The Return (4 page)

I escape into my thoughts

before sleep catches up to me.

The surrender is so sweet.

To fall asleep in one city

and wake up in another.

A Poet Named Césaire

The train pulls into the next station. The girl beside me who was reading a Tanizaki novel gets off. A young man waits for her with a bouquet of mimosas and furtive kisses. The platform empties. The couple is still fused, mouth to mouth now. The train pulls away. The girl forgot her book on the seat. She's already elsewhere. The book, like the train, served only to carry her to him.

I think back to my first suitcase forgotten in one of the city's narrow dusty rooms. Luckily I was able to hold onto the only things worth saving. A letter from my mother in which she explains, sparing no detail, how to live in a country she's never visited, and that dog-eared copy of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. I still have both those things.

That phone call in the middle of the night. Are you Windsor Laferrière? Yes. This is the Brooklyn Hospital . . . Windsor Laferrière has died. We have the same name.

They found my phone number in his pocket. The nurse who looked after him is on the line. In a soft, even voice she tells me he would come and see her when he wasn't feeling well. Sometimes his attacks were serious. No one else but me could get close to him at those times. A very sweet man despite the anger that was so strong inside him. Your father died smiling, that's all I can say. Lying on my back, I stare at the ceiling for a long while.

I get off in Toronto. A quick stop to see an old painter friend. We go for a drink in a bar near the gallery where he has a show. Since we're the same age the same things happened to us about the same time. His father died at the beginning of the year; he'd had to flee the country during the same period mine did. We're a generation of sons without fathers who were raised by women whose voices became even shriller when circumstances got too much for them. We end up drinking rum in his dark little studio. At dawn, he goes with me to the station.

I always travel with Césaire's collection of poems. I found it dull the first time I read it, nearly forty years ago. A friend had lent it to me. Today it seems strange that I could have read it at age fifteen. I didn't understand the devotion the book created among young people from the Antilles. I could tell it was the work of an intelligent man filled with terrible anger. I could feel his clenched jaw and imagine his eyes veiled in tears. I saw all those things, but not the poetry. The text seemed too prosaic. Too bare. Now, on this night, as I finally travel toward my father, suddenly I can feel Césaire's shadow behind his words. I can see how he went beyond his anger to discover new territories in his adventure with language. Césaire's striking images dance before my eyes. That all-powerful rage arises more from a desire to live in dignity than a will to denounce colonialism. The poet helps me draw the line between the pain that tears me apart and my father's subtle smile.

There is a photo of Césaire

sitting on a bench.

The sea behind him.

In a flowing khaki jacket

that makes him look like a frail bird.

His faded smile

and his wide eyes so gentle

do not reveal the rage

that changes him, before our eyes,

into a charred tree trunk.

Manhattan in the Rain

Umbrellas of every color. The air is so warm in New York after the freezing weather in Montreal. My uncles are happy for the warmth, though a bit surprised. It's almost like summer. Manhattan in the tropics. My Uncle Zachée maintains that nature is giving a gift to my father who hated the cold and compared it to the njustice of men. The rain arrived too late in his case.

A crowd in this big Manhattan church

for a man who lived alone

the last years of his life.

He was not forgotten.

Since he didn't want to see anyone,

people patiently awaited his death

to pay him tribute.

Now that he cannot flee

they burden him with compliments.

The sedentary like to see

the nomad made immobile.

Enclosed in a long box

he must think is a pirogue

that will let him skim across

the Guinaudée of his boyhood.

For many of these old Haitian taxi drivers, accompanied by their wives, most of them nurses' aids at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, he remained the young man who stood up to the power and abuse of the President-for-Life. The glory of their youth.

It is the first time

I'm seeing him from so close.

I just have to reach out

my hand to touch him.

But I don't

to respect the distance

he wanted to maintain between us

during his life.

I remember that passage in the Notebook where Césaire demands the body of Toussaint Louverture, arrested by Napoleon, killed by the cold during the winter of 1803 in Fort de Joux, France. His lips trembling with contained rage the poet comes to demand, 150 years later, the frozen body of the hero of the slave revolt: “What is mine a lone man imprisoned in whiteness.”

A woman in a long white astrakhan coat

stands discreetly by the last column.

A ghost of a smile.

The smile of someone who knows

death can never erase

the memory of a certain summer afternoon

in an overheated room in Brooklyn.

Until the end,

even dirty,

even crazy,

my father remained

the dandy he'd always been.

Charm can't be explained.

I wonder who they're celebrating

when the one they're talking about

can't hear a word.

One of his old buddies is telling a story

that seems to amuse everyone.

I hear their laughter from a distance.

My father, very close by, in his casket.

I keep watch from the corner of one eye.

A star too blinding

to look at straight on.

That's what a dead father is.

One thing's for sure: my father won't have died until that woman hears the news. And right now she is sitting on her gallery in Port-au-Prince thinking, as usual, about him. Which is what she has been doing every day since he left. Does she know the wind has blown so hard these last days that it has carried off the tree of which I am but a branch?

Outside it's a real tropical storm.

Broken tree branches.

Taxis drift, as if drunk,

down Fifth Avenue.

The hearse, unshakable, glides across the water.

It's like being in Baradères, my father's native village

and the Venice of Haiti, or so they say.

A Little Room in Brooklyn

My father lived in a little room that was practically empty. My uncles took me there after the burial in the rain at the Green-Wood Cemetery. Toward the end he had rid himself of everything. All his life he was a solitary man though his political activities put him into contact with other people. Every day for twenty years, summer and winter, he walked from Brooklyn to Manhattan. His life could be summed up in that constant movement. His only possession was the suitcase he had entrusted to the Chase Manhattan Bank.

My father spent

more than half

his life

far from his land

from his language

and his wife.

Several years ago I knocked on his door. He didn't answer. I knew he was inside the room. I could hear him breathing noisily behind the door. Since I had come all the way from Montreal, I insisted. I can still hear him yelling that he'd never had a child, or a wife or a country. I had gotten there too late. The pain of living far from his family had become so intolerable he had to erase the past from his memory.

I wonder

when he knew

he would never

return to Haiti

and what exactly he felt

at that moment.

What did he think about

in his little room in Brooklyn

on those long frigid nights?

Outside was the spectacle

of the liveliest city in the world.

But in that room there was only him.

The man who had lost everything.

And so early in life.

I try to imagine him in his room, the blinds drawn, dreaming of his city so similar to the one described by an angry young Césaire: “And in this inert town, this squalling throng so astonishingly detoured from its cry as this town has been from its movement, from its meaning, not even worried, detoured from its true cry, the only cry you would have wanted to hear because you feel it alone belongs . . . ” The cry is still stuck in the poet's throat.

My uncles said I should meet his only friend in New York, a barber on Church Avenue. He hadn't wanted to attend the funeral. I always told Windsor I wouldn't go to his funeral. For two good reasons. One: I don't believe in death. Two: I don't believe in God . . . But that being said, I welcome with all due honor the son of my last friend in this shitty life.

A customer wanted to assure him of his friendship. First, you're not dead, and then you're not Windsor. He comes and stands in front of me. You look a lot like him. I'm not talking about physical resemblance, that's for fools who can't see any farther than their noses. What I mean is that you were carved from the same tree. Let me explain. Everyone laughs. Professor, says my Uncle Zachée, we all understand what you mean. If you say so . . . So then, young man, take a chair. And you can scram, he says to another customer waiting to be looked after. I can wait, I say, and go and sit near the washroom. Look, wasn't I right to say they were carved from the same tree? There are plenty of empty chairs and he goes and sits in the corner, in Windsor's spot. He used to drink his coffee right there, every morning for forty years. Only I could make it for him—me and no one else. Not even my wife who loved him and did his washing. Don't listen to people who tell you that Windsor walked around in dirty clothes; that's not true. His wife, standing next to the big portrait of Martin Luther King, agrees. She went to the funeral because she still believes in God. As if I'm not enough for her. Everybody laughs. Not him. Okay, now it's your turn, Windsor. Windsor is dead and buried, Professor, a customer says. That's my name too, I say. Why are they in such a hurry to waste their breath? That's something I'll never understand about these people. Only two men have the right to express themselves at all times and they're both dead. One was a prophet, and that's Martin Luther King. The other was a madman, and that's Windsor. So shut up, the rest of you. I told you Windsor isn't dead. You went to his funeral and the whole time he's been sitting here quietly. In his spot. That's how I inherited the chair near the washroom.

My uncles hold hands

as they walk to the bank.

Like children afraid

of losing their way in the forest.

That little act speaks for all their distress.

“Your father,” Uncle Zachée speaks into my ear,

“walked straight ahead

as if he always knew where he was going.”

Several people turn to look as we go by.

The Suitcase

We want to retrieve the suitcase my father deposited at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Since I have the same first name, the employee gives me the key to his safety deposit box and asks me to follow him into the bank's vault. I step inside quietly with my uncles. That quality of silence exists nowhere but in a bank, a church or a library. Men fall silent only before Money, God and Knowledge—the great wheel that crushes them. All around us, small individual safety deposit boxes filled with the personal belongings of New York, city of high finance and great misery. The employee leaves us alone. I open my father's box and discover an attaché case inside.

I try to open it before realizing I need the secret code. Numbers and letters. We try everything: his birth date and his different given names, my birth date and my pseudonym. My uncles give me all sorts of possible leads, even the date their childhood friend met a violent death. As a last resort, we try his last telephone number before his mind went adrift. Nothing works. In the end, the employee returns, and we have to put the suitcase back. I could not have taken it with me without first answering a battery of questions that would have unmasked me. I slip the suitcase back into the safety deposit box. The employee closes the great vault of the Chase Manhattan Bank behind us.

My uncles stand in disbelief

in front of the iron door.

I feel light

not having to carry such weight.

The suitcase of aborted dreams.

One of my uncles, the youngest,

suddenly takes me by the arm.

We almost slip on the wet pavement.

Your father was my favorite brother.

He was a very discreet man.

With each of us he maintained

a separate relationship.

Even if he always refused to live with us

he was very present in our lives.

In his own way, he concludes with a wink.

We choose a booth near the window in a restaurant that smells very strongly of fried food, where my father would eat his breakfast in Manhattan. The young waiter rushes over. Can we still have breakfast? my Uncle Zachée asks. We serve breakfast twenty-four hours a day here. And we always will as long as someone in New York wants bacon and eggs and home fries. My Uncle Zachée motions me over. He wants to introduce me to the owner's wife who knew my father very well. She has very white arms, a little mustache and that light in her eyes. Your father ate lunch here every day. I wouldn't let him pay once I knew his story. I couldn't have every exile eating here for free—you can imagine how many there are in New York. But his journey reminded me of my husband's. Both of them were journalists and ambassadors before they got crossed off the list. My husband was ambassador to Egypt and Denmark. At first they talked about foreign policy the whole time. That was my husband's passion. I bought this restaurant so he could meet friends from his country and talk politics. Your father always went to the cash before he left. He never took my generosity for granted. I would refuse but he insisted. I handed him back his money as if I were giving him his change. He stuffed it in his pocket—not the type to count it. Did he even know what I'd done? She laughs softly. I didn't do it out of pity. It was mostly for my husband. I knew your father would never come back if he thought he wouldn't be allowed to pay. So I arranged it so we'd meet at the cash. And your husband? That's him by the window. Sometimes he's okay, sometimes not. He's been expecting your father all week. I can't bring myself to tell him he's dead.