Dany Laferriere - The Return

I can’t really make out objects.

The sleep that comes to me

between two explosions of noise

is like an uppercut.

This isn’t sleep.

This is a knockout.

I’ve been awake for a while, and I feel like I’ve been put through the mill. My body is suffering an adaptation process that’s beyond my will. I am the master of nothing. Everything I banished from my mind back there in order to live without the bonds of nostalgia has a concrete presence here. Those things sought refuge in my body where the cold froze them in place. Now my body is slowly warming. My memory is thawing: that little puddle of water in the bed.

Breathing is difficult. Memories come back to me in three dimensions with their colors, smells and tastes. The cold preserved all their freshness as if I were seeing this fruit or that red bicycle for the first time. The sapodilla with its velvet peel so soft to the touch. The yellow-eyed dogs wandering through the night. The little girls jumping rope while screaming in voices so high-pitched they sound like a flock of birds. The old man at the window of the big wooden house by the Paramount movie theater. The plume of smoke on the mountain. Things today replaced by others of the same density, so that every traveler can make himself a store of images and emotions he can recover at his return.

I also remember the picture

in the living room in the house in Petit-Goâve.

A little uninhabited island

overgrown with fruit trees

where young felines played together.

That’s where I spent my afternoons

when things got too heavy for my young life.

Intolerable heat.

A white bowl filled with water

in the shadows of the bedroom.

Three mangos next to it.

I eat them all, bare-chested.

Then wash my face.

I’d forgotten what mangos taste like at noon.

I go out on the veranda.

A great coconut palm

planted right in the middle

of a house under construction

is dancing in the furious wind.

I watch the scene from the hotel balcony.

For a war correspondent,

that’s not much action.

This city awakens so early

that by two o’clock in the afternoon

it’s on its knees.

In the shade of their broad hats

the ladies who sell melons

are taking their nap.

Their backs against the hotel wall.

Their voices so shrill they break your heart

the women hawking baubles

desperate to sell off their trinkets

and the aggressive horns of the drivers

going from the office to the restaurant

can’t quite cover the lullaby

this woman is softly singing to her daughter

sleeping between two sacks of vegetables.

I receive an urgent summons to the phone. I slip on a pair of pants and rush down to the reception desk. It’s a guy who says he’s a childhood friend of mine. All he wants is money to pay his daughter’s hospital bills. I hesitate but he tells me he’s just on the other side of the gate, calling from a cell phone. I’m about to go looking for him when the receptionist motions me to forget it. “I know the fellow, he always tries that with my guests,” she lets on with a wide smile.

I’ve been away so long I can scarcely remember the faces that flash past me so quickly, demanding to be recognized. “Don’t you remember me?” A feeling of shame. “Your cousin introduced us the night before you left.” So we met once, thirty-three years ago. I’m alone in the middle of eight million people with shared family and personality traits jammed onto half an island, and they all want me to recognize them. They all come with a story that I’m a part of. Apparently we once went to the movies together, forty years ago. I was the best friend of that guy’s older brother. Surely I must know the cousin of the other guy who lives in Montreal. My head is spinning. Sometimes I put a voice to a face but they don’t belong together. It took me a while but I understand that in this thirst to be recognized, they are looking for confirmation that they’re not dead.

I was paging through

the paper on the couch

when I noticed his shadow

pacing in front of the gate.

Now I don’t dare go out.

The hotel owner points out that all the information in today’s paper is at least a week old. For the news of the day, you’re better off with the radio. The delay, in an area in which the ability to deliver information rapidly is more important than the information itself, acts as a buffer between the event and ourselves. That way we’re protected from the bad news, which comes to us with a few days’ lag. By the time it reaches us, the shock wave has been absorbed somewhat by the dense sweating crowd. These few days between the event and ourselves are enough to maintain our equilibrium.

The news of the week concerns both the upper-class neighborhoods and Cité Soleil. A rare occurrence. A young man “from a good family” who’d been kidnapped several months ago has become one of the country’s most pitiless gang leaders. The family’s lawyer declared on the radio that “he didn’t want to get kidnapped anymore and that’s why he became a kidnapper.” In the poor districts they’re still laughing about what the editorialist called the “Stockholm syndrome.” The answer wasn’t long in coming: it appears in graffiti painted on the walls of Cité Soleil. If a rich kid who gets kidnapped by a gang becomes a gang leader after two weeks because of the Stockholm syndrome, then how come a criminal who spends years in prison doesn’t become a cop when he gets out?

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.