The Return
The Return
Dany Laferrière
Translated by David Homel
Douglas & McIntyre
D&M Publishers Inc.
Vancouver/Toronto
At the end of daybreak...
Aimé Césaire
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939
To Dany Charles, my nephew, who lives in Port-au-Prince.
Part 1
The Phone Call
The news cuts the night in two.
The inevitable phone call
that every middle-aged man
one day will receive.
My father has died.
I got on the road early this morning.
No destination.
The way my life will be from now on.
I stop along the way for breakfast.
Bacon and eggs, toast, scalding hot coffee.
I sit by the window.
A sharp sun warms my right cheek.
A quick glance at the paper.
A bloody image of a car wreck.
Death is sold anonymously in America.
I watch the waitress moving
among the tables.
Busy with her rounds.
The nape of her neck is sweaty.
The radio is playing this country song,
the story of a cowboy
unhappy in love.
The waitress has a red flower tattooed
on her right shoulder.
She turns and gives me a sad smile.
I leave the tip on the newspaper
next to the cup of cold coffee.
Walking toward the car I try to imagine
the loneliness of a man facing death
in a hospital bed in a foreign country.
“Death expires in a white pool of silence,”
wrote the young Martinican poet Aimé Césaire
in 1939.
What can anyone know of exile and death
when they're not even twenty-five?
I get back on Highway 40.
Little villages numb with sleep
along the frozen river.
Where are they all hiding?
The invisible people.
The feeling of discovering
virgin territory.
For no good reason I take
a country road
that will set me back by an hour.
A vast land of ice.
It's difficult for me
even after so many years
to imagine the shape
next summer will take.
Ice burns
more fiercely
than fire
but the grass remembers
the caress of the sun.
There are, beneath this ice,
hotter desires
and sharper impulses
than in any other season.
The women here know it.
The men sweat for a living and
the first to open his mouth is a sissy.
Silence is the rule of the forest
if you don't want to be surprised by a bear.
He nurtured silence so long
that emptiness took hold of him.
The man became a dry branch
that cracked in the cold.
Hunger brings the wolf out of the woods
and drives the woodsman home.
He nods off, after his bowl of soup,
by the fireplace.
His wife tells him what they said on the radio.
It's always about war and lost jobs.
So go the centuries in these northern villages.
It's easy to talk when we're warm,
and binding old wounds.
The wounds we're ashamed of
never heal.
I always panic when
I can't hear another human sound.
I am a creature of the city.
My rhythm is the staccato heels
of a woman coming up behind me.
I have lost all direction.
Snow has covered everything.
Ice has burned away the smells.
The realm of winter.
Only a native can find his way through this.
A big bright yellow truck roars past.
The driver, happy to finally
meet someone on the road,
blows his horn wildly.
He's heading south.
I'm driving into the luminous north
that blinds and enchants me.
I know at the end of this road
a bearded man full of gentle fury,
surrounded by a pack of dogs,
is trying to write the great American novel.
Hunkered down in the sleeping village of Trois-Pistoles
on the edge of the frozen river,
he is the only one today who knows how
to dance with ghosts, madmen and the dead.
This bluish light
sweeping the river
swallows me up in a single breath.
The car begins to skid.
I recover just in time.
To die amid beauty
is not granted to the petit bourgeois man
that I am.
I am aware of being in a world
completely different from my own.
The fire of the South crossing
the ice of the North
produces a temperate sea of tears.
When the road is straight like this,
ice on both sides,
no clouds to help
me find my way under the noonday sky
so completely blue,
I can touch infinity.
I really am among those northern people
who drink till they go mad
dancing a broken jig.
They scream obscenities at the sky
and are astonished to find themselves alone
on a giant sheet of ice.
The feeling of driving
through one of those
cheap paintings hanging
above the fireplace.
Landscape within the landscape.
At the far end of the dirt road,
her feet not touching the ground,
that little girl with the black hair
and the fever-colored yellow dress is dancing.
The one who has lived in my dreams
since the summer I was ten.
A quick glance at the gauges
to see how much gasoline is left.
A breakdown on this road
means certain death.
Magnanimous, the cold numbs before it kills.
The dogs are fighting under the table.
The cats playing with their shadows.
The old goat grazing on the carpet.
The master of the house has gone into the woods
for the day, the old housekeeper tells me.
I turn back as I go out the door
and see the cats tearing apart
a fat manuscript that has fallen from a shelf.
The housekeeper's indulgent smile seems to say
that here animals come before literature.
Returning to Montreal.
Tired.
I stop by the side of the road.
A quick nap in the car.
Childhood wells up behind closed eyelids.
I wander beneath the tropical sun
but it is cold as death.
The need to piss wakes me up.
A burning sensation before the liquid spurts out.
The same emotion every time
I see the city in the distance.
I take the tunnel under the river.
We always forget that Montreal is an island.
The low-angled light on the smokestacks
above the Pointe-aux-Trembles factories.
The melancholy headlights of the cars.
I make my way to the Cheval Blanc.
The afternoon drinkers have gone.
The late-night ones haven't shown up yet.
I love this brief moment
when no one is around.
The guy next to me is stretched out on the counter
mouth open and eyes half closed.
They serve me my usual glass of rum.
I think of a dead man whose features
have yet to come together in my mind.
On the Proper Use of Sleep
I got home late at night.
I ran myself a bath.
I always feel at home in water.
An aquatic animalâthat's what I am.
Césaire's water-warped collection on the floor.
I dried my hands before reaching for it.
I fell asleep in the pink bathtub.
That old fatigue
whose cause I pretend not to know
carried me off
toward uncharted territories.
I slept for an eternity.
That was the only way
to return incognito to the country
with my momentous news.
The night horse that sometimes
I ride at noon knows the path
across the desolate savannah.
Galloping across the mournful plain of time
before discovering
that there is in this life
neither north nor south
father nor son
and that no one
really knows where to go.
We can build our dream house
on the slope of a mountain.
Paint the shutters nostalgia blue.
Plant oleander all around.
Then sit at twilight to watch
the sun sink so slowly into the gulf.
We can do that in each of our dreams
but we'll never recover the flavor
of those childhood afternoons spent
watching the rain fall.
I remember I would throw myself on the bed
to try to calm the hunger
that devoured me from within.
Today, I sleep
to leave my body
and quench my thirst for the faces of the past.
The little airplane passes steadily
through the great hourglass
that erases the tape of memory.
Here I stand before a new life.
Not everybody gets to be reborn.
I go around a corner in Montreal
and just like that
I find myself in Port-au-Prince.
Like in some teenage dream
where you're kissing a different girl than the one
you're holding in your arms.
To sleep and awake again in the country I left
one morning without looking back.
A long reverie made up of unrelated images.
Meanwhile the bathwater has grown cold
and I find I've developed gills.
This lethargy always hits me
this time of year
when winter has settled in
and spring is still so far away.
In the midst of the ice at the end of January
I have no more energy to continue
but it's impossible to turn back.
I've started to write again the way
some people start smoking.
Without admitting it to anyone.
And with that feeling I'm doing something
that's not good for me
but that I can't resist
any longer.
As soon as I open my mouth, vowels and consonants pour out in a disorderly mess and I have stopped trying to control it. I discipline myself enough to try writing, but after a dozen lines I stop out of exhaustion. I need to find a way that doesn't demand too much physical effort.
When I bought my old Remington 22, a quarter century ago, I did it to adopt a new style. Tougher, more intense than before. Writing by hand seemed too literary. I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll writer. A writer of the machine age. Words interested me less than the sound of the keyboard. I had energy to burn. In my narrow room on Saint-Denis Street, I spent all day typing feverishly in the dark. I worked, the windows closed, bare-chested in summer's furnace-room. With a bottle of cheap wine at my feet.
I return to my trusty pen
which never lets me down.
At the end of a cycle of overwork
we always return to what seems
most natural.
After all these years
there is practically nothing spontaneous left in me.
Yet when the news was announced over the telephone
I heard that short dry click
that can make your heart stop.
A man accosted me in the street.
Are you still writing? Sometimes.
You said you weren't writing any more. That's true.
Then why are you writing now?
I don't know.
He went off, offended.
Most readers
see themselves as characters in a novel.
They consider their lives a tale
full of sound and fury
for which the writer should be
their humble scribe.
There is as much mystery in getting close
to a person as in moving apart.
Between those two points
stretches stifling daily life
with its string of petty secrets.
From which end will I take this day?
By the rising or the setting of the sun?
These days I've been getting up
when the sun is going down.
First I need a glass of rum
to dissipate the passion of malaria,
the fever I sometimes confuse
with the energy of life.
I won't fall asleep until the bottle
is lying on the wooden floor.
When I smile this way in the shadows
it's because I feel lost
and no one in that case
will make me leave
the pink bathtub
where I curl up in a ball,
a round belly filled with water.
Exile
This morning I picked up the first black notebook
that tells how I came to Montreal.
It was the summer of 1976.
I was twenty-three.
I had just left my country.
Thirty-three years living
far from my mother's eyes.