One day, I bought a book
without really needing to.
It sat on the little kitchen table
unopened for three months
among the onions and carrots.
Today I realize that a good half
of my library remains unread.
I’m waiting to be in a sanatorium before I read Buddenbrooks by the serious Thomas Mann, or track The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Why do we keep books we’ll never read? For The Leopard, the author’s name justified the expense. I forget what keeps me from reading Thomas Mann’s novel.
I will leave with a little suitcase.
Like the one I had when I came here.
Nearly empty.
Not a single book.
Not even mine.
Stay only one short night in Port-au-Prince
before heading to Petit-Goâve to
see that house again not far
from my grandfather’s old distillery.
Later I’ll cross the rusty old bridge
to visit my grandmother in the cemetery.
I’d just as soon spend the rest of my time here
chatting about everything and nothing
with people who have never
opened a book in their lives.
But sooner or later that essential moment will come
when I confuse the novels I read
with the ones I wrote.
Everything moves on this planet.
Seen from the sky its southern flank
is in constant motion.
Entire populations travel northward
in search of life.
When everyone gets there
we’ll all tip over the edge.
Sometimes a phone call in the middle of the night
turns everything upside down in an instant.
We are lost in restless movement.
It’s always easier to change places
than change lives.
Into a suitcase I throw two or three pairs of jeans, three shirts, two pairs of socks, some underwear, a tube of toothpaste, two toothbrushes, a box of aspirin and my passport. I drink a final glass of water in the middle of the kitchen before switching off the lights for the last time.
In a Café
My head lowered into the frigid wind, I go to the corner. I’ve walked this street for thirty years. I know every smell (the Tonkinese soup with the strips of rare beef from the little Vietnamese restaurant), every color (the graffiti on the walls of the old hotel with rooms by the hour), every taste (the fruit market where I buy apples in winter and mangos in summer) along Saint-Denis. Clothing stores have replaced the used bookstores. Indian, Thai and Chinese restaurants instead of crummy bars where you could spend all day over a warm beer.
I slip into the student café
on the corner of Ontario Street.
The waitress looks my way and doesn’t smile.
I sit at the back, by the radiator.
After a while she comes to take my order.
I can barely hear Arcade Fire.
A quick breakfast before heading to the station.
On the paper placemat I scribble down these quick notes (with little drawings between each scene) for song ideas as I sip my coffee.
SIDE A
Scene 1: I wander the streets with the key to my room in my pocket. I’m afraid of losing the key even as I savor the idea (close at hand) that everything I own at this very moment is in my pocket.
Scene 2: I meet a friend I knew in Port-au-Prince and he invites me to his place. His wife welcomes me with bedroom eyes and a smile that’s too sensual. I don’t stick around because I don’t play that game.
Scene 3: I go by the museum where the Modigliani show is on. I get in without paying. His life is no different from mine: frugal repasts, girls with long necks and cheap wine.
Scene 4: I’m sitting on a park bench, right across from the library. Right next to me two teenagers are kissing as a stunned squirrel looks on. The ducks are indifferent to the whole thing.
Scene 5: I’m making myself spaghetti with garlic sauce while keeping one eye on an old war film on my little black-and-white TV. It stars that German actress with the heavy hands — what is her name again?
Scene 6: From my window, I follow that girl in the summer dress (her legs and shoulders bare) all the way to her door. She turns around, feeling my eyes on the nape of her neck, then goes inside. Two days later, she is in my bathtub.
SIDE B
Scene 7: A well-dressed lady is walking in front of me on Laurier Street. She drops an earring. I try and tell her. She pays me no attention. I thrust the earring in her face. She grabs it out of my hand. And looks at me as if I had tried to steal her jewelry.
Scene 8: In a bar, people are talking about suicide. I’m always impressed by the courage it takes to choose death that way. The guy next to me says he’s already made two serious attempts, but he couldn’t stand a single day of exile. It’s the opposite for me. I don’t think I could survive suicide.
Scene 9: I’m in Repentigny, a small, well-off suburban town. Kids are dreaming of showing their paintings in a Montreal art gallery some day. I advise them to start by showing their work in their living rooms. They’re amazed they haven’t thought of that before. I come from a country where we’re used to making do with what we have.
Scene 10: A bunch of us are out together and the girl I’ve been sneaking looks at comes and kisses me. An endless kiss. Her boyfriend looks on with a smile. We haven’t drunk or smoked anything. Her kiss sets off a small explosion in my brain — which completely changes my view of relations between men and women. In Port-au-Prince, a look would have done the trick.
Scene 11: I go to a resource center for immigrant workers on Sherbrooke Street. If you’re really badly off, they’ll give you twenty dollars to get through the day. We talk politics and the guy wants to know in what circumstances I left the country, and whether I’d been tortured. The answer is no. He insists, because just getting slapped in the face would have been worth 120 dollars. The answer is still no. As I leave the office he slips me an envelope that I open outside, on the street. One hundred and twenty dollars. I feel like I’ve won the one-hundred meter dash without taking any drugs.
Scene 12: The old guy who lived upstairs from me, back when I was on Saint-Hubert. Whenever we crossed paths on the stairway, he made me follow him into his room so I could look at his photo album full of smiling faces. But no one ever came to see him, and I lived in that building two years.
Springtime Song: The first day you can go out without a winter coat on. I go down Saint-Denis. The sun on my skin.
Behind the Frosted Window
On that December afternoon I was just
a shadow behind the frosted window
admiring
one of nature’s most impressive spectacles.
Fascinated, I watched all that snow
endlessly falling.
The poet Émile Nelligan gained immortality
by using the word “snow” twice
in one very brief line:
“Oh, how the snow has snowed!”
Gilles Vigneault reached the same heights by singing
“My country is not a country, it’s winter.”
Here ice is the road to glory.
People of the North seem
so attracted by the sea
while ice frightens people of the South.