The Return by Dany Laferrière

back on the subject. One last question: is it better to write by hand or on a computer? It’s always better to read. Okay, I can see I’m not going to get anything out of you, he says, then takes a Carter Brown novel from the shelf and heads for the bathroom.
    On the little gallery.
    I am sitting.
    He is standing.
    A respectful distance.
    You never talk about your times.
    I don’t have a time.
    We all do.
    I’m sitting here with you, that’s my time.
    The cry of a bird that can’t stand
    the noonday heat.
    My aunt takes me aside,
    in a dim room
    where the furniture is covered with white sheets,
    and rattles on and on about some
    endless family saga
    whose protagonists
    are unknown to me and whose claims
    are so confusing
    that even she gets lost.
    It’s like being in a novel
    by a sloppy writer.
    My nephew goes to meet a friend
    by the gate.
    I watch them talking.
    Their affection
    for each other.
    They share the same tough choice:
    stay or go.

City of Talk
    This man sitting alone,
    his back against the gate,
    is soon joined by a stranger
    who begins telling him all sorts of things
    that make absolutely no sense.
    Hunting down the solitary man
    is a collective passion
    in any overcrowded city.
    A tank truck parked
    on the sidewalk across the way.
    I watch my mother
    favoring one leg
    cross the street to
    buy bottled water.
    I never knew crossing a street
    required so much willpower.
    Christian, a nine-year-old neighbor
    who spends a lot of time at our house,
    comes and sits next to me.
    We go almost an hour without talking.
    A good breeze blows through the leaves.
    I soon drift off.
    The boy slipped away so quietly
    I thought I’d dreamed him up.
    My nephew tells me
    he burned his first novel.
    All good writers start by
    being pitiless critics.
    Now he has to learn
    a little compassion for his work.
    My nephew and I sit together on his squeaky narrow bed. I read detective novels, that’s how I relax after a day at the university. A lot of hard work? Actually, we don’t do anything at all. What do you do? Everyone is waiting for their American visa, and once they get it, even if it’s in the middle of an exam, they take off.
    A leaf, near me,
    falls.
    No sound.
    What elegance!
    A dull thud.
    The noise a fat lizard makes
    as it falls by my chair.
    We consider each other a moment.
    In the end it gets interested
    in a spinning fly.
    I listen to the radio.
    A silky voice like a veil
    that obscures the truth without managing to hide it.
    People always have some story to tell
    in a country where words are
    the only thing they can share.
    The music dies suddenly.
    No sound.
    Emptiness.
    A power failure?
    Endless silence in the street.
    Then a cry of pain from the young girl next door.
    To be able to hear silence this loud
    in a city of talk
    means so many people had to
    keep quiet at the same time.
    The radio announces
    the death of a young musician
    beloved by the public.
    My nephew knew him well
    having shared with him
    for a brief moment
    a girl’s heart.
    My nephew changes clothes quickly. My mother’s worried look. The banged-up Chevrolet parks on the sidewalk across the way. Five of them are inside. Two girls in back. My nephew slips in between them. His face immediately transformed. The car pulls away. On the radio is the singer who just died. My sister looks straight ahead without a word. Now I see what my mother’s face looked like when I went out like that on a Saturday night. We would cross paths near Saint-Alexandre Square, on Sunday morning, as she was going to church and I was coming back from a party.

My Mother’s Song
    We are on the gallery.
    By the oleander.
    My mother is speaking to me softly of Jesus,
    the man who replaced her husband
    in exile for the last fifty years.
    In the distance the voice of a woman selling baubles.
    Every family has its absent member in the group portrait. Papa Doc introduced exile to the middle class. Before, such a fate was