The Return (9 page)

Still, it's very surprising how hunger is absent, considering that artists are always looking for subjects. Very few novels, plays, operas or ballets have hunger as their central theme. Yet there are a billion starving people in the world today. Is the subject too harsh? We don't mind exploiting war, epidemics and death in every possible shape. Is the subject too raw? Sex is stretched across every screen on the planet. So what's going on? The problem is that hunger concerns only people who have no buying power. Starving people don't read, don't go to museums, don't dance. They just wait to die.

Food is the most terrifying of drugs. We always go back to it: three times a day for some, once in a while for others. Gary Victor told me he never knew the great famine. Me neither. Which made us think we'd never be the authors of the great Haitian novel whose subject can only be hunger. Roumain touched upon it by making drought the subject of Masters of the Dew. Drought is thirst. The earth that is thirsty. I'm talking about a man who is hungry. Of course the earth feeds man. I tried to console Victor by bringing up subjects that could be as interesting, like exile, but that theme doesn't stand up to a man who is hungry. When we parted, he had a certain sadness in his eyes.

But it's not just the subject of a novel.

We can be impassive

faced with our own hunger but what do we do

when a child is hungry

and reaches out his hand

as happened this morning near the market?

We give him a few pennies

knowing full well the problem

will return in less than three hours.

This man sitting in the shade

by the wall of the hotel.

On a handkerchief he sets

a large purple avocado next to a long loaf of bread.

He slowly produces his jackknife.

This is his first meal of the day.

Such pleasure is unthinkable

for those for whom eating

is not the primary goal of existence.

At ninety-eight this lively, joyful old lady

who runs the Hotel Ifé

and who still fights every day

to keep her head above water

with a smile that never fades

is the mother of a poet friend.

In this country the poet's mother

has to work till her dying day

so that roses can flower

in her son's verses.

He preferred to go to prison

than to work.

Here we are wedged into a corner of a little restaurant in my old neighborhood. A simple meal: rice, avocado, chicken. I like restaurants that serve just one dish. You get there, you sit down and you talk until the food arrives. I was eating, head down, when I spotted a beggar watching me from behind the window with wide liquid eyes so much like my mother's.

My Nephew's Version

My nephew is doing the talking tonight.

Back against the wall.

Calm and resolved.

We listen to what he has to say.

He is telling today's life story.

How does he see things?

What does he feel?

We want to know.

He knows that too and embellishes.

Once I was in his position.

Standing by the door,

my mother smiles.

She has listened to three generations of men,

if we count my father,

each telling

a new version

of the same facts.

My grandmother Da. My mother Marie. My sister Ketty. These women don't concern themselves with History but with daily life, which is an endless ribbon. No time to look back when every day means serving three meals to the children, rent to pay, shoes to replace, medicines to buy, money for Friday afternoon soccer, Saturday night movies and the Sunday morning church fair. Just because you're crushed by dictatorship doesn't mean you have to live poorly.

The most subversive thing there is,

and I've spent my life repeating it,

is to do everything possible to be happy

under the dictator's nose.

The dictator insists on being the center of your life

and what I did best in mine

was to banish him from my existence.

I admit, to do that sometimes I had to throw

the baby out with the bathwater.

So I left and then returned. Things haven't changed a bit. Going to see my mother this evening, I crossed the market. The lit lamps made me feel I was traveling through a dream. A little girl in a short pink jersey dress was sleeping in the arms of her mother who was counting the day's receipts. This tenderness that lets you accept the rest exhausted me and will soon exhaust my nephew.

The people in this neighborhood,

in these modest houses on both sides of the ravine,

earn a salary

on which

it is impossible to live.

By “live” you must understand:

the simple ability to feed oneself.

The other features of life,

like going to the movies

or buying an ice cream

on a Sunday afternoon,

have grown so distant

they no longer concern them.

If they are mentioned it's only out of nostalgia.

When a few Dior-soaked gentlemen

mix every day

with a dense crowd stinking of piss:

the war of the smells.

I know the solution

is not to go for your neighbor's jugular.

At least that's what's said

in certain parlors.

But just how long

can this kind of tension last?

My nephew doesn't put it that way

but in his head I can hear

a familiar wave of background noise.

He doesn't want to worry my mother

whose husband and only son had to go into exile

for the same reasons.

It's up to the third generation

to ask the question that has no solution.

A leaf falls from the tree

onto the notebook where

I am writing these things down.

I save the leaf.

I can't keep my eyes off

that black bird

with the long yellow beak.

I don't see things the way I used to, my nephew tells me. How did you used to see them? I ask without trying to figure out what things he's talking about. Like things that are happening in my life. And now? Like things that are happening around me. What do you mean? I feel more distance between me and reality. Maybe that's your space for writing.

The Dead Are among Us

My nephew drives me back to the hotel. We are in his friend Chico's car, and we have to keep our feet directly below our legs because there's no floor. We can see the asphalt go by and puddles of greenish water. The car is like a convertible in reverse. His brother left him the car when he went to Miami, and four of them use it. Put some gas in it and it's yours. When it breaks down, they chip in and take it to a mechanic. Chico is set to go next week and he'll leave the car to his friends. They take turns using it but they all have to go to the same club on Saturday night. With their girlfriends that makes eight. A pretty tight squeeze. The girls insist on paying the Saturday night gas.

I turn around to see

my mother standing near the big red gate.

She must have woken up suddenly and gotten dressed

in a hurry when she understood I was leaving.

That tense face I know so well.

As if she sensed constant danger.

The last image of my mother

as the car goes around the curve:

I see her take the hand of the little boy next door,

her last confidant.

My nephew drops me off near the square.

I feel like watching the evening

settle over Pétionville.

Those who haven't wandered through a city

at night don't really know it.

I sit down across from city hall

to listen to Wagner's tetralogy

that the mayor has played every evening.

A man sits down quite close to me.

He talks to me through half-closed eyes,

his hands hang between his legs.

His conversation is punctuated

by long conspiratorial silences.

It takes him half an hour

to realize we don't know each other.

He puts his hat back on before disappearing

into the shadows.

My mother told me this afternoon

in the voice of someone

who knows she's being listened to

that the dead walk among us.

You can recognize them by the way

they appear and disappear

without us knowing why they were there.

Lost Things and Lost People

The worker's day is so well regulated he no longer feels the day's heat. We can understand why the first thing the silk workers did in their rebellion was to shoot at the cathedral clock. They recognized their ancestral enemy. Every second is a drop of blood.

I can't really make out objects.

The sleep that comes to me

between two explosions of noise

is like an uppercut.

This isn't sleep.

This is a knockout.

I've been awake for a while, and I feel like I've been put through the mill. My body is suffering an adaptation process that's beyond my will. I am the master of nothing. Everything I banished from my mind back there in order to live without the bonds of nostalgia has a concrete presence here. Those things sought refuge in my body where the cold froze them in place. Now my body is slowly warming. My memory is thawing: that little puddle of water in the bed.

Breathing is difficult. Memories come back to me in three dimensions with their colors, smells and tastes. The cold preserved all their freshness as if I were seeing this fruit or that red bicycle for the first time. The sapodilla with its velvet peel so soft to the touch. The yellow-eyed dogs wandering through the night. The little girls jumping rope while screaming in voices so high-pitched they sound like a flock of birds. The old man at the window of the big wooden house by the Paramount movie theater. The plume of smoke on the mountain. Things today replaced by others of the same density, so that every traveler can make himself a store of images and emotions he can recover at his return.

I also remember the picture

in the living room in the house in Petit-Goâve.

A little uninhabited island

overgrown with fruit trees

where young felines played together.

That's where I spent my afternoons

when things got too heavy for my young life.

Intolerable heat.

A white bowl filled with water

in the shadows of the bedroom.

Three mangos next to it.

I eat them all, bare-chested.

Then wash my face.

I'd forgotten what mangos taste like at noon.

I go out on the veranda.

A great coconut palm

planted right in the middle

of a house under construction

is dancing in the furious wind.

I watch the scene from the hotel balcony.

For a war correspondent,

that's not much action.

This city awakens so early

that by two o'clock in the afternoon

it's on its knees.

In the shade of their broad hats

the ladies who sell melons

are taking their nap.

Their backs against the hotel wall.

Their voices so shrill they break your heart

the women hawking baubles

desperate to sell off their trinkets

and the aggressive horns of the drivers

going from the office to the restaurant

can't quite cover the lullaby

this woman is softly singing to her daughter

sleeping between two sacks of vegetables.

I receive an urgent summons to the phone. I slip on a pair of pants and rush down to the reception desk. It's a guy who says he's a childhood friend of mine. All he wants is money to pay his daughter's hospital bills. I hesitate but he tells me he's just on the other side of the gate, calling from a cell phone. I'm about to go looking for him when the receptionist motions me to forget it. “I know the fellow, he always tries that with my guests,” she lets on with a wide smile.

I've been away so long I can scarcely remember the faces that flash past me so quickly, demanding to be recognized. “Don't you remember me?” A feeling of shame. “Your cousin introduced us the night before you left.” So we met once, thirty-three years ago. I'm alone in the middle of eight million people with shared family and personality traits jammed onto half an island, and they all want me to recognize them. They all come with a story that I'm a part of. Apparently we once went to the movies together, forty years ago. I was the best friend of that guy's older brother. Surely I must know the cousin of the other guy who lives in Montreal. My head is spinning. Sometimes I put a voice to a face but they don't belong together. It took me a while but I understand that in this thirst to be recognized, they are looking for confirmation that they're not dead.

I was paging through

the paper on the couch

when I noticed his shadow

pacing in front of the gate.

Now I don't dare go out.

Through the Window of the Novel

The hotel owner points out that all the information in today's paper is at least a week old. For the news of the day, you're better off with the radio. The delay, in an area in which the ability to deliver information rapidly is more important than the information itself, acts as a buffer between the event and ourselves. That way we're protected from the bad news, which comes to us with a few days' lag. By the time it reaches us, the shock wave has been absorbed somewhat by the dense sweating crowd. These few days between the event and ourselves are enough to maintain our equilibrium.

The news of the week concerns both the upper-class neighborhoods and Cité Soleil. A rare occurrence. A young man “from a good family” who'd been kidnapped several months ago has become one of the country's most pitiless gang leaders. The family's lawyer declared on the radio that “he didn't want to get kidnapped anymore and that's why he became a kidnapper.” In the poor districts they're still laughing about what the editorialist called the “Stockholm syndrome.” The answer wasn't long in coming: it appears in graffiti painted on the walls of Cité Soleil. If a rich kid who gets kidnapped by a gang becomes a gang leader after two weeks because of the Stockholm syndrome, then how come a criminal who spends years in prison doesn't become a cop when he gets out?