The Return (10 page)

We learn that most kidnappings are carried out between people who know each other well—sometimes they belong to the same family. That's where hatred is most deep-rooted. That's where everyone knows the exact amount of money the victim has in his bank account. The ransom demands become more precise and there's less negotiation. Kidnapping has become such a lucrative business that the rich weren't going to miss out on the action for long. Unlike the photos of the hoodlums at the young man's side, the paper took the trouble to blur his picture.

Since the government can't throw impertinent journalists in jail the way it used to, the upper classes have picked up the slack by buying them off at rock-bottom prices. They buy off the corrupt journalist with money. They buy off the poor but honest journalist with considerations. They buy off the perverse journalist by letting him breathe in the subtle perfume of the very young woman who leans toward him during a classy cocktail party.

I just saw the vendor

who wakes me up every morning.

Her high-pitched voice rises above the rest.

I can still hear her when I come back in the evening.

The newspaper vendor who works in front of the hotel tries to get me to pay the price of a whole monthly subscription for one issue. I show him my photo on the front page. He's not impressed and names me the same exorbitant price. I grab a copy from his hand and give him fifteen gourdes. That's the price people who live in gourdes pay, he snaps. How do you know I'm not from here? You're at the hotel. That's my business. For me you're a foreigner like any other foreigner. How much do you ask from people who go by in their fancy cars? He walks away, muttering. It's a good thing the newspaper vendors only read the headlines. Otherwise we'd be prisoners of the fifth estate.

That banal incident

makes me limp

as if I had

a stone in my heart.

To be a foreigner even in the city of your birth.

There are not many of us

who enjoy such status.

But this small cohort

is growing ever larger.

In time we will be the majority.

Climbing the gentle slope

that leads to Saint-Pierre Square,

suddenly I think of Montreal

the way I would think

of Port-au-Prince when I was in Montreal.

We always think of what's missing.

I wander into a new bookstore called La Pléiade. At the end of the '60s, I used to go to Lafontant. He was always sitting by the door: an affable man despite the bushy eyebrows that gave him a surly look. He didn't speak much. We would go straight to the back to look for the books that interested us—never more than one at a time. We chose them from the famous Maspero collection, which was censored by the paranoid powers of the day. Old Lafontant took a chance selling something besides detective novels and trivial magazines displayed on a table by the entrance. We calculated the price and, moving past the cash register, put the exact amount on the counter. Without a look back, we made our way to the exit. The entire operation had to be carried out seamlessly. We would practice at home.

We would get together afterward,

my friends and I,

in our little restaurant

across from Saint-Alexandre Square,

each of us with the book he'd bought.

We would put all the books on the table.

Then draw straws to see who would read what.

We were so serious at twenty

that a girl practically had to rape me

before I understood

what was happening around me.

The girls who listened to The Rolling Stones on the radio

had already progressed to the sexual revolution

while we were still reading the New China News Agency.

We were desperately seeking

in the speeches of our idol Zhou Enlai,

that severe, elegant Party strategist,

the scent of a woman

the glimpse of a leg

or the downy nape of a neck

that would have given us the gift

of erotic dreams.

I opened my eyes and realized we were just a tiny group busy making the revolution in our minds, which mainly meant commenting on the political essays we purchased at Lafontant's store. The rest of the world lived in carefree pleasure and was no worse off for it. I was ready for my first intellectual vacation.

Suddenly I was terribly attracted to the very guys I'd had such contempt for a short time earlier. Guys who lived for dressing sharp, wearing the right cologne and dancing to slow songs by The Platters. Guys who'd never opened a book. And who didn't care about the feelings of those inaccessible princesses who filled our dreams, but only about their graceful slender bodies under their Saturday night dresses. Guys into whose arms those princesses melted, the ones who never considered us. Guys whose bloody faces on page one of the newspaper (they always ended up in a fatal sports car crash) got more press at the Girls' College than Davertige's latest volume of poetry.

Old Lafontant bequeathed his bookstore to his two daughters (Monique and Solanges) who split it into two parts. One store in Port-au-Prince, a little bigger than the one in Pétion-ville. I converse a while with Monique who runs the Pétionville branch. She points to a girl paging through one of my novels. I am fascinated by the back of her neck (the nape speaks volumes about a woman reading). I go into the courtyard, under a tree, to keep from embarrassing her in case she turns and recognizes me. I never imagined that one day I'd find myself at La Pléiade as a writer.

As I move through this universe (the city, the people, the objects) that I've described so often, I don't feel like a writer, but more like a tree in its forest. I realize I didn't write those books to describe a landscape, but to continue being part of it. That's why the newspaper vendor's comment hit me so hard. In Port-au-Prince at the beginning of the seventies, I became a journalist to denounce the dictatorship. I was part of the little group that bared its teeth to power. I didn't ask any questions about myself until that sexual crisis at the very end. I grew aware of my individuality in Montreal. At minus thirty, I quickly developed a physical sense of myself. The cold lowers the mind's temperature. In the heat of Port-au-Prince the imagination is so easily enflamed. The dictator threw me out the door of my own country. To return, I had to slip in through the window of the novel.

The Red Jeep

The crowd pushes me into the street.

Cars brush past me.

I'm already running with sweat.

Suddenly a red Jeep stops next to me.

The door swings open.

I get in.

A second later I'm not part of the prey anymore.

My friend drives through the crowd.

He saw my picture in this morning's paper.

He called Le Nouvelliste and his friends

to find out what hotel I was staying at.

No one could tell him.

And now, just like that, here I am in his car.

He gets on the phone to his wife.

You'll eat with us?

I nod yes.

In the red Jeep with chrome wheels.

The music loud.

We talk over it.

On the side of the mountain

a small yellow airplane skims the treetops.

The pilot sticks his head out the window to wave

to the young boy who pulls off his shirt as he dances.

My childhood cuts through me like a knife.

My friend and his insouciance are just like before.

Here, he tells me, we live intensely

since we can die at any time.

Those who live in the lap of luxury

speak most casually of death.

The rest are simply waiting for death,

which won't disappoint them.

The women descend in single file.

Along the cliffs.

Mountains of fruit on their heads.

Their backs straight.

Their necks sweaty.

Elegant in their effort.

A truck breaks down

on the narrow road to Kenscoff.

The women climb down.

The merchandise is already on the ground.

The men have to push the truck

onto the side of the road.

A low chant rises up.

The voices of men working.

The higher we climb, the fewer people we see.

That brightly colored little house

on the mountain is

hidden in the morning fog.

Settle in there and write

that long historical novel in five volumes.

Mistaking myself for Tolstoy late in life.

The red earth produces such beautiful onions.

The vendors hoist their baskets up to our level.

My friend lowers the window to buy

carrots and onions.

The smell of rich earth makes me dizzy.

The voices of the peasants

coming down the river.

Barefoot in the water.

Straw hats.

Each with a fighting cock under his arm.

And a bottle of alcohol

in his back pocket.

They are going single file

to the Sunday fights.

A dog looks for a sunny spot

then ends up lying down by the wall.

Its muzzle moist.

Its eyes half-closed.

The siesta comes early.

Everything grows here.

Even what no one has planted.

The earth is good.

The wind scatters the seeds.

Why do people gather

where it smells of gasoline and shit?

Where it's always too hot?

Where it's so dirty?

Even as they admire beauty

some prefer to live in ugliness,

often richer in contrasts.

I can't breathe

when the air is too pure.

The landscape too verdant.

The living too easy.

The urban instinct is sharp within me.

From the other side of the cliff,

a horse slowly turns in my direction

and casts a long look at me.

Even the animals have started to recognize me.

Maybe that's what a country is:

you think you know everyone

and everyone seems to know you.

The Jeep swings suddenly to the left.

For ten minutes or so, we follow

a narrow unpaved road

then come to a farm with a green roof

in the middle of wide fields.

My friend's wife, a tall redhead,

is waiting for us at the door.

I have the feeling, in front of this Irish flag

hoisted in the pasture among the cows,

that I'm in another country.

Some time after I left Haiti,

he went to Ireland

where he lived for twenty years.

He brought Ireland back with him

to this green hamlet set upon

the heights of Pétionville.

When I was in Ireland, he said to me, I lived as if I were in Haiti. Now that I'm in Haiti, I feel totally Irish. Will we ever know who we really are? That's the kind of question that makes us feel intelligent even under a blazing sun. Such vanity is no match for a second rum punch.

Like a flight of wild birds

we left almost at the same time.

We scattered across the planet.

Now, thirty years later,

my generation has begun its return.

We talk underneath the mango tree, with so much passion, about the years abroad: a whole life. His wife listens with a tired smile as she sips her coffee. She has come to sit with us. Her only demand is that we speak Creole when she's around. The language touches me here, she says, pointing to her round belly.

As she walks me to the car, while her husband goes to give orders to the staff, her voice is determined. I'm going to make sure my child's mother tongue is Creole. If mother tongue means the mother's language, then it'll be English. No, it's the language the mother chooses to teach her child: I want to raise him in Creole.

I decide to tell her a story. Back in Petit-Goâve, when I was eight years old, I met a woman who came from some unknown place. She was white and walked barefoot through the dust of Haiti. She was the woodworker's wife. They had a son my age who was neither black nor white. I never understood how someone could live in a culture other than their own. Despite the thirty-three years I spent in Montreal the mystery remains. As if I were talking about someone else.

In that little room in Montreal,

I read, drank wine, made love

and wrote without fearing the worst every morning.

But what can I say about this woman

who came from a free country and chose

to live in a dictatorship?

She tells me this story.

One of her girlfriends who lived all her life in Togo

and who she asked for advice before leaving Belfast

explained to her that people are not necessarily

from the country where they were born.

Some seeds are carried elsewhere by the willful wind.

My friend comes back. He kisses his wife's neck; she squirms and moans under the sun. Nothing is more sensual than a pregnant woman. We get into the Jeep and circle the Irish flag before coming back to her. She moves toward the door. They smile at each other with their eyes. She touches his forearm. He starts up the car again. She stands in the sun a while before going back into the house. If ever he gets it into his head to return to Ireland, she won't go with him.

A Little Cemetery Decorated Like a
Naïve Painting near Soissons-la-Montagne

Already we're at the stop, at Fermathe,

where they sell grilled pork

and fried sweet potatoes.

A truck full of people eating.

The anticipation in the air

before the long descent

into the deep South.

It takes as much time

to travel to another country

as it does to go from one city

to another in this country

over the broken roads

and along the edge of dizzying cliffs.

We run a gauntlet of screaming vendors

who jam their fruit baskets in our face.

Laughter rises above the racket.