Dany Laferriere - The Return

I ask Garibaldi (I call him that because he worships Garibaldi) why he doesn’t go back to his country. Mine, I say, is so devastated that it hurts just thinking about seeing it again. But you, just to go back to the stadium to watch Juventus play. He takes the time to go and shut off the television then returns to sit near me. He looks me in the eye and tells me he goes back to Italy every night.

Garibaldi invites me to his place one evening. We go down to the basement. The same ritual. I have to drink his homemade wine. I feel he has something important to tell me. I wait. He gets up, wipes the dust off his books, then produces a signed portrait of D’Annunzio that the writer dedicated to his father. I’m afraid he’s going to entrust me with some scandalous confession. But he just needed to tell me that he’s always hated Juventus, and that his team is Torino FC. Since no one knows that team here and everyone knows Juventus, he says Juventus thinking of Torino. That’s the tragedy of his life. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t think of that betrayal. If one day he ever returns to Italy he isn’t sure he’ll be able to look his old friends in the eye.

I bring back to the country

without a farewell ceremony

these gods who accompanied me

on this long journey

and kept me from losing my mind.

If you don’t know voodoo,

voodoo knows you.

The faces I once loved disappear

with the days of our burned memory.

The sheer fact of not recognizing

even those who were close to us.

The grass grows in, after the fire,

to camouflage all trace of the disaster.

In fact, the real opposition is not

between countries, no matter how different they are,

but between those who have had to learn

to live at other latitudes

(even in inferior conditions)

and those who have never had to face

a culture other than their own.

Only a journey without a return ticket

can save us from family, blood

and small-town thinking.

Those who have never left their village

live unchanging lives

that can prove, with time,

dangerous for their personality.

For three-quarters of the people on this planet

only one type of travel is possible

and that’s to find themselves without papers

in a country whose language and customs

they know nothing of.

There’s no sense accusing them

of wanting to change

other people’s lives

when they have

no control

over their own.

If we really want to leave we have to forget

the very idea of the suitcase.

Things don’t belong to us.

We accumulate them out of the simple need for comfort.

A comfort we have to question

before walking out the door.

We have to understand that the minimum level of comfort

needed to live here in winter

is a dream come true back there.

When I came here, I had one small suitcase into which I could put everything. What I possess today is spread out through my room. I wonder what happened to that first suitcase. Did I forget it in a closet during a quick move? In those days I would slip out, leaving the last month’s rent on the table and a girl sleeping in the bed.

Garibaldi just went by with his grandson, who comes to visit him every Friday after school. He makes him pasta and talks away to him in dialect. The boy is only ten years old, but when you ask him who he hates most of all in the world, he tells you Gianni Agnelli, the owner of Juventus. His son doesn’t want to hear anything about Italy; he likes hockey because it makes him feel closer to the country where he was born. Garibaldi will take revenge on his grandson who will inherit his bottles of bad homemade wine and the yellowed portrait of D’Annunzio.

I fear that an event no matter how great

will never shake

a man from his habits.

The decision is made long before

we actually become aware of it

and for a reason that will always escape us.

The moment of departure has been written

in us so long ago that by the time it comes

it always seems a little banal.

As soon as I moved into a new apartment

I would place my books on the table.

All of them read and reread.

I wouldn’t buy a book unless

the desire to read it was stronger

than the hunger in my belly.

That’s still the case for a lot of people.

When our circumstances change

we think it’s the same

for everyone else.

I know people who constantly

have to choose between eating and reading.

I consume as much meat here

in one winter

as a poor person in Haiti eats

in a lifetime.

I moved very quickly

from forced vegetarian to obligated carnivore.

In my life before, food

was a daily preoccupation.

Everything centered on my stomach.

Once I got something to eat everything was settled.

That’s impossible to understand

if you’ve never experienced it.

Two years ago, after a violent hurricane struck Haiti, I received a letter from a young student who urged me to inform all people of good will who were thinking of sending food to the victims that it would be better if every bag of rice was accompanied by a case of books because, he wrote, “We do not eat to live, but to be able to read.”

One day, I bought a book

without really needing to.

It sat on the little kitchen table

unopened for three months

among the onions and carrots.

Today I realize that a good half

of my library remains unread.

I’m waiting to be in a sanatorium before I read Buddenbrooks by the serious Thomas Mann, or track The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Why do we keep books we’ll never read? For The Leopard, the author’s name justified the expense. I forget what keeps me from reading Thomas Mann’s novel.

I will leave with a little suitcase.

Like the one I had when I came here.

Nearly empty.

Not a single book.

Not even mine.

Stay only one short night in Port-au-Prince

before heading to Petit-Goâve to

see that house again not far

from my grandfather’s old distillery.

Later I’ll cross the rusty old bridge

to visit my grandmother in the cemetery.

I’d just as soon spend the rest of my time here

chatting about everything and nothing

with people who have never

opened a book in their lives.

But sooner or later that essential moment will come

when I confuse the novels I read

with the ones I wrote.

Everything moves on this planet.

Seen from the sky its southern flank

is in constant motion.

Entire populations travel northward

in search of life.

When everyone gets there

we’ll all tip over the edge.

Sometimes a phone call in the middle of the night

turns everything upside down in an instant.

We are lost in restless movement.

It’s always easier to change places

than change lives.

Into a suitcase I throw two or three pairs of jeans, three shirts, two pairs of socks, some underwear, a tube of toothpaste, two toothbrushes, a box of aspirin and my passport. I drink a final glass of water in the middle of the kitchen before switching off the lights for the last time.

My head lowered into the frigid wind, I go to the corner. I’ve walked this street for thirty years. I know every smell (the Tonkinese soup with the strips of rare beef from the little Vietnamese restaurant), every color (the graffiti on the walls of the old hotel with rooms by the hour), every taste (the fruit market where I buy apples in winter and mangos in summer) along Saint-Denis. Clothing stores have replaced the used bookstores. Indian, Thai and Chinese restaurants instead of crummy bars where you could spend all day over a warm beer.