A friend stopped by unannounced,
and we talked all evening.
That’s quite a change from life up North
where everything is arranged by phone.
If we eliminate all surprise from life
we strip it of all interest too.
And die without realizing it.
I seem to think
everything is good here
and everything is bad back there.
It’s just the swing of the pendulum.
For there was a time
when I hated everything about this place.
Men can’t hide anything
for long.
Observe them
and they will strip naked before you.
A cocktail of sex and power
and soon they’re dead drunk.
I’m holed up in my room, fascinated by the documentary I already saw once with my nephew. It’s running twenty-four hours a day on a local channel. Besides the violence, what makes the story successful is its clarity. Dazzling sunlight, dusty streets and two brothers ready to cut each other’s throats for the love of a woman. A real western. At last death has found an esthetic form.
Bare-chested, wearing jeans.
Gun in hand.
Close-up on Tupac.
The young prince of Cité Soleil.
His carnivore’s laugh must arouse
the girls as they watch
cloistered in their wealthy manors
high on the mountainside.
Rarely does a local legend
get us interested
in faces
and not just landscapes.
Here come the final images.
The music that tells you the end is near.
Death at the end of the day that will turn
these young men into heroes of the Cité.
The story takes me back to the beginnings of this country
when our heroes went barefoot
in the golden dust of twilight.
In the distance I hear that irresistible music.
I picture people drinking,
flirting, dancing and laughing.
Who could imagine that not far from the party
a man lying on his back
is seeking out his path through the Milky Way?
At fifty-six, three-quarters of the
people we’ve known are dead.
The half-century is a difficult border
to cross in a country like this.
They move so quickly toward death
that there’s no sense speaking of life expectancy.
It should be death expectancy instead.
If the bullet goes wide.
If even hunger spares you.
Disease won’t miss its mark.
All three together if you are
the chosen of those perverse jesting gods
who grimace in the darkness.
In my early evening sleep
I wonder where that sports car is going
at full throttle through the darkness.
The triumphant roar continues as far as the wall
of the blind alley.
If my ears serve me well
a wealthy young man has just met
that implacable god his father’s
money could never buy off.
I am here watching
what I have seen before,
even without having seen it,
and dwelling on what I already know.
A strange sense of immobility
in the midst of my feverish activity.
Is this what the cat feels
just before it leaps?
The Ex-Revolutionary in His Buick 57
An old doctor, a former minister of Public Works I met at a gallery opening, invited me to his house in Kenscoff, on the heights of Pétionville. We have been driving through the darkness for a while now. A well-maintained Buick 57 is the Rolls-Royce of the Caribbean. I am Gérard of the Gang of Four, he says, turning in my direction. I was a very close friend of your father’s. My blank look reminds him I don’t know much about my father’s life. And he is not at all surprised. The four of us were inseparable: your father, obviously, Jacques. . I’ve heard of him. Of course, he says, sad suddenly, he was the best one of all of us. My mother liked him. He was Marie’s friend, but your mother kept an eye on me. Why is that? Since I had a lot of girlfriends, she thought I’d introduce one of them to her husband, but Windsor had his own stable. And the fourth was François. Is he dead too? No. He’s holed up in the countryside. That guy was so brilliant and now he’s some kind of peasant. There are times when I don’t understand this country, as if we all had a suicidal virus. We just can’t seem to enter modernity. You think you know a guy because you’ve seen him every day for years and suddenly he announces he has to return to the shadows because a household god is demanding his presence there. Is that what happened with François? I don’t know if it was some kind of voodoo business, but in his case, what a waste! Where does he live? The last time I came across him, it was in Artibonite. He was involved in growing rice. I was on my way to Cap-Haïtien when I saw a peasant up to his waist in water. I told my driver to stop. The peasant was François. And to think the guy could have been minister of Agriculture in any government. I did everything in my power to bring him back to Port-au-Prince, you can imagine, the guy loved Brecht and Genet, but to each his own path. Monsieur François is in Croix-des-Bouquets now, the chauffeur says. I know, the ex-minister replies with a note of irritation, I’ve been told he’s raising chickens. The Buick 57 speeds through the night. The chauffeur seems to know every pothole in the pavement. He avoids them with such dexterity it’s like driving on a perfectly paved road.
As we get close to Pétionville
the girls seem younger.
Their skirts shorter.
Their gazes more meaningful.
This war is as ferocious
as the one between the Cité Soleil gangs.
Girls have always paid
a higher price when the city
turns into a jungle
and the night becomes a trap.
A hungry cock
spares no one
in its path.
Though the hour is late, we detour onto the Delmas road to go see Frankétienne. The doctor wants to buy a painting in his latest style. Frankétienne is so prolific an artist he can ruin a collector. He welcomes us so uproariously he must have woken up the whole neighborhood. The ogre in his lair. Despite the doctor’s rich praise, Frankétienne is reticent about selling him a painting from his personal collection. The rich doctor lets him know money is no object, but the painter digs in his heels. Coffee arrives — Frankétienne hasn’t touched alcohol since his illness. Right now he is working on a novel whose voluminous manuscript stretches across his wide worktable in spectacular disorder. Everything is larger than life with him. Bare-chested. Gargantuan appetite. Face as red as a boiled lobster. The wild enthusiasm of a man obsessed with literature and painting. He has painted several thousand canvases and his first great novel, Ultravocal, has metastasized into some thirty volumes over forty years. Urban turbulence is the only setting for this ogre. Seeing how perplexed I am by this expanse of paper scribbled with obscure signs that look more like musical notes than letters of the alphabet (I wouldn’t put it past him to invent a new vocabulary and grammar in order to write a truly original book), he announces that his next work will be an opera-novel. What’s an opera-novel? asks the chauffeur who seemed to be dozing in the corner. Frankétienne turns to him abruptly: you’re the first one who ever dared ask me that question. Everyone else pretends to understand. I can’t explain it, but when I finish the book, you’ll see, and in the meanwhile, allow me to give you a painting. He disappears into his storehouse and returns with an enormous canvas we’ll never be able to get into the car. He disassembles the frame with such energy he nearly rips apart the painting. He throws it into the trunk of the Buick 57 as the doctor-collector looks on in astonishment, empty-handed, his pockets still stuffed with money.