Read Online The Return by Dany Laferrière - Free Book Online Page A

trees everywhere.
    As a child I hated trees
    so much I dreamed of covering the planet in asphalt.
    People always wanted to know why
    a child wouldn’t like trees.
    It was that feeling they were looking down on me.
    Two hearses cross paths
    on this dusty street
    at the foot of the mountain.
    Each one is carrying its customer
    to his resting place.
    The last taxi costs the most.
    Death, that blind archer.
    As busy at midnight as at noon.
    Too many people in this city
    for him, even once,
    to miss his target.
    All I need is to start the rumor
    that I’ve returned to live there
    without saying which there it is
    and in Montreal people will believe
    I’m in Port-au-Prince
    and in Port-au-Prince they’ll be sure
    I’m still in Montreal.
    Death would mean not being
    in either of those cities.

To Die in a Naïve Painting
    I like to climb up the mountain, early in the morning, to get a closer look at the luxury villas set so far apart one from the other. Not a soul around. Not a sound, except the wind in the leaves. In a city this populous, the space you have to live in defines who you are. In my random walks, I discover that these vast properties are inhabited only by servants. The owners reside in New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan or even Tokyo. Like in the days of slavery when the real masters of Hispaniola lived in Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle or Paris.
    They built these houses hoping their children studying abroad would return to take the family business in hand. Since those children refuse to return to a country cast into darkness, the parents have moved closer to them and settled in some metropolis with a museum, a restaurant, a bookstore or a theater on every corner. The money harvested from the mud of Port-au-Prince is spent at Bocuse or La Scala. In the end the villas are rented out for a fortune to the directors of non-profit international aid organizations whose stated goal is to lift the country out of poverty and overpopulation.
    These envoys from humanitarian organizations show up in Port-au-Prince with the best intentions. Lay missionaries who look you straight in the eye as they recite their program of Christian charity. In the media they are prolix about the changes they intend to create to ease the terrible conditions of the poor. They make a quick tour of the slums and the ministries to take the pulse of the situation. They learn the rules of the game so quickly (allow themselves to be served by a host of servants and slip part of the budget allocated to the project into their pockets) you have to wonder whether it’s in their blood—an atavism of colonial times. When confronted with their original project, they escape by saying that Haiti is incapable of change. Yet in the international press, they go on denouncing corruption in the country. The journalists passing through know they have to stop in for a drink poolside to gather the solid information they need from honest and objective people; the Haitians, everyone knows, can’t be trusted. The journalists never ask themselves why these people are living in villas when they say they’ve come to help the wretched of the earth throw off the shackles of poverty.
    Haiti has undergone thirty-two coups
    in its history
    because people have tried to change
    things at least thirty-two times.
    The world is more interested by the military men
    who engineer the coups
    than by the citizens who overthrow
    those men in uniform.
    Silent, invisible resistance.
    There is a balance in this country
    based on the fact
    that unknown people
    in the shadows
    are doing everything they can
    to put off the arrival of night.
    When there’s a power failure,
    people light their houses
    with the energy of sexually charged bodies.
    The only fuel this country has
    in industrial quantities
    can also send
    the demographic curve soaring.
    When you arrive in this city set on the shores of a turquoise sea and surrounded by blue mountains, you wonder how long it