Black Dance

VI. FLOREIO

Milo, 1965–67

THE CHILD I love is turning into the man I love.

At thirteen, his body begins to explode with hormones. He can feel it in his muscles, throat and loins. His voice changes, and so does the way he looks at girls. Edith’s breasts are enormous now, and she actually lets him pull up her sweater or blouse and struggle with her bra (undoing it is off-limits) until one of them flops out and he can kiss it and suck on its nipple to his heart’s content. Edith isn’t beautiful in any conventional sense of the word; she’s freckled and dumpy and lumpy — but oh, the feeling in his balls when she smiles knowingly at him from across the classroom, or slips her tongue into his mouth as they kiss! During his nocturnal sessions of watching TV with the sound off (they have a color TV now, and, thanks to Milo’s inventiveness, Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift and Lucille Ball all speak fluent, funny French), he can joy himself on the chesterfield by concentrating simultaneously on Sophia Loren’s cleavage, the memory of Edith’s nipples and the fantasy of another girl at school — one who has a lovely face but is too stuck-up to talk to him.

We won’t necessarily use all this material, Astuto — we just need to be aware of it. It will be conveyed to our spectators by the confident way the boy now walks, the pugnacious set of his shoulders, the proud carriage of his head. Following his mother’s advice, he trusts few human beings (especially not his cousins, and super especially not his aunt) — but it’s evident at a glance that he trusts himself. .

ON THIS BRILLIANT autumn Sunday afternoon, Grandpa Neil has invited him up to his study to talk. Both the wilting, faltering old man and the budding young one take pleasure in their exchanges. Neil’s natural gift for the gab is reinforced by his aching, impatient hunger to speak English. He sees Milo as an unhoped-for reincarnation of his younger self, and because his own writing path has grown dark and twisty over the years, running into one wall after another, his fondest hope is to help his grandson carve out a destiny that will lead him straight to literary fame.

“So did you manage to read Hamlet since last week?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“There’s a lot I don’t get. Why can some folks see his fader’s ghost and oders not? How does he tink he can venge his fader’s murder by pretending to be crazy? Why’s he so nasty to Ophelia?”

Neil wasn’t expecting these thorny questions, so he goes ahead with the short lecture he’d prepared.

“Well, you see, Milo, generally speaking, people don’t want to be told the truth, they want to be reassured. Often, if you tell them the truth, they’ll get angry and punish you. They prefer dogma to science. Science tends to be depressing, because it shows us we’re not as important as we think. Nowadays, everyone learns in school that our Earth is one of nine planets that revolve around the sun, right? But four hundred years ago, Copernicus shocked all of Europe by suggesting that this might be the case. People were certain that God had made the universe just for us, with the Earth at its center and the sun, moon and stars revolving around it. The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for confirming Copernicus’s theory, and a mere two years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet! You recall that Prince Hamlet attended the University of Wittenberg? Well, a student of Copernicus’s named Georg Joachim was teaching there at the time, so naturally Hamlet would have been obsessed with all these new theories. Indeed, he describes the Earth as a sterile promontory, the sky as a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours, and man. . yes, Milo, man himself. . as a quintessence of dust. Never had anyone dared express so dark a view of humankind.”

“It’s not dat different from what de preacher says,” Milo objects. “Dat we’re made of dust. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

“Hmm.”

Again unsettled by his grandson’s sharpness of mind, Neil takes refuge in free association.

“You know, when I was a boy growing up in Dublin, all the church services were in Latin, and on Ash Wednesday the priest would dip his right thumb into an urn of ashes, go along the altar where we choirboys were kneeling and make the sign of the cross on our foreheads, intoning the words Memento homo quia pulvis est. Know what that means, Milo?”

Neil writes it down for his grandson.

“Uh. . is it about men who like other men?”

“. . because of the word homo?”

Neil laughs until tears roll out of the corners of his eyes and down his cheeks, losing themselves in his long gray beard.

“You’re right. In Greek homo means same, as in homogenized milk. But in Latin it means man, as in. . er. . homicide. Quite a mishmash, eh? So the priest’s words mean, not Don’t forget to move your pelvis, you little queer, but Man, forget not that thou art dust.”

Milo nods a bit uncertainly.

“Remember that book I showed you by the great James Joyce?” Neil plunges on, forgetting to pursue his demonstration of how Hamlet’s nihilism arose from Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. “The one in which he inscribed my name?”

“Dubliners,” says Milo, who forgets nothing.

“Exactly. Well, there’s a funny story about that book. You’ll see the connection in a minute.”

Settling back in his armchair, Neil takes a minute to light his pipe, delighting in the ease of their exchange.

“You see, Jimmy Joyce had one devil of a time getting that book published; it took him all of seven years! He wrote it in 1907–1908, and it was two whole years before he found a publisher for it. Finally, in 1910, he signed with a certain Mr. Roberts. But then he went off to live in Europe, and due to all the real names of businesses and all the dirty words he used in the book, Roberts started worrying about libel suits. So he hemmed and hawed and postponed and delayed, and Joyce threatened to sue him for breach of contract. Believe it or not, Milo, the case was handled by my own father, a magistrate of the Dublin courts!”

(Did Neil really tell you lies as flagrant as that, Astuto? Or are you stretching the truth of his stretching of the truth? Anyway, let’s keep it in—se non è vero, è ben trovato. .)

“Court cases take time. . But finally, when Jimmy returned to Dublin for his mother’s funeral in 1912, everything was set to go: the printer, a man by the name of Falconer, had already churned out the broadsheets for a thousand copies of the book. Do you know what a broadsheet is, Milo?”

“One big page that’ll later be folded and cut up into lots of smaller pages?”

“On the nose. But on the very verge of publication, getting cold feet in turn, Falconer decided to shred the broadsheets. Well, when Jimmy learned of that, Milo, he went berserk. He told everyone his book had been burned, not shredded. That way he could compare himself to the great Giordano Bruno. Yes! James Joyce had been burned at the stake for having told the truth, not about the rotation of heavenly bodies, but about the everyday life of ordinary Irishmen. A bit of an exaggeration, wouldn’t you say? As if Rome and Dublin were the same city, Pope and publisher the same authority, Bruno and Joyce the same man.”

“Homo homo,” Milo says, and again Neil rewards him with a roar of laughter.

“So what did Joyce do to punish Roberts? He wrote a cruel, castigating poem called “Gas from a Burner.” I have a copy of it here somewhere. . ah, here it is. Burner, in the present case, refers not to your usual gas ring on a kitchen stove but to Roberts himself, because he burned Joyce’s book. As for gas, well. . it’s like when you have gas after eating pork ‘n’ beans. You understand? Roberts’s promises, in other words, were nothing but a lot of stenchy farts! Jimmy had the poem printed in Trieste and insisted that his younger brother Charles distribute it in Dublin. Charles did so against his better judgment, and my cousin Thom, who as you recall was a former schoolmate of Jimmy’s, got his hands on a copy and brought it to my place. Ah, Milo, that’s a day I’ll never forget! We weren’t wee lads anymore, I was twenty and Thom a decade older, but we fell to the floor in stitches when we reached the final lines of poem:

My Irish foreman from Bannockburn

Shall dip his right hand in the urn

And sign crisscross with reverent thumb

Memento homo upon my bum.

“Milo? Milo?”

Marie-Thérèse’s angry voice soars up to our hero from downstairs.

“Where are you, for the luva. .? It’s goin’ on four and you haven’t even started your homework yet! That’s enough English! Get down here right this minute! Lickety-split!”

As he goes downstairs to do math under his aunt’s maniacal supervision, Milo breathes a faint sigh of relief. He worships his grandfather, so it disturbs him when Neil talks to him as an equal. .

I LOVE YOU, Milo. I love you. I want to make love to you here and now. I want to take off all my clothes and your hospital pajamas and gently unhook the tubes from your body and kiss you all over as you grab my hair and pull it — kiss your eyelids, your face and lips, kiss your neck as you offer it up to me, kiss your hairless chest and feel your beautiful penis rise in my hands and harden in my mouth, turn you over and kiss the smooth brown skin of your muscular back, wet you with my fingers as you moan, and enter you. . Oh, Milo! If only we could join our bodies again, as we’ve done so often in the past — in New York, arriving you from Toronto and me from Buenos Aires, or in San Salvador, arriving you from Paris and me from L.A. — pleasuring each other’s throbbing, searching cocks with our mouths and hands and anuses, whetting each other’s appetites, whipping each other’s desires, rising together to a violent frenzy, and oh, your shout when you came, Milo, unforgettable, a punch of joy that hit me right in the chest. . How can it be over? How can this be us, you know what I mean? Two old fogies whispering a screenplay at each other through an endless November night in a public hospital in Montreal’s city center. . and you, my love, in the throes of the dreaded illness?

I don’t understand how you managed to catch it in Rio, given that we’d both been fervently faithful to condoms since the late 1980s. . Whatever happened, Astuto, darling? Maybe you shot up again — and somehow, despite the forty new needle exchange programs recently implemented by the Brazilian government, despite the millions of free needles distributed throughout the country over the preceding year, you happened to use an old, dirty one and get infected by it? Tell me, Milo. . No, I know you can’t. You’re right, I’ll shut up. Let’s get back to work. .

A DINNER SCENE.

“I’ve found you a boarding school,” announces Marie-Thérèse. “Way better than any of the schools around here. You don’t even have to wait till September; they’ll let you start in at Easter. They made an exception for you because of your good marks.”

“Wha. . what do you. .?” stammers Neil, but Régis’s voice drowns him out.

“Hey, good for you, little runt! You’re gonna do better than your cousins, or even your uncle!”

“Eh! I should think so!” says Marie-Thérèse. “I should hope so!”

“What about Oscar?” Milo says. “Can he come to the school with me?”

“Don’t be silly, Milo,” says Marie-Thérèse. “You can’t organize your whole life around a dog! We’ll take care of him while you’re gone, and you’ll see him during your semester breaks.”

So you go off to that boarding school and find yourself surrounded by a dozen horny Jesuit priests, a score of frigid nuns and a hundred boys in the first randy rush of puberty. Aware that this is one of the forms of hell on earth your mother warned you about, you cross the days off the calendar as they inch by, slow and slobbery as snails.

The other boys go home on weekends; you don’t. (Why not? Was the school too far away from your home or what?) You find yourself alone in the empty building, bored and anxious, anxious and bored, left to your own resources: reading, playing billiards, fending off the perpetually wandering hands of the priests — and, especially, worrying about Oscar. You can almost hear him whimpering as he waits at the door, nose aquiver, searching for your smell that never comes.

June rolls around at last and you come home to the farm. The reunion between boy and dog: mutual relief and all-engulfing euphoria. Sure, you’re glad to see your grandfather, too, and the cows, and even, in a small way, the kitchen. But there’s no comparison: Oscar is king of your heart. With Oscar at your side you can handle anything. .

(At this point in the film, every spectator will have guessed that Oscar is going to die; the only question is how. Oh, Milo. .)

When you go back to school that fall. . Oscar simply can’t understand your having abandoned him again. He waits for you, refusing to budge from his post at the door. He grows depressed and thin. Though she sees perfectly well what’s happening, Marie-Thérèse refrains from telling you about it; she doesn’t want you to have a less-than-sterling report card at semester’s end. The dog ceases eating completely. He whines and strains at his leash, thins and whines and strains and mopes and sleeps. . and then he dies. He isn’t yet thin enough to have died of hunger; he dies of a broken heart.

Régis insists that Milo be informed at once.

“Okay,” says Marie-Thérèse, “but we’ll tell him he got hit by a car.”

“No, we won’t. We’re not going to lie about it.”

“It’s not really a lie, it’s just to protect him. One way or another the dog’s dead; there’s no changing that.”

“I’ll tell him,” Jean-Joseph puts in, in the deep, authoritative male voice he’s been perfecting in logging camps over the past two years. Now twenty, he weighs more than both his parents put together, so neither of them dares to object.

Jean-Joseph calls the boarding school to announce his visit, only to learn that Milo is in the infirmary. Even as, unbeknownst to him, his dog was dying of his absence, the boy came down with a galloping case of scarlet fever. When Marie-Thérèse hears this, the panic on her face is so sincere that Jean-Joseph knows he’ll spend the rest of his life hating the Injun bastard.

“I’ll go see him,” he says. “I’ve got a job starting the day after tomorrow, not far from where he is. Let me handle it, Ma.”

He arrives bearing not only a picnic basket filled with victuals from Marie-Thérèse, but also a plan, which he immediately puts into action. Eyes sadly downcast into the pretty nurse’s cleavage, he tells her in a low voice that Milo’s beloved dog has died, and requests an hour alone with the boy to break the news to him gently. When the nurse respectfully leaves the room, he locks the door behind her, sets the picnic basket down with a thump and rips the bedding off Milo’s body. Says he’s sure Milo is getting an excellent education in this school that is costing his parents more than they’ve ever spent on him, Jean-Joseph, and his brother, François-Joseph, put together, but that there is one aspect of Milo’s education that is no doubt being sorely neglected here and that only he can see to. So saying, he unzips his fly and starts shooting undiluted hatred into you through his crotch gun, along with harshly muttered words about your redskin whore of a mother, your primitive blood and your savage bastardom. None of this is particularly new to you, Astuto. You’ve known for a long time that human penises can be used for the best and worst of purposes, Heaven and Hell are man-made and here on earth. You’ve heard Jean-Joseph and François-Joseph pant and grunt as they scrabbled in the dark of your bedroom. . played the go-between in your aunt’s passionate love affair with Jacob Bernstein. . guessed a fair amount about your mother’s profession. . seen boys here at school emerge from confessional boxes, tears in their eyes and cheeks aflame. . so you simply go elsewhere in your brain and wait for it to be over. When at last your cousin bucks out of you, zips himself up and leaves, you get up, cross to the sink and wash yourself thoroughly.

A few minutes later, the nurse returns.

“You poor boy, how terrible. I had a dog that died, too, I know just how you feel. .”

That is when the sky collapses on your head.

The following day Milo’s fever subsides. The minute the nurse walks into his room, he tells her he needs to put through a phone call to his aunt.

“No, Milo, you know the rules. Boarders may write letters once a week, but they’re not allowed to use the telephone.”

The Jesuit priests are called in, and then the school director. All encourage him to get over his pain at the loss of his dog by going back to class. He sticks to his guns, will talk of nothing else. At last, because of his dazzling school record, they acquiesce.

“Auntie, you know Jean-Joseph came to see me yesterday. Well, he raped me.”

“What are you. .?”

“Your son raped me. If you don’t want me to tell the whole world your son’s a pansy, get me out of this school. I’ll tell the preacher. I’ll tell Uncle Régis. I’ll tell my grandfather. I’ll tell Jacob Bernstein and every woman in the neighborhood. .”

“You do that, Milo, I’ll kill you.”

“If you don’t want me to tell, get me out of here. Right now. Today.”

By nightfall he is home.

• • • • •

Neil, 1919

IF YOU DON’T mind, Milo, I think we should use only interiors for the sequence about Neil’s first months in Canada. That all right with you? Trying to reconstitute post — First World War Old Montreal would put Blackout Productions into the red for a decade.

So we could find him. . say, seated at a tiny table next to the window in a corner of a frilly, curtained, doilied, lacy, flowery-wallpapered bedroom, reading Shakespeare’s Henry V by dim lamplight and shivering as the venomous wind snakes round the window frame and licks him with its cold tongue. It’s late January; Neil has been in Montreal for two months and they’ve been the most miserable two months of his life. Horrendous cold — at forty below, the Celsius and Fahrenheit thermometers agree wholeheartedly. Feels like forty below, they say, staring at each other and echoing their verdict back and forth in the icy silence. Forty below!

Stones would freeze in this weather; souls would freeze.

We hear Act III, Scene 4 as Neil reads it out loud to himself in two different, mock-female voices: a dialogue between Catherine, the French princess and Alice, her chambermaid. His accent in French is perfectly abominable.

“Je m’en fais la repetition de tous les mots que vous m’avez appris des a present.”

“Il est trop difficile, madame, comme je pense.”

“Excusez-moi, Alice. Écoutez: de hand, de fingres, de nails, de arma, de bilbow.”

“D’elbow, madame.”

“Ô Seigneur Dieu! Je m’en oublie; d’elbow. Comment appelezvous le col?”

“De neck, madame.”

“De nick. Et le menton?”

“De chin.”

“De sin. Le col, de nick; le menton, de sin.”

“Oui. Sauf votre honneur, en vérité, vous prononcez les mots aussi droit que les natifs d’Angleterre.”

He snorts. Who would have thought that Shakespeare could teach him French? All he has to do is work backward: elbow is coude, neck is col, nails are ongles. . Now, if only he had an Alice!

CUT to dinner that evening. We’re in the pseudo-Victorian Sherbrooke Street home of Judge Ross McGuire, friend and former colleague of Neil’s father, who has unenthusiastically agreed to provide lodgings for the young man until he gets his bearings in the new country. Now twenty-seven and burning to be free, Neil is dismayed to find himself once again eating Irish food (roast beef, potatoes, gravy, green beans and creamed onions), served by an Irish maid to an Irish magistrate and his Irish wife. His father explicitly instructed him never, in this household, to broach the topics of James Joyce, Maud Gonne, or the Easter Rising.

“Yesterday,” mutters Judge McGuire as he swallows a large slice of roast beef almost whole, including fat and gristle, “Sinn Féin went ahead and proclaimed independence. Looks like war to me.”

“War, war, haven’t we had enough war?” Mrs. McGuire asks rhetorically. “First the Great War in Europe, then the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. . and now, no sooner have our men come home than the Sinn Féiners start acting up again.”

“Forgive me,” Neil says. “But having arrived so recently from Dublin, I must say I understand their point of view. It would be worse than frustrating, humiliating, to come so close to independence and see it snatched away from us at the last minute.”

In excitement, Mrs. McGuire’s narrow rear end bobs up and down on her chair.

“But why could they not be content with what they were given? Every single one of their sixty-nine candidates was victorious in last month’s elections!”

“Including twelve with death sentences on their heads,” her husband interrupts, his mouth full of mashed potatoes, “and twenty-one others currently serving prison terms.”

“Still,” insists Mrs. McGuire, “they did win fully three-quarters of the seats! It would have given them a powerful voice in Parliament. They would have been able to make themselves heard!”

“Yes, but in British Parliament,” Neil points out. “They don’t want a powerful voice in British Parliament, Mrs. McGuire. After all the sacrifices they’ve made, they feel it would be an unforgivable compromise.”

“Yes, they were most generous about sacrificing other people’s lives, weren’t they?” says the judge while chewing, gravy dribbling down his chin. “The lives of poor, ordinary, run-of-the-mill Catholics, who found themselves caught up in strikes, lockouts and riots, and corralled into a political movement about which they knew nothing.”

“They want a parliament of their own,” intones Neil with dignity. “The Dáil Éireann. From all I can gather, that is what has just been ratified.”

“It means war, I tell you!” splutters McGuire. “The new chief of state will be Éamon de Valera, who also happens to be in jail in England! Frankly, my boy, would you not rather see Ireland run from Westminster than from Holloway?”

“Con Markiewicz wasn’t above saying yes,” Mrs. McGuire points out. “I must admit I’m proud of that woman. Just think: the first female member of Parliament ever, an Irishwoman! British women have voting rights now,” she adds, in a bit of a non sequitur. “Canadian women, too; well, except here in Quebec. .”

“I knew her,” Neil blurts out.

“Who? Lady Constance?”

“Yes. I mean, I saw her a few times.”

“And where would that have been?”

Mercifully, the maid barges in.

“Shall I warm the apple torte now, ma’am?”

“Yes, do, Maggie. We should be ready for it in three or four minutes.”

CUT to Neil walking the streets of Old Montreal. At these temperatures, the wind is searing. It burns your cheeks, whips powdery snow up your trouser legs, and dives into the space between your scarf and neck, attacking your vulnerable, warm flesh. In a matter of minutes your nose can freeze; your ears can freeze; your fingers and toes can freeze.

It’s a miserable city in which to pound the pavement in search of employment. Neil had thought that being a river port like Dublin, Montreal would feel familiar to him, but nowhere along the Saint Lawrence can one hop and skip from bridge to bridge as along the Liffey, cutting capers and dreaming of one’s green-as-a-meadow future (ah! that memory’s nearly a decade old!). All is harsh and cold and hard and cold and gray and cold and dark and cold and hostile; and cold. The pavement beneath his feet is sharp and slippery with frozen slush. His shoes are wearing thin; even new, they could not have withstood this punishing climate. To survive in Canada, he’ll need not only new shoes but a new personality, new hopes, new values.

On his first evening in Montreal, Judge McGuire had plunged him into a bottomless melancholy merely by showing him a map of the province. Half a dozen Irelands could fit into it, the judge had told him, but it is empty. Apart from the small towns and smaller villages spaced out along the river that plunges its sharp wedge diagonally through the province’s southernmost section all the way to the Great Lakes, it is unpopulated. Nothing but Indian and Eskimo tribes of a few hundred members each, scattered over an inconceivably gigantic, uninhabitable, icy tundra dotted with a zillion frozen lakes.

Neil doesn’t know quite why the thought of Quebec’s immensity and emptiness so distresses him, but it does.

After about forty minutes, he literally can’t stand the cold anymore; his legs have turned into sticks of ice and he fears they’ll snap if he remains outdoors even one more minute. He ducks into a hotel lobby on Notre-Dame Street.

INTERIOR — DAY, if this gloom can qualify as daylight. Acutely depressed, Neil pushes through swinging wooden doors into the hotel restaurant and heads for a small table next to the window. His depression is not merely that of any lonely, unemployed person who finds himself in a crowded place where everyone else seems to know who they are and why. It’s worse. It’s the depression of exile.

Visible through the nasty freezing snow, painted in white letters on the side of a smoke-blackened brick building across the street, he reads the words G. A. Holland and Son Co. House Furnishers, Carpets, Draperies. Perhaps this firm would hire him? Perhaps he could spend the rest of his life selling draperies in Montreal? It makes him want to die. Who are Holland and Son, anyway? Where did they come from and what the feckin’ hell are they doing here? Why do people cross oceans? Why do they do anything? What were you thinking of, Willie Yeats, when you advised me to immigrate to the Americas to write? Did you come over to Montreal to seek inspiration? Not at all! You preferred to remain holed up in your comfortable old apartment in London and your wild, romantic thoor in County Galway. As for Jimmy Joyce, he cleverly moved from Trieste to Zurich to Paris, and can now spend the remainder of his years traipsing along the Seine, holding forth in bars and tying up whores! What, prithee, can one hope to write in forty-below weather in a port city along whose river one cannot even walk?

Neil weeps hot tears inside.

The waitress comes up to him and, his head being bowed, the first thing he sees of her is an immaculate white apron on a black uniform. Adopting his point of view, we notice as he does that her curves (as men used to say) are in all the right places, but that she has buttoned her blouse awry. This reminds him of Yeats’s cardigan, which again makes him feel a piercing nostalgia for Ireland.

“Qu’est-ce que j’vous sers?”²

He doesn’t understand.

“What?

“Qué c’est que vous allez prendre?”³

He utters the first French word that comes back to him from the Shakespearean dialogue read the previous day.

“Menton.”

“Quoi?” The girl wrinkles her nose and giggles. “Un menton?”⁴

“Coude, ventures Neil. I’m trying to learn French.”

“Eh bien, avec ces mots-là, ça fonctionnerait mieux dans un cours de danse que dans un restaurant. Voulez un café?”⁵

He decides to exploit his weakness rather than conceal it.

“Coffee?”

“Café.”

“Ca-fay.”

“Avec du lait?”

“Dou-lay.”

“Oui, m’sieu‘.”

“Oui, m’-siou‘.”

She smiles at him.

“Buttons,” he says.

“Butter? Du beurre?”

“No. .”

Gently, gesturing, smiling, he demonstrates on his own shirt that her blouse has a buttoning problem. The girl glances down then up, and laughs out loud.

“Oh, dear, I got my buttons mixed up again, I don’t believe it! Thanks for telling me. .”

CUT to Mount Royal Park on a sunny day. Several months must have elapsed, because the snow has melted and the trees are in full blossom. Sitting on a bench, Neil and the young waitress pursue their mutual exploration. Though Neil’s French has improved, his accent is still god-awful.

“I’ll be a great writer. . You’ll see, Marie-Jeanne. Before my thirtieth. . uh. . day of birth. . I’ll publish a great novel.”

“Will you write a show for me?”

“What? A shoe?”

“A show, not a shoe! A show I can star in!”

“Yes. You’re my star, that’s for sure!”

CUT to Saint Helen’s Island in the summertime. The two of them walking there.

“Nowadays there are more English than French in Montreal. . but in the olden days it was a French city. It was founded by a Frenchman, three hundred years ago: Samuel de Champlain, his name was. And he named this place Saint Helen’s Island after his wife, Hélène Boullé. Just think, she was only twelve when they got married!”

“And you. . seventeen when you marry me. Lucky I said yes, you’re already getting old.”

“Hey, wait a minute! I haven’t said yes yet!. . I think Champlain married Hélène Boullé for sa dot.”

“Sa dot? What’s dat?”

“The money a family gives their daughter at her marriage.”

“Ah, okay, dowry. I see. So what about you? What’s your dowry?”

“Well, tell you the truth. . I spoke to my father about it. . and he offered to buy up a plot of land next door. . and give it to me as a wedding present. . But that’s not what I want, Neil. I want to be an actress! My career’s just getting off the ground!”

“You can’t live forever in those Homes for the Protection of Young Women run by nuns! And if we try to consummate our marriage in the home of Judge McGuire, it’ll make a big scandal. . We have to look the truth in the face, my love. I’ve been unable to find work as a lawyer in Montreal, and it’s beneath me to do menial labor. . I’m a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, after all! I’d rather chop down trees. I’m sure it would give me good ideas for a novel. If it’s good enough for Tolstoy, it’s good enough for me.”

“Who’s Tolstoy?”

“Uh. . never mind. Let’s accept your father’s offer. Let’s go live out at your place, at least at first. . We could try it just for a year, and then see. .”

“Yeah, only my daddy doesn’t yet know what kind of a man he’s making his offer to! A damned Englishman!”

“I’m not English, I’m Irish; it’s not the same thing! We hate those damn Brits, too! Besides, they’re Protestant and I’m Catholic. .”

“You told me you didn’t go to church.”

“To marry you, I’d go all the way to Hell! Don’t worry, I still know how to sing Sancta Trinitas, unus Deus, miserere nobis. Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis. How do you like that? And I even have a French name! Don’t you like the sound of Marie-Jeanne Noirlac?”

“Yeah. .”

“And don’t you like me?”

“Yeah. .” “All right, then. . So shall I pop the question to your da?”

“But you don’t know the first thing about forestry!”

“Now, Marie-Jeanne! I know enough! Where do you think the paper comes from, on which I shall write my books?”

Sound track: organ music. The final shot of this sequence will be a long, sweeping panorama of the Mauricie region around 1920. We’ll need a helicopter. Starting high in the sky — endless forests of pine, maple, birch and oak, but mostly pine — we’ll go swinging slowly down into a lumber camp. All the noise absent: saws, axes, crashing trees, shouting men, crackling branches, rushing river. . The organ music will give us a bit of distance from the macho thrill of the thing. A sort of permanent Boy Scout camp, if you will: logging is dangerous, exhausting labor that requires not only youth and strength but exceptional physical coordination. After watching the lumberjacks for a while, we move to the drivers, leaping with picks and hooks to guide the logs downstream. Close-up on their legs as they leap and slip from log to log, doing footwork that makes Fred Astaire look as if he’s standing still.

Down, down, down the Saint-Maurice River to the pulp-and-paper mills at Trois-Rivières, past that to the village we already know from forty years later, the little church in which Milo and Normand will be punished for drawing dirty pictures. . Moving slowly across the threshold of the church, we peek inside and see that it is packed, for Marie-Jeanne’s father, Pierre-Joseph Chabot, is a landowner known and respected by all. Turning, we see Marie-Jeanne herself — lovely, a white veil floating over her dark hair, cheeks pink and eyes bright with excitement. Arm in arm, she and her father hover in the entrance, Neil just behind them, waiting for the priest’s cue. At the last possible minute before the ceremony begins, Neil notices Marie-Jeanne has again buttoned her dress awry. And so, whereas the organ and congregation have already launched into the hymn that will bring them forward to the altar to pronounce their vows, he swiftly undoes the seventeen buttons in the back of his bride-to-be’s white dress and even more swiftly does them up again. Her father’s eyebrows rise but Marie-Jeanne smiles and blushes, bubbling over with love for her Irishman. She has obstinately preserved her virginity, and the prospect of its imminent loss is making her head spin. The three of them march down the aisle.

Dressed to the hilt, Marie-Jeanne’s brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins entirely fill the first two rows of pews. Neil has been adopted by this family, and before long he will be engulfed by it.

Never, ever, will they release their grip on him.

• • • • •

Awinita, August 1951

WE COULD START off with a close-up of Declan’s face. Before a word is uttered, his expression will say all. It’s the expression of an irresponsible young man whose girlfriend has just told him she is pregnant.

The camera retreats and we discover we’re again on Saint Helen’s Island. Declan and Awinita are sitting at a remove from each other, staring out over the water in different directions.

“You’re puttin’ me on.”

“. .”

“You just had a baby. Even my mom had a few months’ breathin’ space between kids. You can’t get pregnant again right off the bat.”

“I didn’ give suck.”

“Wha?”

“Can’t get knocked up again if you nurse de baby.”

“So anyhow. So okay. So why you tellin’ me?”

“It’s your kid.”

“Ha. Fat chance.”

“Listen, Mister Cleaning-Fluid. You and me had plans, remember? Even dough I learned ages ago you should never believe a guy wid a hard-on, I let you talk to me ‘bout love and livin’ in the woods and stuff. You ask me what’s de difference tween you and a john? Answer: no john ever got into my body widout a safe on.”

Declan runs his hands through his red hair a couple of times. Glances up at the seagulls, perhaps envying them their freedom. Takes a swig from his whisky flask. Finally mutters:

“My kid. .”

“Simple as dat.”

“We gonna have a kid together, Nita?”

“I gonna have one, dat for damn sure.”

“Well, let’s get married, then. . eh? Listen. Come up to the farm and meet my family.”

Close-up on Declan as he briefly imagines bringing a pregnant Indian woman home with him. We see the scene in distorted color in his mind: Neil raising his eyebrows, turning to him and whispering, Does she even know how to read?; Marie-Thérèse frowning and pursing her lips; the little boys, Jean-Joseph and François-Joseph, snickering and pointing at his fiancée’s parti-colored hair.

“Naw, forget about that,” he says. “Jus’ les get married.”

He’s beginning to slur his words.

“Sure, Deck. I’ll marry you. . minute you get a job.”

“I’m lookin’, I’m lookin’. . It’s not easy to find work, specially now I got a police record.”

“You know. .” says Awinita, “once dere was an Attikamak chief who said he’d give his daughter only to de best hunter of de clan. De girl, she was in love wit a strong young brave named Yanuchich. He had a good reputation as a hunter, but her fader want to make sure. He tell Yanuchich he can marry his daughter only if he bring back a hundred hides. So de brave, he go off into de forest. .”

Long silence. A cargo ship glides down the river in front of them, and a moment later wavelets lap at their feet.

“Yeah?” says Declan, bored, taking another swallow of his cheap bourbon. “Then what happened?”

“Nuttin’.”

“What do you mean, nothin’? Somethin’ always happens in stories.”

“Not dis time. The girl wait. She wait and she wait, and she wait and she wait, and Yanuchich never come back.”

“That’s it?”

“Dat’s it. She wait so long she get old, and turn to stone, and she still waitin’ today. Dey say you can see her stone head out near Shawinigan. Dat how the town of Grand-Mère got it name.”

“Aw, who gives a shit. That’s a boring story, Nita.”

“Yeah. I don’t like dat story, either, Mister Cleaning-Fluid. Just to let you know, I’m not gonna wait till I get old.”

“Okay, I got the message. Listen, I’m lookin’ for a job, okay? I’ll find one, don’t you worry. There’s so many strikes these days. . Maybe I could check out Imperial Tobacco.”

“Strikebreaker not reg’lar work, Deck. An’ meanwhile. .”

“Okay, don’t rub it in. Meanwhile I’m still living offa you. But somethin’ll turn up, I promise you. . Now that I’m gonna be a dad, I’ll clean up my act and start earning good money.”

With Doris Day’s “Shanghai” on the sound track, CUT to the visiting room at Bordeaux Jail a week later: Awinita and Declan talking to each other under a glass partition.

Same music (a big hit this summer; the radio plays it constantly). Awinita shooting up in the tiny bathroom next to the cruddy bedroom above the bar. When she emerges, swaying slightly, a client is sitting on the bed waiting for her. In his mid-seventies, with scant white hair, a heavy paunch, and trembly flesh on his jowls and arms, he’s already naked except for his glasses, watch and socks. Awinita glances at the Formica table — the money is there.

Hands shaking, the man takes off his watch and glasses and sets them on the bedside table. Keeps his socks on. Lies down and holds his arms out to us. We move toward him, melting, partly because his myopic blue gaze seems kind, but mostly because of the drug rush in our blood.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“Nita.”

“Hey. I’m Cal. How old are you, Nita?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Really? You look about fourteen! Must be because I’m so very old. . Let me tell you a secret, Nita. Are you listening? Nobody can believe they’re really old the way their grandparents used to be old when they were young. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Deep down, you feel young your whole life long.”

“What can I do for you, Cal, baby?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. Don’t know when I last managed to get it up. Just come here, that’s it. . just let me look at you. . Just let me touch you, honey. . oh, you’re so lovely. . So beautiful. So beautiful. So beautiful. So beautiful. So beautiful. Oh. . that is amazing. . Oh my God. . Oh. . Oh. . Oh …”

In shades of gray and black, swirls of paint coalesce into patterns, slide out of them again, and finally crystallize into the black remains of a fire: charred, smoking ruins with the harsh taste of death. But then. . unexpectedly. . time passes backward over the scene. The burned beams and boards become whole again, climb onto each other, fit together and slowly form the little shack in which Awinita grew up. Moving around the shack, we come upon. . Awinita herself, age eleven, sitting on the front steps and watching the sun rise.

“Oh my God!” gasps the old man, who has just come in her hands. “Oh, I don’t believe it. That was astounding, Nita. Thank you so much. . You’re a lovely, lovely girl.”

Awinita doesn’t answer. Engrossed in her vision, she lies on her side and stares out the window.

“Thank you, Nita,” the white-haired john says, picking up one of her limp hands and covering it with kisses. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” A while later he puts his clothes back on, adds an extra bill to the one that’s already on the Formica table, and leaves the room. .

(Don’t cry, Milo. Yeah, I know you never cry, but don’t cry anyway. Let’s try to think of a funny scene that might have happened as, curled up in your junkie mother’s womb, you evolved from junkie embryo to junkie fetus. .)

That extra bill came in handy — Awinita’s hair is blond again.

Neil Kerrigan walks into the bar and glances around. He catches sight of Awinita’s blondness. Magnetized by it, he comes to sit next to her at the bar.

You’re right, it wouldn’t be funny for Neil to be one of Awinita’s clients that summer. Not totally improbable — the erotic life of sixty-year-old widows in rural Quebec can’t have been terribly exciting, and on some of his day trips into the city to visit bookstores and stock up on rare editions, Neil might well have stopped off in the red-light district for a bit of pleasure. So, not impossible, but not funny, given that Awinita is currently pregnant with his grandson. Too kinky for our film.

“What can I get you?” the barman asks him.

“A Molson would be lovely, thanks. And if the young lady doesn’t mind, bring her another glass of whatever she’s drinking. I need help to celebrate.”

“Do you mind, miss?” Irwin asks Awinita, as if he hadn’t seen her several hundred times before.

When she turns to Neil, some part of Awinita’s brain probably registers the fact that his eyes are the same shade of green as Declan’s. But the heroin muddles her thinking, and besides, she’s had johns with eyes of every color in the rainbow, even a couple without eyes.

“Tank you, sir,” she says. “What you celebratin’?”

“The Virgin Mary just went hydroelectric!” Neil proclaims in a loud voice, raising his glass to all and sundry.

“Somebody turn her on?” Awinita asks.

Neil shouts with laughter. At sixty, having chosen, like Yeats, to spend the final years of his life as a Mad Old Man, he no longer cares what people think of him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our dear premier, Maurice Duplessis, made a big speech today (I’m sure you all heard it on CBC) to inaugurate a new hydroelectric installation at Beauharnois. Isn’t that fantastic? Come on, sing along with Duplessis, everyone, and raise your glasses to Hydro-Québec!!”

“You got a problem with Duplessis, Irishman?” says one of the tipsier customers, lurching up to Neil.

“Not at all, except that he also made a big speech out at Notre-Dame-du-Cap the other day (I’m sure you all heard it on CBC) officially dedicating our Belle Province de Québec to the Virgin Mary. Everyone who was anyone was there! Le clergé, les grands journaux, tout le monde. And he made sure we found out that just a stone’s throw upriver, at Le Paradis des Sports hotel on Lac des Piles, his old pal Georges Cossette would be allowed to sell liquor without a license. . except during Sunday Mass, of course, ha-ha-ha!”

“I know dat place,” murmurs Awinita. “Not far from Grand-Mère, right? I got a friend who work up dere.”

“That’s right. Everybody hear that? The young lady has friends who work at Le Paradis des Sports. I’m certain they’re on excellent terms with Georges Cossette, Maurice Duplessis, and other gentlemen of the same circles. And I’m certain that with a little extra persuasion, they will also be on good terms with the American jazzmen who come to play in that prestigious establishment. Isn’t that fantastic?”

“Fuck off, you bloody Mick!” the drunken customer blares. “Go home and screw those druids of yours if you’re not happy here! Duplessis is a good man!”

“He’s a man of my bleedin’ age!” roars Neil, his green eyes ablaze, his salt-and-pepper beard abristle. “And having lived in the province of Quebec for thirty-three years now, I have the right to say what I think of Maurice Duplessis, for the luva Christ! I think Maurice Duplessis is one arsehole of an opportunist, who sings the praises of the Good Virgin when he needs to wangle votes from the populace, and of Hydro-Québec when he needs to attract investment from the Brits! That’s what I think! It’s a free country!”

“Free, my ass,” says Awinita.

But no one hears her because Neil and the drunken customer have come to blows and the others are shouting and taking sides and Irwin is busy shooing the whole testosterone-drenched free-for-all out of the bar and onto the sidewalk, and this scene will hopefully give our spectators some badly needed comic relief.

CUT to a Friday morning scene in the kitchen with Liz.

“It just doesn’t tally, Nita.”

“. .”

“Who do you think you’re fooling? Irwin’s at the bar every night, he keeps track of the number of guys each girl goes up with. His count for you this week is twenty-nine, yours is seventeen, so I wanna know what happened to the other twelve. What happened to the other twelve, Nita? You keep this up, sweetheart, and you’re out of here. Now tell me the truth. Where’s your money going?”

“Just. .”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Nita. You supporting a boyfriend, a habit, or both?”

Awinita doesn’t avert her gaze. Her face is impassive.

“Been doin’ a bit o’ H.”

Liz’s expression alters.

“Oh, no. Oh, no. That’s a lousy idea, sweetheart. Poppers are one thing, okay. Long as you don’t overdo it, they help get you through your working night. But H. . Nah, I’ve lost too many girls to H, honey. . I don’t want you on that shit. It’s death, man. How long you been shootin’ up?”

“Not long.”

“Okay, listen. I’ll give you one chance, not two. I’ll pay for you to get cleaned up. As I’ve told you before, this is not a charity operation; I’m doin’ it as a favor to myself. I’ve invested good money in you, and I don’t wanna lose my investment. That clear?”

CUT to a room in a private medical clinic. Awinita, trembling and trickling sweat, stands at a window that gives onto a white wall. We grip the windowsill, then our stomach. .

The camera, which is our gaze, explores the room, watches objects writhe with a furtive life of their own, receives reality as sheer horror. The window is light, then dark, then light, then dark. Awinita’s withdrawal lasts twenty-nine days and twenty-nine nights. .

(Sound track: to be dealt with later. Yeah, Milo, I agree — it should be rough but not redundant, not jejunely illustrative of the pain your mother is enduring. Maybe just slip an MP3 into the vortex of a garbage incinerator — something like that?)

Calmer now, we are lying on the bed, on top of the bedspread, staring up at the ceiling.

A jack-in-the-box suddenly springs out of a colored block and starts bouncing gaily around. The floor of the room is dotted with other blocks, no doubt containing other jack-in-the-boxes. It runs slam-bang into a closed door, topples backward in a somersault, and finds itself right-side up again, joyous and unscathed. Just then the door opens and the Bad Giant appears. He raises his huge, hairy foot and brings it down on the jack-in-the-box, crushing it. . but the spring is strong and it bounces up again, knocking the Bad Giant flat on his back.

Awinita sits up in bed and rings for the nurse.

“I’m clean,” she tells her.

• • • • •

2. —What c’n I get ya?

3. —Can I take your order?

4. —What?. . A chin?

5. —Well, with those words you’d be better at the tailor’s than in a coffee shop. Wanna coffee?