The Return by Dany Laferrière Read Free Book Online Page A

fondness
    for that meat when it’s grilled
    with no concern for the panicked voice
    calling everywhere for Mitzi.
    Headache.
    I can’t sleep.
    I go out on the veranda
    and sit.
    Something is moving up there.
    A little girl
    climbing the mountain
    with a pail of water on her head.
    Here we live on injustice and fresh water.

Drawing a Blank
    The young man who sweeps
    the hotel courtyard every morning
    brings me a coffee and a message from my sister.
    She didn’t want to wake me
    but my mother is not doing well.
    She has locked herself in her room
    and won’t open the door for anyone.
    Everyone looks pretty happy to me. My sister kisses me as she dances. What’s going on? Nothing. What about my mother? That was this morning, now she’s fine. It happens sometimes, you know. In Montreal I would fall into an abyss without warning and not surface for hours. The enemy, in Montreal, is on the outside, when it’s minus thirty for five days in a row. Here the enemy is within, and the only nature we have to tame is our own.
    I hear my mother singing. A song popular in her youth. Radio Caraïbes often plays it on its oldies show, Chansons d’autrefois. My sister whispers that she’s often like this after one of her descents into hell.
    Marie, her name so simple
    it’s like
    sharing my mother
    with all my friends.
    When I think about it I don’t have any stories
    about my mother from when she was young.
    She’s not the type to talk about herself.
    Aunt Raymonde’s stories are all
    about her own person.
    In vain I try to glimpse my mother
    behind her.
    My mother does not swim
    in the great sea of History.
    But all individual stories
    are like rivers that run through her.
    In the folds of her body she keeps
    the crystals of pain of everyone
    I have met in the street since I came here.
    Pain.
    Silence.
    Absence.
    None of that has anything to do
    with folklore.
    But they never
    talk about those things
    in the media.

Ghetto Uprising in the Bedroom
    In my nephew’s little room.
    Books on a narrow shelf
    next to a Tupac Shakur poster.
    I spot one of my novels
    and a collection of poems by his father.
    My eyes seek out every detail
    to help me travel back through the stream of time
    and recover the young man
    I was before my sudden departure.
    We are sitting on the unmade bed
    watching a documentary about violent gangs
    battling each other in the lower reaches of the city.
    Gunshots ring out.
    From time to time, my mother comes in
    and gives us a suspicious look.
    My nephew is at the age when death
    is still something esthetic.
    From close range a Danish television crew is following
    the violent confrontations that have been raging
    for months in this miserable district.
    Graffiti on a wall shows an empty stomach
    and a toothless mouth holding a gun
    heavier than the weight of the average adult
    in that part of town.
    A young French woman
    has entered this seething slum.
    Close-ups on the two brothers as sensitive
    as cobras in the sun.
    Each heads his own gang.
    The young woman travels back and forth
    between the two brothers.
    One loves her.
    She loves the other.
    A Greek tragedy in Cité Soleil.
    Bily is obsessed by his younger brother
    who took on the name Tupac Skakur.
    Fascination with American culture
    even in the poorest regions
    of the fourth world.
    I watch the two brothers
    strolling through the Cité.
    Undernourished killers.
    Emaciated faces.
    Cocaine to burn.
    Weapons everywhere.
    Death never far.
    I wonder what my nephew
    thinks about all this.
    It’s his culture.
    The new generation.
    Mine was the ’70s.
    We’re all cloistered in our decades.
    These days the murderer strikes at noon
    in this country.
    Night is no longer the accomplice of the killer
    who dreams of adding his star to the firmament.
    To reach the heavens nowadays
    they have to kill with their face uncovered
    and trumpet their acts on the TV news.
    The Tonton Macoutes of my era had
    to hide