Black Dance

by Nancy Huston

  On the Formica table in the background, we notice a single wilted rose in a too-large chipped blue vase.

  “Dey don’t hold me tight when we dance. And dey don’t ask so many questions.”

  “That why you love me?”

  “I say I love you?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Okay, den shut up.”

  They laugh. Declan gets out of bed and, pulling a flask of whisky from the inside pocket of his leather jacket (draped over a chair), takes a couple of serious swigs. Lights a cigarette, moves to the window and stands there smoking, naked. We’re in Awinita’s eyes, looking at his body . . .

  (Okay, Milo, I’ll keep it simple. We won’t make a lingering inventory of Declan’s physical beauty, moving slowly from the nape of his neck where his red-blond hair curls and furls, down the curve of his lower back over his buttocks and thighs . . . It’d be easy to fall in love with your father at age twenty-four, but all right, we’ll leave the spectators free to notice his charms or not, as they see fit . . .)

  “What do the johns talk to you about?” asks Declan, smoking, his tone curious rather than aggressive.

  “Whatever.”

  “No, really.”

  “Why?”

  “Just . . . you know . . . to know what kinda stuff you go through here.”

  In black and white in Awinita’s mind, a chaotic cascade of stills. Men in blurry close-up, contorted and sweating, shouting into the void; other men sitting on the edge of the bed talking to her, at her, in urgent self-absorption; still others drawing snapshots from their wallets to show her their houses, horses, cars, kids and wives. FADE TO SHADOW: and, in the shadow, imperceptible shift to animated images . . .

  A woman’s hand grasps a dark purple snake that writhes and twists, struggling to get away. She maintains her grip and finally it goes limp; the snake’s head drops and its forked tongue hangs out.

  “Lotta dem boast,” she sums up. “Dey wanna be admired.”

  “Do they ask you your name?”

  “Sure. Some o’ dem ask it tree, four times.”

  “Do they come back? The same ones?”

  “Happens.”

  “And you don’t get attached to them?”

  “Happens.”

  “But differently from me?”

  “Everybody different.”

  “Nita!”

  He laughs, she doesn’t.

  “You got Indian clients?”

  “Indians are broke, Mister Cleaning-Fluid.”

  “So’m I.”

  “Well, maybe you part Indian! Now shut up and lemme get some sleep.”

  “Naw, don’t go back to sleep, Nita . . . Let’s go down to the river.”

  CUT. Quick shot of Awinita in the tiny bathroom, tipping pills into her hand and gulping them down with tap water.

  On Saint Helen’s Island, passersby gape at the two of them walking hand in hand: the small, conspicuously pregnant Indian girl with bleached-blond hair and the gangly, flame-headed youth in cowboy boots. Declan takes her to a spot he knows, a tiny cove amidst rocks, its water a still pool. Beyond, the rushing river. Sitting on the minute, pebbly idea of a beach, her bulk between his skinny bent legs, his arms protectively circling her belly; they stare out at the water, boats and birds. Declan takes a swig of whisky.

  “I love it here.”

  “Yeah, ‘sokay.”

  “Want some?”

  “Tanks . . .”

  “I really only feel at home in nature, you know? I’m a country boy at heart.”

  “So what ya doin’ in de city?”

  “No jobs in the country.”

  “You got a job now?”

  “Nah. Prefer to live offa you.”

  He laughs, she doesn’t.

  “Awinita . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “Since . . . I mean, since you’re planning to give the kid up for adoption anyhow . . . why don’t we . . . like, go someplace together? I mean . . . why don’t we just leave Montreal and go live out in the forest someplace, make a life for ourselves? Awinita, come away with me! We’re both young, we can start over.”

  “Start what over?”

  “Whatever! We could buy a stand of maple trees and learn how to make maple syrup . . .”

  “Buy it how?”

  “You ain’t got any savings?”

  She says nothing. We remember the tin-roofed shack, the packed dirt floor, the weeping family.

  “Your dad didn’t leave you any money when he died?”

  Again she says nothing.

  In front of them, an Indian man of forty or forty-five, his body transparent, is bent over the water’s edge. He’s holding something in his hands, but we can’t see what. Suddenly he smashes it on a rock and tosses the pieces into the air. They fall—heavily at first, like gold nuggets, then gently, like raindrops. The drops disturb the still pool. The man gradually dissolves.

  “Your dad’s de one who got money,” she says at last.

  “Only hitch is, he disowned me.”

  “How come?”

  “Third jail sentence, he got fed up. I disappoint him, Nita. Seems like none of his sons turned out the way he hoped. He wanted us all to go to university. Workin’ on the land is beneath us, he says. Back in Ireland he was a lawyer, his dad was a judge, his friends were a buncha famous writers . . .”

  “So how come he left?”

  “Somethin’ happened during the First World War, I don’t know what. Maybe he refused to be drafted by the British, somethin’ like that.”

  “Dey drafted Indians from here, too,” Awinita murmurs, but Declan doesn’t hear her.

  “He came to Canada, found himself a nice plump Québécoise to marry. Then she started churning out babies and he worked his ass off on her father’s land. If I heard it once I heard it a thousand times: twenty years of backbreaking labor in Pierre-Joseph Chabot’s foresting industry . . . all the while clutching at his dream of getting a novel published. After a long day’s work on the property, he’d sit up reading and writing in his library late into the night. When his folks died, he had eighteen boxes of books shipped over from Dublin. And that still wasn’t enough. Every time he went to Montreal or Ottawa he’d come home with a fresh armload of books. Plays, poetry, first editions . . . But Neil, darling, what good will all these books do us? I remember my mother saying. We can’t feed our children with poetry! Truth is my mom was slightly pissed off ‘cause she’d grown up in the sticks and wanted out of them. Ran away to Montreal at age eighteen to become an actress, landed up waiting tables instead, in a coffee shop on Notre-Dame. That’s where they met. So she was none too thrilled when he insisted they head back to the sticks. She figured if she had to wade through cow and baby dung from morning to night, least he could do was shut up about Shakespeare. He used to corral all his sons into his study every Sunday morning, read out loud to us in English from these ancient books, stuff about Greek wars, British kings, whatever. I learned to hate that library of his. The girls meanwhile, being francophones, would be off at Mass with our mom . . . She died giving birth to her thirteenth baby and, being the oldest girl, Marie-Thérèse took over. She raised us with an iron hand, that’s for sure, but she couldn’t change our father’s ways.”

  We gently leave the ground and go wafting up in the air to join the gulls wheeling above the Saint Lawrence. We fly through our own long, undulating hair . . . But as we move through it, it begins to wrap around us—more and more tightly—until finally we’re nothing but a hard little ball of hair. We bounce.

  “When I was twelve or so,” Declan plunges on, “my da got a package in the mail, a signed copy of a book by some Irish writer with a woman’s name . . . Janice or some such, I forget. The book was a mishmash of foreign words and hard words and nonwords, as if the guy’d taken a big stack of books from all over the world and tossed them into a pot and made a stew of them, then ladled the stew onto the pages . . . After about an hour of listening to that horridge-porridge, I got mad. H
ow dare my father waste my time with this when I had stuff to do, buddies to see . . . That day, I swore I’d never be caught dead with a book in my hands. My brothers musta done the same ‘cause none of us ever made it past junior high.”

  “Not so different,” Awinita murmurs in her husky voice.

  “What’s not so different?”

  “You.”

  “From what?”

  “My johns.”

  “Thanks!”

  “’Sokay. You’re a guy, and guys like de sound of deir own voice. Hey, gotta get back to work.”

  • • • • •

  IV

  MALÍCIA

  The very essence of capoeira, malícia allows you to see the darkest sides of human beings and society without losing your joie de vivre.

  Milo, 1958–62

  THE CHILD OF absence is in the closet again—or rather in a closet again, not the same one as before. There’ve been a number of closets already in his short life and he’s found a way to survive in there—he makes an even darker closet for himself inside his head, enters it of his own volition and firmly closes the door behind him. Calling out to no one, needing no one, finding what he needs within himself.

  Once he’s in there, in the dark of the dark, he’s filled with anticipation because, closing his eyes, he can summon images and voices and they will come to him. He can elicit the cocker spaniel at the house next door to the German family when he was little and play with it as he was never allowed to at the time, since there was a picket fence between them and only two of the pickets were broken. Now he can throw a stick and the dog will bark excitedly, scamper to fetch the stick and bring it back to him, growling in pride—a game to be endlessly repeated. Then Milo can pet the dog’s head, say Good boy, reward it with a biscuit and feel its small wet scrapy tongue lick his palm because they love each other more than anything in the world. In the dark of the dark he can also meet up with his best friend, an imaginary boygirl named Ness like the Loch Ness monster, and the two of them can take off for wild adventures on the moon or Mars or under the sea or in the jungle or the desert or on the tundra, or exploring glaciers at the North Pole or volcanoes in South America or the topmost tips of the Himalayas . . .

  (The self-created closet gradually became your carapace, Milo. It would protect you forever. Your concentration was so extreme in there that you could accept literally anything—blows, rape, verbal attacks—and keep a hot star burning in your brain . . .)

  Other times, in the closet, little Milo hears his mother’s voice singing to him and whispering his secret name, or the voice of Sara Manders reading him a bedtime story. He feels Sara’s ample bosoms against his back as she holds him on her lap and cuddles him, strokes his head and marvels at the beauty of his hair . . . Curled on the closet floor, he hugs his own body and sometimes, listening to these beautiful women’s voices or feeling their breasts, his hand slips into his pants and he strokes himself and whines and pants until a blaze of light happens in his brain, after which he can relax and sometimes fall asleep. One day he’s doing this and suddenly the blaze of light turns into a real light, pale and appalling—his foster mother has opened the closet door and flicked on the switch and found him there with his hand inside his pants and his head thrown back, drinking in the slow deep joy of a woman’s flesh moving softly on his skin. She yells, catapulting him out of his reverie, then grabs the weapon nearest to hand—the long metal tube of the vacuum cleaner—and clobbers him over the head with it: God forgive me, but if I don’t beat this evil out of you there’ll be no hope left, you’ll grow up to be a criminal just like your parents! Bad seed on bad ground! As her blows rain down on Milo’s head and back and shoulders—his arms protect his face—the woman also kicks him with her pointed shoes wherever she can fit a kick in . . .

  YOU’RE RIGHT, MILO—MOVIEGOERS enjoy blood and gore of all sorts; they’ll watch in mesmerized delight as people cut each other’s head off, stab each other in the back, or bomb whole cities to oblivion; many of them also revel in seeing adult males rape little girls; but for some reason, though it’s one of the most widespread forms of violence on the planet, grown women hitting little boys makes them squirm . . . Go figure, eh?

  (Hear that, Milo? You’ve even taught me to say eh? like a Canadian. Hey. Are you doing all right? Are we doing all right? Can we go on, my love? I love you, Astuto. Let’s go on. Yes, yes, we’ll change the name, no problem—do it in a single click, soon as we finish the first draft . . .)

  THE LITTLE BASTARD knows how to read now, in English. He learned to read with a vengeance. Having completed the first two grades of school in a single year, he reads everything he can get his hands on, even if it’s only the dreary Reader’s Digest in the bathroom or the newspaper called the Gazette or the Bible his current foster mother keeps on her bedside table for daily inspiration. The printed words waft him away to freedom, set his mind spinning with stories. The main thing is to be out of this world, out, out . . .

  Though we can also toss in a few images of Milo’s so-called real life during those years (Milo in the classroom, his attention riveted on the teacher, on the blackboard, oblivious to the children around him . . . Milo in the school courtyard, bullied by older boys and unexpectedly fighting back so that within three seconds the leader’s nose is gushing with blood . . . Milo walking home alone in the four o’clock December dark . . . Milo shoveling snow . . . mowing the lawn . . . sitting stiff and straight on the pew of a Protestant church between two stiff and straight adults, one male, one female, whose heads we’ll never see), it’s clear that his real real life now unfolds inside the closet, in the dark of the dark. Ecstasy of images, voices drifting through silence . . . He’s become addicted to solitude.

  And then—brutally—he gets weaned of it. Cold turkey.

  He comes home from school one warm June day, opens the screen door and brings up short. His foster parents (still headless torsos) are seated in the front room with a gray-bearded stranger; packed and waiting in the hallway is Milo’s suitcase. At lightning speed, his eyes shift from grown-up to suitcase to grown-up, but no matter how often he changes the order of his perusal, he still can’t fathom what’s going on.

  CUT to the enormous, dimly lit hall of Windsor Station in Montreal. Chaos. Hordes of people rushing every which way amidst the hiss of steam engines and the strident sigh of whistles, shouting, smoking, waving, embracing and calling out to each other, dragging bags and trunks in their wake. Spiffy, red-hatted, chocolate-skinned porters shoving luggage carts. Arrival and departure announcements that sound like threats, reverberating over the loudspeaker in French. After scanning the crowd, the camera zooms in from behind on the old man, who is pulling Milo’s heavy suitcase with one hand and Milo with the other.

  The boy balks, in shock. The gray-bearded stranger turns to him and at last we see his face. It may take us a moment to recognize Neil.

  “Come on,” he says. “We’ll miss the train.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “They beat the bejesus out of you and you want to stay with them?”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you wanted to go. I’m your grandpa and I’m taking you out of that Protestant hellhole.”

  “You’re not my grandpa.”

  “So I am, bless you. Look.” He draws an Irish passport from his breast pocket. “Know how to read? Neil Noirlac. You see, it’s written there. And what’s your name?”

  “. . .”

  “What’s your name, young’un?”

  “Milo.”

  “Milo what?”

  The boy can’t help muttering Noirlac under his breath.

  “Right. And where would you have gotten a name like Noirlac?”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Do you know its meaning?”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Black lake, it means. Did you know your n
ame was black lake, my boy? Do you speak French?”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Come on, now, Milo, or we’ll be missing our train! Way they’ve been treating you, those Protestants are lucky I came without my gun.”

  “You got a gun?”

  “Naturally, for hunting rabbit and lynx and moose.”

  “Will you teach me how to hunt?”

  Neil gathers the child in his arms and pretends for a moment that he is strong enough to carry him. He isn’t, though, and, sensing this, Milo gives in.

  “I’ll come wit you,” he says, “if you teach me to hunt.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  CUT to the two of them in a train, hurtling northeastward through the province of Quebec. Around them, other passengers are chattering in French. Neil takes out a paper bag and hands a sandwich to Milo, who accepts and devours it without a word, staring out the window at flash-by forest as he chews. Never before has he set foot outside of Montreal.

  CUT to a Dubé family meal, the noonday meal they call dinner, in the kitchen of a large farmhouse in Mauricie. Seated on benches on either side of a long maple wood table are Neil’s oldest daughter, a brittly pretty woman named Marie-Thérèse; her husband, Régis Dubé, his cheeks mottled with smallpox scars; and their two strapping teenagers, François-Joseph and Jean-Joseph, all slurping soup and shouting in French at the same time.

  Milo is lost. Even were he able to revive the dormant rudiments of French he once possessed, this clipped, slanted, rural version of the tongue would be opaque to him. Occasionally Neil leans down to translate for him, but every time she catches him at it Marie-Thérèse slams her hand on the table.

  “Papa! Stop that at once! This is a French-speaking house, he might as well get used to it from the start. I don’t want you running off at the mouth again with your bullshit bilingual notions, do you hear me?”

  “How can he be expected to learn?” Neil protests, stroking his beard. “The poor kid doesn’t understand a word we’re saying.”

  “He’ll learn as he goes along, like everybody else.”

  “Gotta be patient,” Régis suggests, his mouth three or four centimeters away from his bowl of soup. (Régis is a cowed man who seems perpetually to be ducking, even when not bent over to eat.) “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he adds, so softly as to be inaudible to all but us.