MAGIC MOMENT
AFTER A WHILE, he ushered me into his office, which was filled with photos of the two of us in different settings in Port-au-Prince. In front of the Rex Cinema, next to an ice cream vendor, playing soccer in the big square on the Champ-deMars, in our school uniforms across from the girls’ high school. I have no photos from that time. I’d forgotten François was so interested in photography, and that he’d even taken a correspondence course. He showed me a small picture, rather blurry, taken with some Japanese tourists. Japanese people in Haiti — I hadn’t remembered that. Nothing like a photo to cast you back to another time. We all have two lives, at least. One that settles into memory like a stone at the bottom of a well, and another that disappears as it unravels like a vapor trail. The tourists had actually been journalists from a big Tokyo daily who’d passed themselves off as innocent travelers in order to write an exposé about life in Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship. We spent a lot of time with the young lady interpreter, Miss Shikibu Murasaki, who worked at the Japanese embassy. It was a very Japanese summer. The blushing Miss Murasaki would invite us all the time to the embassy for cocktails. I suppose everything started between François and her back then. I hadn’t noticed a thing, too absorbed at the time by Diderot and my fascination with the beginning of Jacques le fataliste. I read it as I walked down the street. You can’t read that book sitting down. That sense of speed suited me perfectly. I was always bugging François with Diderot. He thought the guy was lazy. The idea of laziness was fine with me. A lazy writer — now that was a life for me! Not too many descriptions and a lot of dialogue. Diderot is still an influence on me. There’s plenty of talk in his books. I like books where you see people talking. I hate it when the narrator talks for them. That method never got too far, though, because although Frenchmen love to converse, they don’t like to let their characters talk. Apart from crime novels, you never hear anyone even saying hello in a French book. It’s too easy, so writers skip that step, which you can’t do in real life. Unfortunately, Miss Murasaki had to return to New York to study journalism at Columbia University. All summer, we accompanied the journalists through the country, despite the Tontons-Macoutes who stuck to us like glue. We didn’t really notice them, so subjugated were we by Miss Murasaki, who led the expedition with wonderful grace. We would have followed her right into one of Papa Doc’s prisons. The journalists told her that her studies at the famous American university would help her find a job at a Tokyo newspaper. Unless she preferred working in television, in which case it would be simpler to go back to Japan and get a job doing the weather. Television is much more image than intelligence. Miss Murasaki turned as red as a beet at the very word “television.” We understood then that she was too shy for the small screen that sucks in human energies and spits out wind in return. François went to be with her in New York after I left Haiti. Now it’s François telling the story. We lived together for a while, but we were too different to share life as a couple. That had nothing to do with the fact she was Japanese. She considered love from the accountant’s point of view. Every week, she had to draw up a statement of our romantic and financial life. I spent, and she saved. We quickly understood we couldn’t live together. Since our desire still burned, we remained lovers, going from my little room to her spacious apartment in Manhattan (her parents were in banking and the diplomatic service). I continued to see her friends, who were all Japanese. Then I moved to Brooklyn, where I found something bigger. We saw each other less and less: I spent more time at my place, since I had sun in my room now. A love affair in New York is a fleeting thing. The sun is more reliable. Just before I moved out of Manhattan, I ran into a girl at Columbia who was a cousin of Shikibu’s. She lived in Brooklyn too. Destiny is made of many coincidences. Well, that didn’t work out either. I came back to Montreal, and that’s when I met Shônagon, at McGill where she was doing her master’s in accounting. Shônagon never knew I’d had two Japanese women before her. I convinced her that our meeting was the fruit of chance, and not the result of a path set out before me. You don’t just meet a girl, I’ve come to see, you meet a culture. And you don’t leave that culture easily. It takes five unhappy affairs to break free from a culture as powerful as Japan’s. Once you meet your first Italian girl, you’ll be eating spaghetti the rest of your life. That’s what makes people suspicious of interracial romances: they wonder if it’s really them or their culture that interests their partner. Blacks want to know whether they are really loved, or if someone just wants to support a cause. And rich people, if it’s just about their money. That’s why I never spoke of Shikibu in front of Shônagon. Sometimes I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to tell the truth, since I’m always afraid of running into someone who knew me in New York. Maybe she hasn’t told me everything about her life, either. Maybe she keeps a secret diary. So we’re even. We laughed. And with that laughter we left his office.
Shônagon was busy wrapping something when we came into the living room. She offered me the tightly tied package and forbade me to open it until I was by myself. François wanted to go hear some jazz at the Rising Sun. He was friends with the owner, a certain Doudou Boicel. I informed him that I didn’t have a dime — and he smiled kindly. Tonight was on him. We heard Dizzy Gillespie. A great sound, but it would have been better without all the exaggerated facial expressions. Then we went for a nightcap on Rue St-Denis, in the East End. The West was for meeting his friends. The East was where he went out with his wife. He ran his life like an accountant, with two columns: debit and credit. That’s all he’d kept of Miss Murasaki — the banking side. François was beaming. Even when I wasn’t saying anything, he was sure I was the most brilliant person he’d ever met. There was no curing him of that illusion. It was my karma. Fortunately, very few people share his opinion. The rest of the world, to reach the same conclusion, would demand proof — of which I have none. François weighed me with his heart, not his mind. That’s great, but hard to bear. Another nightcap. A little drunk, François wanted to introduce me to the customers. Shônagon kept her eyes lowered. After lengthy negotiations, I managed to convince him to give up his plan. I helped him to his feet. We headed for the car, climbing the hill that lead to Sherbrooke Street. Leaning on my shoulder, François started muttering things I had trouble making out. Like that he’d never loved Miss Murasaki, but seeing that I was interested in her, he got to her first. He wasn’t going to let me win in the woman area. I was in books, that was okay. The rest just sort of happened, he said, and here I am in the Montreal suburbs with a new Japanese girl. In life, we always take the wrong path at the right time. François wanted to drive me back, even though I kept telling him I’d rather walk beneath the glowing moon, which always makes me feel closer to Basho. Pretty soon, these wonderful mild nights will be over — winter is coming in. Life, for François, ended with adolescence. He filled up with memories back then, and everything has been frozen in that emotional space ever since. He’s never wanted to leave that magic moment. We weren’t far from the car when his wife slipped a matchbook into my hand with her cell phone number written on it.