at night don’t really know it.
I sit down across from city hall
to listen to Wagner’s tetralogy
that the mayor has played every evening.
A man sits down quite close to me.
He talks to me through half-closed eyes,
his hands hang between his legs.
His conversation is punctuated
by long conspiratorial silences.
It takes him half an hour
to realize we don’t know each other.
He puts his hat back on before disappearing
into the shadows.
My mother told me this afternoon
in the voice of someone
who knows she’s being listened to
that the dead walk among us.
You can recognize them by the way
they appear and disappear
without us knowing why they were there.
Lost Things and Lost People
The worker’s day is so well regulated he no longer feels the day’s heat. We can understand why the first thing the silk workers did in their rebellion was to shoot at the cathedral clock. They recognized their ancestral enemy. Every second is a drop of blood.
I can’t really make out objects.
The sleep that comes to me
between two explosions of noise
is like an uppercut.
This isn’t sleep.
This is a knockout.
I’ve been awake for a while, and I feel like I’ve been put through the mill. My body is suffering an adaptation process that’s beyond my will. I am the master of nothing. Everything I banished from my mind back there in order to live without the bonds of nostalgia has a concrete presence here. Those things sought refuge in my body where the cold froze them in place. Now my body is slowly warming. My memory is thawing: that little puddle of water in the bed.
Breathing is difficult. Memories come back to me in three dimensions with their colors, smells and tastes. The cold preserved all their freshness as if I were seeing this fruit or that red bicycle for the first time. The sapodilla with its velvet peel so soft to the touch. The yellow-eyed dogs wandering through the night. The little girls jumping rope while screaming in voices so high-pitched they sound like a flock of birds. The old man at the window of the big wooden house by the Paramount movie theater. The plume of smoke on the mountain. Things today replaced by others of the same density, so that every traveler can make himself a store of images and emotions he can recover at his return.
I also remember the picture
in the living room in the house in Petit-Goâve.
A little uninhabited island
overgrown with fruit trees
where young felines played together.
That’s where I spent my afternoons
when things got too heavy for my young life.
Intolerable heat.
A white bowl filled with water
in the shadows of the bedroom.
Three mangos next to it.
I eat them all, bare-chested.
Then wash my face.
I’d forgotten what mangos taste like at noon.
I go out on the veranda.
A great coconut palm
planted right in the middle
of a house under construction
is dancing in the furious wind.
I watch the scene from the hotel balcony.
For a war correspondent,
that’s not much action.
This city awakens so early
that by two o’clock in the afternoon
it’s on its knees.
In the shade of their broad hats
the ladies who sell melons
are taking their nap.
Their backs against the hotel wall.
Their voices so shrill they break your heart
the women hawking baubles
desperate to sell off their trinkets
and the aggressive horns of the drivers
going from the office to the restaurant
can’t quite cover the lullaby
this woman is softly singing to her daughter
sleeping between two sacks of vegetables.
I receive an urgent summons to the phone. I slip on a pair of pants and rush down to the reception desk. It’s a guy who says he’s a childhood friend of mine. All he wants is money to pay his daughter’s hospital bills. I hesitate but he tells me he’s just on the other side of the gate, calling from a cell phone. I’m about to go looking for him when the receptionist motions me to forget it. “I know the fellow, he always tries that with my guests,” she lets on with a wide smile.
I’ve been away so long I can scarcely remember the faces that flash past me so quickly, demanding to be recognized. “Don’t you remember me?” A feeling of shame. “Your cousin introduced us the night before you left.” So we met once, thirty-three years ago. I’m alone in the middle of eight million people with shared family and personality traits jammed onto half an island, and they all want me to recognize them. They all come with a story that I’m a part of. Apparently we once went to the movies together, forty years ago. I was the best friend of that guy’s older brother. Surely I must know the cousin of the other guy who lives in Montreal. My head is spinning. Sometimes I put a voice to a face but they don’t belong together. It took me a while but I understand that in this thirst to be recognized, they are looking for confirmation that they’re not dead.
I was paging through
the paper on the couch
when I noticed his shadow
pacing in front of the gate.
Now I don’t dare go out.
Through the Window of the Novel
The hotel owner points out that all the information in today’s paper is at least a week old. For the news of the day, you’re better off with the radio. The delay, in an area in which the ability to deliver information rapidly is more important than the information itself, acts as a buffer between the event and ourselves. That way we’re protected from the bad news, which comes to us with a few days’ lag. By the time it reaches us, the shock wave has been absorbed somewhat by the dense sweating crowd. These few days between the event and ourselves are enough to maintain our equilibrium.
The news of the week concerns both the upper-class neighborhoods and Cité Soleil. A rare occurrence. A young man “from a good family” who’d been kidnapped several months ago has become one of the country’s most pitiless gang leaders. The family’s lawyer declared on the radio that “he didn’t want to get kidnapped anymore and that’s why he became a kidnapper.” In the poor districts they’re still laughing about what the editorialist called the “Stockholm syndrome.” The answer wasn’t long in coming: it appears in graffiti painted on the walls of Cité Soleil. If a rich kid who gets kidnapped by a gang becomes a gang leader after two weeks because of the Stockholm syndrome, then how come a criminal who spends years in prison doesn’t become a cop when he gets out?
We learn that most kidnappings are carried out between people who know each other well — sometimes they belong to the same family. That’s where hatred is most deep-rooted. That’s where everyone knows the exact amount of money the victim has in his bank account. The ransom demands become more precise and there’s less negotiation. Kidnapping has become such a lucrative business that the rich weren’t going to miss out on the action for long. Unlike the photos of the hoodlums at the young man’s side, the paper took the trouble to blur his picture.
Since the government can’t throw impertinent journalists in jail the way it used to, the upper classes have picked up the slack by buying them off at rock-bottom prices. They buy off the corrupt journalist with money. They buy off the poor but honest journalist with considerations. They buy off the perverse journalist by letting him breathe in the subtle perfume of the very young woman who leans toward him during a classy cocktail party.