My sister's son is called Dany.
We didn't know you were going to come back, my sister told me.
The exile loses his spot.
He goes and gets himself a glass of juice, then he's back on the subject. One last question: is it better to write by hand or on a computer? It's always better to read. Okay, I can see I'm not going to get anything out of you, he says, then takes a Carter Brown novel from the shelf and heads for the bathroom.
On the little gallery.
I am sitting.
He is standing.
A respectful distance.
You never talk about your times.
I don't have a time.
We all do.
I'm sitting here with you, that's my time.
The cry of a bird that can't stand
the noonday heat.
My aunt takes me aside,
in a dim room
where the furniture is covered with white sheets,
and rattles on and on about some
endless family saga
whose protagonists
are unknown to me and whose claims
are so confusing
that even she gets lost.
It's like being in a novel
by a sloppy writer.
My nephew goes to meet a friend
by the gate.
I watch them talking.
Their affection
for each other.
They share the same tough choice:
stay or go.
City of Talk
This man sitting alone,
his back against the gate,
is soon joined by a stranger
who begins telling him all sorts of things
that make absolutely no sense.
Hunting down the solitary man
is a collective passion
in any overcrowded city.
A tank truck parked
on the sidewalk across the way.
I watch my mother
favoring one leg
cross the street to
buy bottled water.
I never knew crossing a street
required so much willpower.
Christian, a nine-year-old neighbor
who spends a lot of time at our house,
comes and sits next to me.
We go almost an hour without talking.
A good breeze blows through the leaves.
I soon drift off.
The boy slipped away so quietly
I thought I'd dreamed him up.
My nephew tells me
he burned his first novel.
All good writers start by
being pitiless critics.
Now he has to learn
a little compassion for his work.
My nephew and I sit together on his squeaky narrow bed. I read detective novels, that's how I relax after a day at the university. A lot of hard work? Actually, we don't do anything at all. What do you do? Everyone is waiting for their American visa, and once they get it, even if it's in the middle of an exam, they take off.
A leaf, near me,
falls.
No sound.
What elegance!
A dull thud.
The noise a fat lizard makes
as it falls by my chair.
We consider each other a moment.
In the end it gets interested
in a spinning fly.
I listen to the radio.
A silky voice like a veil
that obscures the truth without managing to hide it.
People always have some story to tell
in a country where words are
the only thing they can share.
The music dies suddenly.
No sound.
Emptiness.
A power failure?
Endless silence in the street.
Then a cry of pain from the young girl next door.
To be able to hear silence this loud
in a city of talk
means so many people had to
keep quiet at the same time.
The radio announces
the death of a young musician
beloved by the public.
My nephew knew him well
having shared with him
for a brief moment
a girl's heart.
My nephew changes clothes quickly. My mother's worried look. The banged-up Chevrolet parks on the sidewalk across the way. Five of them are inside. Two girls in back. My nephew slips in between them. His face immediately transformed. The car pulls away. On the radio is the singer who just died. My sister looks straight ahead without a word. Now I see what my mother's face looked like when I went out like that on a Saturday night. We would cross paths near Saint-Alexandre Square, on Sunday morning, as she was going to church and I was coming back from a party.
My Mother's Song
We are on the gallery.
By the oleander.
My mother is speaking to me softly of Jesus,
the man who replaced her husband
in exile for the last fifty years.
In the distance the voice of a woman selling baubles.
Every family has its absent member in the group portrait. Papa Doc introduced exile to the middle class. Before, such a fate was reserved only for a president who fell victim to a coup or one of those rare intellectuals who could also be a man of action.
I took all possible precautions
before announcing to my mother
that my father had died.
First she turned a deaf ear to me.
Then took it out on the messenger.
The distance is so slight
between lengthy absence and death
that I didn't take enough care
to consider the effect the news would have on her.
My mother won't look at me.
I watch her long delicate hands.
She slides her wedding band
on and off her finger
and hums so softly
I have trouble understanding the words of her song.
Her gaze is lost in the clump of oleander
that reminds her of a time
when I did not yet exist.
The time before.
Is she recalling those days when she was
a carefree young woman?
Her fleeting smile moves me more than tears.
I hear my mother singing
from the room next door.
The news of my father's death
has finally reached her consciousness.
Sorrow is her daily escort,
the empty days
alternating with the magic of the first smile.
Everything resurfaces.
I finally catch a few words
of my mother's song
that speaks of panicked sailors,
rough seas
and a miracle just when
all hope seems lost.
She likes to listen to the radio on the little set I sent her a few years back. Tuned to the same prayer station. She listens only to sermons and religious music except for
Chansons d'autrefois,
the show where the singers hit notes so high they make the old dog whimper from under the chair where it sleeps.
I go back and forth from the hotel
to the house hidden behind the oleander.
My mother is surprised I won't stay
with her.
It's because I don't want to give her the illusion
we're living together again
when my life has gone on without her
for so long.
I keep coming back to her
in everything I write.
I spend my life interpreting
the slightest shadow on her brow.
Even from a distance.
Her Sadness Dances
As I get dressed I think of that woman
who spent her life taking care of other people.
It's a way of hiding too.
Now for the first time she is laid bare.
My mother in her naked pain.
I'm in a friend's car on the way to her house. I remember we never listened to music back then. The radio was just for the news. All it played were the same speeches celebrating the glory of the President. They went so far we sometimes wondered whether he didn't smile at all that flattery. He was compared to the greatest men, even to Jesus once. My mother reacted with a burst of dry laughter. We had to pretend we were listening so the neighbors wouldn't suspect us of not supporting the regime. We turned up the volume. Our neighbors did the same. An atmosphere of collective paranoia. Those were dark years. Our blood ran cold every time we heard classical music. Right after, they would announce a failed coup, which was always a pretext for carnage. I ended up associating classical music with violent death.
Every morning, on the radio, a stentorian voice
would remind us of our oath to the flag
followed by the nasal voice of Duvalier
himself who would declare “I am the flag, one and
indivisible.” I've been allergic to political speeches
ever since.
I picture my mother dancing
with a chair
in the shadows of the little living room.
She dances her sadness at five o'clock
in the afternoon.
Like a Lorca poem
about Franco's bloody nights.
My mother loved numbers. Every morning she made her budget of the day's expenses in a school notebook. Since she was always short of money, having lost her job right after my father left, she spent hours counting and recounting the few coins she had. Endless calculations. I do the same thing today, but with words. The bank was farther from my mother than the dictionary is from my hand.
The neighbor boy lets me know with a nod of his head
that my mother has fallen asleep again
still humming her song about the sailors
lost at sea to whom an angel appeared.
I use the break to talk with my sister
in the room at the back
where it's as hot as an oven.
My sister is even more secretive than my mother.
Seeing her constant smile it's hard to imagine
she lives in a country ravaged by dictatorship
like a hurricane
that has been punishing the island for twenty years.
She tells me about her life at work where people call her a snob because she makes a point of buying a novel as soon as she gets paid and because she wears perfume to the office. The more she treats people with respect, the more they plot against her. As if she reminded them of that precious thing they have lost along the way: their own self-respect.
My sister talks calmly
without looking at me.
She is like a little girl forgotten
by her parents in the dark woods
who wonders how long it will take
before the pack catches up to her.
Back at the house, she discovers her mother sitting on the gallery, silent and sad. My mother who was once so lighthearted. Of course I look after her expenses, but my sister has to face the travails of daily life. She's forced to watch my mother's health deteriorate, and struggle through her dark days: “I'm afraid one day I'll be too worn out to go get her at the bottom of the well.” This time she looks at me, and I see the years of my absence written on her face. We remain silent for a time. Then slowly a smile blooms. The dark cloud has passed.
Sitting in the darkened living room with my sister, I watch my mother go about her evening business. She inspects the kitchen down to the last crumb before lighting the lamp and placing it in the middle of the table. Then she scrapes the remains of the meal into a blue plastic bowl. Only then does she sit down to eat. That's her ritual.
Why is she eating from this plastic bowl when I sent her a new set of dishes? From underneath the sofa my sister pulls out the big box of silverware that has never been removed from its packaging. She doesn't like it? On the contraryâit's her treasure. She takes it out once a month and cleans it. In the lamplight, her face is serene. She is still beautiful. She is wearing her face for special days. As soon as you leave, my sister tells me, she'll put her dark-day face back on.
I am overcome with such a feeling of remorse.
The feeling that everything is wasted.
My mother, and then my sister.
The women have paid the price in this house.
I go out to see my nephew on the gallery. He was listening to the news on my mother's transistor radio. I sit next to him. Do you ever dream? Yes, but I don't remember. I used to dream every night when I was young, and every morning I would tell my grandmother my dream. Why? At the time, we would tell our dreams. Anyway, I always dreamed the same dream. Actually, I had two kinds of dreams. In the first, I had wings. I flew over the town. And I slipped through the window of certain houses to watch girls I was in love with sleep. My nephew laughs. And the second kind? I dreamed of the devil. The same thing every time. All of a sudden we heard a terrible racket. The devils were coming. We hurried to get inside before they showed up. You never knew that house, I say to my nephew. My mother talks about it all the time. It was a big house with lots of doors and windows. It feels like a century ago . . . We tried to close them. But the devils were everywhere. When we closed a door, they came in through the window. Nowadays, those devils have been replaced by real killers in the light of day. But I keep having the same dreams wherever I go. In hotel rooms all around the world. That's the only thing that hasn't changed with me. I have the same ritual: I lie down between white sheets, read a while, then turn off the light and drop into a universe full of devils. You should keep holy water in your suitcase. That's what my grandmother used when I had nightmares. But I treasure those dreams. They're the only thing that's left of my life from before.
My mother and my sister
come out to be with us
on the gallery.
A choir singing religious music on the radio.
My mother accompanies them.
Evening falls.
A Social Problem
A cold face in the pale early morning light.
A young shark in a Cardin shirt
striding swiftly to his car
seems as insensitive to life as to death.
To survive if only morally
in this city where the rules change
according to the customer's looks,
the rich man has to avoid
meeting the poor man's eyes.
Every hour
the exchange rate for the gourde changes.
Even if money is concentrated
in the same hands.