Black Dance (20 page)

I don’t know how many times I saw you endure these crises of inexistence. Far from improving as you grew older, they grew worse—because you’d earned your stripes as a screenwriter; people knew you were brilliant and they expected you to perform. All of a sudden, strangled by anxiety, you’d find yourself unable to write. You’d miss deadlines and appointments, break promises and contracts, fall behind on obligations. Money would stop coming in, unpaid bills would pile up, bankers and tax inspectors would start harassing you. You would unplug your phone and stop checking your mailbox—no one could get in touch with you. And of course, the worse it got, the worse it got. The idea of their mounting resentment would make you cringe with shame, so you’d crawl further still into your hole.

At last, after weeks or even months of hibernation, something would move and it would be over. In one fell swoop, your light would be and your strength would come rushing back a hundred-fold. You’d write feverishly, day and night, pouring your innermost
being onto the page . . . And people would forgive you every time, because what you wrote in those phases was just, unassailably, excellent.

I’ve always loved you, Milo, neither
despite
nor
because of
your black holes.
With
them . . .

SUCH, HOWEVER, WAS
not the case with Roxanne. After two years of riding your soul’s roller coaster with you, hanging on for dear life, she got fed up and kicked you out. Bequeathed you her black hat and left you to your black holes. You were twenty-one, with a college diploma and not a red cent to your name . . .

There was only one place in the world you could head: New York City.

Odd jobs: waiter, taxi driver, fishmonger, lighting technician, nurse’s aid . . . You take up boxing for a while, discover you have a gift for the sport, start making good money at it and even consider going professional . . . but one day you’re fighting this humongous black man and you knock him out. Looking at him lying motionless on the floor, you realize this sport could kill you, so you hang up your gloves: your mother wouldn’t want you to meet so pointless an end.

Riffling through the
Times
one evening in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Seventh Avenue (in 1974 if I’m not mistaken), you’re brought up short by a headline—Seán MacBride, cofounder of Amnesty International, has just received the Nobel Peace Prize. The name rings a bell. MacBride . . . MacBride . . . You close your eyes and your grandfather’s voice comes arcing back to you over the thousand miles and days:
Poor Mrs. MacBride was reduced to following Irish news from abroad . . . for fear that, were she to leave France, she’d lose legal custody of young Seagan.

Seán and Seagan:
homo homo?
Yes, Milo. Same man. His mother, Maud Gonne, had fought her whole life long for the rights and the
release of political prisoners, she’d even founded an association called Amnesty—and now, by God, her little boy had gone and won the fucking Nobel! You’ll drink to that! Hightailing it out of Dunkin’ Donuts, you head for an Irish pub you’re partial to on Forty-Second Street—and, in loving memory of your grandpa Neil, dead these five years, down half a dozen pints of Guinness, that near-black beer topped by a stripe of creamy foam . . .

FADE TO WHITE.

•    •    •    •    •

Neil, 1920–1923

SOUND TRACK
of live music: Québécois songs accompanied by fiddle and accordion.

(We’ll need to get a researcher working on this, Milo; I’ll bet you’ve got no idea what songs would have been sung at sugaring-off parties in the 1920s, am I wrong?)

The large barn space, next to the shed in which Neil was trying to write about exile when his ephemeral son Thom was born, has been temporarily converted into a dining/dancing hall. Long tables have been set up. Squeezed together on benches, several dozen men, women and children wolf down heaping platefuls of fried potatoes, fried sausages, hotcakes, tomatoes and toast, all drenched in maple syrup. Behind them, others dance, stomp and clap in time to the tunes stirred up by the little orchestra.

As she gracefully lifts her skirts to twirl beneath her cavalier’s raised arm, we see that Marie-Jeanne’s stomach is rounded by the beginnings of a new child. Close-up on their feet, Neil’s now
heavily booted and Marie-Jeanne’s sensibly shoed, moving not too clumsily round and round, toeing in and toeing out. Close-up on their faces: Neil’s red-bearded; Marie-Jeanne’s rosy-cheeked and sparkly-eyed.

“
T’es pas vertigineuse?”

“
On dit pas t’es pas vertigineuse, on dit t’as pas le vertige!”

“
T’as pas la faim?”

“
On dit pas t’as pas la faim, on dit t’as pas faim!”

“
T’as pas fatigue?”

“
On dit pas t’as pas fatigue, on dit t’es fatiguée!”

“Oh! I give up.
Elle est trop perverse, votre langue.”

“Anyway, I’m neither dizzy nor hungry nor tired . . . Just immensely happy. What about you?”

“I’m all right.”

“You worried about Ireland?”

“Yes.”

“Quebec is your country now, Neil. Even if he speaks English, the boy I’m carrying won’t be an Irishman, he’ll be a French Canadian. Are you sure it’s a good idea to read the Irish press all the time? It keeps you from sleeping at night, and in the daytime it keeps you from being where you are, sharing our joys and miseries.
We’re
your family now!”

“You don’t understand what’s happening over there,” says Neil in a low voice. “My comrades-in-arms are in the front lines. How am I to think of anything else? The IRA shoots eleven master spies from Britain who were following them everywhere, and how do the police respond? By shooting into the crowd at a rugby match! Twelve dead and seventy-two wounded! It’s insane, Marie-Jeanne!”

“I agree completely, it’s an unforgivable sin. The British will have to answer to God for Bloody Sunday . . . But as for you,
Neil Noirlac, you should stop worrying your head about all that. You’ve been here two years already . . . It’s time you cut the umbilical cord between you and your native country!”

NEIL’S MEMORIES OF
Bloody Sunday would come back to you, Milo darling, when a similar massacre took place in Brazil in August 1993. On pretext that four cops had been murdered by young drug lords, the Rio police stormed into cafés and private homes in the favela of Vigário Geral, opening fire at random. Twenty-one people were killed, none of whom was connected to the drug world in any way. History repeats itself, horrors rhyme and you, Astuto, were so porous, so sensitive to the tales of others, and yourself so unrooted in a particular time and place that the bloody rebellions and repressions that haunted your bad dreams and black holes could have been unfolding in Dublin, Montreal, or Rio . . .

CUT TO A
sumptuous panoramic shot of the Mauricie region from on high. The camera will move simultaneously through space and time. Trees sprout leaves that change color, fall off, sprout green again (we’re reminded of one of Awinita’s cartoon fantasies) . . . Snow falls and melts, animals materialize and vanish . . . And in each season we will see Neil
—
dressed now in heavy winter gear, now in a T-shirt and light trousers, now in a red-and-black- or green-and-black-checkered wool shirt—working with other men, lopping branches off trees, inserting taps into trunks, pouring golden syrup from barrels into bottles, making maple taffy . . .

Voice-over: Neil as an old man, talking to his grandson.

It wasn’t easy for me to get used to living here, Milo. It felt uncanny, not to say immoral, to be dealing with moose and maple syrup as my country sank into hell. A month after Bloody Sunday, in
December 1920, Westminster passed Lloyd George’s Government of Ireland Act, effectively separating Northern from Southern Ireland. The North said yea, the South said nay, and they’ve never changed their minds since. All through the spring I could think of nothing else. I was desperate to join the Irish Republican Army, now run by Michael Collins and the brilliant, ebullient young Seán MacBride. Remember I told you about Maud Gonne and John MacBride? Well, this was their son. Like myself a few years earlier, he was taking a law degree when politics claimed his soul. At sixteen, he became the youngest lieutenant in the Irish Republican Army. In May, they took over the Customhouse and laid waste to it. Milo, it took my breath away! The Customhouse—the most conspicuous and detested symbol of British power in Ireland, after Dublin Castle—a heap of smoking ruins! The whole British administration paralyzed! Meanwhile Yeats, in London, went on churning out Irish plays and poetry; Joyce, in Paris, went on serially publishing his masterpiece
Ulysses
; and I, I, Milo—who had played such an important role in Ireland as lawyer, poet and rebel—what was I doing? Sitting here in Mauricie eating pork ‘n’ beans with Marie-Jeanne’s family. From the outside, an ordinary man among ordinary men. But from the inside: raging, suffering, crippled by my brain in a world of brawn.

Your aunt Marie-Thérèse was born in June. She was a sweet, healthy wee thing; Marie-Jeanne sang and spoke to her in French. In Ireland, North and South were at each other’s throat. My mother wrote to say that she and my father were considering having their assets transferred to banks in Belfast. Yes, even Catholics, now—if they were wealthy and pro-British—were being targeted, terrorized, forced to flee.

Southern Ireland won its independence on Christmas Day, putting an end to seven centuries of British presence. But the minute the terms of the treaty were made public, the Dáil, the Sinn Féin and the IRA split apart and madness set in—that special form of
madness known as civil war. Backs were stabbed and guts ripped open as South killed South, son killed father and brother killed brother, not only in Dublin but in the provinces, down to the tiniest of villages. As time went by, people forgot what the issues were; caught up in an unending concatenation of revenge and bitterness and misery, a festival of gore, an orgy of hatred, they simply fought to fight and killed to kill. The army got pushed up into the hills; thousands of men were jailed. Maud Gonne MacBride begged that the prisoners be treated with leniency, instead of which they were summarily shot. Executions are terrible, said the Minister for Home Affairs, but the murder of a nation is more terrible. Yeats, now deeply immersed in a phase of automatic writing with his wife, Georgie, saw symbols everywhere. Convinced that the Christian era was drawing to a close and that we had twenty centuries of undiluted horror in store for us, he wrote “The Second Coming”:

Meanwhile the leaves changed color, dropped and sprouted anew, the Saint-Maurice River and Lac des Piles froze and thawed, the sap in the maple trees rose and overflowed, my sweet wife’s breasts and tummy swelled and shrank, our children mewled and spewed and grew. One day I received a letter from my mother. I’m sorry to have to share this with you, Milo, but my history is part of yours and I feel you should know even the worst of it . . . Judge Kerrigan being known for his pro-British legal decisions over the years . . . our home had been broken into, our china smashed, our paintings slashed, our pillows eviscerated, our garden trampled . . . and my younger sister, Dorothy, who happened to be at home alone playing the piano that day, savagely beaten and raped by IRA revolutionaries or whatever
they claimed to be. She was lucky to escape with her life . . . My family promptly fled to Belfast, a city in which I’d never once set foot.

After reading that letter, Milo, I spent the rest of the day vomiting—just as I had on the boat coming over. I now had no place to go home to.

In May 1923, sickened by the inanity of the fighting, Éamon de Valera surrendered and the civil war ground to a halt. It had lasted two years and caused several thousand deaths . . . That fall, Willie Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I could not go on.

END OF PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE SHOT.

CLOSE-UP ON NEIL
in December 1923, thirty-one and miserable, on his knees at Marie-Jeanne’s bedside as she nurses Marie-Thérèse.

“I can’t go on like this, Marie-Jeanne. I’m sorry . . . I adore you, but I have to make some changes . . . If I can’t write, I’ll go crazy. Listen . . . I’m going to look for employment as a journalist in Montreal. I’m sure I’ll find something . . . I promise to come back. You can trust me . . .”

“Listen, Neil! I have something to tell you! It’s a secret, you’re not supposed to know yet. My father wanted it to be a surprise, for your Christmas present, but as of next spring he’s going to add a floor to the house, just for you. Isn’t that fantastic, Neil? He’s going to build you an office, and you’ll be able to write!”

Neil’s head sinks until his brow touches Marie-Jeanne’s smooth-skinned hand. Night falls over the endless winter forest of Mauricie.

FADE TO BLACK.

•    •    •    •    •

Awinita, October 1951 . . .

THIS WILL BE
the roughest of the Awinita sections, Milo, darling, as your mother starts shooting up again and you grow inside her womb, your tiny heart guzzling heroin and pulsing it through your bloodstream into your just-forming brain, numbing all your nascent senses. A section with no dialogue, just fragmented images melting one into the next as your mother fades in and out of consciousness . . . sits at the bar and drinks phony drinks with her johns and real ones with Declan . . . smiles at the johns and frowns at Declan . . . takes the johns’ money and gives it to Declan . . . climbs up and down the stairs between bar and bedroom, bedroom and bar . . . takes off her boots, stockings, blouse, bra and panties and puts them on again, all her clothes getting tighter and more uncomfortable on her body as you grow but of course she can’t afford a pregnancy wardrobe . . . closing her eyes so as not to see the faceless needy men pushing into her, asking her to love and care about them, until they come and leave.