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

will take before it all becomes a nightmare. In the meantime you live with the energy of someone waiting for the end of the world. So said a young German engineer who’s been working for the last ten years rebuilding the road network.
    We were having a drink at the bar at the Hotel Montana. When did you first understand that this particular hell wasn’t for you? He gazed at me a while. My father came here for the New Year’s holiday, and he made me see it. My father is an old military man. His job is to look at things as they are and say what he thinks in no uncertain terms. What did he say to you? That we were all bastards in this well-protected luxury hotel, all the while thinking we were living a dangerous and difficult life. And so? And so ten years later I’m still here. But at least I’m not telling myself any more lies. We can even use cynicism to keep from dying of shame.
    The headquarters of foreign journalists.
    A hotel set on the heights so they can see
    what’s boiling over down below
    in the great stewpot of Port-au-Prince
    without actually having to go there.
    For the details just listen to the local radio station.
    The bar is stocked well enough to resist a month-long siege.
    I’ve been watching this cameraman at the end of the bar for a while. His arm resting lightly on his camera. I move down to his end because I like people whose job is to look. But I don’t see anything, he tells me. I see only what I’m filming. I look down a very narrow field. People are incredible here. They participate in everything, they’re so enthusiastic. I’ve been to a lot of countries with the job I do, but this is the first time I’ve seen anything like it. You can ask someone whose family has just been killed to reenact the scene, and they’ll play the whole thing for you with complete attention to detail. The murderer too: just ask him and he’ll play the murderer for you. It’s a real pleasure working here. Wherever I go people ask for money, but not here. Okay, friends of mine told me the market ladies want to be paid if you take their picture, but that’s only if they don’t like you. That’s because some photographers don’t know how to go about it. They want to go too fast. Here, you can’t hurry people. They have their dignity. They can feel it right away if you respect them, and if they feel you’re making fun of them then I can tell you your life is in danger. Otherwise, they’re cool. And the setting is magnificent, not too green so it doesn’t look like a postcard, it’s great, I really can’t complain. Excuse me, it’s your country and I’m talking this way, I’m not insensitive to what’s happening, I see the poverty and everything, but I’m speaking as a professional. All jobs are like that; if you could hear the surgeons when they operate on you, they opened me up three times, and it’s curious but hearing them talk about what they had for dinner the night before as they were slicing me up, that reassured me because I knew they were doing it to relax. I’m not insinuating that people are insensitive to their own misfortune, it’s just that they like to play, to act, they’re born comedians, and what does a comedian do when the camera goes on? He acts. The kids, especially the kids—they’re so natural. And in a setting like this. It’s like nothing is real here. I listen to the big shots talking, I cover the press conferences at the palace, receptions at the embassies, and I can tell you, if you don’t mind, that the only thing that will get this country out of the state it’s in is the movies. If the Americans forgot about Los Angeles and came and shot their blockbusters here and if the Haitian government was smart enough to demand a quota, yes, I said a quota of Haitian actors on every film, in less than twenty years you’d see this country get out of