Between the journey and the return,
stuck in the middle,
this rotten time
can lead to madness.
That moment always comes
when you stop recognizing yourself
in the mirror.
You've lived too long without witnesses.
I compare myself to the photo
of the young man I was before the departure.
The photo my mother slipped
into my pocket just as I
closed the low green gate.
I remember all that sentimentality
made me smile back then.
Today that old photo is my only
reflection to measure passing time.
Sunday afternoon in Port-au-Prince.
I can tell because even the plants
look bored.
We are sitting, my mother and I,
on the gallery, in silence, waiting
for darkness to settle over the oleander.
In the yellowed photo
I am paging through
(no doubt with moist palms and pounding heart)
the summer issue of a woman's magazine
with girls in bikinis.
Next to me, my mother pretends to sleep.
If I didn't know then that
I was going to leave
and never return,
my mother, so careworn
that day,
must have felt it
in the most secret part
of her body.
We're stuck in a bad novel
ruled by a tropical dictator
who keeps ordering
the beheading of his subjects.
We scarcely have time
to escape between the lines
toward the margin that borders the Caribbean Sea.
Here I am years later
in a snow-covered city
walking and thinking of nothing.
I am guided only
by the movements of frigid air
and that fragile neck ahead of me.
Intrigued by the strength
that girl has, so determined,
confronting the harsh
and frigid winds that bring
tears to my eyes
and whirl me around like a dervish.
A child sitting in the middle of the stairway
waits for his father to take him to the arena.
From his sad look I can see
that the game has already started.
I would have given anything
to miss a game
and spend the afternoon watching my father
read his paper in the corner café.
I know that house with a cat in the window.
To enter you have to put
the key in all the way
then draw it back as you turn it
gently in the lock.
The stairs begin to creak
at the eighth step.
A big wooden house.
A long bare table
with a basket of fruit at the end.
On the wall a display
of black-and-white photos
that tell the story
of a man and a woman
in the blaze of love.
A little squirrel climbs the tree at top speed
turning its head in my direction
as if inviting me to follow.
The pale light of three a.m.
when teenage girls walk the streets
on stiletto heels that will break their backs
before they reach thirty.
That girl in the green miniskirt and the cracked lips gets paid at dawn in cocaine cut with baking soda just before the cops come by then she sniffs the stuff right there to face the cold stares of the proper ladies in purple curlers keeping an eye on their brats from the window.
It's rare that I'm in more of a hurry than a squirrel. But that's the case today. The animal is amazed that this passerby doesn't want to feed or play with it. No one's taught it that it's just a poor squirrel living in an ordinary neighborhood park. Social classes might not exist among animals. But ego does.
I wait for the café to open.
The waitress pulls up on her bike
despite the cold.
She grabs the two piles of papers
the young delivery boy left earlier
in front of the door.
I watch her go about her business behind the bay window.
Her movements are precise and driven by habit.
Finally she opens the door.
I go in for my first coffee and
read the morning's editorials
which always make me furious.
She puts on heavy metal at top volume
but she'll change it to Joan Baez
when the first customers show up.
I always stop in at the bookseller's next door. She's at her post behind the counter. Her features are drawn. Winter is not kind to her. She's about to go to Key West to see a writer friend who has been living there for the past years. Literature, like organized crime, has its networks.
The reader's bent neck as he stands at the back.
His left profile.
Clenched jaw.
Intense concentration.
He's about to change centuries.
Right before my eyes.
Without a sound.
I always thought
that books crossed
the centuries to reach us.
Then I understood
seeing that man
the reader does the traveling.
Let us not trust too much in that object covered in signs
that we hold in our hands
and that is there only to attest
the journey really did take place.
I go back to the café next door. The waitress signals that someone has been waiting for me. After Joan Baez, it's Native singer Buffy Sainte-Marie's turn. I'd completely forgotten the appointment. I beg to be pardoned. The young journalist asks me coldly whether she can record our conversation. I tell her yes, even though I know that the point of conversations is to leave no trace. She works for one of those free weeklies that litter the tables of the local cafés. T-shirt, jeans, tattoos, roseate eyelids, sparkling eyes. I order a tomato salad. She goes for a green salad. Sometime in the 1980s, we moved from the culture of steak to the culture of salad in the hope it would make us more peaceful.
The machine records. So really, you're just writing about identity? I write only about myself. You've already said that. It doesn't seem to have been heard. Do you think people aren't listening to you? People read in search of themselves and not to discover someone else. Paranoid, perhaps? Not enough. Do you think one day you'll be read for yourself? That was my last illusion until I met you. You seem to me different in reality. Why, have we met in a book before? She gathers up her material with that bored look that can ruin even a sunny day.
The only place I feel completely at home is in this scalding water that warms my bones. The bottle of rum within reach, never too far from Césaire's collection of poems. I alternate mouthfuls of rum and pages of the Notebook until the book slides onto the floor. Everything is happening in slow motion. In my dream, Césaire takes my father's place. The same faded smile and that way of crossing his legs that reminds me of the dandies of the postwar days.
I have studied that photo of my father for so long.
His well-starched shirt collar.
The mother-of-pearl cufflinks.
Silk socks and shined shoes.
The loose knot of his tie.
A revolutionary is above all a charmer.
The weatherman is calling for twenty-eight below this morning.
Hot tea.
I am reading by the frosted window.
Numbness fills me.
I lay the book on my stomach.
My hands together and my head thrown back.
Nothing else will happen today.
This sunbeam
that warms my left cheek.
A child's afternoon nap
not far from his mother.
In the shadow of the oleander.
Like an old lizard
hiding from the sun.
Suddenly I hear that dull sound
the book makes as it falls to the floor.
The same sound that
the heavy juicy mangos of my childhood made
as they fell by the water basin.
Everything brings me back to childhood.
That fatherless country.
What's for sure is that
I wouldn't have written this way had I stayed behind.
Maybe I wouldn't have written at all.
Far from our country, do we write to console ourselves?
I have doubts about the vocation of the writer in exile.
The Photo
A man sitting in front of a thatched hut
with a peasant hat on his head.
A plume of smoke rising behind him.
“That's your father in the countryside,”
my mother said to me.
The President-for-Life's henchmen were looking for him.
Distant as it is,
that picture comforts me even today.
When it's noon and I'm too hot
in these tristes tropiques
I will remember my walk
on the frozen lake, near the cabin
where my friend Louise Warren
would go to write.
Cats play on the porch
without concern for passing time.
Their time is not ours.
This kitten slips
into the shadows of my memory.
White socks on the
waxed wood floor.
I've lost track of myself.
Memories run together in my mind.
My life is just a small damp package
of washed-out colors and old smells.
It's as if an eternity had passed
since the phone call.
Time is no longer cut
into fine slices called days.
It's become a compact mass with a density
greater than the earth's.
Nothing beyond this imperious need to sleep. Sleep is my only way of dodging the day and the obligations it brings. I have to admit that things have been falling apart for some time now. My father's death has completed a cycle. It all happened without my knowledge. I had just begun picking up the signs that warned of this maelstrom and already it was carrying me off.
Images from deep in childhood
wash over me like a wave
with such newness
I really feel I am seeing
the scene unfold before me.
I remember another detail
from that picture of my father
but so tiny that my mind
can't locate it.
All I can recall is the memory
of a moment of pleasure.
I remember now what made me laugh so much when my mother showed me the photo of the peasant in the straw hat. I was six years old. In the left corner, a chicken was scratching at the ground. My mother wondered what I thought was so funny about a chicken. I couldn't explain what I felt. Today I know: a chicken is so alive it moves even in a picture. Compared to the chicken, everything else looks dead. For me, my father's face can't begin to move without my mother's voice.
The Right Moment
This moment always comes.
When it's time to leave.
We can always hang around a little,
say useless goodbyes and gather up
things we'll abandon along the way.
The moment stares at us
and we know it won't back down.
The moment of departure awaits us by the door.
Like something whose presence we feel
but can't touch.
In reality, it takes on the form of a suitcase.
Time spent anywhere else than
in our native village
is time that cannot be measured.
Time out of time written
in our genes.
Only a mother can keep that sort of count.
For thirty-three years
on an Esso calendar
mine drew a cross over each day
spent without seeing me.
If I meet my neighbor on the sidewalk
he never fails to invite me in
to taste the wine he makes in his basement.
We spend the afternoon discussing Juventus
back in the days when Juventus was Juventus.
He personally knows all the players
though most have been dead for some time.
I ask Garibaldi (I call him that because he worships Garibaldi) why he doesn't go back to his country. Mine, I say, is so devastated that it hurts just thinking about seeing it again. But you, just to go back to the stadium to watch Juventus play. He takes the time to go and shut off the television then returns to sit near me. He looks me in the eye and tells me he goes back to Italy every night.
Garibaldi invites me to his place one evening. We go down to the basement. The same ritual. I have to drink his homemade wine. I feel he has something important to tell me. I wait. He gets up, wipes the dust off his books, then produces a signed portrait of D'Annunzio that the writer dedicated to his father. I'm afraid he's going to entrust me with some scandalous confession. But he just needed to tell me that he's always hated Juventus, and that his team is Torino
FC
. Since no one knows that team here and everyone knows Juventus, he says Juventus thinking of Torino. That's the tragedy of his life. Not a day goes by when he doesn't think of that betrayal. If one day he ever returns to Italy he isn't sure he'll be able to look his old friends in the eye.
I bring back to the country
without a farewell ceremony
these gods who accompanied me
on this long journey
and kept me from losing my mind.
If you don't know voodoo,
voodoo knows you.
The faces I once loved disappear
with the days of our burned memory.
The sheer fact of not recognizing
even those who were close to us.
The grass grows in, after the fire,
to camouflage all trace of the disaster.
In fact, the real opposition is not
between countries, no matter how different they are,
but between those who have had to learn
to live at other latitudes
(even in inferior conditions)
and those who have never had to face
a culture other than their own.
Only a journey without a return ticket
can save us from family, blood
and small-town thinking.
Those who have never left their village
live unchanging lives