Free The Return by Dany Laferrière

this mess, and the money would be clean money too because these people are fabulous actors. And the sets too, they’re so colorful, very, very alive. I never thought you could die in a landscape like this.

Hunger
    I woke up
    in the middle of the night.
    My nerves jangling.
    My pajamas completely soaked.
    As if I had swum
    through a sea of noise.
    From that tiny house,
    just three rooms
    protected only by walls as thin
    as fine paper,
    I saw no fewer than thirty-six people
    come out
    in less than an hour.
    Not a millimeter left unoccupied.
    Not a second of silence, I imagine.
    We search for life
    among the poor
    in absolute uproar.
    The rich have bought up the silence.
    Noise is concentrated
    in a clearly defined perimeter.
    Here trees are scarce.
    The sun, implacable.
    Hunger, constant.
    In this space teeming with people.
    First comes the obsession with the belly.
    Empty or full?
    Sex comes right after.
    And after that, sleep.
    When a man prefers
    a plate of beans and rice
    to the charming company of a woman
    something has happened
    to the hierarchy of taste.
    The pattern has become common. The rich who flee the poor leave the city behind and go to live in ever more secluded parts of the countryside. It’s not long before the news spreads through the overpopulated zone. The siege begins. A little hut in a ravine. Another at the foot of the pink villa. Two years later a whole slum has sprung up, asphyxiating the new upper-class quarter. The goal of all wars is the occupation of territory.
    The space of words can be occupied as well. For the last hour, this toothless old woman has been telling me a story of which I understand nothing. Yet I feel that it’s hers and it is worth, in her eyes, as much as anyone else’s.
    A day here lasts a lifetime.
    You’re born at dawn.
    You grow up at noon.
    You die at twilight.
    Tomorrow you change bodies.
    The horn has a variety of uses. Sometimes it replaces the cock’s crow. It alerts the absent-minded pedestrian. It announces a departure or an arrival. It expresses joy or anger. It carries on an endless monologue in traffic. To outlaw the horn in Port-au-Prince would be censorship.
    I walked into an Internet café and discovered a friend I hadn’t seen for some time. My old comrade Gary Victor with his moon-like face always makes me think of sweet-tempered Jasmin Joseph, the man who painted nothing but rabbits. Every time, Gary Victor pulls out of his hat a novel full of devils, thieves, zombies, mocking spirits and carnival bands painted in the cheerful colors of a naïve painting. But so loaded down with obsessions that in the end it becomes as dark as a teenage nightmare. I talked with him for a while about what the subject of the great Haitian novel might be. First we reviewed the obsessions of other nations. For North Americans, we thought it was space (the West, the Moon landing, Route 66). For South Americans, it’s time (One Hundred Years of Solitude). For Europeans, it’s war (two world wars in a century alters the mind). For us, it’s hunger. The problem, Victor told me, is that it’s difficult to talk about it if you haven’t known it. And those who’ve seen it up close aren’t necessarily writers. We’re not talking about being hungry just because you haven’t eaten for a while. We’re talking about someone who has never eaten his fill in his entire life, or just enough to survive and be obsessed by it.
    Still, it’s very surprising how hunger is absent, considering that artists are always looking for subjects. Very few novels, plays, operas or ballets have hunger as their central theme. Yet there are a billion starving people in the world today. Is the subject too harsh? We don’t mind exploiting war, epidemics and death in every possible shape. Is the subject too raw? Sex is stretched across every screen on the planet. So what’s going on? The problem is that hunger concerns only people who