The Return Read Free

to have been heard. Do you think people aren’t listening to you? People read in search of themselves and not to discover someone else. Paranoid, perhaps? Not enough. Do you think one day you’ll be read for yourself? That was my last illusion until I met you. You seem to me different in reality. Why, have we met in a book before? She gathers up her material with that bored look that can ruin even a sunny day.
    The only place I feel completely at home is in this scalding water that warms my bones. The bottle of rum within reach, never too far from Césaire’s collection of poems. I alternate mouthfuls of rum and pages of the Notebook until the book slides onto the floor. Everything is happening in slow motion. In my dream, Césaire takes my father’s place. The same faded smile and that way of crossing his legs that reminds me of the dandies of the postwar days.
    I have studied that photo of my father for so long.
    His well-starched shirt collar.
    The mother-of-pearl cufflinks.
    Silk socks and shined shoes.
    The loose knot of his tie.
    A revolutionary is above all a charmer.
    The weatherman is calling for twenty-eight below this morning.
    Hot tea.
    I am reading by the frosted window.
    Numbness fills me.
    I lay the book on my stomach.
    My hands together and my head thrown back.
    Nothing else will happen today.
    This sunbeam
    that warms my left cheek.
    A child’s afternoon nap
    not far from his mother.
    In the shadow of the oleander.
    Like an old lizard
    hiding from the sun.
    Suddenly I hear that dull sound
    the book makes as it falls to the floor.
    The same sound that
    the heavy juicy mangos of my childhood made
    as they fell by the water basin.
    Everything brings me back to childhood.
    That fatherless country.
    What’s for sure is that
    I wouldn’t have written this way had I stayed behind.
    Maybe I wouldn’t have written at all.
    Far from our country, do we write to console ourselves?
    I have doubts about the vocation of the writer in exile.

The Photo
    A man sitting in front of a thatched hut
    with a peasant hat on his head.
    A plume of smoke rising behind him.
    â€œThat’s your father in the countryside,”
    my mother said to me.
    The President-for-Life’s henchmen were looking for him.
    Distant as it is,
    that picture comforts me even today.
    When it’s noon and I’m too hot
    in these tristes tropiques
    I will remember my walk
    on the frozen lake, near the cabin
    where my friend Louise Warren
    would go to write.
    Cats play on the porch
    without concern for passing time.
    Their time is not ours.
    This kitten slips
    into the shadows of my memory.
    White socks on the
    waxed wood floor.
    I’ve lost track of myself.
    Memories run together in my mind.
    My life is just a small damp package
    of washed-out colors and old smells.
    It’s as if an eternity had passed
    since the phone call.
    Time is no longer cut
    into fine slices called days.
    It’s become a compact mass with a density
    greater than the earth’s.
    Nothing beyond this imperious need to sleep. Sleep is my only way of dodging the day and the obligations it brings. I have to admit that things have been falling apart for some time now. My father’s death has completed a cycle. It all happened without my knowledge. I had just begun picking up the signs that warned of this maelstrom and already it was carrying me off.
    Images from deep in childhood
    wash over me like a wave
    with such newness
    I really feel I am seeing
    the scene unfold before me.
    I remember another detail
    from that picture of my father
    but so tiny that my mind
    can’t locate it.
    All I can recall is the memory
    of a moment of pleasure.
    I remember now what made me laugh so much when my mother showed me the photo of the peasant in the straw hat. I was six years old. In the left corner, a chicken was scratching at the ground. My mother wondered what I thought was so funny about a chicken. I couldn’t explain what I felt.