behind the frosted window

admiring

one of nature's most impressive spectacles.

Fascinated, I watched all that snow

endlessly falling.

The poet Émile Nelligan gained immortality

by using the word “snow” twice

in one very brief line:

“Oh, how the snow has snowed!”

Gilles Vigneault reached the same heights by singing

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

Here ice is the road to glory.

People of the North seem

so attracted by the sea

while ice frightens people of the South.

Is the seduction of hot weather enough

to explain why the first group

became colonizers much more easily

than the second?

No one saw it the way I did,

the snow falling

in fat gentle flakes.

I escaped the island

that seemed like a prison to me

and ended up encased

in a room in Montreal.

A short yellow dress slipping

through the cornfield

that dips down to the river.

I run behind my cousin.

The long summer vacation

still enchants my memory.

You can hear the song of the washerwomen

from the shack of that man

who lives off snail soup

and attends every funeral.

On my eyelids these images

burned by the sun of childhood.

Time moves at speeds so maddening

it has turned my life to a blur of colors.

That is how the polar night passes.

This sad gaiety always descends on me

at the same time.

When the car lights come on

and their beams sweep my room

and awaken my childhood terror.

I hide under the sheets.

The arrow makes

no noise in the night.

The pain visits

so suddenly

and will not depart

before dawn.

Night Train

In the train.

Time softens.

We let ourselves be lulled.

I awake with a start

when in the night we cross

a phantom train.

The livid faces

make me feel

this train is arriving from 1944.

A nightmare flash created

by fulguration (speed and light)

and my foggy brain.

We're in the middle of the countryside.

Pale glow lighting the houses.

I picture people gathered around the
TV
set.

The old man eating alone in his room.

The train won't slow down until we reach

the next city.

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

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

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