Black Dance

by Nancy Huston

  MILO IS TWO. These scenes will be shot from the vantage point of a two-year-old, amidst the feet and legs of giants. German is now more or less right-side up.

  Lying flat on the kitchen floor, the little boy plays with a couple of potatoes that are fancy racing cars. Propels himself forward on his tummy with low vrooming noises. Is suddenly grabbed by the arm—What are you doing? Milo! What are you doing?—yanked up off the floor and into the air.

  An angry woman has again taken hold of his entire being with one hand. Her other hand swats at his shirt and pants to dust him off, batting his penis on the way down. Still he doesn’t cry, but his pedaling legs strike the woman’s thigh—she cries out and releases him. He falls in a heap on the floor.

  Milo is locked into a little closet under the staircase, in total blackness. We’re in there with him—listening. Straining with all our might to hear sounds on the far side of the door. Hearing only our own breathing. We breathe in unevenly. Hold back our sobs. However long this lasts, it’s an eternity.

  Daily life in this household—quick flashes, not all bad: little Milo being spoon-fed . . . sung to in German at bedtime . . . dressed by his foster mother in a navy-blue snowsuit, boots, scarf and mittens, and taken out by his foster father to horse around in the snow . . . trying to pet the neighbor’s cute little cocker spaniel through the slats of the fence between their yards and being reprimanded by his foster mother No! No, Milo! Dogs are too dirty! . . .

  He’s sitting alone on the pot, doing nothing. His foster mother checks, rechecks, finally gives up and roughly pulls up his pants. Later, furious to see he’s shat himself, she disgustedly shakes out his underpants above the toilet, all the while berating him in German. Then she pins a diaper back onto his bottom, too tightly—the toddler’s frown reflects his shame and discomfort—and shoves him back into the closet. Turn of the lock, clack. The blackness. Little Milo breathes in and out; a faint whine of fear is now audible in his breathing. His heart beats; time beats.

  Suddenly the door swings open and Milo’s world is flooded with light.

  Who is this woman? Blond and young and beautiful, she drops to her knees so that her face is on a level with his, laughing in her low voice: What ya doin’ in de dark, little one?

  Question of your life, Milo. What ya doin’ in de dark?

  The kneeling woman holds her arms out to Milo as no one ever has. Tentatively he moves forward and is grasped and gently clasped to her welcoming flesh. She presses his face to her neck, not too tightly. Dizzy, he breathes in the commingling of perfume and sweat beneath her blouse. At last she draws back, smiles at the stunned child and murmurs, Come wit me? Come wit your mom?

  Taking him by the hand, she leads him out of the closet, down the hallway, out the front door and down the steps . . .

  Here we’ll need music, Astuto, for it’s a June day of insane felicity. The two of them go to a fair and ride on a merry-go-round together, laugh and lick ice cream cones as their horses go up, go down, yes, the laughter, the splendid music and the woman’s flashing smile, her arms that lift him to set him on the high horse, the licking, the laughing, the going round, her dark eyes so tender gazing at him, her arms that lift him down to set him on the ground, in fact it was probably then that she bought him the ice cream cone, for he would have needed both hands to hang on to the pole, his impressions are all mixed in child chronology, the woman waving good-bye to him, sunlight dancing on his mother’s blond hair, how could he know its real color was black, how could a three-year-old ever imagine that the most beautiful woman in the world would damage her own hair to make it blond? Be good now, son, be strong, little one. You’re gonna have to be strong, you know that? A resistant—whispering into his ear the Cree name that means resistant . . . Dat’s your real name, she said, and repeated it. Don’t forget it. It’ll help you. Opening the closet door . . . Come wit me, come wit your mom! What ya doin’ in de dark, little one? Shutting the closet door . . .

  Then sccccrrrratch—BLACKOUT.

  • • • • •

  Neil, May 1914

  A MEETING OF the Irish Volunteers, somewhere in Dublin. Men’s voices speaking in loud tones of urgency and anger. In the audience, Neil Kerrigan, at twenty-two, seems a different man. His features are graver, and he listens with all his might as gaunt, earnest poet and school director Padraic Pearse takes the floor.

  “May I read you a poem I’ve just written?”

  I have turned my face

  To this road before me

  To the deed that I see

  And the death I shall die . . .

  “Even the Daughters of Erin are arming themselves!” Thom McDonagh chimes in. “Arms, discipline and tactics, they say, should be the one thought, the one work, the one play of Irish men and women.”

  Never before has a revolution been led by poets, marvels Neil’s inner voice. All the brightest and most brilliant men—yes, and women, too.

  His cousin Thom had taken him to Monto and now he has brought him to Sinn Féin. Thom wants to make a man of him, and Neil is grateful: occasionally he even feels his blood stir with something akin to genuine indignation.

  Thom has been drilling, Neil has not. Thom has been marching up and down, running, hiding, taking rifles apart and putting them back together, aiming, doing target practice . . . Neil has been reading for his final examinations.

  “Sinn Féin!” Thom shouts, leaping to his feet along with the others (and this Gaelic expression will be translated as a subtitle: Ourselves alone!).

  “Well, perhaps not quite entirely alone?” Neil whispers. “It does seem we’ve been seeking and receiving a fair amount of help from the Germans.”

  “Hasn’t politics always been the art of intelligent compromise?”

  “I s’pose so.”

  “No struggle is pure, Neil. The Germans have the same enemy as we do, and they’ve promised to argue for Irish independence at the peace conference after the war, if there is a war, and there will be a war. They have arms and ammunition and we do not, so we need and shall take their help. We shall do what must be done in order to win, conquer, establish and impose ourselves.”

  Neil’s right foot bounces impatiently on his left knee. Again we hear his thoughts in voice-over . . .

  I know as much, sweet cousin, about our people’s moral strength as about their military weakness, and have no difficulty grasping that it is in Ireland’s interest, if there is a war, and there will be a war, to aid and abet the German military in every way, generously sharing our coastline and coastal waters with German submarines and accepting German weapons in return . . . But none of this dying stuff, Pearse. Nor shall I follow in the diverging footsteps of poor Willie Yeats, torn between political activism and the inane theosophical ramblings of Madame Blavatsky! Yeats will get lost and I shall go on, for I have a job to do on this earth.

  The bard now aspires, as he avows, to be Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish. As for me, my soul is at white heat. I shall write of the fine determination in these meetings, the men and women in revolt from the mud and blood of their childhood, with official British history pounded into their brains at school but body memories of revolting injustice at the hands of the British occupier. Peasants dispossessed by the thousands, their land reclaimed, their villages burned, their cottages toppled with battering rams, their children screaming in the cold and rain—yes, Irish children trembling and dizzy at school, trying to think and to study on an empty stomach. I shall describe how today’s young heroines and heroes of Erin scramble to find meaning in old tales, in the claim to roots, grunting as they snuffle like pigs in Celtic drivel, shoving their snouts into the soil of Ireland, seeking to unearth true meaning, old meaning, deep dark smelly truffle meaning. As if the Celts had not themselves invaded this island! They were invaders as much as the Brits were, merely a few centuries earlier! Our culture is not in the past; it is in the future! Our heroes are not the puffed-up Cúchulainns of yesteryore, but the amazing men and women who, hic et
nunc, devote their lives to shaking off the shackles of the shite-eating Brits.

  “Yes, we are prepared to die,” thunders Pearse, “but for our country, not for another! If war breaks out, my friends, you can be sure that the British will use us again as they have used us always. They’ll turn us into cannon fodder, as they did in the Boer War fifteen years ago.”

  “I was there!” pipes up a haggard, gravelly-voiced man whose hair is streaked with gray. “Saw it with my own eyes, I did! Spent ten years o’ my life fighting the Brits in South Africa. Raised the Irish Transvaal Brigade against them! Became a Boer citizen, I did!”

  “That’s MacBride,” Thom murmurs.

  Neil takes a closer look at the orator. Bad posture, bad complexion, red wine in his veins, Major John MacBride is an unpleasant man, whose bushy mustache no doubt conceals a weakness of the upper lip.

  “There were five hundred of us battling the Brits down there, and who did we end up shooting, I ask you?” MacBride shouts. “Our own Irish brothers, our flesh and blood, the Dublin Fusiliers and the Inniskillings! It broke my heart, boys. The British prance about on tiptoe like sissy ballerinas, protected behind a great thick wall of Irish flesh. They wait till we’ve been mowed down, then take credit for the victory.”

  “He loves to tell the story,” Thom whispers. “In Paris, he told it so often that he grew addicted to red wine.”

  Neil nods. John MacBride is a national hero, but he is also Willie Yeats’s worst enemy, for it was he, a Catholic, a commoner, an adventurer, whom Maud Gonne, the great love and light of the poet’s life, ultimately chose to marry. In 1903 Willie had been traumatized by Maud’s telegram informing him of her plan to convert to Catholicism and become MacBride’s bride. He’d written her letter after letter begging her not to make so grotesque an error . . . but to no avail. And oh, how it had tortured him to think of the two of them together. Maud, like himself, a person of upper-class Protestant and thus innately superior background, a higher type of person, in touch with life’s most subtle, mystical, poetic, ecstatic, esoteric secrets—Willie’s own brilliant, precious, unspeakably beautiful Maud—in bed, naked, her skin against the skin of this silly, noisy warrior, this callow, superficial, bragging, filthy, lower-class Catholic . . . No, the image was revolting, intolerable!

  Like everyone else, Neil had followed the complex history of the love triangle in the newspapers. True to Yeats’s predictions, within a year after the irons of holiness had been clamped round their bodies and wedlocked, John MacBride had disappointed his wife—and Maud, shortly after giving birth to the son they named Seagan (Gaelic for Seán), had sued him for divorce.

  Oh, but it was ill thought of in Ireland, both to divorce and to cast aspersions upon Irish military heroes, especially if one happened to be a British-born Protestant female. Perhaps Mrs. Mac-Bride was not, as she claimed to be, a Volunteer committed to Irish freedom, but rather a filthy spy paid by the British to infiltrate the Volunteers! Meanwhile, poor Willie Yeats had continued to moon, sigh, long, pine and yearn for her, occasionally attempting to win her over by striking the stance of political commitment, but consistently reverting to his mistrust of the masses, the lower classes, the Catholics . . .

  My dear is angry that of late

  I cry all base blood down

  As though she had not taught me hate

  By kisses to a clown.

  And so it was that as dramatic hours ticked by and her country suffered—that is to say, the country that, though born in England and raised primarily in France by French governesses after her mother died when she was five, Maud felt to be hers, given that her British soldier of a father, after having deserted the army and taken up the struggle of the Irish nation against his own and taught her to fight for justice always, had died in turn when she was eighteen and madly in love with him, thus making his political combat her raison d’être once and for all—as general strikes followed lockouts, which gave rise to demonstrations, riots, shootings and imprisonments, as Home Rule was denounced by Ulster as a thin disguise for Rome Rule and defeated and the tension rose . . . poor, gorgeous, frustrated, flaming-tongued, red-haired Mrs. MacBride was reduced to following Irish news from abroad, writing articles and raising money in Paris for the cause of Irish independence but no longer actually daring to set foot in Ireland for fear that, were she to leave France, she’d lose legal custody of young Seagan . . .

  DAMMIT, ASTUTO—ARE YOU sure it’s a good idea to bring this old love triangle into our movie? No, I haven’t forgotten your theory about stories being trees with roots and trunks and branches, but this tree of ours keeps sprouting huge new branches we simply won’t be able to afford . . . I mean, even apart from budget, we can’t afford storywise to follow every little branch down to the smallest leaf and twig, you know what I mean? Our spectators are gonna get confused. First you make sure they know the Catholics of Southern Ireland are trying to rid themselves of the Protestant Brits, then you tell them Yeats and Gonne are pro-independence Protestants—about as typical as pro-Hamas Israelis, right? What’s with this Maud Gonne anyhow? You’d think you yourself—and not poor shortsighted Willie Yeats—were desperately, endlessly, hopelessly in love with the woman. Hey, man! I mean, she died sixty years ago!

  Yeah, I know, Milo. Dead people are as real as we are. And characters are as real as we are, too. Bringing them alive is our job. In fact, it’s the only thing that justifies our being alive (for those of us who are). I agree, I agree, it’s just that—look—listen to me, there’s an information problem here, because we know stuff no one at that 1914 meeting of the Irish Volunteers could possibly have known. Right? To protect his reputation, John MacBride sued a Dublin newspaper for libel, and from then on the Irish public was kept in the dark about the details of Gonne’s case against him. No one ever learned that one night in Paris, when she was off at a political meeting, MacBride had come home blind drunk and attempted to rape every female in the household, including Françoise (the maid), Elaine (Maud’s father’s illegitimate daughter), and Iseult (Maud’s own illegitimate daughter). I mean, the facts get really complicated here. Okay, don’t get all het up, we can leave it in for now. We’ll figure something out.

  NEXT SCENE: a solemn procession of students, scores of them, some taller, some smaller, but all male, bodies draped in black gowns and heads topped with flat caps, filing down the Trinity College walkway, up the monumental staircase and through into the grand auditorium. Judge and Mrs. Kerrigan, Neil’s parents, are in the audience.

  (If we want to recognize them, we’ll need to establish them in the first scene—maybe, creeping home at dawn from his disastrous night on Talbot Street, the young man will not have been able to slip into bed unnoticed, maybe his mum will have been standing sternly waiting for him at the top of the staircase, maybe she will have called out sharply to his dad to interrupt his shaving and come take a look at this cur cringing down there in the entryway, its clothes disheveled and liquor on its breath . . . Or maybe his younger sister, Dorothy, passing him on the front steps that morning as she strutted off to school, will have snitched on him . . . )

  Neil, his right foot bouncing with impatience on his left knee, is back at last night’s rally. Over and above the drone of official commencement ceremony speeches: In the great tradition of our forefathers . . . Outstanding institution founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1592 . . . —he hears the rebels’ voices rising, hot with desperation.

  “Our strikes have failed! Our men have gone back to work with no rise in wages! And now, with our young’uns dying of hunger and tuberculosis, half the city jobless, living in the dark off bread and tea, hundreds of pure, virtuous young Irish women reduced to chattel at Curragh for the fun and games of the British soldiers, those arrogant bastards still riding up and down our city, occupying our castle and our customhouse, running our lives and humiliating our quiet citizens with their shouted orders—now, as if that weren’t enough, they want to draft us yet again! We shall resist, we shall resist.” (Chanted
in Neil’s brain, the phrase rises and becomes a slogan.)

  “Dear, dirty Dublin is starving! How many are we? Seventy thousand. Seventy thousand Cúchulainns! Seventy thousand heroes! Sure, up in Ulster they are more, and better armed. The buggars are talking about secession. Unionist buggars. Creeping, cruddy traitor coward bugs. They may be more, but justice is on our side. This cannot go on. Up with free Ireland!”

  “Neil Kerrigan.”

  Hearing his name called, Neil mounts the steps to the stage and strides forward, as practiced earlier in the day, to shake the rector’s right hand and receive the paper cylinder of the LLB diploma from his left. The rector’s assistant sneaks up from behind to drape the ermine ribbon around his neck and Neil starts in surprise; the man accidentally knocks off his cap, he bends over to pick it up and his own falls off. Neil picks that one up and they bang heads straightening up, then sheepishly trade caps as the audience titters loudly for at last something has happened, at last they are no longer bored, and when Neil moves back to his seat grasping his diploma their applause is as wild as Victorian applause can be, i.e., audible. Neil’s sister Dorothy leans over and simpers into his ear, “You’re red as a beet, you know.”

  CUT to the well-heeled crowd milling about in the great chandeliered reception hall after the ceremony. False smiles glued to their faces, Neil’s parents shake hands and accept congratulations left and right; Neil is repeatedly asked to reenact the little incident with the caps, to show how it went. We hear him seethe. Do they not know? Is it possible they do not know that Irish babies are dying of hunger a mere stone’s throw from here? That hundreds of our country’s best men are rotting in the jails of Britain for having dared to defend our dream of independence? That their world is about to go up in smoke?