Even before the new day dawns
I can hear
the sounds of the town
awakening like a servant girl.
On her tiptoes.
A woman brings me coffee.
The white cup.
The embroidered cloth.
She waits until I have finished drinking it.
The way they say good morning in Baradères.
The man appears soon after. With his hat over his heart. I make room for him next to me. He sits down. For some time he says nothing. That’s my grave, he murmurs. My whole family has been buried there for four generations. I immediately get to my feet. Stay. It’s an honor for us. Again this silence I have no intention of breaking. My wife recognized you. You know me? Legba. He is confusing me with the god who stands at the border between the visible and invisible worlds. The one who allows us to move between them. I’ve been out of the country. We know that. I’ve come to bury my father, and now I am being welcomed like a god in his native village. We were waiting for you, he says solemnly. But I am not Legba. You are the son of Windsor K, my classmate. We went to grammar school together here. I am amazed, astonished. If we didn’t know who you were, you wouldn’t be alive now. You’re not the first to return to bury a family member. I see. But you’re the first I’ve seen without a body. And you are accompanied by Legba. And Legba chose to spend the night on our grave. We don’t deserve such an honor. What sign spoke to you of Legba? The black hen. The hen? Yes, the black hen. Of course, the black hen. Sometimes you have to pretend to understand, because here no one will explain to you what you are supposed to know.
A large but skinny and mangy dog
comes and rubs himself against his leg.
I wonder if he
isn’t a god too.
The dog star I saw last night.
Children cross the cemetery
on their way to school.
As they go past they run their palm
over their ancestors’ graves.
That way they keep daily contact
with the other world.
Last Sleep
By road or by sea?
I choose the sea.
It so happens, the man tells me, there’s a sailboat
about to leave the harbor.
It’s my cousin Rommel’s boat.
A village of cousins.
First we go to La Gonâve for wood
that we’ll deliver to Pestel.
Several women get on board the Epiphany.
They need oil, salt and flour.
They impose the rhythm of daily life
on the sailboat.
We fish along the way.
On the great salty highway.
Mostly threadfin.
The women never look at the water.
Half the crew doesn’t know how to swim.
The sea was off limits to the slave.
From the beach, he could dream of Africa.
And a nostalgic slave
isn’t worth much
on a plantation.
He would be killed so his sadness
would not spread to others.
The brilliant sun
in a cloudless sky
and the turquoise sea lined with coconut palms
is just a Northern reverie
for the man trying
to escape the leaden cold of February.
From where I stand I note:
Ferocious beauty.
Eternal summer.
Death under the sun.
We put in at every bay, where various female cousins await the merchandise in noisy marketplaces. We use the stops to pick up the necessities of life. New vendors climb aboard, and the fire in their bodies means they’re members of Erzulie Freda Dahomey’s family. The men watch them sleepily. Start something with one of those women and, at the next bay, a new machete will be waiting in the sun.
Before getting off, a woman wanted to buy my hen to sell it, she said, at the next market. Just to take it off my hands because she’d pay market price for it and wouldn’t make any profit. The lady next to me stepped in. Later, she made me swear never to sell the black hen whatever happened. But I knew that already.
The men are farmers
who work close to their huts.
The women know every one
of the tiny villages where
they sell their vegetables.
Jealous husbands make their wives
stay at the local market.
That gazelle with the slender ankles
accompanies her mother.
Her head down.
A sidelong glance.
She’s studying everything
for the day when it’s her turn
to make the trip alone.
Up ahead, a small group
of people on the shore.
A sign announces “Les Abricots.”
The Indians thought
it was paradise.
I finally get there.
Tall trees whose
branches bend low
to touch the sea.
Big pink fish
still flopping in
the fishermen’s boat.
Kids with navels like flowers
devouring perfumed mangos.
The sweet life before Columbus.
I’m not so sure whether
I am in real time
as I move toward
this dreamed landscape.
I’ve read too many books.
Seen too many paintings.
One day, learn to see things
in their naked beauty.
Always too much hope ahead.
And too much disappointment behind.
Life is a long ribbon
that ceaselessly unfolds
in changing variations
of both.
I go my way
toward a small thatched hut
deep in the banana plantation.
The coffee is prepared
by an Indian princess
with high cheekbones
and the pure breath
of highland women.
In the hammock,
a pre-Columbian invention
that says much
about the degree of refinement
in this society,
you can spend your life
in horizontal meditation.
Three months
to escape the urban intensity
that once gave my life its rhythm.
Three months sleeping
protected by an entire village
that seems to know the source
of that sweet sickness of sleep.
This is not winter.
This is not summer.
This is not the North.
This is not the South.
Life is spherical now.
My former life seems so distant.
That life when I was a journalist, an exile,
a worker, even a writer.
And when I met so many people
for whom now I am no more
than a slowly fading shadow.
Humble houses scattered in the landscape.
Nothing here to recall the Indian genocide
so expertly orchestrated by the Spanish.
His hand on his Alcantara cross
Nicolás de Ovando gave the signal for the massacre
that Arawak memory refuses to forget.
A gentle hand
on my forehead cools my fever.
I doze between dawn and twilight.
And sleep the rest of the time.
Rocked by the music
of the ancient Caribbean wind
I watch the black hen
unearth a worm
that squirms in its beak.
And so I see myself in the jaws of time.
Someone has seen me smile
in my sleep too.
Like the child I was
in the happy times with my grandmother.
A time at long last recovered.
The journey is over.