people patiently awaited his death
to pay him tribute.
Now that he cannot flee
they burden him with compliments.
The sedentary like to see
the nomad made immobile.
Enclosed in a long box
he must think is a pirogue
that will let him skim across
the Guinaudée of his boyhood.
For many of these old Haitian taxi drivers, accompanied by their wives, most of them nurses’ aids at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, he remained the young man who stood up to the power and abuse of the President-for-Life. The glory of their youth.
It is the first time
I’m seeing him from so close.
I just have to reach out
my hand to touch him.
But I don’t
to respect the distance
he wanted to maintain between us
during his life.
I remember that passage in the Notebook where Césaire demands the body of Toussaint Louverture, arrested by Napoleon, killed by the cold during the winter of 1803 in Fort de Joux, France. His lips trembling with contained rage the poet comes to demand, 150 years later, the frozen body of the hero of the slave revolt: “What is mine a lone man imprisoned in whiteness.”
A woman in a long white astrakhan coat
stands discreetly by the last column.
A ghost of a smile.
The smile of someone who knows
death can never erase
the memory of a certain summer afternoon
in an overheated room in Brooklyn.
Until the end,
even dirty,
even crazy,
my father remained
the dandy he’d always been.
Charm can’t be explained.
I wonder who they’re celebrating
when the one they’re talking about
can’t hear a word.
One of his old buddies is telling a story
that seems to amuse everyone.
I hear their laughter from a distance.
My father, very close by, in his casket.
I keep watch from the corner of one eye.
A star too blinding
to look at straight on.
That’s what a dead father is.
One thing’s for sure: my father won’t have died until that woman hears the news. And right now she is sitting on her gallery in Port-au-Prince thinking, as usual, about him. Which is what she has been doing every day since he left. Does she know the wind has blown so hard these last days that it has carried off the tree of which I am but a branch?
Outside it’s a real tropical storm.
Broken tree branches.
Taxis drift, as if drunk,
down Fifth Avenue.
The hearse, unshakable, glides across the water.
It’s like being in Baradères, my father’s native village
and the Venice of Haiti, or so they say.
A Little Room in Brooklyn
My father lived in a little room that was practically empty. My uncles took me there after the burial in the rain at the Green-Wood Cemetery. Toward the end he had rid himself of everything. All his life he was a solitary man though his political activities put him into contact with other people. Every day for twenty years, summer and winter, he walked from Brooklyn to Manhattan. His life could be summed up in that constant movement. His only possession was the suitcase he had entrusted to the Chase Manhattan Bank.
My father spent
more than half
his life
far from his land
from his language
and his wife.
Several years ago I knocked on his door. He didn’t answer. I knew he was inside the room. I could hear him breathing noisily behind the door. Since I had come all the way from Montreal, I insisted. I can still hear him yelling that he’d never had a child, or a wife or a country. I had gotten there too late. The pain of living far from his family had become so intolerable he had to erase the past from his memory.
I wonder
when he knew
he would never
return to Haiti
and what exactly he felt
at that moment.
What did he think about
in his little room in Brooklyn
on those long frigid nights?
Outside was the spectacle
of the liveliest city in the world.
But in that room there was only him.
The man who had lost everything.
And so early in life.
I try to imagine him in his room, the blinds drawn, dreaming of his city so similar to the one described by an angry young Césaire: “And in this inert town, this squalling throng so astonishingly detoured from its cry as this town has been from its movement, from its meaning, not even worried, detoured from its true cry, the only cry you would have wanted to hear because you feel it alone belongs. . ” The cry is still stuck in the poet’s throat.
My uncles said I should meet his only friend in New York, a barber on Church Avenue. He hadn’t wanted to attend the funeral. I always told Windsor I wouldn’t go to his funeral. For two good reasons. One: I don’t believe in death. Two: I don’t believe in God. . But that being said, I welcome with all due honor the son of my last friend in this shitty life.
A customer wanted to assure him of his friendship. First, you’re not dead, and then you’re not Windsor. He comes and stands in front of me. You look a lot like him. I’m not talking about physical resemblance, that’s for fools who can’t see any farther than their noses. What I mean is that you were carved from the same tree. Let me explain. Everyone laughs. Professor, says my Uncle Zachée, we all understand what you mean. If you say so. . So then, young man, take a chair. And you can scram, he says to another customer waiting to be looked after. I can wait, I say, and go and sit near the washroom. Look, wasn’t I right to say they were carved from the same tree? There are plenty of empty chairs and he goes and sits in the corner, in Windsor’s spot. He used to drink his coffee right there, every morning for forty years. Only I could make it for him — me and no one else. Not even my wife who loved him and did his washing. Don’t listen to people who tell you that Windsor walked around in dirty clothes; that’s not true. His wife, standing next to the big portrait of Martin Luther King, agrees. She went to the funeral because she still believes in God. As if I’m not enough for her. Everybody laughs. Not him. Okay, now it’s your turn, Windsor. Windsor is dead and buried, Professor, a customer says. That’s my name too, I say. Why are they in such a hurry to waste their breath? That’s something I’ll never understand about these people. Only two men have the right to express themselves at all times and they’re both dead. One was a prophet, and that’s Martin Luther King. The other was a madman, and that’s Windsor. So shut up, the rest of you. I told you Windsor isn’t dead. You went to his funeral and the whole time he’s been sitting here quietly. In his spot. That’s how I inherited the chair near the washroom.
My uncles hold hands
as they walk to the bank.
Like children afraid
of losing their way in the forest.
That little act speaks for all their distress.
“Your father,” Uncle Zachée speaks into my ear,
“walked straight ahead
as if he always knew where he was going.”
Several people turn to look as we go by.
The Suitcase
We want to retrieve the suitcase my father deposited at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Since I have the same first name, the employee gives me the key to his safety deposit box and asks me to follow him into the bank’s vault. I step inside quietly with my uncles. That quality of silence exists nowhere but in a bank, a church or a library. Men fall silent only before Money, God and Knowledge — the great wheel that crushes them. All around us, small individual safety deposit boxes filled with the personal belongings of New York, city of high finance and great misery. The employee leaves us alone. I open my father’s box and discover an attaché case inside.