The house where we sleep
has no roof.
I spend the night strolling through the Milky Way.
And I think I recognize my grandmother
in a lonely star
I spot for the first time,
not far from the Big Dipper.
A Window on the Sea
Bare mountains on the right.
Giant cactus on the left.
The asphalt road from a distance
looks like a quiet lake.
The trucks that used to carry
animals to the slaughterhouse
are now used for humans
who travel standing,
their heads covered with dust,
their mouths filled with mosquitoes.
We near the famous cliffs
that provoked the
worst nightmares
of my childhood.
Reality is much more modest.
At the bend the blaring horn
of a red truck coming in the opposite direction.
Childhood fears surface again.
You have to wonder whether the country's highways aren't all one-way because the peasants who travel to Port-au-Prince never go back. First they are sucked in by the center of the metropolis, then they're soon thrown back toward the overcrowded periphery. Where it is impossible to survive without at least a knife.
Beyond a certain number
people's lives don't have the same value.
They're used as cannon fodder
or they do the dirty work.
Some manage to make a way for themselves
without being too compromised
by general corruption
and everyday murder.
We arrive late in Ville-Bonheur where
two virgins reign.
The Christian one is called
Mary of the Immaculate Conception.
Her twin, who sits on the throne in the voodoo pantheon,
is Erzulie Freda Dahomey.
Thirsty virgins.
One, for blood,
the other, for sperm.
The chauffeur pays tribute to both.
At the end of the road
we find a small hotel,
completely rickety,
where food is being served.
The bedbugs are waiting for us between the sheets.
How can we convince this woman
who is so proud of having been to New York
that all we want is fresh fruit juice
and not warm Coca-Cola?
For her, the local fruit is good only
for poor people and pigs.
The young man who seemed
so dangerous with his scarred
face turns out to be sweet-tempered.
His wounds were caused
by a thief he caught in his field.
As so often happens we
confused the victim and the criminal.
Everything is a miracle
in this little place.
Starting with the mere fact of existing.
A pig made it possible
for the young man to study agronomy
in Damien, near Port-au-Prince.
He speaks of it like a member of the family.
The pig is the peasant's bank account.
When after an epidemic
they asked the peasants in the region to kill
all the pigs to avoid putting
people's lives in danger
they hid them in the mountains.
In the eyes of a peasant a pig
may be worth less than his family
but certainly more than the advice of the minister
of Agriculture.
We stop at a snack bar by the sea. Thatched roof. No door. Everything exposed to the elements. Six bare tables. The sea literally beneath our feet. On the menu: grilled fish, salted fish, threadfin in hot sauce. My nephew can't abide fish. The chauffeur and I tuck in. He even agrees to loosen his tie.
I watch my nephew eating oysters with his face to the sea. From time to time a truck goes by, without stopping, its passengers covered in dust. The feeling that in this country you don't go from one city to another but from one world to another. The horizon is completely empty. Except for the lady selling coconuts who is at the mercy of the truck that stops sometimes, but few of them do at this time of day.
Just as we get back in the car
we change our minds
dive naked into the warm sea
and stay there
till nightfall.
The chauffeur sits on the hood of the car
and waits patiently.
The strange poise that men in the tropics have.
I felt
I was
lost to the North when
in the warm sea
in pink twilight
time suddenly became liquid.
My Father's Other Friend
Return to Croix-des-Bouquets where, this time, I catch up with the painter I used to see all the time before I left. He is a skillful colorist who used to paint nothing but landscapes filled with pigeons and overripe fruit. We talk a little and drink a lot in his darkened studio. Rum for me. Milk for him since his illness. A bunch of bananas rotting in the shadows reminds us of his odd obsessions. His heavy body. His sleepy voice. We slip into lethargy. The fact that the studio is also a voodoo temple adds to the paintings' poisonous charm. The strange way of looking he has and the enigmatic way he speaks put me ill at ease. I always feel we are communicating between two parallel universes: the master of this place and me. Once we leave, the chauffeur admits he felt strong negative vibrations in the room. My nephew had spent the whole time watching the young vendors in the yard next door.
A large basin of cold water
where young women selling mangos
bathe as they cover their breasts
and scream in shrill voices.
Their dresses plastered to their bodies.
The painter emerges from his studio
to show me the road
that leads to my father's friend.
He lives, he told me, behind the market.
We had to make a long detour.
It is impossible to drive through the market.
The chauffeur parked under a tree
then went to look at the stalls.
Some malangas had caught his eye.
My nephew stayed with him.
I have to meet my father's friend by myself.
I find him feeding his chickens. He seems even more frail than in the photo I saw at the ex-minister's house. His piercing eyes and firm handshake tell me it would be a mistake to underestimate him. A strong personality. He goes and fetches two chairs and sets them under the arbor. So he's dead. Who's dead? I ask like an idiot. Your father. He recognized me. Someone told you. I don't see anyone besides my chickens and the peasants who come and ask me to write letters for them. How do you know then? You're his spitting image. And that's the only reason you'd come all this way to see me here. You want something? All I drink now is tafia. I'll have a little glass too. In this heat it's not advisable for someone who comes from the cold. Something cool then? He nods discreetly to a girl washing clothes under the mango tree. That's my granddaughter, Elvira. Since her mother died she lives with me . . . So, Windsor K is dead. He died in Brooklyn. I don't give a damn where he died. You don't die somewhere, you just die. He retreats into memory for a moment. Our history teacher had to absent himself for one reason or another, and Windsor took his place. He got up in front of the class. And immediately demanded silence from the bunch of stubborn mules that we were. Then he told us the history of our country, according to him. We all sat there, stunned. Never seen anything like it. He was seventeenâwe all were. I watched him go through his paces and I said to myself that I'd follow that guy anywhere. And that's exactly what I did. I wasn't the only one, but I was the closest to him.
Elvira comes back barefoot
in the warm dust
with the drinks on a little platter.
Piercing eyes.
A shy smile.
Long graceful legs.
Her modesty can't
hide the explosive energy
she got from her grandfather.
We drink in silence. I couldn't have said what my drink is made of, but with an effort I recognize papaya, grenadine, lemon, soursop and cane syrup. In any case it's cold. I look around as I listen to the voices of the mango vendors. We're in no hurry here, he tells me with a mocking but friendly smile. Windsor knew a lot of people, but we were the Gang of Four. The inner cell. What we wanted was simple: revolution. Windsor got the idea to start a political party. We were twenty years old. “The Sovereign,” because it was the party of the people and the people are always sovereign. We didn't follow any rules. We had no qualms about using our fists. We went into the offices and kicked out the pencil-pushers and replaced them on the spot with honest and competent employees who didn't necessarily belong to our group. We had one list of dishonest employees and another list of competent, honest citizens who couldn't find work, which meant we had plenty to do putting things right. We didn't have a job; we had a mission. We wanted a country run by citizens, not cousins. We were for action. What about Jacques?
Elvira comes back with a basin of water
and places it on a rickety little table.
François gets up to wash his hair,
his armpits and his torso.
She dries him tenderly
with a big white towel.
The young vestal virgin
caring for her grandfather.
His face transfigured now. Suddenly he's twenty years younger. I am a plant that needs watering from time to time, otherwise I dry out. I like water too. He sits down again. You said Jacques...? Jacques! Jacques! It was like a punch in the gut and I've never gotten over it. Neither did your father. Marie told me because no one could know what he felt. I say no one, and I was his lieutenant. No one except for your mother. She told me he cried. Do you have any news of Gérard? He tosses some grain on the ground and a few seconds later we are surrounded by a flock of chickens. Here I will speak only of Windsor and Jacques. You speak only of the dead? I speak only of people I know. I thought I knew Gérard. That's all I can say. I feel it's my turn to talk now. My father put a suitcase in a safety deposit box. It's certainly not moneyâyour father wasn't the type to save. What do you think it is? I ask him. Oh, he says, scattering the chickens, I have no idea. I have gotten rid of everything that once weighed me down and the past was the heaviest part. When I left Port-au-Prince, all I brought was my own corpse. But your father was a historian; maybe they're documents, but let's forget about it. He takes a long breath as if preparing to say one last thing before falling into silence. All I know is that I loved Windsor and that Jacques is the wound in my life. Now I live here with my granddaughter, surrounded by insatiable chickens I have to feed every hour, illiterate peasants I help to write letters of protest, and noisy women who don't stop chattering from morning to night, and I have all that I desire.
We leave the market area
and are already heading south
when I notice behind the car
Elvira, running in long strides,
bringing me a hen,
a gift from her grandfather.
Instead of my father's suitcase
that stayed behind in a Manhattan bank,
my inheritance is a black hen
from his best friend.
My nephew couldn't breathe
the whole time
Elvira was standing by the car.
And the silence that
followed her departure.
Like the plains after a wildfire.
A Green Lizard
I go for a walk in
the peaceful cemetery of Petit-Goâve.
Graves scattered in the tall grass.
On my grandmother Da's headstone,
a green lizard looks at me
for a long while
then slips into a break in the rock.
It isn't far from the des Vignes River
where I caught crayfish
with my cousins
during my rainy childhood.
A girl from the North came
to this cemetery
a few years ago,
with a modest bouquet of flowers for Da
whose grave she sought in vain.
That's because Da lives
in my books.
She entered head held high
into fiction.
The way others elsewhere
enter heaven.
For the simple bouquet placed that day
on the nearest grave
I promise, Pascale Montpetit,
you'll always have a spot
in the modest cemetery in Petit-Goâve,
where the gods converse
unsmiling with women.
A man napping
in the shade of a banana tree.
Lying on a tombstone
by the cemetery exit.
Is it more restful
to be that close
to eternal sleep?
I walk up Lamarre Street to number 88, the old house where I spent my childhood with my grandmother Da. As I move up the street, I recognize it less and less. It takes me a while to locate the house. The little field where Oginé kept horses for ten centimes while their owners sold vegetables in the market has changed places. Mozart's store has done the same. Mozart died before Da. I manage to find the house only because of the building across from it. It has remained intact, the way it was in my memories. The pink-and-white doors and the long walkway where a black dog stood guard. One evening, it went for a thief's throat.
I picture Da sitting on the gallery and me at her feet watch-ing ants go about their business. People greet Da and she offers them a cup of coffee. In her yellow dress, Vava goes up the street with her mother. My friends Rico and Frantz will pick me up and we'll go stand before the sea. That afternoon will never end.
Heading South
Just before Carrefour Desruisseaux
and the cutoff toward Aquin,
we stop at Miragoâne to
fill the car with gas.
I recognize the gas station guy.
We had our first communion together.
He hasn't changed a bit.
He's the same forty-five years later.
He still has that foolish smile that
has protected him from the sting of time.
The rain has been pelting down since Miragoâne.