I got home late at night.
I ran myself a bath.
I always feel at home in water.
An aquatic animal — that’s what I am.
Césaire’s water-warped collection on the floor.
I dried my hands before reaching for it.
I fell asleep in the pink bathtub.
That old fatigue
whose cause I pretend not to know
carried me off
toward uncharted territories.
I slept for an eternity.
That was the only way
to return incognito to the country
with my momentous news.
The night horse that sometimes
I ride at noon knows the path
across the desolate savannah.
Galloping across the mournful plain of time
before discovering
that there is in this life
neither north nor south
father nor son
and that no one
really knows where to go.
We can build our dream house
on the slope of a mountain.
Paint the shutters nostalgia blue.
Plant oleander all around.
Then sit at twilight to watch
the sun sink so slowly into the gulf.
We can do that in each of our dreams
but we’ll never recover the flavor
of those childhood afternoons spent
watching the rain fall.
I remember I would throw myself on the bed
to try to calm the hunger
that devoured me from within.
Today, I sleep
to leave my body
and quench my thirst for the faces of the past.
The little airplane passes steadily
through the great hourglass
that erases the tape of memory.
Here I stand before a new life.
Not everybody gets to be reborn.
I go around a corner in Montreal
and just like that
I find myself in Port-au-Prince.
Like in some teenage dream
where you’re kissing a different girl than the one
you’re holding in your arms.
To sleep and awake again in the country I left
one morning without looking back.
A long reverie made up of unrelated images.
Meanwhile the bathwater has grown cold
and I find I’ve developed gills.
This lethargy always hits me
this time of year
when winter has settled in
and spring is still so far away.
In the midst of the ice at the end of January
I have no more energy to continue
but it’s impossible to turn back.
I’ve started to write again the way
some people start smoking.
Without admitting it to anyone.
And with that feeling I’m doing something
that’s not good for me
but that I can’t resist
any longer.
As soon as I open my mouth, vowels and consonants pour out in a disorderly mess and I have stopped trying to control it. I discipline myself enough to try writing, but after a dozen lines I stop out of exhaustion. I need to find a way that doesn’t demand too much physical effort.
When I bought my old Remington 22, a quarter century ago, I did it to adopt a new style. Tougher, more intense than before. Writing by hand seemed too literary. I wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll writer. A writer of the machine age. Words interested me less than the sound of the keyboard. I had energy to burn. In my narrow room on Saint-Denis Street, I spent all day typing feverishly in the dark. I worked, the windows closed, bare-chested in summer’s furnace-room. With a bottle of cheap wine at my feet.
I return to my trusty pen
which never lets me down.
At the end of a cycle of overwork
we always return to what seems
most natural.
After all these years
there is practically nothing spontaneous left in me.
Yet when the news was announced over the telephone
I heard that short dry click
that can make your heart stop.
A man accosted me in the street.
Are you still writing? Sometimes.
You said you weren’t writing any more. That’s true.
Then why are you writing now?
I don’t know.
He went off, offended.
Most readers
see themselves as characters in a novel.
They consider their lives a tale
full of sound and fury
for which the writer should be
their humble scribe.
There is as much mystery in getting close
to a person as in moving apart.
Between those two points
stretches stifling daily life
with its string of petty secrets.
From which end will I take this day?
By the rising or the setting of the sun?
These days I’ve been getting up
when the sun is going down.
First I need a glass of rum
to dissipate the passion of malaria,
the fever I sometimes confuse
with the energy of life.
I won’t fall asleep until the bottle
is lying on the wooden floor.
When I smile this way in the shadows
it’s because I feel lost
and no one in that case
will make me leave
the pink bathtub
where I curl up in a ball,
a round belly filled with water.
Exile
This morning I picked up the first black notebook
that tells how I came to Montreal.
It was the summer of 1976.
I was twenty-three.
I had just left my country.
Thirty-three years living
far from my mother’s eyes.
Between the journey and the return,
stuck in the middle,
this rotten time
can lead to madness.
That moment always comes
when you stop recognizing yourself
in the mirror.
You’ve lived too long without witnesses.
I compare myself to the photo
of the young man I was before the departure.
The photo my mother slipped
into my pocket just as I
closed the low green gate.
I remember all that sentimentality
made me smile back then.
Today that old photo is my only
reflection to measure passing time.
Sunday afternoon in Port-au-Prince.
I can tell because even the plants
look bored.
We are sitting, my mother and I,
on the gallery, in silence, waiting
for darkness to settle over the oleander.
In the yellowed photo
I am paging through
(no doubt with moist palms and pounding heart)
the summer issue of a woman’s magazine
with girls in bikinis.
Next to me, my mother pretends to sleep.
If I didn’t know then that
I was going to leave
and never return,
my mother, so careworn
that day,
must have felt it
in the most secret part
of her body.
We’re stuck in a bad novel
ruled by a tropical dictator
who keeps ordering
the beheading of his subjects.
We scarcely have time
to escape between the lines
toward the margin that borders the Caribbean Sea.
Here I am years later
in a snow-covered city
walking and thinking of nothing.
I am guided only
by the movements of frigid air
and that fragile neck ahead of me.
Intrigued by the strength
that girl has, so determined,
confronting the harsh
and frigid winds that bring
tears to my eyes
and whirl me around like a dervish.
A child sitting in the middle of the stairway