My intention is to live like Basho this time. Underneath a banana tree. But the winter is too harsh. I sleep here and there. Sometimes on a hot-air grate in front of a downtown building, a warm breeze on my back. Other times in the subway. If you don’t sleep two nights in a row in the same station, you can get away with it. The police keep a lazy watch. Sometimes I spend the night in the Voyageur station where the buses head out for the great American cities. I just say I’m going to New York or Chicago and they leave me alone. Watch out for your smell— it’ll give you away. The cops do their rounds at the smaller bus station (the main one is downtown and not to be recommended), sniffing at people to ferret out the scent of poverty. Here, race isn’t much of an issue (we all belong to the loser race); smell determines everything. And it’s not easy getting rid of that smell, believe me. I go for a shower at the SaintVincent de Paul. I soap myself down till the smell disappears. I put on a clean shirt. Everything goes according to plan until I start sweating. I’ve got a trick: I replace the identifiable smell of poverty with another one. I go and I sit in front of the Da Giovanni restaurant until the smell of spaghetti fully permeates my skin. I want to change smells.
It’s easy to find something to eat in a big city: you follow the first guy you see walking south with his head down. South is always poorer than north. The man led me to the docks. He sat down and looked at the boats. It was child’s play: the lapping of the waves, a few white birds attracted by the crumbs he was throwing. I stood there, knowing this wasn’t his final station. After getting his fill of the horizon, he stood up, adjusted his old bones and got back on the road. I followed him like a shadow. We all have an itinerary in a city. His was mine too. The difference is that I had chosen my path, while he was passive. I could tell by his slumped shoulders. He stopped a minute, turned around as if he suddenly felt he was being followed, then stepped through a doorway. I followed him in and discovered a giant room where all the city’s down-andouters seemed to have their meeting point. The place smelled like vegetable soup. It didn’t smell bad; it smelled of poverty. A smell of wet canvas and rotting fruit. A sweetish smell. We were in the bowels of the city. Someone motioned me forward. I hadn’t even noticed I had joined the ranks. There was one line and one menu. A nun was doing her best to make us feel at home. Everything came to a standstill. A man wanted two portions. Impossible, the nun told him with a sad smile. We don’t know how many people will be needing us. There were the usual visitors, then there were people like me who followed some miserable old guy, not realizing he was part of the slumped-shouldered crowd. My bowl of soup. I went and sat down in a corner near the window with a splendid view of the river. Two or three people burst out laughing. It’s always dangerous when poor people laugh. I spotted a shadow on the floor stretching out in front of my shoes. I looked up and discovered the exact reproduction of the Indian who acted in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I understood what he meant before he said it. I’d looked for the most uncomfortable spot and I’d found it. I was halfway through my soup when a man kneeled down in front of me. What did he want? My soul, I guess. It’s the last thing I had that I could sell. He took my measurements and assured me that next time, he would bring me a pair of boots so I could get through the winter with warm feet. Later the nun told me he’d been doing that for twenty years. No one knew his name. I wasn’t afraid of him, but of the guy he works for. What does he want from me?
I RAN INTO
François near the little store that sells fish, fruits and vegetables where I’d bought, not so long ago, my last salmon. We had lost track of each other. We’d always done everything, not exactly together, but at the same time. When we needed to express ourselves publicly, in our twenties, we did so: he on the radio, me in an entertainment weekly. When things got too dangerous, we left the country together. In Montreal, we refused to live in a ghetto. We liked Malraux, and we got sick of him at the same time too. We did so many things in the same way without even asking each other. Then came a time when our paths separated. Life is like that. I would hear about him, but through friends in common. I suppose the same people kept him up-to-date about me. Then time began to do its work. Slowly, his image faded from memory. And now life brought us together again. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the complex network of events that had been necessary for our reunion to take place. He told me this wasn’t his neighborhood, he never went to this store, he’d stopped off here only because he’d forgotten to pick up his salmon at his usual fish market. He understood the situation immediately, I could see it in his eyes, when he noticed my jacket was missing two buttons. He must have spotted the spaghetti-sauce stain on my shirt, too. He saw I was going through a rough period, but he couldn’t have known that that was exactly what I was looking for. His greeting was manly and his warmth sincere; that’s the way he’s always been, with that surface strength. Of course he did his best not to sniff that soup-kitchen smell that clung to my skin: the perfume of poverty. I did the same thing for his chartered-accountant odor. Our smells tell others where we’ve been. Lately, I’d been finding what I needed in Chinatown, in the alley that runs behind the grocery stores. Tuesday and Saturday are garbage pick-up days.
Despite my fall, I still mattered to him—I was the only one who could appreciate his ascent. I knew him back when he hadn’t even climbed the first rung. He wasn’t going to let me get away without telling me the story of his struggle, step by step. And he wouldn’t settle for a simple recounting of events: with my bare hand, I’d have to touch every trace, every sign, every object that spoke of his rise through society. What good would it do to tell him I’d spent my life scribbling down stories that I tore up once I’d finished them, not because they were bad, but because I was writing them for myself? I am both writer and reader. Totally autonomous. I would have kept on like that if I hadn’t got sick of working at the factory. I stopped working, but I wanted to continue writing. I found a way of getting a publisher. A publisher, I understood, gives you money in hopes of getting a book at the end of the line. The perfect deal for me. I negotiated over a book I hadn’t written, and knew I wouldn’t write; the only proof of its existence was the title. They gave me five thousand euros upon signing the contract. I hardly even saw the color of that money because of the debts I’d built up over the years. They promised me the rest, another five thousand, when I submitted the manuscript. In other words, I made five thousand euros for nothing. In the meantime, I became a filmmaker, I made a short film about a group of Japanese girls, a film that even the most experimental festivals wouldn’t touch. Everyone wants a neatly tied-up little plot. I get bored too quickly to begin a story and then finish it. Once I can picture the ending, I move on to something else. I write as long as I’m not hungry. When I feel like eating, I wrap up the story in a hurry. Maybe I’d get something from Midori. I didn’t know how much she’d be willing to put out for her photo book. I could write it over a weekend, but I’d make her believe it’d take me months of effort. I’ve noticed that people are unhappy when they get something too easily. You have to sweat—that’s the only moral they know. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of story you could tell an old friend on the first night of your reunion. I trusted him to serve me up a better fable.
We went into the bar where he stops off for a drink once or twice a week with his colleagues. I knew he wanted me to observe the position he occupied in his world. François likes concrete things. I remember he used to love acting out the anecdotes he’d tell me, and if a story took place in a discotheque, he’d start dancing. I tried in vain to make him see he could achieve the same results with words. He smiled, then applied a gentle slap to the face: “That’s something a writer would say.” Back then, I hadn’t written a single line. And when I did write my first story, after he read it, he was practically angry. “You want the Nobel?” he said. “Is that what you want?” And now he was being greeted noisily by his group of friends—which is a figure of speech, because I’m his only friend. Hearty slaps on the back. He introduced me and I received a vague welcome, but he wanted everyone to greet me with greater respect. “Listen, guys, he’s the one I’ve been telling you about. Ask him anything you want to about what’s going on in the world—he’ll have the answer.” Everyone waited a moment or two, but no questions came. An embarrassed silence settled in. Finally, a mercantile murmur arose (they’re accountants, after all). A chalet in the Laurentians, the new model that bmw had just come out with, the chances of winning that night’s hockey game. The price of pleasure, above all else. After five minutes, my head was spinning. Still, I could see that he was the prince of the evening. The waitresses took his order first. And when he laughed at a joke, everyone’s laughter ratcheted up a notch. But we weren’t going to put down roots here. We said our goodbyes and headed out. Fat tips on the table. I didn’t even look at the bill. Such figures didn’t concern me. He was taking me to his place. We got on the expressway. He wanted to spring a surprise on me. He rummaged through the glove compartment and finally found a Skah Shah cd, the group of our tender years. He danced as he drove—and so did the car. Dancing was his thing. Not mine. He used to say, every time, “Sure, but you know how to make words dance.” We finally got there. His house stood at the end of a dead-end street, behind a barrier of rosebushes—his colleagues must have the same set-up. Off-handedly, he introduced me to his wife, Shônagon. I’d always thought François was the kind of guy who would settle down with someone of his own blood type. We entered the living room. Sober decoration. He didn’t walk, he glided. Cognac? Whiskey? He had rum too. He laughed. People laugh as soon as he laughs. His laughter always was contagious. He wanted to give me everything he had: his house, his wife, his car. Nothing new there; he’d always wanted to be me. Even as a teenager, he had everything he wanted: girls, money, freedom. I was a shy guy, I didn’t know how to dance and I didn’t have a penny. Worse, my mother wouldn’t let me go further than the Paramount movie house. Why? What did he see in me that he didn’t have? Finally, his wife smiled. I began to see her differently. An overseas call he’d been expecting came in. He went into his office to take it. I was alone with Shônagon. The silence was awkward. Then, in a small voice, she began to tell me what her life with him was like. François talked constantly about me. It was a regular obsession. I avoided her eyes, so sad and resigned. A magnificent Hokusai on the wall. Not a single Haitian painting. The decor was entirely Asian. On the outside, he’s a Quebecker. Within his own walls, he’s Japanese. Everyone is always telling him that Haiti is a disaster. Does he ever dream of Haiti? Does he remember the country? He returned with the rum (Haiti in a bottle) in the middle of a silence. Now he began telling me about his wife. He started with her origins. Her father is Spanish and her mother Japanese. She inherited from both sides: Spanish fire and Japanese sobriety, he added without a smile. As if the thing that had once seduced him no longer meant much. An interesting mix in bed, I imagined. Those are the qualities I’d like to have as a writer: a classic style fueled by devastating passion. François told stories from our boyhood as he drank. He remembered tiny things my memory could not hold. I imagined him in front of a bottle of rum on a Saturday night, performing a heartbreaking solo. In life, we fight but a single battle. The more he drank, the more he wanted to recall the smallest details of his life before the big departure. He seemed desperate that he’d forgotten the title of a Tabou Combo song. And when I said—it was a pure guess—that it was “Bébé Paramount,” he was even more distraught that I, to whom music meant nothing, could remember the title he’d been searching his memory for all these years. It was typical of our strange relationship, of how he’d always claimed I was a genius, worthy of the Nobel. The only song whose title he’d forgotten, and I remembered it right off. That happens only with him; otherwise I don’t know anything in life. By the way he looked at his wife, I saw that what she had been trying to explain to me was true: I really was the focal point around which his incredible energy revolved. Every detail he conjured was about me, as if he had spent his entire life analyzing my being. Shônagon’s smile (his last piece of property) grew thinner as I, a helpless witness, was forced to watch the film of my life. Life before Shônagon. Every time I broke in to tell a story about him, he cut me off, the better to batter me with compliments. I felt as though I belonged to him. With his prodigious memory, so flattering to me, he had taken over my life. I had been dispossessed of myself. Beware of those who love you.
AFTER A WHILE
, he ushered me into his office, which was filled with photos of the two of us in different settings in Port-au-Prince. In front of the Rex Cinema, next to an ice cream vendor, playing soccer in the big square on the Champ-deMars, in our school uniforms across from the girls’ high school. I have no photos from that time. I’d forgotten François was so interested in photography, and that he’d even taken a correspondence course. He showed me a small picture, rather blurry, taken with some Japanese tourists. Japanese people in Haiti—I hadn’t remembered that. Nothing like a photo to cast you back to another time. We all have two lives, at least. One that settles into memory like a stone at the bottom of a well, and another that disappears as it unravels like a vapor trail. The tourists had actually been journalists from a big Tokyo daily who’d passed themselves off as innocent travelers in order to write an exposé about life in Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship. We spent a lot of time with the young lady interpreter, Miss Shikibu Murasaki, who worked at the Japanese embassy. It was a very Japanese summer. The blushing Miss Murasaki would invite us all the time to the embassy for cocktails. I suppose everything started between François and her back then. I hadn’t noticed a thing, too absorbed at the time by Diderot and my fascination with the beginning of
Jacques le fataliste
. I read it as I walked down the street. You can’t read that book sitting down. That sense of speed suited me perfectly. I was always bugging François with Diderot. He thought the guy was lazy. The idea of laziness was fine with me. A lazy writer—now that was a life for me! Not too many descriptions and a lot of dialogue. Diderot is still an influence on me. There’s plenty of talk in his books. I like books where you see people talking. I hate it when the narrator talks for them. That method never got too far, though, because although Frenchmen love to converse, they don’t like to let their characters talk. Apart from crime novels, you never hear anyone even saying hello in a French book. It’s too easy, so writers skip that step, which you can’t do in real life. Unfortunately, Miss Murasaki had to return to New York to study journalism at Columbia University. All summer, we accompanied the journalists through the country, despite the Tontons-Macoutes who stuck to us like glue. We didn’t really notice them, so subjugated were we by Miss Murasaki, who led the expedition with wonderful grace. We would have followed her right into one of Papa Doc’s prisons. The journalists told her that her studies at the famous American university would help her find a job at a Tokyo newspaper. Unless she preferred working in television, in which case it would be simpler to go back to Japan and get a job doing the weather. Television is much more image than intelligence. Miss Murasaki turned as red as a beet at the very word “television.” We understood then that she was too shy for the small screen that sucks in human energies and spits out wind in return. François went to be with her in New York after I left Haiti. Now it’s François telling the story. We lived together for a while, but we were too different to share life as a couple. That had nothing to do with the fact she was Japanese. She considered love from the accountant’s point of view. Every week, she had to draw up a statement of our romantic and financial life. I spent, and she saved. We quickly understood we couldn’t live together. Since our desire still burned, we remained lovers, going from my little room to her spacious apartment in Manhattan (her parents were in banking and the diplomatic service). I continued to see her friends, who were all Japanese. Then I moved to Brooklyn, where I found something bigger. We saw each other less and less: I spent more time at my place, since I had sun in my room now. A love affair in New York is a fleeting thing. The sun is more reliable. Just before I moved out of Manhattan, I ran into a girl at Columbia who was a cousin of Shikibu’s. She lived in Brooklyn too. Destiny is made of many coincidences. Well, that didn’t work out either. I came back to Montreal, and that’s when I met Shônagon, at McGill where she was doing her master’s in accounting. Shônagon never knew I’d had two Japanese women before her. I convinced her that our meeting was the fruit of chance, and not the result of a path set out before me. You don’t just meet a girl, I’ve come to see, you meet a culture. And you don’t leave that culture easily. It takes five unhappy affairs to break free from a culture as powerful as Japan’s. Once you meet your first Italian girl, you’ll be eating spaghetti the rest of your life. That’s what makes people suspicious of interracial romances: they wonder if it’s really them or their culture that interests their partner. Blacks want to know whether they are really loved, or if someone just wants to support a cause. And rich people, if it’s just about their money. That’s why I never spoke of Shikibu in front of Shônagon. Sometimes I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to tell the truth, since I’m always afraid of running into someone who knew me in New York. Maybe she hasn’t told me everything about her life, either. Maybe she keeps a secret diary. So we’re even. We laughed. And with that laughter we left his office.