Dany Laferriere: The Return

I wait for the café to open.

The waitress pulls up on her bike

despite the cold.

She grabs the two piles of papers

the young delivery boy left earlier

in front of the door.

I watch her go about her business behind the bay window.

Her movements are precise and driven by habit.

Finally she opens the door.

I go in for my first coffee and

read the morning’s editorials

which always make me furious.

She puts on heavy metal at top volume

but she’ll change it to Joan Baez

when the first customers show up.

I always stop in at the bookseller’s next door. She’s at her post behind the counter. Her features are drawn. Winter is not kind to her. She’s about to go to Key West to see a writer friend who has been living there for the past years. Literature, like organized crime, has its networks.

The reader’s bent neck as he stands at the back.

His left profile.

Clenched jaw.

Intense concentration.

He’s about to change centuries.

Right before my eyes.

Without a sound.

I always thought

that books crossed

the centuries to reach us.

Then I understood

seeing that man

the reader does the traveling.

Let us not trust too much in that object covered in signs

that we hold in our hands

and that is there only to attest

the journey really did take place.

I go back to the café next door. The waitress signals that someone has been waiting for me. After Joan Baez, it’s Native singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s turn. I’d completely forgotten the appointment. I beg to be pardoned. The young journalist asks me coldly whether she can record our conversation. I tell her yes, even though I know that the point of conversations is to leave no trace. She works for one of those free weeklies that litter the tables of the local cafés. T-shirt, jeans, tattoos, roseate eyelids, sparkling eyes. I order a tomato salad. She goes for a green salad. Sometime in the 1980s, we moved from the culture of steak to the culture of salad in the hope it would make us more peaceful.

The machine records. So really, you’re just writing about identity? I write only about myself. You’ve already said that. It doesn’t seem to have been heard. Do you think people aren’t listening to you? People read in search of themselves and not to discover someone else. Paranoid, perhaps? Not enough. Do you think one day you’ll be read for yourself? That was my last illusion until I met you. You seem to me different in reality. Why, have we met in a book before? She gathers up her material with that bored look that can ruin even a sunny day.

The only place I feel completely at home is in this scalding water that warms my bones. The bottle of rum within reach, never too far from Césaire’s collection of poems. I alternate mouthfuls of rum and pages of the Notebook until the book slides onto the floor. Everything is happening in slow motion. In my dream, Césaire takes my father’s place. The same faded smile and that way of crossing his legs that reminds me of the dandies of the postwar days.

I have studied that photo of my father for so long.

His well-starched shirt collar.

The mother-of-pearl cufflinks.

Silk socks and shined shoes.

The loose knot of his tie.

A revolutionary is above all a charmer.

The weatherman is calling for twenty-eight below this morning.

Hot tea.

I am reading by the frosted window.

Numbness fills me.

I lay the book on my stomach.

My hands together and my head thrown back.

Nothing else will happen today.

This sunbeam

that warms my left cheek.

A child’s afternoon nap

not far from his mother.

In the shadow of the oleander.

Like an old lizard

hiding from the sun.

Suddenly I hear that dull sound

the book makes as it falls to the floor.

The same sound that

the heavy juicy mangos of my childhood made

as they fell by the water basin.

Everything brings me back to childhood.

That fatherless country.

What’s for sure is that

I wouldn’t have written this way had I stayed behind.

Maybe I wouldn’t have written at all.

Far from our country, do we write to console ourselves?

I have doubts about the vocation of the writer in exile.

A man sitting in front of a thatched hut

with a peasant hat on his head.

A plume of smoke rising behind him.

“That’s your father in the countryside,”

my mother said to me.

The President-for-Life’s henchmen were looking for him.

Distant as it is,

that picture comforts me even today.

When it’s noon and I’m too hot

in these tristes tropiques

I will remember my walk

on the frozen lake, near the cabin

where my friend Louise Warren

would go to write.

Cats play on the porch

without concern for passing time.

Their time is not ours.

This kitten slips

into the shadows of my memory.

White socks on the

waxed wood floor.

I’ve lost track of myself.

Memories run together in my mind.

My life is just a small damp package

of washed-out colors and old smells.

It’s as if an eternity had passed

since the phone call.

Time is no longer cut

into fine slices called days.

It’s become a compact mass with a density

greater than the earth’s.

Nothing beyond this imperious need to sleep. Sleep is my only way of dodging the day and the obligations it brings. I have to admit that things have been falling apart for some time now. My father’s death has completed a cycle. It all happened without my knowledge. I had just begun picking up the signs that warned of this maelstrom and already it was carrying me off.

Images from deep in childhood

wash over me like a wave

with such newness

I really feel I am seeing

the scene unfold before me.

I remember another detail

from that picture of my father

but so tiny that my mind

can’t locate it.

All I can recall is the memory

of a moment of pleasure.

I remember now what made me laugh so much when my mother showed me the photo of the peasant in the straw hat. I was six years old. In the left corner, a chicken was scratching at the ground. My mother wondered what I thought was so funny about a chicken. I couldn’t explain what I felt. Today I know: a chicken is so alive it moves even in a picture. Compared to the chicken, everything else looks dead. For me, my father’s face can’t begin to move without my mother’s voice.

This moment always comes.

When it’s time to leave.

We can always hang around a little,

say useless goodbyes and gather up

things we’ll abandon along the way.

The moment stares at us

and we know it won’t back down.

The moment of departure awaits us by the door.

Like something whose presence we feel

but can’t touch.

In reality, it takes on the form of a suitcase.

Time spent anywhere else than

in our native village

is time that cannot be measured.

Time out of time written

in our genes.

Only a mother can keep that sort of count.

For thirty-three years

on an Esso calendar

mine drew a cross over each day

spent without seeing me.

If I meet my neighbor on the sidewalk

he never fails to invite me in

to taste the wine he makes in his basement.

We spend the afternoon discussing Juventus

back in the days when Juventus was Juventus.

He personally knows all the players

though most have been dead for some time.