Dany Laferriere - The Return

Later on.

In a comfortable armchair.

By the fireside.

Fame will come.

Too late.

The hope then will be

for a day without suffering.

The worst stupidity, it seems,

is to compare one era

to the next.

One man’s time

to another’s.

Individual times

are parallel lines

that never touch.

In the little room, my nephew and I

look without seeing each other.

We try to understand

who the other is.

On the narrow shelf I notice

some Carter Brown novels that once belonged to me.

To write a novel, I tell my nephew

with a sly smile,

what you really need is a good pair of buttocks

because it’s a job

like the seamstress’s

where you spend a lot of time sitting down.

You also need a cook’s talents.

Take a large kettle of boiling water,

add some vegetables

and a raw piece of meat.

You’ll put in the salt and spices later

before lowering the heat.

All the flavors will blend into one.

The reader can sit down to the feast.

It’s like a woman’s job,

my nephew points out, worried.

It’s true you have to be able to change

into a woman, a plant or a stone.

All three realms are necessary.

Watching the vein in his temple beat that way, I know he’s thinking fast. But you haven’t explained the most important thing to me. What would that be? It’s not just the story, it’s how you tell it. Then what? You have to tell me how to do it. You don’t want to write something personal? Of course. No one can tell you how to be original. There must be tricks that can help. It’s always better if you discover them yourself. But I’ll waste time. That’s the point: time doesn’t exist in this job. I feel like I’m all alone. And lost. What good is having an uncle who’s a writer if he tells you he can’t help you out? At least you know that much. A lot of young writers think they can’t write because they aren’t part of a network. Maybe I don’t know how to write. You can’t say that if you haven’t spent at least a dozen years trying to find out. What do you mean? A dozen years to find out I can’t write? Well, believe me, that’s a conservative figure. So what good is the experience then? I can’t tell you any more than that, Dany.

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.

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.

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