Dany Laferriere - The Return

We can build our dream house

on the slope of a mountain.

Paint the shutters nostalgia blue.

Plant oleander all around.

Then sit at twilight to watch

the sun sink so slowly into the gulf.

We can do that in each of our dreams

but we’ll never recover the flavor

of those childhood afternoons spent

watching the rain fall.

I remember I would throw myself on the bed

to try to calm the hunger

that devoured me from within.

Today, I sleep

to leave my body

and quench my thirst for the faces of the past.

The little airplane passes steadily

through the great hourglass

that erases the tape of memory.

Here I stand before a new life.

Not everybody gets to be reborn.

I go around a corner in Montreal

and just like that

I find myself in Port-au-Prince.

Like in some teenage dream

where you’re kissing a different girl than the one

you’re holding in your arms.

To sleep and awake again in the country I left

one morning without looking back.

A long reverie made up of unrelated images.

Meanwhile the bathwater has grown cold

and I find I’ve developed gills.

This lethargy always hits me

this time of year

when winter has settled in

and spring is still so far away.

In the midst of the ice at the end of January

I have no more energy to continue

but it’s impossible to turn back.

I’ve started to write again the way

some people start smoking.

Without admitting it to anyone.

And with that feeling I’m doing something

that’s not good for me

but that I can’t resist

any longer.

As soon as I open my mouth, vowels and consonants pour out in a disorderly mess and I have stopped trying to control it. I discipline myself enough to try writing, but after a dozen lines I stop out of exhaustion. I need to find a way that doesn’t demand too much physical effort.

When I bought my old Remington 22, a quarter century ago, I did it to adopt a new style. Tougher, more intense than before. Writing by hand seemed too literary. I wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll writer. A writer of the machine age. Words interested me less than the sound of the keyboard. I had energy to burn. In my narrow room on Saint-Denis Street, I spent all day typing feverishly in the dark. I worked, the windows closed, bare-chested in summer’s furnace-room. With a bottle of cheap wine at my feet.

I return to my trusty pen

which never lets me down.

At the end of a cycle of overwork

we always return to what seems

most natural.

After all these years

there is practically nothing spontaneous left in me.

Yet when the news was announced over the telephone

I heard that short dry click

that can make your heart stop.

A man accosted me in the street.

Are you still writing? Sometimes.

You said you weren’t writing any more. That’s true.

Then why are you writing now?

I don’t know.

He went off, offended.

Most readers

see themselves as characters in a novel.

They consider their lives a tale

full of sound and fury

for which the writer should be

their humble scribe.

There is as much mystery in getting close

to a person as in moving apart.

Between those two points

stretches stifling daily life

with its string of petty secrets.

From which end will I take this day?

By the rising or the setting of the sun?

These days I’ve been getting up

when the sun is going down.

First I need a glass of rum

to dissipate the passion of malaria,

the fever I sometimes confuse

with the energy of life.

I won’t fall asleep until the bottle

is lying on the wooden floor.

When I smile this way in the shadows

it’s because I feel lost

and no one in that case

will make me leave

the pink bathtub

where I curl up in a ball,

a round belly filled with water.

This morning I picked up the first black notebook

that tells how I came to Montreal.

It was the summer of 1976.

I was twenty-three.

I had just left my country.

Thirty-three years living

far from my mother’s eyes.

Between the journey and the return,

stuck in the middle,

this rotten time

can lead to madness.

That moment always comes

when you stop recognizing yourself

in the mirror.

You’ve lived too long without witnesses.

I compare myself to the photo

of the young man I was before the departure.

The photo my mother slipped

into my pocket just as I

closed the low green gate.

I remember all that sentimentality

made me smile back then.

Today that old photo is my only

reflection to measure passing time.

Sunday afternoon in Port-au-Prince.

I can tell because even the plants

look bored.

We are sitting, my mother and I,

on the gallery, in silence, waiting

for darkness to settle over the oleander.

In the yellowed photo

I am paging through

(no doubt with moist palms and pounding heart)

the summer issue of a woman’s magazine

with girls in bikinis.

Next to me, my mother pretends to sleep.

If I didn’t know then that

I was going to leave

and never return,

my mother, so careworn

that day,

must have felt it

in the most secret part

of her body.

We’re stuck in a bad novel

ruled by a tropical dictator

who keeps ordering

the beheading of his subjects.

We scarcely have time

to escape between the lines

toward the margin that borders the Caribbean Sea.

Here I am years later

in a snow-covered city

walking and thinking of nothing.

I am guided only

by the movements of frigid air

and that fragile neck ahead of me.

Intrigued by the strength

that girl has, so determined,

confronting the harsh

and frigid winds that bring

tears to my eyes

and whirl me around like a dervish.

A child sitting in the middle of the stairway

waits for his father to take him to the arena.

From his sad look I can see

that the game has already started.

I would have given anything

to miss a game

and spend the afternoon watching my father

read his paper in the corner café.

I know that house with a cat in the window.

To enter you have to put

the key in all the way

then draw it back as you turn it

gently in the lock.

The stairs begin to creak

at the eighth step.

A big wooden house.

A long bare table

with a basket of fruit at the end.

On the wall a display

of black-and-white photos

that tell the story

of a man and a woman

in the blaze of love.

A little squirrel climbs the tree at top speed

turning its head in my direction

as if inviting me to follow.

The pale light of three a.m.

when teenage girls walk the streets

on stiletto heels that will break their backs

before they reach thirty.

That girl in the green miniskirt and the cracked lips gets paid at dawn in cocaine cut with baking soda just before the cops come by then she sniffs the stuff right there to face the cold stares of the proper ladies in purple curlers keeping an eye on their brats from the window.

It’s rare that I’m in more of a hurry than a squirrel. But that’s the case today. The animal is amazed that this passerby doesn’t want to feed or play with it. No one’s taught it that it’s just a poor squirrel living in an ordinary neighborhood park. Social classes might not exist among animals. But ego does.