The Return (8 page)

What can such financial frenzy mean

on an island abandoned by the birds?

He rushes from his house to his car,

from his car to his office,

from his office to the restaurant

and from the restaurant to his seaside house

where he'll meet his mistress of the month.

He may know nothing of the poor man

but the poor man is watching his every move.

The rich man is a creature of habit.

What good is being rich in a country

constantly at the mercy of a bread riot?

The chances of losing a fortune

overnight are high.

A can of gas and the whole neighborhood goes up.

The game changes so fast.

One starving guy with a match

calls the shots.

Why stay in this mudhole mixed with shit trampled by crowds hemmed in by malarial anopheles when you could lead a dream life somewhere else? Here the rich man must collect the poor man's money. And he can't delegate an operation like that, considering the country's current moral state. People have no scruples about keeping money for themselves that they figure is stolen. The debate raging these days in the poor districts where Christian morality has gotten its hooks in can be summarized by this mighty question: is it theft to steal from a thief? The State says yes. The Church does too. But what if just once the question wasn't put to them? The pressure is strong on the ill-paid office clerk who has to deliver to the boss, down to the last penny, all the money gathered in the poorest districts of the hemisphere. All those houses with neither roof nor door rented to large needy families by usurers representing the rich who live in the luxury villas set high up the mountain. We're really living in Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables.

When I went North, I had to rid myself

of the heavy reality of the South

that oozed from every pore.

I spent thirty-three years adapting

to that winter country where everything is so different

from what I'd known before.

Returning South after all these years

I am like someone

who has to relearn what he already knows

but had to forget along the way.

I admit that it's easier

to learn than to relearn.

But harder still

is to unlearn.

The Blind Archer

Noise was the path the Caribbean used

to enter me.

I had forgotten the racket.

The bellowing crowd.

The overabundance of energy.

A city of beggars and rich men

awake before dawn.

You can find the same energy

in a naïve painting

where the vanishing point

is not at the back of the canvas

but in the solar plexus

of the viewer.

When you look at a market scene

by any street painter

you don't feel you're entering

the marketplace but that

instead the market

is entering you, overwhelming you

with smells and tastes.

Which is why you step back

faced with these strong primary colors.

People die faster here than elsewhere,

but life is more intense.

Each person carries the same amount

of energy to burn

except the flame is brighter

when the time it has to burn

is briefer.

Behind me, the blue mountains

that surround the city.

This dawn sky with its rosy hue.

A man is still sleeping

under a truck packed with melons.

In the international media

Haiti always appears deforested.

Yet I see trees everywhere.

As a child I hated trees

so much I dreamed of covering the planet in asphalt.

People always wanted to know why

a child wouldn't like trees.

It was that feeling they were looking down on me.

Two hearses cross paths

on this dusty street

at the foot of the mountain.

Each one is carrying its customer

to his resting place.

The last taxi costs the most.

Death, that blind archer.

As busy at midnight as at noon.

Too many people in this city

for him, even once,

to miss his target.

All I need is to start the rumor

that I've returned to live there

without saying which there it is

and in Montreal people will believe

I'm in Port-au-Prince

and in Port-au-Prince they'll be sure

I'm still in Montreal.

Death would mean not being

in either of those cities.

To Die in a Naïve Painting

I like to climb up the mountain, early in the morning, to get a closer look at the luxury villas set so far apart one from the other. Not a soul around. Not a sound, except the wind in the leaves. In a city this populous, the space you have to live in defines who you are. In my random walks, I discover that these vast properties are inhabited only by servants. The owners reside in New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan or even Tokyo. Like in the days of slavery when the real masters of Hispaniola lived in Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle or Paris.

They built these houses hoping their children studying abroad would return to take the family business in hand. Since those children refuse to return to a country cast into darkness, the parents have moved closer to them and settled in some metropolis with a museum, a restaurant, a bookstore or a theater on every corner. The money harvested from the mud of Port-au-Prince is spent at Bocuse or La Scala. In the end the villas are rented out for a fortune to the directors of non-profit international aid organizations whose stated goal is to lift the country out of poverty and overpopulation.

These envoys from humanitarian organizations show up in Port-au-Prince with the best intentions. Lay missionaries who look you straight in the eye as they recite their program of Christian charity. In the media they are prolix about the changes they intend to create to ease the terrible conditions of the poor. They make a quick tour of the slums and the ministries to take the pulse of the situation. They learn the rules of the game so quickly (allow themselves to be served by a host of servants and slip part of the budget allocated to the project into their pockets) you have to wonder whether it's in their blood—an atavism of colonial times. When confronted with their original project, they escape by saying that Haiti is incapable of change. Yet in the international press, they go on denouncing corruption in the country. The journalists passing through know they have to stop in for a drink poolside to gather the solid information they need from honest and objective people; the Haitians, everyone knows, can't be trusted. The journalists never ask themselves why these people are living in villas when they say they've come to help the wretched of the earth throw off the shackles of poverty.

Haiti has undergone thirty-two coups

in its history

because people have tried to change

things at least thirty-two times.

The world is more interested by the military men

who engineer the coups

than by the citizens who overthrow

those men in uniform.

Silent, invisible resistance.

There is a balance in this country

based on the fact

that unknown people

in the shadows

are doing everything they can

to put off the arrival of night.

When there's a power failure,

people light their houses

with the energy of sexually charged bodies.

The only fuel this country has

in industrial quantities

can also send

the demographic curve soaring.

When you arrive in this city set on the shores of a turquoise sea and surrounded by blue mountains, you wonder how long it will take before it all becomes a nightmare. In the meantime you live with the energy of someone waiting for the end of the world. So said a young German engineer who's been working for the last ten years rebuilding the road network.

We were having a drink at the bar at the Hotel Montana. When did you first understand that this particular hell wasn't for you? He gazed at me a while. My father came here for the New Year's holiday, and he made me see it. My father is an old military man. His job is to look at things as they are and say what he thinks in no uncertain terms. What did he say to you? That we were all bastards in this well-protected luxury hotel, all the while thinking we were living a dangerous and difficult life. And so? And so ten years later I'm still here. But at least I'm not telling myself any more lies. We can even use cynicism to keep from dying of shame.

The headquarters of foreign journalists.

A hotel set on the heights so they can see

what's boiling over down below

in the great stewpot of Port-au-Prince

without actually having to go there.

For the details just listen to the local radio station.

The bar is stocked well enough to resist a month-long siege.

I've been watching this cameraman at the end of the bar for a while. His arm resting lightly on his camera. I move down to his end because I like people whose job is to look. But I don't see anything, he tells me. I see only what I'm filming. I look down a very narrow field. People are incredible here. They participate in everything, they're so enthusiastic. I've been to a lot of countries with the job I do, but this is the first time I've seen anything like it. You can ask someone whose family has just been killed to reenact the scene, and they'll play the whole thing for you with complete attention to detail. The murderer too: just ask him and he'll play the murderer for you. It's a real pleasure working here. Wherever I go people ask for money, but not here. Okay, friends of mine told me the market ladies want to be paid if you take their picture, but that's only if they don't like you. That's because some photographers don't know how to go about it. They want to go too fast. Here, you can't hurry people. They have their dignity. They can feel it right away if you respect them, and if they feel you're making fun of them then I can tell you your life is in danger. Otherwise, they're cool. And the setting is magnificent, not too green so it doesn't look like a postcard, it's great, I really can't complain. Excuse me, it's your country and I'm talking this way, I'm not insensitive to what's happening, I see the poverty and everything, but I'm speaking as a professional. All jobs are like that; if you could hear the surgeons when they operate on you, they opened me up three times, and it's curious but hearing them talk about what they had for dinner the night before as they were slicing me up, that reassured me because I knew they were doing it to relax. I'm not insinuating that people are insensitive to their own misfortune, it's just that they like to play, to act, they're born comedians, and what does a comedian do when the camera goes on? He acts. The kids, especially the kids—they're so natural. And in a setting like this. It's like nothing is real here. I listen to the big shots talking, I cover the press conferences at the palace, receptions at the embassies, and I can tell you, if you don't mind, that the only thing that will get this country out of the state it's in is the movies. If the Americans forgot about Los Angeles and came and shot their blockbusters here and if the Haitian government was smart enough to demand a quota, yes, I said a quota of Haitian actors on every film, in less than twenty years you'd see this country get out of this mess, and the money would be clean money too because these people are fabulous actors. And the sets too, they're so colorful, very, very alive. I never thought you could die in a landscape like this.

Hunger

I woke up

in the middle of the night.

My nerves jangling.

My pajamas completely soaked.

As if I had swum

through a sea of noise.

From that tiny house,

just three rooms

protected only by walls as thin

as fine paper,

I saw no fewer than thirty-six people

come out

in less than an hour.

Not a millimeter left unoccupied.

Not a second of silence, I imagine.

We search for life

among the poor

in absolute uproar.

The rich have bought up the silence.

Noise is concentrated

in a clearly defined perimeter.

Here trees are scarce.

The sun, implacable.

Hunger, constant.

In this space teeming with people.

First comes the obsession with the belly.

Empty or full?

Sex comes right after.

And after that, sleep.

When a man prefers

a plate of beans and rice

to the charming company of a woman

something has happened

to the hierarchy of taste.

The pattern has become common. The rich who flee the poor leave the city behind and go to live in ever more secluded parts of the countryside. It's not long before the news spreads through the overpopulated zone. The siege begins. A little hut in a ravine. Another at the foot of the pink villa. Two years later a whole slum has sprung up, asphyxiating the new upper-class quarter. The goal of all wars is the occupation of territory.

The space of words can be occupied as well. For the last hour, this toothless old woman has been telling me a story of which I understand nothing. Yet I feel that it's hers and it is worth, in her eyes, as much as anyone else's.

A day here lasts a lifetime.

You're born at dawn.

You grow up at noon.

You die at twilight.

Tomorrow you change bodies.

The horn has a variety of uses. Sometimes it replaces the cock's crow. It alerts the absent-minded pedestrian. It announces a departure or an arrival. It expresses joy or anger. It carries on an endless monologue in traffic. To outlaw the horn in Port-au-Prince would be censorship.

I walked into an Internet café and discovered a friend I hadn't seen for some time. My old comrade Gary Victor with his moon-like face always makes me think of sweet-tempered Jasmin Joseph, the man who painted nothing but rabbits. Every time, Gary Victor pulls out of his hat a novel full of devils, thieves, zombies, mocking spirits and carnival bands painted in the cheerful colors of a naïve painting. But so loaded down with obsessions that in the end it becomes as dark as a teenage nightmare. I talked with him for a while about what the subject of the great Haitian novel might be. First we reviewed the obsessions of other nations. For North Americans, we thought it was space (the West, the Moon landing, Route 66). For South Americans, it's time (One Hundred Years of Solitude). For Europeans, it's war (two world wars in a century alters the mind). For us, it's hunger. The problem, Victor told me, is that it's difficult to talk about it if you haven't known it. And those who've seen it up close aren't necessarily writers. We're not talking about being hungry just because you haven't eaten for a while. We're talking about someone who has never eaten his fill in his entire life, or just enough to survive and be obsessed by it.