Black Dance

X. BICHO FALSO

Milo, 1990–2005

EUGÉNIO BECAME YOUR son, Astuto. I mean, what could be more logical than for an Irish-Quebecker-Cree bastard like yourself to have an Afro-Caribbean son? He was your child even if you couldn’t adopt him legally, and you took far better care of him than you did of yourself.

Your inquiries had brought you precious little information about his mother. However, the thumbnail sketch reluctantly provided by the police — teenager, prostitute, dead — was more than enough. You loved the boy with a vengeance. Sought and found pretexts to travel to Brazil as often as possible, accepting any and every job that could take you there, including scripting tourist trash on the beaches of Arraial d’Ajuda or Porto Seguro. The rest of the time you learned Portuguese, kept up with Eugénio’s school reports, sent money to his foster mother, and regularly requested photos of the child in exchange.

Strange as it may seem, Eugénio sewed your ragtag life together. You’d soon be fifty, Milo, darling. Your wild and gorgeous energy had begun to wane, but you could feel it rising in your son. What your muscles lost, his gained. And your black holes were fewer and farther between, because the thought of Eugénio kept you going.

Flash scenes from those years: Milo and Eugénio, both wearing white pants, walking and talking together in the favela of Saens Peña. Laughing. Practicing capoeira together at the Senzala Academy. Classes were held way up at the top of the small and shabby Olympico Club in Copacabana, with its rehearsal room built around the naked rock of a tiny mountain. The boy’s eyes shine as he watches his Canadian protector kick-spin and feint.

For me, those were the halcyon years. Our film Science and Sorcery won a prize, and my career skyrocketed — suddenly I was being solicited and feted left and right. I admit I enjoyed that brief stint as a celebrity; never would this misfit Jewish kid from Buenos Aires have imagined he’d one day be jetting business class from Sundance to Berlin and from Venice to Locarno, drinking champagne, smoking Cuban cigars and watching his bank account grow fat. Though our paths crossed less often, whenever we did meet our love was there at once, as rich as on day one. We still fucked like gods (not Yahweh, not Allah, not Our Father Almighty — God forbid! — but the horniest pagan deities of ancient Greece).

Slow down the flashing. Halt in the year 2005.

A SCENE WITH Milo and Paul in the shower together (sorry, I can’t resist doing this just once). Paul, having been wined and dined at a dozen film festivals in the past year, may perhaps have acquired a tiny bit of a potbelly, but we don’t need to insist on that. After three decades of loving, their bodies are still in full trust and lust. They soap each other’s cock and crack, kiss beneath the hot sprinkle, mix saliva and water on their lips and tongues, turn to massage each other’s shoulders and lower back.

“Been too long since we worked together, baby,” murmurs Paul.

As they fuck, the camera will take an acute interest in patterns of steam and droplets on the shower stall’s glass wall.

“I got an idea,” says Milo a few moments later, turning off the taps. “We should do a film about capoeira in de favelas. Eugénio could star in it; he’s almost fifteen now, you know. De kid’s incredible.”

“Nah. . Capoeira’s everywhere these days. Video games, cartoons, you name it. Even Catwoman does capoeira, for Christ’s sake! You know? I mean, it’s a complete cliché.”

The two men towel each other down in the spacious marble bathroom of Paul’s hotel suite. (We don’t need to know what city the hotel is in. Could be Miami, L.A. .)

“No, not dat,” says Milo. “A political document, you know? Capoeiristas used to be black kids who picked fights. It was always about delinquency and disorder, rebellion and resistance. De film could start out wit de black slaves in Brazil, how dey revived de music from all over de African continent and mixed it up wit Indian rhydms. For dem de dance was a weapon, man, for dem it was a language. Dose slaveowners scattered families and mixed different tribes togeder to keep people from talkin’ to each oder, but deir bodies still could talk. Deir bodies still could understand each oder.”

“Like ours.”

“Eugénio could be de young hero. He’s taller dan me now! You wouldn’t recognize him, man!”

“Actually, Milo, it’s not unusual for children to grow between the ages of four and fourteen. And, uh. . I hate to point out the obvious, but height is not my sole criterion for hiring actors.”

“Okay, I know you tink I’m biased cause I’m his godfader. . but come see for yourself, it’ll take you tree seconds to see I’m right. He’s got his green belt already, he’s a phenomenon! I swear he could do it. If you’re not sure, do a screen test. We’d write de script togeder. Tree monts workin’ on location in Rio. Hey, man, it’d be a ball.”

“Three months? Sure, I think I can easily fit that into the spring of. . say, 2020.”

Having donned identical beige bathrobes, the two men are now seated at a low glass table in the suite’s drawing room, sipping Irish whisky neat.

“Do a screen test,” Milo insists. “You can find time for dat, can’t you, you stingy Jew?”

I shouldn’t have laughed, shouldn’t have listened to you, should never have gone back to Rio with you, Astuto. Big mistake.

CUT to the practice room at Copa’s Olympico Club. We’ll set up the camera in the same corner as the musicians. Toque is established. Roda forms. Gingas get going. Under the direction of their mestre, dark-skinned teenagers in white pants go through a formal series of kicks, twists, leaps and swivels, jiving constantly to the rhythm, constantly to the song, their left arms regularly moving up to protect their faces. Eugénio stands out among them; so swift and supple that he seems weightless. Paul and Milo watch from the far end of the room, Milo taking notes, Paul doing nothing, stunned by the kid’s grace.

CUT to early the next morning: Eugénio performing alone on the beach at Copacabana, Paul recording his spectacular whirls and leaps and somersaults in the air. (I like the fact that we’re ending the film as we began it — with a man cutting capers at water’s edge.) Close-up on Milo’s face as he plays atabaque to accompany his son. For the first time since he was a baby in the hospital half a century ago, his eyes are moist with tears.

A studio in Gloria. Paul simultaneously shooting Eugénio and giving him instructions that Milo, when necessary, translates into Portuguese: Terrific. . Could you just, like, walk across the room? Good, great. . Now, turn around. . Smile at someone beyond my left shoulder. . Yes. Terrific smile, thank you. . Now if I give you something to read for a sound test — anything at all, here, take this newspaper — would you mind reading me the beginning of an article, any article? Do you understand? Can you ask him to read something for us, Milo?

Eugénio kept glancing over at you uncertainly, and because you kept warmly nodding your encouragement, he continued to obey me despite his growing discomfort. I was uncomfortable, too. I don’t know why I didn’t listen to my instinct and put an end to the situation as soon as I grasped its overtones (i.e., within about two minutes), but I didn’t. For your sake, Milo, both Eugénio and I forced ourselves to go on with the screen test, which therefore lasted the usual three-quarters of an hour.

Eugénio obeyed, but I could tell that he hated taking orders from a well-dressed, balding (and, okay, slightly potbellied) white man. The scene must have reminded him of etchings on the theme of slavery from his history books at school. You, the boy adored — no problem there. He’d known you forever, your skin was brownish if not black, and like him you’d grown up poor. Moreover, you were an authority not only on capoeira, but on every other important subject under the sun. . Rap! Crack! Soccer!

I, on the other hand, was white and wealthy. Unlike you, who had to keep forcing jobs in Brazil to materialize, I could come and go as I pleased, fly into Rio and fly out again, choose the young man I wanted to elevate and leave the others behind in their muck and misery. In other words, Milo, I was the enemy.

But that’s not all. . I think Eugénio’s favela friends must have seen you and me in Centro together, holding hands or. . touching. You know. . the way we can’t help touching when we’re together. They must have told him you were queer. . made fun of you, done a grotesque imitation of the two of us. . taunted him for having a fairy godfather. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that Eugénio was already tense and angry when he arrived at the studio that afternoon. Furious with me for having devirilized you in his eyes — and, worse, in the eyes of his buddies. . CUT.

CUT, goddamn it.

THAT EVENING AFTER the screen test, you went up to Saens Peña. You warned me you’d be back late, Eugénio’s mother having invited you over for dinner. . And as for me. . Hmm, I’ve never told you what happened, have I?

The Café do Forte, part of the military fort built on the promontory between Ipanema and Copacabana, is a chic, blue-and-white-tiled joint with marble tables. All but one of the sandwiches on the menu are named after famous Brazilian writers and statesmen. Paul Schwarz orders the one called the “Statue of Drummond,” because he finds it hilarious for a sandwich to be named after a statue. Pink-suited and preoccupied, a frown digging deep furrows into the broad, golden expanse of his forehead (okay, we’ll rewrite that later), he eats his solitary supper, wipes his lips with a linen napkin, and lights a cigar. The café is about to close, waiters are pressing him to leave, so he swallows the last of his brandy, pays for his meal with a credit card and heads back along the promontory. It’s the month of November, the sky is already pitch-black at eight P.M. (well, maybe there was a moon; tell you the truth I don’t remember) and Copacabana’s long, gorgeous curve of beach is invisible. The walkway is studded at regular intervals with cannons, which Paul can’t help seeing as black, metallic cocks jutting out from between two black, metallic testicles for the purpose of ejecting black, metallic projectiles that will sow death and destruction. . He’s always been depressed by the way men (not just straight men) deny their vulnerability by hardening their bodies and turning them into weapons.

No, scrap that. Can’t use the Forte de Copacabana scene. It would be our first departure from this film’s guiding principle — always follow one of the three main protagonists.

Hmm.

You don’t know what happened, do you, Astuto? Eh, my love? And if you don’t know, I’m afraid I can’t help you, because whatever happened it killed me and we haven’t been able to give each other new information since.

Was Eugénio among them? He told the police he wasn’t, but you’ll never know for sure. Did his pals claim to be selling sex or drugs? I handed them my wallet at once. Did Eugénio offer to sleep with me, to sell me his body? Did his friends ask for my credit card numbers or did they ask how much I’d pay them to sodomize me? I handed them my wallet at once. Was I called names, mocked, humiliated, slapped, jostled and raped before I died, or did they kill me right off the bat? Did Eugénio sneak up on me from behind and stick a gun in my back the way the British soldier did to your grandpa Neil on Saint Stephen’s Green in 1916? Did he pull the trigger, or did one of the other kids? Did anyone hear the gunshot? I doubt it. Remember how we used to tense up every time we’d hear loud retorts coming from the favelas? And someone told us it was fireworks. In Rio, loud explosions mean fun and games; M16 assault rifles are quick and quiet. Did I put up a fight, instantly collapse in a heap like Neil’s cousin Thom, a scarlet stain gradually spreading on the back of my pink suit? I handed them my wallet at once.

It doesn’t much matter, Milo marvel. It’s up to you. All the words are yours, anyhow. All the voices have been yours since the beginning. They’ve always been your consolation and your salvation. Whispering tales in your ear as you waited in the closets of your childhood. Making up dialogue as you watched TV movies in the living room at night. Whistling in the dark. .

• • • • •

Neil, 1939

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?

A dark, late-December afternoon, up in Neil’s study. Forehead propped on left hand, baby finger holding in place the spectacles, which, if left to themselves, tend to slide down his nose, Neil is committing to memory what he considers to be William Butler Yeats’s greatest poem, “The Tower.” The bard died nearly a year ago, and Neil is still in mourning for him. He peruses his poems and plays, relives their momentous encounter at Ballylee, and tries to believe, appearances notwithstanding, that he, Neil Kerrigan alias Neil Noirlac, will one day make his literary mark.

The poem conveys both Yeats’s despair at being no longer young and raunchy, and his resolve never to espouse the easy virtues championed by society. He says that despite the encroachments of old age, he’ll remain true to his wild, poetic visions. . until they, too, are dissolved by time and death. When he wrote “The Tower” in 1926, Willie had barely crested sixty. Neil himself is only forty-seven, but having just learned that he is to become a father for the twelfth time and a grandfather for the first (Marie-Thérèse, who married Régis at age seventeen last summer, informed her parents this morning, if not joyfully at least firmly, that they were expecting a baby next June), he feels decrepit age tied to him, too, as to a dog’s tail. When will my life begin? he moans in petto. Is it worse to have known grandeur and lost it, like Willie Yeats, or, like me, never to have known it at all?

Marie-Jeanne’s voice comes lilting up the stairs: “Neil! Are you coming down, my love? It’s going on five o’clock, Christmas dinner is almost ready and you haven’t yet chopped the firewood!”

CUT to Neil entering the woodshed in which he used to experience excruciating literary frustration, before he was given a room of his own in which to experience it. He chops. And chops. And chops. He now has the chopping-wood part of being Tolstoy down to a fine art.

CUT to the Noirlac dining room, early evening. Fire crackling in the fireplace, candlesticks, mistletoe, etc. Assembled around the table is the family au complet: children of all ages (we won’t waste time giving them names the spectators would instantly forget) and four adults (including young Régis, who has brought a bottle of wine to celebrate their pregnancy announcement), to say nothing of the two new humans in the making, as yet invisible. . To contemplate the amount of life he has engendered even as he was busy writing no books makes Neil faintly nauseated. (And he can’t even blame the former for the latter, Tolstoy having fathered thirteen children.)

When all are silent, Marie-Jeanne lights the central candle of the Advent wreath.

“It’s your turn to say grace, Neil, darling.”

“God is good and God is great, grub is ready, time we ate. . Sorry, just joking. We are gathered together this evening to. . to celebrate. . the birth of. . of. .”

The image of yet another baby coming into the world, even if it is the Son of God, all but makes him gag.

“Santa Claus,” pipes up Declan, already a mischief-maker at twelve.

“Declan!” says Marie-Thérèse. “Hold your tongue, that’s blasphemy! You’ll go straight to Hell!”

“Go on, darling. .” Marie-Jeanne urges Neil.

“I’d like for everyone to close their eyes, and observe one minute of silence for the European continent, again in the throes of a terrible war.”

“Bang, bang!” says a younger boy.

“Boom!” says an older one.

“It’s not the right moment, Neil,” Marie-Jeanne admonishes him gently. “Please. Christmas dinner with your children is not a good time to talk about war.”

Neil raises his voice: “You’re right, Marie-Jeanne. There are plenty of other things I could talk about. Like how come Finnegans Wake is deemed a masterpiece whereas my own opus of mixed languages, written twenty-five years earlier, bit the dust. Or how come the Unionists won by an overwhelming majority in Ulster, obliterating all hope of a merger between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Or how come. .”

“Amen,” says Marie-Jeanne, cutting him off.

Echoed by Marie-Thérèse and Régis in quick succession, her Amen goes hop-skipping around the table until all mouths have uttered it, either in French or in English, except for the very smallest mouth, which has learned no language yet.

“Would you like to cut the turkey?” says Marie-Jeanne, holding her annoyance in.

And the dinner commences as best it can. Bowls of vegetables circulate, but Christmas cheer does not.

CUT to an hour or so later. Close-up on the nearly empty bottle of wine. Only the two men have been drinking, and, neither being accustomed to alcohol, both are feeling its effects: Régis is more outspoken than usual and Neil has grown downright boorish.

“If we’re not careful, the foreigners will take over all our land, and I mean all of it! You’re a big reader, Mr. Noirlac, but I bet you haven’t read Menaud Maître-Draveur, by Félix-Antoine Savard? That’s exactly what’s gonna happen around here! Those Englishmen, they do as they please! They decide what they want and they take what they want and they do exactly what they want!”

“That’s right,” mutters Neil. “The Brits are foreigners here, whereas the French go way back, don’t they? There was no one here before they came, was there? Yes, I skimmed through that racist, colonialist, repetitive piece of shite by Savard, and could not help remarking that the word Indian was mentioned nowhere in it, not even once. . whereas the word Quebec is itself an Indian word! Oh, Régis, I’m so tired of this cant! I’ve been through it before! Pearse and Connolly were using the self-same patriotic drivel back in 1914, before you were so much as a glimmer in your daddy’s eye! Hey, we stole this land first!: a one-sentence summary of the French Canadian nationalist movement. Same thing in Ireland, go back far enough.”

“Please don’t talk to my husband in that tone of voice,” says Marie-Thérèse. “The difference is that the Indians didn’t do any work on the land! We took wild forestland and tamed it by the sweat of our brow, and we’re not gonna let a bunch of damned Englishmen come and steal the fruits of our hard labor!”

“Be careful, Marie-Thérèse,” says Marie-Jeanne. “When you say damned Englishmen, you’re also talking about your own brothers. Don’t forget that! Who knows? Maybe someday they’ll be head of the Hudson’s Bay Company!”

“My brothers, run an enterprise? With the education our father gave them? Don’t make me laugh!. . They’re fully qualified for. . nothing at all! And I mean nothing! Even here on the property they never lift a finger to help. I don’t know what they’ll be when they grow up, Mommy, but they won’t be big bosses, that’s for sure. You can burn me at the stake if I’m wrong.”

“Yeah, let’s burn her at the stake!” says Declan. “That used to be a witch’s test: if you’re a witch you won’t burn. Come on, tie yourself to the stake, you ol’ witch, you got nothin’ to fear!”

“Declan, that’s enough out of you,” says Marie-Jeanne. “I’ll ask you not to open your mouth between now and the end of the meal.”

“If I can’t open my mouth I can’t eat,” Declan says, shoving back his chair. “You guys have spoiled my appetite with all your quarreling. I’m sick of this family.”

“Why don’t you run away?” suggests an older brother.

“Best idea I heard in weeks.”

“Mommy! Mommy!” a younger sister pipes up. “Declan’s gonna run away from home!”

Régis gets to his feet, raises his wineglass, and loudly recites the opening paragraph of Father Savard’s novel: “Having drawn a map of the new continent, from Gaspé to Montreal and from Saint-Jean-d’Iberville to Ungava, we declared: here, everything we have brought with us. .”

Rising in turn, Neil drowns out his son-in-law’s schoolboy recitation with his Irish roar, booming out a verse from “The Tower”:

I leave both faith and pride

To young upstanding men

Climbing up the mountain-side,

That under bursting dawn

They may drop a fly. .

Under pressure to prove to his young wife that her father’s virility won’t cause his own to falter, Régis raises his voice. Unfortunately, it gets higher instead of louder, and he succeeds only in squeaking: “. . our religion, our language, our virtues and even our defects will henceforth be considered sacred and intangible, and must remain so to the end of time.”

Simultaneously, Neil concludes:

“Being of that metal made

Till it was broken by

This sedentary trade.

. . Broken!” he adds. “D’ye hear that, all of ye? The sedentary trade of poetry can break the metal of which young men are made. Smash it to pieces!”

“Merry Christmas, everybody!” pleads one of the younger girls, trying to fix the fiasco.

At this Marie-Jeanne, both arms clutched round her belly, collapses sobbing on the table.

CUT to the smoldering embers of the fire. The house is still; everyone has gone off to bed except Neil and Régis, the two men whose wives are expecting babies. If only subliminally, both are aware that this fact was not for nothing in the flare-up between them over dinner. Another bottle has been found, and they are well into it. Throughout the following dialogue, the camera will stay on the fire grate.

“Félix-Antoine Savard does have a certain flair, I grant you that,” says Neil, puffing on his pipe.

“It sound quite nice,” reciprocates Régis, “zis poem de. . comment. . how you say his name ees? Keats?”

“No, not Keats. Keats is a British poet. Yeats, William Butler Yeats. An Irishman. The greatest poet since Shakespeare. He died last year. It kills me that he died.”

“I’m sorry. He was your friend?”

“Yes. Yes, he was my friend. . in another life. He’s the one who told me to come to Canada.”

“Really. To break metal with poetry, zat is quite strong.”

“He desperately wanted to believe that because he felt his poetic gift waning as he aged and it scared him horribly. Not only his gift but. . the rest as well. The other kinds of. . potency.”

“Wid women?”

“Yes, with women. He’d always felt that physical love and poetic inspiration were connected in him. To lose one was to lose the other. .”

“Estonishing!”

Neil begins to laugh:

“In 1933, a few years after he wrote that poem, he underwent an operation at the hands of a famous London specialist.”

Trying to repress a giggle, Régis winds up snorting.

“No! Operate on. . down dere?”

“A surgeon by the name of Haire, himself a homosexual, incidentally, who offered men what he called the Steinach rejuvenation operation, to restore all their powers.”

Now very drunk, the two men sit there laughing helplessly together.

“And did it work?” pants Régis.

“Halfway,” answers Neil when he can speak. “Yes, he was delighted with the result for half of his problems, and claimed he’d been given a second puberty.”

“Which half?” shrieks Régis.

“Well,” says Neil, struggling to sober up and speak his answer straight, “in the five years that remained to him to live, he managed to. . write a few more good poems!”

The fire’s last ember fades and dies.

BLACKOUT.

• • • • •

Awinita, March 1952

WELL, ASTUTO, WE’VE got a fair amount of whittling down to do, but on the whole I’m proud of us. The Noirlac-Schwarz team is still going strong. Structure’s there, solid, I can feel it. Just one more little piece to fit into the puzzle.

Yeah, sure, I told you we’d change the name. No problem. Maybe we could use your real name. Your Cree name, which no one in the world would recognize. Has it come back to you in the meantime?. .

IN HER RARE moments of lucidity between fixes, Awinita plans her getaway down to the last detail. She’ll pay Liz back what she owes her. Overall, the woman has been kind to her, and Awinita is loath to give whites the least justification for bad-mouthing Indians.

In the cruddy little bedroom above the bar, Don hands her an advance of two hundred dollars and flashes his white-toothed smile at her.

“Don’t spend it all in one place! You’ll see, baby. You’ll be dealing with important people from now on. Wealthy businessmen, members of Parliament, police chiefs and the like. No more of this riffraff you’ve been putting up with. You’re of age, aren’t you, Nita? Tell me the truth. How old are you?”

“Soon twenny.”

“Ouch! Nineteen going on twenty-one, eh?”

“But I los’ my papers.”

“Well, that’s no sweat, we’ll make you new ones. We should change your name, too, while we’re at it. Find you a nice, sexy, new one. Nita’s a bit too. . neat, know what I mean? How ‘bout. . er. . Zsa Zsa, like Zsa Zsa Gabor? Zsa Zsa! You like that?”

“Okay wit me.”

“Kiss me, gorgeous. Ahhhh. . with a new hairdo, a bit of lipstick, a slinky gold lamé dress and spike-heeled sandals, you’ll knock ‘em out, believe you me!”

“Need some time to get back into shape, after de baby.”

“Sure you’ll need time. ‘Course you’ll need time. Er. . how long do you think? Coupla days?”

“Coupla weeks, more like it.”

“Ha! Acting the princess already, are we? Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Main thing is to have your suitcase all ready and packed when you leave for the hospital, so my chauffeur can pick you up when you’re done. An express delivery, let’s hope! You started packing yet?”

“Yeah. Got a bag ready. Not much stuff.”

“Good. Best to forget your old life anyhow, start the new one from scratch. From now on, you’re twenty-one and your name is Zsa Zsa. Right, Zsa Zsa?”

“I guess.”

Don undoes his belt buckle. “Okay, glad we see eye to eye on that. Now, let me give you another little course of instruction in what men like most.

Little rippling colored curves, the petals of a pink flower. Mouths opening and closing, either in pain or exhaustion. Eyes blinking very rapidly. This up-and-down motion throughout, this vacillation. .

Weighed down by our enormous stomach, we walk slowly up Saint Laurent Boulevard from Saint Catherine Street. About halfway home, we turn into a little five-and-ten. Using one of the crisp new twenty-dollar bills we just received from Don, we purchase a dozen small bottles of nail polish in different hues.

CUT to the sleazy apartment on the Plateau Mont-Royal: the other girls crow with delight as Awinita distributes her tiny gifts.

“Just sumpin’ to remember me by.”

“Wow!” Xandra, the new girl, kisses her. “You’re the one who’s getting married, baby! We should be giving you presents!”

“Thanks, Nita.” Lorraine grins at her. “You know where to reach me if you need me, eh?”

Alison, the young Haitian girl, weighing twenty pounds less than when we last saw her and sporting purple rings beneath her eyes, weaves her cokey way down the corridor, brandishing her new bottle of nail polish and singing a Creole lullaby.

Liz, again in her yellow pantsuit, takes the envelope of money from our hands and slips it into her belt. Then, stubbing out her cigarette, she comes around the table to give us a hug.

“Congratulations, Nita. I hear you and the Irishman are getting hitched! I just hope you’re not makin’ a mistake, leavin’ here.”

“Nah.”

“I mean, at least this place is safe, right? At least you’ve got some understanding here.”

“. .”

“You sure about this guy?’Cause once you’re out, you’re out, eh? Your bed’ll be gone in a jiff. You know that, don’t you?”

“Sure, Liz.”

“Well, it’s your funeral!”

Sitting down again, Liz carefully counts the money into her cashbox. Then she nods and Awinita leaves the room.

CUT to Awinita lying on her back on the floor, hands on ballooning belly. Sound track: Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.”

We’re at the bottom of a gully. A rope is tossed down to us from a cliff top, and people yell, Just pull! You can make it! We’ll hold you! We use all our strength to hoist ourselves up, but then—Sorry, we weren’t able to! — they let go of the rope and we go tumbling backward. . A moment later, though, our fall turns into flight. We float. We soar.

Getting clumsily to her feet, Awinita returns to the kitchen and looks straight at Liz.

“Do me a favor?”

“All depends!”

“Can ya write sumpin’ down for me?”

“Sure, I guess so. Long as it’s not the Bible!” Liz reaches across the table for pen and paper.

“Shoot.”

“I, Declan Noirlac. .”

“Whoa, whoa! How do you spell that?”

“You have to help me wit the words. Make ‘em sound strong, you know?”

CUT to the coffee shop on Saint Catherine. Declan and Awinita are in the same booth as on the day of Deena’s murder. As Declan reads the pact out loud, the camera slides from one to the other, filming the fear in their faces.

“I the undersigned, Declan Noirlac, father of the child soon to be born to Miss Awinita Johnson, do hereby solemnly swear to take care of said child, see to its physical and emotional needs, and pay for its education, until such a time as its mother finds herself in a position to return and take up her share of these responsibilities. Montreal, on this the twenty-eighth day of March, in the year of Our Lord, 1952. Signed, et cetera. Wow!”

“Can you sign it, Mister Cleaning-Fluid?”

“Sure, Nita. Sure, I’ll sign it. I told you I’d pull my weight as a da, now, didn’t I?”

“Told me lotsa stuff.”

“What I don’t get is why. What’s it for? You goin’ somewhere?”

“I dunno. Just. . you know, case I die havin’ de kid, or whatever.”

Declan glances at the page: “Well, if you die you won’t be able to. . return and take up your share of these responsibilities, now, will ya?”

“Or if I get sick or sumpin’. Ya never know. Just so’s I don’t lose sight of dis baby like I did de oder one.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, I understand. There.”

Though rather green about the gills, Declan signs.

“Dere’s two copies. One for you an’ one for me.”

“There you go!”

Close-up on his hands, shaking badly as they sign. . (we recognize the hands that left little Milo at the hospital, near the beginning of the film). Suddenly Declan rises and bolts for the men’s room.

Awinita folds up her copy of the contract and slips it into her purse. She sits there, nine months pregnant, not moving, her expression as inscrutable as always.

She is ready.

There was

a word

in the darkness.

Tiny. Unknown.

It hammered in the darkness.

It hammered

on the water’s plinth.

From the depths of time

it hammered.

On the wall.

A word.

In the darkness.

Calling me.

— Eugénio de Andrade

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