Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (21 page)

“Your brother looks angry,” I said to her.

“That’s not my brother, it’s my boyfriend.”

“You mean your lover.”

“If you want,” she said, while kissing me as though she were going to devour my mouth.

I opened my eyes to find the guy still looking at me.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t with this guy in front of me.”

“OK,” she said, guiding me to the other side of the island.

I had the impression I was her prey, an unknown sensation for a young man in the Caribbean, except with a rich older woman. I learned so many things in just one night. And from the same girl.

“Why don’t you show them here?” I ask.

“Where?” Paul asks me.

“Here, in the sitting room. There’s lots of space.”

“But we can’t!”

“Why?”

“It’s not a gallery.”

“Big difference! You hang the paintings on the wall. People come to see them. You offer refreshments. And if someone wants to buy one, you give him a price.”

Silence. Suddenly, a cry from Paul: “This guy is brilliant!”

Despite the marijuana, the heavy metal music and the fact that young Quebeckers can spend the night with anyone, I get the impression that, on a deeper level, young Haitians are freer. Let’s say definitely more responsible. When poverty is mixed with dictatorship, it gives people a more precocious sense of responsibility.

They become interested in me.

“Are there painters where you come from?”

“We do nothing but that. In Haiti, painting is a popular art. All my neighbours paint to earn a living. Our main goal isn’t to have social status as a painter, but to live from this work.”

“And music?”

“It’s only for dancing. We never sit like you’re doing to listen to music. Music goes with the body. There’s a direct link.”

“What kind of dancing?” asks my friend from last night, who seems to be a dancer herself. It’s true she has a body made for ballet.

“You cling to the girl and try to become one with her. Dancers can kiss, too. In fact, they make love standing up, to the music. It’s called vertical fucking.”

“I could never do that,” she says. “For me they’re two such absorbing things. When I listen to music, it’s as though I were living in a universe of pure sound. When I dance, it’s the same thing but with colours.”

“Three things,” her boyfriend says calmly. “Johanne, you’re forgetting love.”

“That must be something, to dance while
making love,” says another girl, Sylvie, giving me a languorous look.

“We do this in Haiti only because there’s a lack of space. Port-au-Prince is an overpopulated city. It’s in the crowd of dancers that you generally manage to find a certain intimacy.”

“That’s something I’d like to try,” says Sylvie.

What I immediately understood when I arrived here is that the Quebec woman is more open than the man, more apt to plunge into a new society. The man refuses to leave his familiar place, as though he were constantly in danger, from a cultural point of view, while the woman seems more audacious. She’s capable of penetrating into the young immigrant’s bedroom. She wants to know everything: what he eats, his music, his dance and also his way of making love. Integration is a fundamentally masculine idea. It seems to me it’s very close to sexual penetration. The immigrant must let himself be penetrated by the welcoming country’s culture before being accepted into the tribe, while the female body is made for welcoming—to be penetrated. The woman is therefore North America’s soft belly, and our only chance to keep a part of our past alive.

The driver turns towards me. “You’re Haitian?”

“Yes,” I say.

“You watched the election yesterday?”

“Magnificent! The Parti Québécois is finally in power.”

“How long have you been here?” he asks in a fairly brutal tone.

“Five months.”

“OK, I’m going to tell you something. This country belongs to the Haitians. We’re everywhere. In the schools, in the hospitals (and not only as patients), in the factories, everywhere. With the taxi, we control the road, day and night. We know exactly what’s happening in politics before everyone else. Last week, I drove Premier Bourassa in my taxi twice. And we talked at length. Mr. Bourassa understood that the importance of Haitians in Quebec shouldn’t be minimized. But he understood it too late. My brother-in-law, last month, drove Trudeau. Trudeau is a trickster. You can never tell what he’s thinking.”

“If you’re so powerful, why don’t you work in management positions instead of driving taxis?”

“Those who really have power should never let themselves be seen. You saw the Italian community. They showed too much strength, and today you never hear about them. But …”

“But what?”

“We’re in danger right now. If we let them do it, the Quebeckers will take this country from us.”

“You just told me that real power should never show its face.”

“This is different. Action is needed. Take my card. Call me. We have a meeting tonight in the basement of the Notre-Dame church.”

Here’s the big difference between Haitians and Quebeckers. Quebeckers think about politics solely in terms of independence, while Haitians think only of power. Each Haitian taxi driver firmly believes that if he really wanted to, he could become premier of Quebec while waiting to become president of Haiti. Having the power in Quebec is only a pastime for the boring days of exile.

All of a sudden she shakes me sharply. I wake up with a start.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t understand,” she says, a little frightened. “You were fighting with someone in your dream.”

“What was I saying?”

“I don’t know. You were speaking Creole. You were yelling, fighting, it scared me—but I’m sorry for having woken you up.”

I know very well what’s going on, but how to tell this comparative literature student that I was dreaming about werewolves? They were trying to get me once again, and like all the previous nights (it’s why I rarely ask girls to stay the night) I had to fight to keep them from carrying me off. But how do I explain that to this young North American? The devils from my country never leave me. As soon as the lights are out, like cockroaches, they gather around my bed. To be afraid of devils at my age is equivalent, here, to an adult who wets his bed. Full of shame, I decide to scare her.

“It’s you I was defending, you know.”

“Oh, good,” she says, vaguely worried.

“The thing is, I’m married to a very jealous voodoo goddess, so when there’s a woman in my bed, she sees red.” Voodoo, I know, works every time.

“And …”

“Well, I have to fight so that she won’t hurt the woman.”

A long silence.

“I have an exam this morning, I have to go review my notes,” she says suddenly. “I’m sorry.… We’ll see each other tomorrow night.”

I let her go, knowing she’ll never come back. I had a choice between giving myself the reputation of a ridiculous seducer who still dreams of devils or passing as the husband of a jealous voodoo goddess. I’m sure there are still those reckless enough to want to dethrone the bloodthirsty goddess Erzulie Dantor.

I don’t know why we continue to have such nightmares. Our demons follow us. Dreams play an important role in the life of every human being, but even more in the life of someone uprooted. Each night, he does the journey back. It’s the only way to escape from the madness. At the same time, he needs to get rid of his devils if
he hopes to embrace the present. North American life takes place by day, not by night. All conquest is done during the day. Night is for rest, desire and alcohol. The newly arrived immigrant must confront the Western machine by day, and at night, the tropical devils. Finally, he’s an exhausted man.

The first day I found myself in front of a machine, it took me a long moment to understand what was happening to me. In Haiti, the economic situation might have been disastrous, but I had a social status. My father was a journalist, very briefly the mayor of Port-au-Prince, Assistant-Secretary of State and finally diplomat. My mother was an archivist. My grandparents lived comfortably in Petit Goâve. And there I was in front of a machine designed to crush me (I almost lost an arm the first day), in front of all these people who believed it was the best thing that could
happen to me. To them, my condition had never been better. I spent the afternoon in the factory washrooms thinking about my new condition. I was a worker, an immigrant and a black. Bingo! The bottom of the barrel.

I went home. I was totally down. I sat in the middle of the room, in the dark. For the first time in my life I wasn’t thinking about a political, literary or philosophical problem, but about what was happening to me in everyday life.
Real life
, as they say in Quebec. The question wasn’t what I would become, but rather what I planned to do with myself. For the first time my life was in my own hands. It was both terrifying and exciting.

I was alone in this city, the trunk of the genealogical tree—nobody before me, and no descendants yet. I was no longer the son here, but not yet a father. Only me. The tree would bend in the direction I gave it. The new Quebec friends I spent my evenings with in the bars came mostly from those spruce little suburban cities surrounding Montreal. They didn’t in fact travel too far from the family nest. From time to time, when things were going badly for them, they wouldn’t be seen for one or two weeks, and we would learn that they had gone to recuperate at the family
home (in Repentigny, Sainte-Thérèse, Saint-Marc or Joliette). As for me, there was nobody behind me. Without a net. And it’s what saved me.

“And you, what do you do?”

“What?”

“What do you do in life?”

A pause. The whole table is watching me now. It is the first time they have really seen me.
I have to say that I almost never speak during these meetings.

“You must do something,” says someone else in a more friendly tone.

“I’m writing a novel,” I finally answer.

General surprise. They are writing short stories, poems, tales, but nobody in the group is writing a novel.

“And what’s it about?”

Again silence.

“We shouldn’t bother him,” says a girl. “Some writers don’t like to talk about the book they’re working on. You see, I’ve known him a long time now and I didn’t know he was a writer.”

“I’m not a writer. I’m writing a novel, that’s all.”

From that moment on, they saw me differently. My silence gained a certain weight. I had a precise function in the group. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, someone would say: “Be careful, guys, the writer is taking down everything you say.”

This was how I started writing down my friends’ conversations. To get myself into the atmosphere, I went to La Scala right after work. In the afternoon, it’s a traditional Greek bar with old Greeks telling each other stories about Greece.
There were a dozen of them who bothered the waitress while eating souvlaki and overly sweet desserts. I sat in a corner, beside the window. And I wrote. Anything. Bits of conversation from the night before. Little stories of seduction that happened here at night. The story of that magnificent waitress we were all more or less in love with. She wasn’t really interested in anyone, but she was always nice to everybody. All the more inaccessible. Like Mount Everest.

One night, a guy came in. He sat a little out of the way. And I saw her go crazy. She never stopped walking around him. Even so, you could tell she was trying to resist. She was doing what she could to avoid his corner. But she was helpless. The attraction was too strong. And she finally started to go over under more and more wacky pretexts. I was, I think, the only one to observe this game. There she was coming out of the washroom, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her wan face. The lightning had just struck her. She passed in front of me (as though a zombie) to go sit in front of the guy.

I could capture about ten stories like this in just one night (not all with this intensity). Separations. Reconciliations. Tender feelings. And the next day, I would write all this down in
my notebook. Some time later, I would forget the names, the faces, to remember only the situations. It’s chaos, therefore a novel.