Elvira comes back barefoot
in the warm dust
with the drinks on a little platter.
Piercing eyes.
A shy smile.
Long graceful legs.
Her modesty can’t
hide the explosive energy
she got from her grandfather.
We drink in silence. I couldn’t have said what my drink is made of, but with an effort I recognize papaya, grenadine, lemon, soursop and cane syrup. In any case it’s cold. I look around as I listen to the voices of the mango vendors. We’re in no hurry here, he tells me with a mocking but friendly smile. Windsor knew a lot of people, but we were the Gang of Four. The inner cell. What we wanted was simple: revolution. Windsor got the idea to start a political party. We were twenty years old. “The Sovereign,” because it was the party of the people and the people are always sovereign. We didn’t follow any rules. We had no qualms about using our fists. We went into the offices and kicked out the pencil-pushers and replaced them on the spot with honest and competent employees who didn’t necessarily belong to our group. We had one list of dishonest employees and another list of competent, honest citizens who couldn’t find work, which meant we had plenty to do putting things right. We didn’t have a job; we had a mission. We wanted a country run by citizens, not cousins. We were for action. What about Jacques?
Elvira comes back with a basin of water
and places it on a rickety little table.
François gets up to wash his hair,
his armpits and his torso.
She dries him tenderly
with a big white towel.
The young vestal virgin
caring for her grandfather.
His face transfigured now. Suddenly he’s twenty years younger. I am a plant that needs watering from time to time, otherwise I dry out. I like water too. He sits down again. You said Jacques…? Jacques! Jacques! It was like a punch in the gut and I’ve never gotten over it. Neither did your father. Marie told me because no one could know what he felt. I say no one, and I was his lieutenant. No one except for your mother. She told me he cried. Do you have any news of Gérard? He tosses some grain on the ground and a few seconds later we are surrounded by a flock of chickens. Here I will speak only of Windsor and Jacques. You speak only of the dead? I speak only of people I know. I thought I knew Gérard. That’s all I can say. I feel it’s my turn to talk now. My father put a suitcase in a safety deposit box. It’s certainly not money — your father wasn’t the type to save. What do you think it is? I ask him. Oh, he says, scattering the chickens, I have no idea. I have gotten rid of everything that once weighed me down and the past was the heaviest part. When I left Port-au-Prince, all I brought was my own corpse. But your father was a historian; maybe they’re documents, but let’s forget about it. He takes a long breath as if preparing to say one last thing before falling into silence. All I know is that I loved Windsor and that Jacques is the wound in my life. Now I live here with my granddaughter, surrounded by insatiable chickens I have to feed every hour, illiterate peasants I help to write letters of protest, and noisy women who don’t stop chattering from morning to night, and I have all that I desire.
We leave the market area
and are already heading south
when I notice behind the car
Elvira, running in long strides,
bringing me a hen,
a gift from her grandfather.
Instead of my father’s suitcase
that stayed behind in a Manhattan bank,
my inheritance is a black hen
from his best friend.
My nephew couldn’t breathe
the whole time
Elvira was standing by the car.
And the silence that
followed her departure.
Like the plains after a wildfire.
A Green Lizard
I go for a walk in
the peaceful cemetery of Petit-Goâve.
Graves scattered in the tall grass.
On my grandmother Da’s headstone,
a green lizard looks at me
for a long while
then slips into a break in the rock.
It isn’t far from the des Vignes River
where I caught crayfish
with my cousins
during my rainy childhood.
A girl from the North came
to this cemetery
a few years ago,
with a modest bouquet of flowers for Da
whose grave she sought in vain.
That’s because Da lives
in my books.
She entered head held high
into fiction.
The way others elsewhere
enter heaven.
For the simple bouquet placed that day
on the nearest grave
I promise, Pascale Montpetit,
you’ll always have a spot
in the modest cemetery in Petit-Goâve,
where the gods converse
unsmiling with women.
A man napping
in the shade of a banana tree.
Lying on a tombstone
by the cemetery exit.
Is it more restful
to be that close
to eternal sleep?
I walk up Lamarre Street to number 88, the old house where I spent my childhood with my grandmother Da. As I move up the street, I recognize it less and less. It takes me a while to locate the house. The little field where Oginé kept horses for ten centimes while their owners sold vegetables in the market has changed places. Mozart’s store has done the same. Mozart died before Da. I manage to find the house only because of the building across from it. It has remained intact, the way it was in my memories. The pink-and-white doors and the long walkway where a black dog stood guard. One evening, it went for a thief’s throat.
I picture Da sitting on the gallery and me at her feet watch-ing ants go about their business. People greet Da and she offers them a cup of coffee. In her yellow dress, Vava goes up the street with her mother. My friends Rico and Frantz will pick me up and we’ll go stand before the sea. That afternoon will never end.
Heading South
Just before Carrefour Desruisseaux
and the cutoff toward Aquin,
we stop at Miragoâne to
fill the car with gas.
I recognize the gas station guy.
We had our first communion together.
He hasn’t changed a bit.
He’s the same forty-five years later.
He still has that foolish smile that
has protected him from the sting of time.
The rain has been pelting down since Miragoâne.
An infernal racket on the roof.
We go on talking
as if nothing were happening
then quiet down as we enter Aquin.
Completely drained.
What kind of pride made us want to
challenge the fury of the elements?
The sun returns.
We come to a crossroads and don’t know
whether to go right or left.
The chauffeur believes we should turn left.
My nephew thinks we should go right.
A man sitting on his gallery watches us,
drinking his coffee with his dog at his feet.
Without lifting his head, he points us in the right direction.
I’m sure on the way back he’ll be
in the same spot.
In two days or ten years.
Meanwhile I keep running.
He sits unmoving on his gallery.
We will meet at least
twice in this lifetime.
On the way out and on the way back.
I am reading Césaire in the shade (“earth great vulva raised to the sun”) when my nephew approaches me as delicately as a cat. What’s it like? he asks without preliminaries. What? Living somewhere else. Back there is like here for me now. But it’s not the same landscape. I’ve lost the idea of territory. It happens so gradually you don’t realize it, but as time goes by the images you had in your memory are replaced by new ones and that never stops. He sits down next to me with the serious look of a young man who has started thinking too early in life. For us, you’re in the lap of luxury up there. Not exactly. Just to be able to express yourself without fear, that’s a good start. At first, yes, it was exciting, but after a few years it becomes natural, so you start looking for something else. A human being is a very complicated machine. He’s hungry, he finds something to eat and right away he wants something else, that’s normal, but other people go on seeing him as the starving man he was when he first showed up. Aunt Ninine says you’re the only person who spent three decades in North America and returned home empty-handed. That’s the way it is. That’s how I am. I can’t change things. I’m one of those people who doesn’t take money seriously. I know we need it, but I’m not going to be a slave to it. That’s not what I mean! So Aunt Ninine put you up to this. Silence. She never abandons her prey. It’s all right, I’ll leave you alone with Césaire.