The Return

The Return

Dany Laferrière

Translated by David Homel

Douglas & McIntyre

D&M Publishers Inc.

Vancouver/Toronto

At the end of daybreak...

Aimé Césaire

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939

To Dany Charles, my nephew, who lives in Port-au-Prince.

Part 1

The Phone Call

The news cuts the night in two.

The inevitable phone call

that every middle-aged man

one day will receive.

My father has died.

I got on the road early this morning.

No destination.

The way my life will be from now on.

I stop along the way for breakfast.

Bacon and eggs, toast, scalding hot coffee.

I sit by the window.

A sharp sun warms my right cheek.

A quick glance at the paper.

A bloody image of a car wreck.

Death is sold anonymously in America.

I watch the waitress moving

among the tables.

Busy with her rounds.

The nape of her neck is sweaty.

The radio is playing this country song,

the story of a cowboy

unhappy in love.

The waitress has a red flower tattooed

on her right shoulder.

She turns and gives me a sad smile.

I leave the tip on the newspaper

next to the cup of cold coffee.

Walking toward the car I try to imagine

the loneliness of a man facing death

in a hospital bed in a foreign country.

“Death expires in a white pool of silence,”

wrote the young Martinican poet Aimé Césaire

in 1939.

What can anyone know of exile and death

when they're not even twenty-five?

I get back on Highway 40.

Little villages numb with sleep

along the frozen river.

Where are they all hiding?

The invisible people.

The feeling of discovering

virgin territory.

For no good reason I take

a country road

that will set me back by an hour.

A vast land of ice.

It's difficult for me

even after so many years

to imagine the shape

next summer will take.

Ice burns

more fiercely

than fire

but the grass remembers

the caress of the sun.

There are, beneath this ice,

hotter desires

and sharper impulses

than in any other season.

The women here know it.

The men sweat for a living and

the first to open his mouth is a sissy.

Silence is the rule of the forest

if you don't want to be surprised by a bear.

He nurtured silence so long

that emptiness took hold of him.

The man became a dry branch

that cracked in the cold.

Hunger brings the wolf out of the woods

and drives the woodsman home.

He nods off, after his bowl of soup,

by the fireplace.

His wife tells him what they said on the radio.

It's always about war and lost jobs.

So go the centuries in these northern villages.

It's easy to talk when we're warm,

and binding old wounds.

The wounds we're ashamed of

never heal.

I always panic when

I can't hear another human sound.

I am a creature of the city.

My rhythm is the staccato heels

of a woman coming up behind me.

I have lost all direction.

Snow has covered everything.

Ice has burned away the smells.

The realm of winter.

Only a native can find his way through this.

A big bright yellow truck roars past.

The driver, happy to finally

meet someone on the road,

blows his horn wildly.

He's heading south.

I'm driving into the luminous north

that blinds and enchants me.

I know at the end of this road

a bearded man full of gentle fury,

surrounded by a pack of dogs,

is trying to write the great American novel.

Hunkered down in the sleeping village of Trois-Pistoles

on the edge of the frozen river,

he is the only one today who knows how

to dance with ghosts, madmen and the dead.

This bluish light

sweeping the river

swallows me up in a single breath.

The car begins to skid.

I recover just in time.

To die amid beauty

is not granted to the petit bourgeois man

that I am.

I am aware of being in a world

completely different from my own.

The fire of the South crossing

the ice of the North

produces a temperate sea of tears.

When the road is straight like this,

ice on both sides,

no clouds to help

me find my way under the noonday sky

so completely blue,

I can touch infinity.

I really am among those northern people

who drink till they go mad

dancing a broken jig.

They scream obscenities at the sky

and are astonished to find themselves alone

on a giant sheet of ice.

The feeling of driving

through one of those

cheap paintings hanging

above the fireplace.

Landscape within the landscape.

At the far end of the dirt road,

her feet not touching the ground,

that little girl with the black hair

and the fever-colored yellow dress is dancing.

The one who has lived in my dreams

since the summer I was ten.

A quick glance at the gauges

to see how much gasoline is left.

A breakdown on this road

means certain death.

Magnanimous, the cold numbs before it kills.

The dogs are fighting under the table.

The cats playing with their shadows.

The old goat grazing on the carpet.

The master of the house has gone into the woods

for the day, the old housekeeper tells me.

I turn back as I go out the door

and see the cats tearing apart

a fat manuscript that has fallen from a shelf.

The housekeeper's indulgent smile seems to say

that here animals come before literature.

Returning to Montreal.

Tired.

I stop by the side of the road.

A quick nap in the car.

Childhood wells up behind closed eyelids.

I wander beneath the tropical sun

but it is cold as death.

The need to piss wakes me up.

A burning sensation before the liquid spurts out.

The same emotion every time

I see the city in the distance.

I take the tunnel under the river.

We always forget that Montreal is an island.

The low-angled light on the smokestacks

above the Pointe-aux-Trembles factories.

The melancholy headlights of the cars.

I make my way to the Cheval Blanc.

The afternoon drinkers have gone.

The late-night ones haven't shown up yet.

I love this brief moment

when no one is around.

The guy next to me is stretched out on the counter

mouth open and eyes half closed.

They serve me my usual glass of rum.

I think of a dead man whose features

have yet to come together in my mind.

On the Proper Use of Sleep

I got home late at night.

I ran myself a bath.

I always feel at home in water.

An aquatic animal—that's what I am.

Césaire's water-warped collection on the floor.

I dried my hands before reaching for it.

I fell asleep in the pink bathtub.

That old fatigue

whose cause I pretend not to know

carried me off

toward uncharted territories.

I slept for an eternity.

That was the only way

to return incognito to the country

with my momentous news.

The night horse that sometimes

I ride at noon knows the path

across the desolate savannah.

Galloping across the mournful plain of time

before discovering

that there is in this life

neither north nor south

father nor son

and that no one

really knows where to go.

We can build our dream house

on the slope of a mountain.

Paint the shutters nostalgia blue.

Plant oleander all around.

Then sit at twilight to watch

the sun sink so slowly into the gulf.

We can do that in each of our dreams

but we'll never recover the flavor

of those childhood afternoons spent

watching the rain fall.

I remember I would throw myself on the bed

to try to calm the hunger

that devoured me from within.

Today, I sleep

to leave my body

and quench my thirst for the faces of the past.

The little airplane passes steadily

through the great hourglass

that erases the tape of memory.

Here I stand before a new life.

Not everybody gets to be reborn.

I go around a corner in Montreal

and just like that

I find myself in Port-au-Prince.

Like in some teenage dream

where you're kissing a different girl than the one

you're holding in your arms.

To sleep and awake again in the country I left

one morning without looking back.

A long reverie made up of unrelated images.

Meanwhile the bathwater has grown cold

and I find I've developed gills.

This lethargy always hits me

this time of year

when winter has settled in

and spring is still so far away.

In the midst of the ice at the end of January

I have no more energy to continue

but it's impossible to turn back.

I've started to write again the way

some people start smoking.

Without admitting it to anyone.

And with that feeling I'm doing something

that's not good for me

but that I can't resist

any longer.

As soon as I open my mouth, vowels and consonants pour out in a disorderly mess and I have stopped trying to control it. I discipline myself enough to try writing, but after a dozen lines I stop out of exhaustion. I need to find a way that doesn't demand too much physical effort.

When I bought my old Remington 22, a quarter century ago, I did it to adopt a new style. Tougher, more intense than before. Writing by hand seemed too literary. I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll writer. A writer of the machine age. Words interested me less than the sound of the keyboard. I had energy to burn. In my narrow room on Saint-Denis Street, I spent all day typing feverishly in the dark. I worked, the windows closed, bare-chested in summer's furnace-room. With a bottle of cheap wine at my feet.

I return to my trusty pen

which never lets me down.

At the end of a cycle of overwork

we always return to what seems

most natural.

After all these years

there is practically nothing spontaneous left in me.

Yet when the news was announced over the telephone

I heard that short dry click

that can make your heart stop.

A man accosted me in the street.

Are you still writing? Sometimes.

You said you weren't writing any more. That's true.

Then why are you writing now?

I don't know.

He went off, offended.

Most readers

see themselves as characters in a novel.

They consider their lives a tale

full of sound and fury

for which the writer should be

their humble scribe.

There is as much mystery in getting close

to a person as in moving apart.

Between those two points

stretches stifling daily life

with its string of petty secrets.

From which end will I take this day?

By the rising or the setting of the sun?

These days I've been getting up

when the sun is going down.

First I need a glass of rum

to dissipate the passion of malaria,

the fever I sometimes confuse

with the energy of life.

I won't fall asleep until the bottle

is lying on the wooden floor.

When I smile this way in the shadows

it's because I feel lost

and no one in that case

will make me leave

the pink bathtub

where I curl up in a ball,

a round belly filled with water.

Exile

This morning I picked up the first black notebook

that tells how I came to Montreal.

It was the summer of 1976.

I was twenty-three.

I had just left my country.

Thirty-three years living

far from my mother's eyes.