I also think of those who could have done it
and haven’t.
Then I feel badly looking out on my city
from a hotel balcony.
Near Sainte-Anne Square I meet an old friend I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. At the time he lived in this workers’ neighborhood where he still lives. What amazes me most since I’ve been back is how almost no one has left their district. They have gotten poorer but keep fighting the wind that wants to blow them into more miserable quarters.
I remember the neat square with the flowering bushes surrounding a tall statue of Toussaint Louverture on horseback. Right across from the school of the same name. Now the bushes are black with mud. People’s faces gray and dusty. Houses with filthy entrances. I don’t understand how people can get used to such calamity.
I promised myself not to look at the city
with yesterday’s eyes.
Images from the past constantly try
to superimpose themselves on the present.
I am navigating through two worlds.
Sometimes we used to follow the train to filch
bits of sugar cane and chew on them
in the shadow of the King Salomon Star.
That crummy hotel became a bordello at night
while during the day it served as the headquarters
for all sorts of wildlife from the countryside
who’d come to the capital to do their dirty deals.
The real traveling salesmen stayed
in a modest hotel near Martissant.
We would lie down on the rails and jump out of the way just before the train came. We’d bet on who would get off the track last. My friend won every time. One day I asked him what his secret was. I close my eyes, he told me, and imagine I’m making love to Juliette. Juliette drove us all crazy back then. Of course he’d want her to be his. I wouldn’t have gotten off the track in time. I meet him again: he is a prisoner of his wheelchair. He can’t move his legs. First I thought that desire had won out over fear. Once he told me that after his friends left, he would go back and play this Russian roulette all by himself. Can you play that sort of game alone? Who’s the winner then? That was his way of having an orgasm. The closer the train came, the clearer Juliette’s face would become.
We lived in an electric atmosphere. It was dangerous just to stick our noses outside when the sharks in dark glasses paraded past in their luxury cars with young Dominican prostitutes smoking long menthol cigarettes. Often a machine gun pretended to sleep on the backseat. They spent whole nights gambling at the casino. We had to stay out of their way when they went home at dawn to sleep, because they didn’t think twice about firing at anything that moved — just to play another game. Their primary job was the Chief’s security. They’d invent some political plot just to throw their weight around in a recalcitrant neighborhood.
My friend got shot in the hip at the casino
by an officer jealous of the way his wife
couldn’t take her eyes off him.
The story got into the papers.
The President offered him money.
His father refused.
The opposition wanted to make a hero out of him.
He refused.
I watch him concentrate all the energy
he can summon on the thing
that stokes his desire.
He begins to burn
when a girl in a short skirt
brushes against him not suspecting
the effect of such provocation
on a man in a wheelchair.
He can’t move his legs
but the organ in question
still seems quite alert.
I’m afraid to call the roll
to find out what state
my generation is in.
Some work for the government, others are in prison. Some vegetate, others live in luxury. Some still go in for seduction, others have aged prematurely. But those who never could leave the country and who always wanted to, feel, when they meet me again, that it’s up to a new generation to dream of that journey.
In Praise of Diarrhea
I went by the pharmacy and on the glass door there was a message scrawled on a piece of cardboard: “Closed for Funeral.” Diarrhea had kept me up all night. I couldn’t stop shitting, amazed once again at how much the belly can hold. The night before, I drank some fruit juice from a stall along my way, just to prove that I was still a son of the soil. Nationalism can trick my mind, but not my guts.
The young pharmacist with icy hands
recommended Buscopan
and amoxicillin three times a day.
Next door I bought a bottle of water
and began the treatment immediately.
I run to the hotel bathroom and settle in comfortably. I might be in for quite a stay. I look around and on the window ledge I discover an old issue of Historia that tells me everything about Himmler’s ascension through the Third Reich and the court rivalry, at the end, when they were done in like rats in the bunker. It was understood that the war was lost when Nazi officers started dressing without first taking a shower. I thought of my teenage years, when those stories fascinated me, which threw my mother into despair since she was scared silly of everything that had to do with politics in any form. Strangely she stopped worrying about me once I published my first article in Le Nouvelliste. It was a long literary commentary about Ficus, a novel that had just come out. In any other country, literary criticism would not have been a dangerous vocation, except for the risk of getting slapped by a parlor poet offended by some unflattering comment about his latest volume. But not in Haiti. My article provoked two reactions that were decisive for my career. The first came from Professor Ghislain Gouraige, the author of the monumental History of Haitian Literature (from independence to the present) that we studied in school, and who congratulated me for the originality of my opinions even as he pointed out a dozen errors of fact. That was followed the same day by a summons to the barracks of Major Valmé. According to established criteria, I had arrived.
My mother, trembling but determined, accompanied me to the office of the fearsome Major Valmé. I was exceedingly calm. The Major called for a coffee for my mother but did not allow her to attend the interrogation that was to be “a friendly conversation between two true lovers of literature.” My mother insisted, but the Major asked a non-commissioned officer to look after her. All this kind attention, instead of reassuring her, only increased her anxiety. But the conversation with the Major went well and did not go much beyond the subject of literature. As for the novel by Rassoul Labuchin, his opinion differed from mine. For him, Labuchin’s real project was not literary but political. Did I know that the author had spent time in Moscow? And that he was the confidant of the communist writer Jacques Stephen Alexis? In my opinion, General Sun, My Brother by Jacques Stephen Alexis is one of the most beautiful novels in Haitian literature. Quite spontaneously he replied that his preferences leaned toward Romancero aux étoiles. Mauriac was his favorite writer. Mauriac’s description of the bourgeoisie of Bordeaux reminded him of his own adolescence in the provinces. He ended the conversation by congratulating me on my “clear and readable style so unlike the usual Haitian manner.” I was impressed by the man’s elegance and culture, though I did not forget that he ran Papa Doc’s torture chambers. At times we heard screams coming from nearby rooms. Still, I continued to believe that literature would save me from all harm. On our return, my mother, too overwrought to ask me what was said in the office, took me out for a sandwich and a Coca-Cola and even wanted to buy me cigarettes. I wrote a literary column in the weekly Le Petit Samedi Soir until my colleague Gasner Raymond was murdered by the Tonton Macoutes on June 1, 1976, on the beach at Léogâne. I went into exile immediately afterward, in Montreal.