The Return (7 page)

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 contrary—it'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.