The Return (19 page)

I go through the little cemetery.

The earth has drunk up all the water from the sky.

The dead were thirsty

though they do prefer

something stronger.

I just need to look up

to see Sirius

on the collar of Canis Major.

I will spend the night

with this brightest of stars.

I sit down

in the night

on a headstone

to smoke a cigarette.

And think of my father.

That teenager who yesterday was running

nearly naked in the rain

through the streets of Baradères

could have lived out his life

like his friends

who never left their native village.

And never have known

such a strange destiny.

The path trampled through the grass crosses the cemetery and hits the rocky track that leads to the paved road. He started out on that path on his way to Port-au-Prince. And years later, to Havana, Paris, Genoa, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Rome, the world's great cities. And then New York where I recently saw him stiff in a black alpaca suit with a magnificent tie of the same color. Always elegantly dressed. The way his generation was. The only personal feature: that smile pinned to his face, witness to the final burst of pain.

My mother questioned me at length

about what he wore for the funeral.

Every detail of his appearance

counted for him—and now for her.

All I remembered were his hands

and his smile.

In the end, once a dandy, always a dandy. Especially when the dandy has stopped taking care of himself. The form can change. The personality, never. If personality never changes, then that Baradères teenager knew everything back then. All the roads he was to take were already laid out inside him.

On a night like this, he must have

looked into the sky at

that great life-size map and seen

all the hospitals, prisons, embassies,

feigned celebrations and lonely nights

that one day he would face.

And if the moon was full and bright

he must have seen my life too,

an extension of his

so similar to it.

We each have our dictator.

For him it was the father, Papa Doc.

For me, the son, Baby Doc.

Exile without return for him.

For me, this enigmatic return.

My father has returned

to his birthplace.

I brought him back.

Not the body

burned to the bone by ice.

But the spirit that made it possible

for him to face

the deepest solitude.

To stand up to that solitude

all those gray days

and cold nights,

how many times did he

picture in his mind

the primitive images

of Baradères in the rain?

He in Baradères.

I in Petit-Goâve.

Then each followed his path

through this wide world.

To return to our point of departure.

He gave me birth.

I take care of his death.

Between birth and death,

we hardly crossed paths.

I have no memory

of my father that I can trust.

That belongs to me alone.

There is no picture

of us alone together.

Except in my mother's memory.

A Son of the Village

Even before the new day dawns

I can hear

the sounds of the town

awakening like a servant girl.

On her tiptoes.

A woman brings me coffee.

The white cup.

The embroidered cloth.

She waits until I have finished drinking it.

The way they say good morning in Baradères.

The man appears soon after. With his hat over his heart. I make room for him next to me. He sits down. For some time he says nothing. That's my grave, he murmurs. My whole family has been buried there for four generations. I immediately get to my feet. Stay. It's an honor for us. Again this silence I have no intention of breaking. My wife recognized you. You know me? Legba. He is confusing me with the god who stands at the border between the visible and invisible worlds. The one who allows us to move between them. I've been out of the country. We know that. I've come to bury my father, and now I am being welcomed like a god in his native village. We were waiting for you, he says solemnly. But I am not Legba. You are the son of Windsor K, my classmate. We went to grammar school together here. I am amazed, astonished. If we didn't know who you were, you wouldn't be alive now. You're not the first to return to bury a family member. I see. But you're the first I've seen without a body. And you are accompanied by Legba. And Legba chose to spend the night on our grave. We don't deserve such an honor. What sign spoke to you of Legba? The black hen. The hen? Yes, the black hen. Of course, the black hen. Sometimes you have to pretend to understand, because here no one will explain to you what you are supposed to know.

A large but skinny and mangy dog

comes and rubs himself against his leg.

I wonder if he

isn't a god too.

The dog star I saw last night.

Children cross the cemetery

on their way to school.

As they go past they run their palm

over their ancestors' graves.

That way they keep daily contact

with the other world.

Last Sleep

By road or by sea?

I choose the sea.

It so happens, the man tells me, there's a sailboat

about to leave the harbor.

It's my cousin Rommel's boat.

A village of cousins.

First we go to La Gonâve for wood

that we'll deliver to Pestel.

Several women get on board the Epiphany.

They need oil, salt and flour.

They impose the rhythm of daily life

on the sailboat.

We fish along the way.

On the great salty highway.

Mostly threadfin.

The women never look at the water.

Half the crew doesn't know how to swim.

The sea was off limits to the slave.

From the beach, he could dream of Africa.

And a nostalgic slave

isn't worth much

on a plantation.

He would be killed so his sadness

would not spread to others.

The brilliant sun

in a cloudless sky

and the turquoise sea lined with coconut palms

is just a Northern reverie

for the man trying

to escape the leaden cold of February.

From where I stand I note:

Ferocious beauty.

Eternal summer.

Death under the sun.

We put in at every bay, where various female cousins await the merchandise in noisy marketplaces. We use the stops to pick up the necessities of life. New vendors climb aboard, and the fire in their bodies means they're members of Erzulie Freda Dahomey's family. The men watch them sleepily. Start something with one of those women and, at the next bay, a new machete will be waiting in the sun.

Before getting off, a woman wanted to buy my hen to sell it, she said, at the next market. Just to take it off my hands because she'd pay market price for it and wouldn't make any profit. The lady next to me stepped in. Later, she made me swear never to sell the black hen whatever happened. But I knew that already.

The men are farmers

who work close to their huts.

The women know every one

of the tiny villages where

they sell their vegetables.

Jealous husbands make their wives

stay at the local market.

That gazelle with the slender ankles

accompanies her mother.

Her head down.

A sidelong glance.

She's studying everything

for the day when it's her turn

to make the trip alone.

Up ahead, a small group

of people on the shore.

A sign announces “Les Abricots.”

The Indians thought

it was paradise.

I finally get there.

Tall trees whose

branches bend low

to touch the sea.

Big pink fish

still flopping in

the fishermen's boat.

Kids with navels like flowers

devouring perfumed mangos.

The sweet life before Columbus.

I'm not so sure whether

I am in real time

as I move toward

this dreamed landscape.

I've read too many books.

Seen too many paintings.

One day, learn to see things

in their naked beauty.

Always too much hope ahead.

And too much disappointment behind.

Life is a long ribbon

that ceaselessly unfolds

in changing variations

of both.

I go my way

toward a small thatched hut

deep in the banana plantation.

The coffee is prepared

by an Indian princess

with high cheekbones

and the pure breath

of highland women.

In the hammock,

a pre-Columbian invention

that says much

about the degree of refinement

in this society,

you can spend your life

in horizontal meditation.

Three months

to escape the urban intensity

that once gave my life its rhythm.

Three months sleeping

protected by an entire village

that seems to know the source

of that sweet sickness of sleep.

This is not winter.

This is not summer.

This is not the North.

This is not the South.

Life is spherical now.

My former life seems so distant.

That life when I was a journalist, an exile,

a worker, even a writer.

And when I met so many people

for whom now I am no more

than a slowly fading shadow.

Humble houses scattered in the landscape.

Nothing here to recall the Indian genocide

so expertly orchestrated by the Spanish.

His hand on his Alcantara cross

Nicolás de Ovando gave the signal for the massacre

that Arawak memory refuses to forget.

A gentle hand

on my forehead cools my fever.

I doze between dawn and twilight.

And sleep the rest of the time.

Rocked by the music

of the ancient Caribbean wind

I watch the black hen

unearth a worm

that squirms in its beak.

And so I see myself in the jaws of time.

Someone has seen me smile

in my sleep too.

Like the child I was

in the happy times with my grandmother.

A time at long last recovered.

The journey is over.

Copyright © 2009 Dany Laferrière and Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle Translation copyright © 2011 David Homel

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit
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or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Originally published in French as L'énigme du retour by © Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle and, in Canada, by Les Éditions du Boréal.

The translation of Aimé Césaire is the work of Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, whom this translator acknowledges.

Douglas & McIntyre
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada 
ISBN
978-1-55365-808-5 (pbk.)
ISBN
978-1-55365-809-2 (ebook)

Cover design by Peter Cocking
Cover illustration adapted from art by Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, for our translation activities.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Other books by Dany Laferrière and published by Douglas & McIntyre

• I Am a Japanese Writer
  
• How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired
  
• Heading South
  
• Down among the Dead Men
  

Winner of the Prix Médicis

Winner of the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal

Finalist for the Prix France Culture-Télérama

Finalist for the Prix des libraires du Québec

Finalist for the Governor General's Award for French-language Fiction

“The Return is like a whole life that suddenly explodes as a Big Bang, liberating the past and the present, dreams and reality, North and South, hot and cold, life and death, exile and return, those who stay and those who go, themes that are found throughout Dany Laferrière's writing but that have never been as well put together, maybe because they were missing this angle of father and son, which casts everything in a new light. It is a book to savor, a long poem that demands more than one reading.”

Chantal Guy,
La Presse

“The force of The Return flows from the universality of its message. Laferrière gives his creativity and fecund ambition free rein. The result is a sublime novel that pulses to the hypnotic rhythm of his words and the depth of his journey. It is a novel that speaks to the human condition.”

Thomas Flamarion, évène.fr

“In an age of great postcolonial migrations, this is a magnificent book.”

Grégoire Leménager,
Le nouvel observateur

“Sharp and dry like a shot of Barbancourt rum, as beautiful and as poignant as one of Apollinaire's poems, his searing prose takes one's breath away.”