Black Dance

IX. NEGAÇA

Milo, 1975–90

A NIGHT SCENE, lit by torches, on Terreiro de Jesus in Salvador de Bahia’s upper city — a large and beautiful square surrounded by old churches and cafés. Young black men in white pants have formed a street roda and passersby are being drawn into it. Radiating from the central berimbau, energy circulates from one body, voice and soul to the other; by turn, the capoeiristas sing and kick and spin and wheel and cartwheel, beat drums and shake tambourines—ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA—smiling always, even when they miss a beat and fall or accidentally strike an adversary. The rhythm is hypnotic and insistent, monotonous and precise. It’s not by virtue of making an effort that they play together; rather they are part of a single body, the pulsating joyful body of the fight-dance. Raising your foot in a kick-spin, you all but graze your adversary’s face, the beauty is to miss him but just barely, if he dances well he’ll feel the blow coming and be ready to second-guess you and avoid it, knock you off balance and gracefully threaten you in turn, as the two of you watch and duck, swing and smile and wheel and dive and lollop, the beat carries you forward, then your turn is over and, moving to watch the next pair bow to salute each other in front of the central berimbau, you encourage them with our singing, drumming, clapping and your smiles. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . There’s no winning or losing in this game, only playing, endless playing, you want your adversary to be strong not weak, smart not dumb, you’re delighted to trick him and delighted to be tricked by him, boy learns from girl, white learns from black, old learns from young, the teaching is the doing is the beauty is the grace is the humor, endlessly you go on learning, smiling, moving, feinting, never missing a beat. Gingare, the dance of life: the controlled, prolonged, sustained, ineffable excitement of capoeira is like an endless climax.

Receding from the vortex of the event, our camera turns and finds itself nose to nose with. . another camera. Shooting the roda in black and white is a film crew from New York, Milo among them. . Moment of mutual embarrassment. Like dogs, the two cameras sniff each other out, moving around to see what’s going on in the back.

Because Milo’s body has begun to move of its own volition, he is being gradually but imperiously included in the performance. The Bahians watch him, approving with nods and gestures the precise élan of his limbs. .

OH, MILO, WHAT wouldn’t I give to have witnessed that scene! Your other forms of physical training were all reactivated at once: hockey for clever swerves, swivels, pivots, and feints; boxing for swiftness, lightness of footwork and accuracy of arm thrusts; sex with Paul Schwarz for sensual, graceful interaction with other male bodies. This was what you’d been looking for all your life. The Bahians saw it, too. No room for doubt — buoyed up by the solid, attentive warmth and approval of the crowd, your head went down, your legs went up, the speed increased, and your body, like that of the other young men, became a pure, moving cipher. Eyes wide open, you gave yourself up to the capoeira rhythm as it irrigated your flesh. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . You knew this beat from before, long before, from your mother’s heart that gently, rhythmically played her ancestors’ tales into your ears when you lived inside of her, Milo, yes, you had this beat in your blood and could feel it now, coming up from the ground of Terreiro de Jesus, zinging through the sacred berimbau and galvanizing your whole being. Unexpectedly, at age twenty-three, you felt at home for the first time in your life.

Sorry. Yes, of course we’ll go back to the third person. And yes, of course we’ll change the name, don’t worry. What’s in a name? (To call your mother Nita is to destroy the meaning of her name, which is fawn. .)

CUT TO THE following day: a gathering in a tiny open-air café at São Joaquim, Salvador’s outdoor market. Seated with several of the capoeira initiates, you’re smoking cigarettes, drinking weak beer and chewing the rag. Your friend Homer, the African American director of the candomblé film you’ve come to work on, translates for you from the Portuguese.

“. . They wanna know where you learned capoeira.” Milo shrugs and grins.

“Dey taught me.”

“. . They say you’re one of them.”

“I feel it, too. An honor. Ask dem if I may pay for de next round.”

That evening, the New York crew is invited to the home of a local capoeira mestre. Smiles follow plates of fejoada and glasses of caipirinha around the table. Several shots from different angles, to show hours passing, elation rising. Late in the evening, a corpulent woman of sixty or so, sexily swathed in a green cotton print dress, comes to sit next to Milo. Her skin is copper-colored, her teeth bright white, her English halting but clear.

“I saw you dance last night. The fire was in you.”

“Oh, so dat’s what it was!” Milo laughs. “I wondered.”

“You’re Milo Noirlac, a French person from Quebec. I asked around. My name’s Manoela.”

“Trilled to meet you, Manoela.”

“I’m Indian. I come from the south of Bahia, near Porto Seguro. My people are the Pataxo Hahahae.”

“Hahahae, a fine laughing name.”

“My husband was madingueiro, too. . He worked many years with Mestre Pastinha.”

“You say was. .?”

“Two years ago in a fishing expedition, he. . drown. Our children big already, live far …”

“I’m sorry. Life must be lonely for you sometimes.”

Other people pull him back into the conversation. It goes on and on. Later, Manoela comes back to Milo and says,

“Your skin is talking to mine.”

“Your skin is answering mine.”

CUT to the two of them making love that night, in Manoela’s more than modest bedroom. Afterward they lie in bed, holding each other.

“You’re Indian, just like me. . aren’t you, child?” she murmurs.

“How you know dat?”

“’Cause of your silence.”

“What do you mean? I spent de whole evening talkin’ my head off.”

“Can’t fool me with that, baby.”

They laugh and kiss and laugh and kiss. The next morning, as they drink strong coffee together on the doorstep, he tells her in a few words the tale of his birth, even adding (in a rare élan of total trust) that when he was three or four Awinita revealed his middle name to him, a Cree word meaning resistant.

“So she don’t leave you completely.”

“She did, Manoela.”

“No, child. You’re a little baby, she live with you a few days, look at you closely and see you going to make it. You understand? If she give you this name, it mean she got confidence in your fate.”

Several shots of Homer filming other capoeira performances in and around Salvador, Milo achieving a higher degree of integration each time. Learning as he goes, laughing, feinting and radiant, talking with people, making love now with women, now with men. Just before his departure, he undergoes a batizado ceremony and is given a new name, one that suits him to a T: Astuto.

On the flight back to New York, Milo and Homer go over their notes, talking about what’s in the reels and how to edit it, occasionally rocking with laughter.

CUT to Milo working alone in his Lower Manhattan apartment. The phone rings (in 1975, still one of those jangly, heavy black Bakelite contraptions) and he jumps out of his skin.

“What?” he yells at the phone before picking it up.

“Milo?” says a soft, high, wavering female voice at the other end: a French voice, but whose?

“Yeah. Who’s calling?”

“It’s your cousin. It’s Gabrielle.”

Through Milo’s eyes, we look out the window at a bric-a-brac of brick walls, fire exits, garbage cans and broken bottles.

“Milo, Mommy is dying. She wants to see you.”

“How did you find me?”

“Your friend Edith told me you were in New York, so I called information. Daddy asked me to get in touch with you, Milo, he’s all het up. . Mommy has womb cancer. I don’t want to bother you, I know you’ve got another life and you don’t think about us anymore. . but Mommy’s only got a few days left to live and she’s been asking to see you. She wants to apologize to you. . you know. . for the bonfire.”

“I got noting against you and Régis, Gabrielle. .” says Milo, interrupting softly. “I got noting at all against de two of you. .”

Very gently, he hangs up. . CUT.

THOSE YEARS, MILO says yes to any project, whether documentary or feature film, that will take him back to African soul dancing on American soil.

You see, Astuto? We were fated to meet. When I returned to the NYU Film School as an alumnus and gave a presentation of my new film on Haitian voodoo, it was inevitable that you’d come to the projection and I’d fall for you the minute I set eyes on you. I don’t know what you saw in me, apart from a supremely handsome, intelligent, gifted, almost-successful genius of a film director; anyway, we made love at your place that very night. . You amazed me in bed. No hang-ups, no shyness, no apologies or kinks. . Just eagerness, inventiveness and stupendous generosity.

We talked the next morning over breakfast, and the more I got to know you the more I wanted to work with you. . By the time we separated later that same day, I’d signed you up as cowriter on my next film.

A riffle through Milo’s travels, travails, trails and trials over the next few years. We see him attending film festivals, meeting directors, making a name for himself as a screenwriter. He’s not a writer in any usual sense of the word — avoids writing in his own name, even letters; doesn’t want people to know how to reach him, find him; often refrains from answering even phone calls (his telephone phobia will never leave him). Time shadows him always, hard on his heels, and he moves on, never stops moving, gingare, like a capoeirista in Bahia or an Indian in the forest, effacing his tracks as he goes along so as to leave no evidence behind. . He has no style of his own but has hit upon the perfect compromise between Neil’s ultraliterary tradition and Awinita’s oral one—writing orality. In his dark bedroom in Manhattan as in the closets of his childhood in Montreal or in front of the silent TV set in Mauricie, he listens intently to the voices in his head, then transcribes their words with confounding accuracy. Being half deaf in one ear has impaired his inner hearing not at all. .

JUNE 1980, MONTREAL World Film Festival. Close-up on Milo, not quite thirty, at a fancy dinner party. He glances around the table — white tablecloth, champagne, oysters, women in sparkling jewelry making long, careful curls bounce when they toss their heads back to laugh, men holding forth in loud proud voices — and thinks it is fine. Whatever. (He thinks his Lower Manhattan hole-in-the-wall is fine, too.)

A young actress, bleached blond, wearing a slinky, strapless black dress and teetering on stiletto heels, comes over and sits down next to him. At once they dive deeply into mutual seduction. . CUT.

In Milo’s room at the Ritz-Carlton on Sherbrooke (a mile or so west of the gray stone house in which Neil was once uncomfortably lodged by Judge and Mrs. McGuire), he and the blonde are making love. It turns out that this woman, whose name is Yolande or Yolaine, he’s not sure which, is even more beautiful without than with her makeup and fancy clothes.

“Hey, Milo Noirlac,” she whispers into his ear when they wake up in the morning, “I adore you, you know that? I’m not sure it’s wise of me but I can’t help it, I love the hell out of you.”

Milo smiles, presses her to him and, in the brilliant sunlight of a Sunday morning in Montreal, makes love to her again. They chat afterward, tapping silver knives through the shells of their soft-boiled, room-service eggs.

“Dis is incredible.”

“What’s incredible, Milo, love?”

“Dis whole thing. Being back in my hometown after all dese years. . Winning a festival prize. . Meeting you, Yolaine, de best actress in Quebec and de most beautiful woman in de world.”

“Especially meeting me.”

“Dat’s for sure!”

“Will you write a role for me one day?”

“Ha! You know de Belgian joke!”

“No?”

“How do you recognize an up-and-coming Belgian actress?”

“. . Well?”

“She’s de one who sleeps with de screenwriter.”

They let their chairs tip backward onto the bed and go at each other again, Yolande taking the initiative this time and Milo giving himself up rapturously to her caresses.

CUT to the bathroom: Yolaine murmuring sweet nothings into Milo’s ear as they shower together.

“I love your hair. . And I love the way you write. . And I love how gentle you are. . And I love how you’re going to take me with you on your trips. .”

CUT to Milo and Yolande walking on Saint Helen’s Island together.

“Why are you always so passive, Milo?”

“I tought you loved me.”

“Yeah, I love you, but. . I mean, a person’s gotta know what they want. I say let’s get married, you say fine, and then you don’t do anything about it!”

“Well. . what is dere to be done? Is it as complicated as all dat? I don’t know, I never married anybody before.”

“Neither did I, you idiot, but we should throw a party, send out invitations to our families, I know that much. .”

“. .”

“Okay, okay, I know you never met your parents. . But you must have been raised by somebody, Milo. You didn’t grow up with wolves in the forest!”

“Dat woulda been nice.”

“Come on. . You said you had a wonderful grandfather.”

“He’s dead.”

“And. . don’t you have a whole houseful of aunts and uncles and cousins up in Mauricie?”

“Dere’s nobody left.”

“You want us to get married just like that, in city hall?”

“Dat’s fine wit me.”

“Okay, well. .”

Close-up of Milo’s right hand, signing his name with a flourish at the bottom of an official paper. We read the end of the text: united in wedlock on this day. . Signed: Milo Noirlac. He hands the pen to Yolaine. . CUT.

OVER THE NEXT half minute or so: flashes from the next few years as Milo and Yolaine begin the life of a fairly happy, rather successful, moderately artistic Québécois couple of the late 1970s.

Milo running up the short flight of steps onstage to be congratulated at an awards ceremony, Yolande clapping from the audience. . The same situation the other way around. . Milo making wild love with Paul Schwarz on their first scoping-out trip to Rio. . Yolaine memorizing lines in the living room, with Milo cuing her. . Milo chain-smoking as he writes at the kitchen table in the middle of the night. . Yolande coming home at three A.M. and the two of them making love amidst his papers on the table. . Yolaine jealous because Paul Schwarz is on the phone and she suspects there might be something between them. . Milo in a black hole, in bed, his head turned to the wall, Yolande hovering at his side and worrying about him just as Roxanne used to. . Yolaine and Milo vacationing on the Côte d’Azur after the Cannes International Film Festival. . Sitting side by side on the beach. . Making love in the sand after nightfall, when everyone has gone home. .

A conversation over dinner that night. Yolande smiles at him as they raise their glasses in a toast.

“What shall we drink to?”

“To us, my beauty!”

“Yeah, but to us what?”

“To us, I dunno. . Do we have to add someting?”

They sip their drinks.

“That’s just the question, Milo.”

“What?”

“Yeah, should we add something or shouldn’t we? I mean. . should I stop taking the pill or shouldn’t I?”

“Ah!”

“You said it. Ah.”

“I don’t know. . D’you want a kid?”

“I don’t know. But it’s time I did, with my thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you! Do you want a kid?”

“I don’t know.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Hmm.”

“We’re pretty weird, aren’t we?”

“You tink so?”

“Okay, well, we can think about it awhile longer.”

“Let’s do dat.”

“Yeah, right, we’re not in that much of a hurry, eh? We can give it some more thought.”

“Right.”

(Remember how warmly I encouraged you to have a baby with Yolande, Milo darling? I quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet to you: You had a father: let your son say so. . I wanted you to live forever! But in Quebec in those days, too many adults had been unwanted, illegitimate, orphaned, lost, or abandoned children. . Now that people could avoid having kids, no one seemed to know quite how they felt about parenthood.)

EXTERIOR, SAINT DENIS STREET — NIGHT. Paul Schwarz is in Montreal to work with Milo on Science and Sorcery, their project about AIDS in Brazil. Sauntering into a bar together, the first thing they see is Yolaine’s back, with the arm of a male stranger draped ostentatiously around it. Not missing a beat, Milo steers Paul over to a corner table and goes on talking about how to do smooth camera work in the steep, unevenly cobbled streets of the favelas.

When she gets up to leave a few minutes later, the strange man’s arm still possessively glued to her body, Yolande catches sight of her husband and freezes in her tracks. The man releases her, but Milo smiles and looks away.

She slips her arm back through the man’s arm and they go out the door together.

CUT to Milo working at the kitchen table the next morning, cigarette in hand. When Yolaine comes home, he pours her a cup of coffee and brings it to her with a kiss. She clatteringly drops the cup into the sink.

“I just don’t get it, Milo! I don’t come home all night and you don’t give a damn!”

“. .”

“You see me with another man, I don’t come home all night and that’s fine with you!”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Listen, it’s just not normal to be that unjealous! I’m jealous, and I find it only normal to be jealous!”

“So we each tink we’re normal. Dat’s normal. .”

“For God’s sake, Milo! You’re just too passive! You have no will of your own! I’ve been telling you so for years! It is impossible to know what you really want, because you don’t want to tell me! I want to make love, you say fine; I want to marry you, you say fine; the great Paul Schwarz wants to make a film with you, you say fine; and what if he wants to sleep with you? Do you say fine then, too? Maybe you do! I spend the night in the arms of another man and you say fine. Are you missing a cog or what, Milo? You should get help!”

Before answering, Milo stubs out his cigarette, carefully washes and dries his coffee cup, and puts it away in the cupboard.

“You don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to you. People can’t belong to each oder. They can’t even know each oder. . Dey don’t even know demselves! I don’t feel de need to know everyting you do. I trust you. Everybody does what dey need to do, don’t dey?”

“But if I leave you, Milo?”

“Well. . if you leave me, you leave me. You won’t be dere, so you won’t have to tell me, I’ll see it all by myself.”

“Jesus, I don’t believe it. You’re incredible!”

CUT to the two of them in bed, writhing in each other’s arms. But Yolaine’s mind is elsewhere. .

Then comes a depressing scene most of us have probably lived through at least once: on a rainy, desperately gray November afternoon, surrounded by boxes and suitcases, the couple divvies up their kitchen utensils. . record collection. . library books. . all the possessions they’ve accumulated in five years of marriage.

CUT to Milo’s right hand, signing his name with a flourish at the bottom of an official paper. Close-up on the end of the text: divorce by mutual consent. As no children issued from this union, no legal dispositions need be made on the subject. Signed: Milo Noirlac. He hands the pen to Yolande.

(And then, Astuto. . It was just a few weeks after your divorce, wasn’t it, that. .)

One evening, in his new and much smaller apartment out in the Mile End section of Montreal, Milo is completely engrossed in the Science and Sorcery screenplay. . so when the phone rings (jump, shout, What?), he picks up the receiver angrily. Listens. We hear a man’s voice but can’t make out the words. After a few seconds, Milo sits down again.

“I don’t believe you. . Who de hell is dis?. . Okay. No, tomorrow I go to New York. Next week I come. Tell me your address. Okay. Six o’clock next Wednesday. Okay.”

CUT to Milo walking down the dimly lit hallway of a shabby rooming house. The odor of poverty fairly leaps at us from the screen: a gut-rippling mixture of urine, beer and cabbage. So thick is the layer of filth on the walls and floor that Milo’s hand hesitates before touching the door knocker. The door opens a crack; a bleary eye peers out; a chain is removed; Milo steps into the room.

Smaller than he, the man reeks of whisky, decayed teeth and ancient sweat. His apartment seems to have seen neither daylight nor a duster in decades. . Thank God for images, Astuto; thank God we don’t need to cast about for words to describe the place. The stench and strangeness are so overpowering that Milo has to consciously will his body to stay nailed to the spot.

“Sit down,” the old man says. “Make yourself at home.”

Milo lowers himself into a faux-leather armchair whose springs whine in protest at his weight.

“So explain to me what you’re talking about.”

“It’s true. I swear it’s true. Cross my heart and hope to die, I’m your da.”

“My fader’s dead.”

“No,” says Declan, ridiculously flexing his biceps. “Look: There is still a bit of life left in these old bones! If I was dead I’d know about it, seems to me!”

“Who de fuck are you?”

“I’m not kiddin’, I’m your da. Look! I’ve got your birth certificate and all.”

Hobbling over to a chest of drawers, Declan pulls out a sheet of paper and waves it under Milo’s nose, then points triumphantly at words on the paper: “See? See?”

But whether because of the dim light in the room or the hubbub in his brain, Milo can decipher nothing; all he sees is the black line of dirt under the old man’s fingernail.

“Noirlac, Milo. Son of Noirlac, Declan and Johnson, Awinita. I’m Noirlac, Declan. I’m your da, see? Neil’s son, seventh of thirteen, right smack in the middle! Didn’t Neil ever tell you about me?”

Milo is thunderstruck.

“I’m the one who named you Milo! I chose your name, I did! In March ‘51, Miles Davis’s Birdland songs were on the radio all the time and I was crazy about them. So I called you Milo, which is Irish for Myles. Given that we’re Irish.”

Silence. Then: “How did you find me?”

“Saw in the newspaper you were livin’ in Montreal again. Called up information on the off chance.”

“In de newspaper?”

“Yeah, look. .”

Declan opens a folder containing a sprawl of newspaper clippings. Torn from the culture section of a recent Gazette, the one on the top includes a photo of Milo and Paul grinning from ear to ear, their arms around each other’s waist. Local Screenwriter Swings Contract with Major U.S. Producer, the headline reads.

“So?”

“So! You’re doin’ good, eh? You’re doin’ fine. Glad to know it, Milo.”

“So?”

“So I thought. . you know. . Me being your very own da and all, and you havin’ come up in the world, so to speak. . doin’ even better than your own da. .”

“I don’t believe it. . Is dat why you got in touch wit me?”

“Well, I admit I thought you might see clear to givin’ your old man a hand. Makin’ him a loan, like.”

Silence. Declan offers Milo a glass of whisky. Getting no response, he sits down and takes a swig directly from the bottle.

“I told your ma I’d maybe ask you for a little help, and she said it was a good idea.”

An electroshock.

“My moder’s alive?”

“Sure. . Why should everybody be dead? We ain’t even old yet. We keep in touch. When you were born, I promised her I’d take care of you and I did.”

“You took care of me? I’m tirty years old, I meet you for de first time in my life, and you sit dere and look me in de eye and say you took care of me?”

“Yeah, you know. . I stayed in touch with the agency. . I always kept track of the foster homes they put you in. . And if I heard your foster parents were beatin’ you too bad, I made sure they moved you somewhere else. . None of that for me! Strangers, hitting my own son! No, sirree! I kept my promise to your mom. .”

“My Indian name.”

“Yeah, Nita gave you a Cree name, too. That’s right.”

“What was it?”

“Huh. . it’s been ages. . Got it written down somewhere. Prob’ly find it in that chest of drawers, if you wanna take a look. Or you can call her up and ask her for yourself. She’s back on the res now, up north. Happy to give you her number, if you can afford long distance calls. I sure as hell can’t!”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She wrote to me last week. Go see for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Letter’s right there in the bedroom.”

Milo rises. As he crosses toward the bedroom in slow motion, Awinita’s voice moves into our ears in crescendo: What ya doin’ in de dark, little one? Come wit me! Come wit your mom!. . Fear noting, son. The sacred is neider above nor below you. . Don worry ‘bout God or de Devil. . Everyting you do is a prayer. . Your Cree name means resistance. You gonna have to resist, little one. You gonna need to be strong. . What ya doin’ in de dark, little one?

In the bedroom: subjective camera, swinging down in a capoeira ginga from ceiling (cracks and cobwebs) to floor (overflowing ashtrays, discarded clothing stiff with filth). The bed hasn’t been made in ages. An upended orange crate serves as a bedside table. On the crate: an envelope.

Milo crosses the room (lightfooted, Indian, his mother’s son). Picks up the envelope. Camera close-up on the clumsy, childish handwriting. Declan’s name and address. . Montreal spelled Muntreal. . Her hand traced these words a mere few days ago. . he’s virtually touching his mother. . Gently, he turns the envelope over. Withdraws the single sheet it contains. Unfolds it. Starts to read. Again we hear Awinita’s voice. . but strange and low and echo-filled, as if from far away.

Hi Mister Clening — Fluid

glad to hear you found your son

Milo refolds the sheet of paper. Slides it back into the envelope. Sets the envelope on the orange crate. Crosses to the door. Turns off the light. Leaves the room. Leaves the building.

IT’S OKAY, ASTUTO. There would have been no point in your actually, physically traveling to an isolated Cree reserve way the hell up north in Waswanipi and meeting Awinita. She was pushing fifty by then, and probably alcoholic and obese. . What would you have said to each other? I mean. . your mother had been talking to you your whole life long. She couldn’t ever leave you.

• • • • •

Neil, 1927

SEVERAL YEARS HAVE passed. We come upon Neil at age thirty-five, sitting at his desk in his new den on the second floor, reading glasses perched on his nose, his red beard now streaked with gray. The bookshelves on the walls around him are empty; at their foot, bearing shipping stickers from Ireland, several crates of books have been opened but not as yet unpacked. Distracted by family noises from downstairs, he is trying desperately to concentrate but getting nowhere.

CUT to the dinner table, later that evening. Present are Marie-Jeanne, hugely pregnant, Neil, hugely despondent, and half a dozen snotty, squirmy little children, up to and including a thin, dark-haired six-year-old girl whose already-bossy attitude designates her as Marie-Thérèse.

“You’re holding your fork the wrong way, Sam,” she says.

“You’re not my mother.”

“Do what she says, Sam.”

“She gets on my nerves.”

“Did you hear what he said, Mommy?”

“Calm down, darling, it’s not that important.”

“Pass the butter.”

“You didn’t say please.”

“Please.”

“Please who?”

“The butter, goddamm it.”

“Watch your tongue!”

“I’m full, Mommy.”

“Mommy, can I leave the table?”

“What do you think, Neil?”

“Far as I’m concerned, they can leave the house.”

“That’s not funny.”

“No, it’s not funny.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“No, I’m not serious. It’s just a line from this new poem I’m trying to write. Some people write Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born, others write Far as I’m concerned they can leave the. .”

“Ouch! Mommy, Antony pinched me!”

“Ask your son if he pinched his sister!”

“Did you pinch your sister, Antony?”

“Not very hard. She kicked me yesterday.”

“That’s too long ago. You can’t pinch her today because she kicked you yesterday; otherwise it’s civil war.”

“What’s civil war, Daddy?”

“Well, you know, back in Ireland. .”

“Oh, no! Not Ireland again!”

“Boo, boo. . not Ireland again!”

“Anyway, you’re not supposed to talk with your mouth full.”

“Marie-Thérèse, it’s not your job to correct your father’s table manners.”

“Why should grown-ups be allowed and not children?”

“Because that’s the way it is. I count on you to set a good example!”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Goody-goody.”

“Now, William. .”

“What’s the matter?”

“Don’t insult your older sister.”

“It’s not an insult, it’s the truth.”

“Well, as your namesake Willie Yeats told me long ago, you’ve got to be careful of the time you choose for truth-telling.”

“Oh, no, not Willie Yeats again! Mommy, I’m tired of Daddy’s old stories about Willie Yeats!”

Seeing red, Neil gets to his feet.

“Oh, yeah? Well. . if I can no longer talk to me own feckin’ family about me own feckin’ friends. .”

And with a great roar of virile rage he overturns the dinner table, sending children squealing like piglets and scattering in all directions. Suddenly a different scream arcs high above the general clamor — Marie-Jeanne’s water has just broken. Close-up on her face, contorted in panic. . and on Neil’s, scowling with shame.

CUT to exterior night, at the icy heart of darkness, two or three in the morning. Marie-Louise, visibly older than when we last saw her, comes out the front door. Neil staggers a bit, exhausted from pacing up and down in front of the house. Bangs his pipe against the porch steps to empty it, then scuffs out the embers in the dirt.

“Well?” he asks the midwife.

“He’s got nice red hair.”

“Ah! A boy!”

“Yes. Gonna make another Anglo outta him?”

“And that’s not all! That’s not all! I plan to make this one my heir.”

“Oh, really? I thought the house and grounds still belonged to your brothers-in-law.”

“No, Marie-Louise, I mean a spiritual heir. That boy in there will inherit my books. He’ll inherit my ideas. He’ll inherit my dreams.”

“And have you found a name for this heir of yours?”

“Declan.”

“Funny name.”

“It means full of goodness.”

“Okay, well anyway, in the meantime you can go make his acquaintance.”

And Marie-Louise — white-haired, white-uniformed, white-capped — moves off into the shadows of the night.

• • • • •

Awinita, January 1952

NOW SIX MONTHS pregnant with Declan’s baby and pumping heroin daily through the bloodstream she shares with it, Awinita hovers and wavers downstairs in the wake of a client. (As always, we are in her body.) The latter — a short, fat, balding sexagenarian who might be a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman on the verge of retirement — does not turn to thank us or wish us a good day but walks straight through the bar and out into the dawn, his step springy with Good riddance (though one would be hard put to say whether the phrase applied to his sperm or to the woman he’s just paid to help relieve him of it).

We hike ourselves up onto a stool and more or less collapse onto the bar, head slumped on folded arms, vaguely expecting Irwin the barman to bring us a coffee as he sometimes does when we’ve been up all night. Today, however, Irwin doesn’t bring coffee. He brings news.

Close-up on his belt buckle as it moves toward us along the bar and comes to a halt a few inches from our nose.

“Deena got hers.”

We sit up straight. As in the first scene, we see our face in the mirror behind the bar. Surrounded by blond-and-black hair, its features are frozen; no question marks light up our eyes.

“I just told Liz and she’s mad as hell. Serves the little bitch right, though. You girls know you’re not s’posed to see your johns on the side. You know it. It’s for your own sake, Jesus Christ. But she couldn’t resist the idea of makin’ some extra dough, so she followed this guy up to his place. After rapin’ her with a broken bottle or somethin’, he strangled her and tossed her out the window. Strokaluck, the cop who found her (he’s a regular here), came and told me, quiet-like, while she was bein’ hauled off to the morgue. Native Female, Unidentified we decided to call her. I can’t believe you guys. You, too, Nita. I know you been forkin’ out to that Irish lush o’ yours. Those guys can be dangerous, man. That’s what I’m here for, to protect you, not just to spy on you or take my cut. . You’re not careful, you’ll end up like Deena, a naked corpse in the gutter.”

Our motionless face in the mirror gradually turns into a black mask with huge eyeholes and a grinning, gaping mouth hole.

CUT to later that morning, a coffee shop a couple of doors down Saint Catherine Street. Sitting in front of a cup of untouched coffee, Awinita stares at a fleck of gold in the Formica table. Declan squeezes both her hands in his.

“Jesus Christ, Nita. Holy Moses. Oh, shit. Deena’s dead? Holy shit, I can’t believe it. Baby, we gotta get you outta that dump. And I mean now, before you have our child. We just can’t take the risk, Nita. Deena strangled, Jesus, I can’t believe it. Dja know her family?”

“How could I? I’m Cree, she Mohawk. Our reserves are days apart.”

“Okay, okay! Don’t look at me like I’m an idiot! I got enough women in my life look at me that way. . You listening to me, Nita?”

“. . Yeah.”

Declan checks to make sure no waitresses are in sight before releasing her hands and taking a swig from the flask in his jacket pocket.

“Well, you better be listening. Once we’re married, I want this talkin’ back to stop, that clear?”

Silence.

“You should get off the game, Nita, find some other line o’ work. I mean, look what happened to poor Deena, Jesus.”

Close-up on our limp, still hands and, next to them, the gold fleck in the Formica table. Hold this image for a few long seconds.

CUT to the cruddy little bedroom above the bar, that same evening. After setting ten dollars on the table under the window, our new client starts to undress. He’s a tall, flint-haired, business-suited anglophone in his midfifties. Gold watch, gold tiepin (the kind of elegance you and I, Milo, have always heartily despised).

“My name’s Don,” he announces, approaching us with a bobbing erection. “What’s yours, my lovely?”

CUT to a few minutes later: the man’s face in the throes of orgasm.

Silence.

Still later, lying next to us in bed, Don strokes our large round tummy.

“So has this baby got a dad, Nita?”

“Not mucha one.”

“When are you due?”

“Coupla monts, I tink.”

“Pregnancy going all right?”

“Wha? Yeah, sure. No problem.”

“What will you do with the child once it’s born? Will you raise it yourself?”

“Nah. . I give it up for adoption.”

“And then?”

“Den what?”

“Yes, then what?”

“. .”

“What will you do next, my lovely?”

“Keep on workin’, I guess.”

“Wouldn’t you like to earn more money than you do here?”

“Sure.”

“Wouldn’t you like to buy yourself some pretty clothes? Be able to go to the hairdresser’s every now and then?”

“. .”

“Look at me, Nita.”

We look into his eyes.

“Can you kiss me, Nita?”

“Nah. . I don’t do kisses.”

“Look at me, sweetheart. Can you kiss me on the lips? Can you?”

Very slowly, we move toward the well-shaven face of the gray-haired asshole stranger of a white American businessman. Extreme close-up on the crow’s feet at the corner of his left eye.

“Ah. . that was marvelous. Know what I think, Nita? I think you should be working in a classier place than this one. Don’t you agree?. . Do you trust me, Nita? Just say the word and I’ll give you a room of your own in my penthouse. You’ll earn much better money and be able to buy everything your heart desires.”

Awinita reaches out her hands to herself in a gesture of complete trust.

“Tell me, my lovely, will you come to me as soon as you’ve had your baby?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, Nita! You make me so happy! Give me another kiss, my darling, to seal the agreement between us.”

Giving in to the fatigue, the heroin, the hope, and the sense of being a little girl again, we sink into the man’s arms and allow him to smother our face, neck, swollen breasts and stomach with kisses.

Trees, waving conspiratorially. Each leaf clear-cut and brightly beautiful. The form of a face appears in their midst. At first it frowns. Then it smiles.

“Yes,” we say. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Get me out of here, Don. Yes.”

How you doing, Astuto? The machine grinds on to the best of its ability, zingzing kerplunk. Cogs spin and whir, the projector projects, the connector connects, generations criss and cross, and we begin to sense that before long the whole kit and caboodle will be over. I’ve always been impressed by the fact that human beings are hardwired to respond emotionally to stories. Unless you bore them stiff with stuff like Last Year at Marienbad, they’ll start feeling moved about two-thirds of the way through any book or movie. We’re well past the two-thirds point now; I’d say we’re at about nine-tenths.

Hey, babe. We’ve been working all night. Look! Sky’s changing from dark gray to light gray. What else is new? It’s November in the city of Montreal. Sun’s coming up. So to speak. Sun’s not moving; Earth is moving. Before you know it, the nurses will be barging in with breakfast. Jesus, Milo, you must be starving! Me? No, no, I don’t get hungry. Except for sex, of course. Here. . gimme a kiss. . Oh, as Don would say. . that was marvelous!

Astuto, I’m very tired all of a sudden. Think I’ll lie down myself, if you don’t mind. Nah, no need to move over, I don’t take up any room. . just need to rest for a while.

• • • • •