Dany Laferriere - The Return

Human flesh is meat too.

How long can a taboo

stand up to sheer necessity?

Fleshly desires.

Psychedelic visions.

Sidelong looks.

They’d like to devour

their neighbor for lunch.

Like one of those mangos

with such smooth skin.

A man whispers something into the ear

of his friend who smiles discreetly.

A gentle breeze lifts the woman’s dress

as she runs laughing to hide behind a wall.

Drops so fine

I didn’t realize it was raining.

Pain takes a time out.

This undecided lizard,

after much thought,

jumps from its branch.

A grass-green flash

cuts through space.

I am in this city

where nothing

for once

happens besides

the simple pleasure of being alive

under the blazing sun

at the corner of Vilatte and Grégoire Streets.

Hundreds of paintings covered in dust hang on the walls, all along the street. They look as though the same artist painted them all. Painting is as popular as soccer in this neighborhood. The same luxuriant landscapes remind us that the artist doesn’t paint the real country but the country of his dreams.

I ask that barefoot painter

why he always paints trees bending low

under the weight of ripe heavy fruit

when everything around him is desolation.

You understand, he tells me with a sad smile,

who would want to hang in his living room

what he can see out the window?

When I see that teenager sitting by himself

on the branch of a mango tree

strumming away on a battered old guitar,

I understand that amateur musicians

have taken over from the birds.

All that boy needs

is a pair of transparent wings.

A man who knew me thirty-five years ago comes up to me, arms open. With abundant details and flying spittle, he conjures up memories I’d completely forgotten and, worse, that don’t interest me. I try to avoid his eyes as we speak. What started as a wonderful reunion has turned into torture. I’m waiting for him to get to the point: money. In the end he moves on without asking anything of me. I might have underestimated him. As I walk, I try to retrace the thread of his story. Why didn’t I listen to him more carefully? Because of his dirty clothes, his black fingernails, his toothless mouth? If he had been cleaner and more prosperous, would I have paid him more attention? Even if he opened the photo album of my teenage years before my eyes.

This old gentleman slightly bent at the waist

sweeping dry leaves

that have fallen into the courtyard of the city hall.

An activity that must take him all day.

From time to time, he sits down

but gets up with every breath of wind

that brings with it more dry leaves.

Not far away, on a yellow sofa that a little girl has just finished cleaning, two businessmen are chatting as they wait to see the mayor. People’s voices cover the hushed tones of negotiation between these men who have always lived in a world protected by cash.

You have no idea

of the effect that new bills have

on people’s eyes

in a country

where a worker makes

less than a dollar a day.

Last night, in front of the discotheque,

a teenage girl in a red miniskirt

and a tiny yellow blouse

screamed that she wasn’t a whore

because “I don’t want money,

I just want what you can buy

with money.”

I am sitting under the hotel’s almond tree

during the afternoon siesta.

A low pink wall

separates me from the street.

Life is on the other side.

Standing on the bench, I look over the wall at three young women in front of a pyramid of brightly colored fruit. They are talking among themselves so fast I can’t make out what they are saying. Their words interest me less than the beauty of the scene.

What I see in the marketplace

is no different from what I see

in the little painting I just bought.

I look at the two scenes

unable to say

which one imitates the other.

A bird flies swiftly

into the clear hard noonday sky.

So thin but with an astonishing

determination to get as close

as possible to the sun.

It goes so far up

my eyes abandon the quest.

A well-groomed young woman.

Black skirt below the knee.

She crosses the little square quickly

on her way to the phone booth

whose wire has been cut.

She sits down on a bench next to the phone.

Her head between her hands.

Men in black.

Women in tears.

Light rain despite the sun.

The little cemetery, hidden behind the marketplace,

is an oasis of peace.

Women in mourning though not widows

move among the dead

telling of their pain

without fear of being interrupted.

It’s the only spot

where killers never come.

To live on a deforested island

knowing they’ll never

see what is happening

on the other side of the water.

For most people

the hereafter is the only country

they have any hope of visiting.

A dog moves up the street.

Nose skyward.

Tail up.

It runs to the head

of the funeral procession.

I remember the pallbearers of my childhood

who danced with the casket on their shoulders.

Women threatening to throw themselves

into the hole to join their husband.

Frightened dogs running among the graves

while the wind shook the palm trees

like a schoolgirl playing with her braids.

Death seemed so funny to me back then.

Later when I was a teenager

not a day would go by without

the bell tolling for someone.

Each time it made my mother’s blood run cold.

Death that people compared to a journey

set my own mind wandering.

Death could come at any time.

A bullet in the back of the neck.

A red flash in the night.

It appeared so quickly we

never had time to see it coming.

Its speed made us doubt its existence.

A quiet neighborhood.

Very discreet.

A vendor sets up her stall

near a wall.

Then a second one comes.

Then a third.

A week later

a new market has sprung up.

And life has changed in the neighborhood.

A man running with sweat

with a white plastic water pail.

He hides behind the low wall

and vigorously washes his face,

neck, torso and armpits.

Then returns to the market.

How can anyone think of other people when they haven’t eaten for two days and their son is at the General Hospital which doesn’t even have enough bandages? But that’s exactly what that woman did when she brought me a cool glass of water. Where does she find such selflessness?

That’s me in the yellowing photograph,

that thin young man from Port-au-Prince

in the terrible 1970s.

If you’re not thin when you’re twenty in Haiti,

it’s because you’re on the side of power.

Not just because of malnutrition.

More like the constant fear

that eats away at you from inside.

I remember the sun beating down on the backs of people’s heads. Dusty street, no trees. We all had the same emaciated look (wild eyes and dry lips). That’s how you could recognize our generation. We used to meet up in the afternoon in a little restaurant near Saint-Alexandre Square, with a view of the lumpy buttocks of anarchist poet Carl Brouard. This son of the solid bourgeoisie had chosen to wallow in the black mud, in the middle of the coal market, to share the poverty of the working-class people. There weren’t just parlor poets tethered to corrupt power back then.