Black Dance

by Nancy Huston

  Awinita’s face (our face) reflected in a pond. We’re still only nineteen, but our expression is grave. As we stare at ourselves in the water’s still surface, our face sprouts long brown hair and laughs at us. Our body shrinks and we turn into some small, round, furry animal, maybe an ockqutchaun (woodchuck). Quivering, we bound away.

  Awinita is fast asleep on Declan’s chest in the cruddy little bedroom above the bar. Half sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, Declan looks drunk and in an evil mood.

  “Nita,” he says (but she’s breathing from the depths of sleep). “Nita!” he repeats, stubbing out his cigarette and jerking her to wakefulness.

  “What?”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  She doesn’t answer. Wouldn’t know where to start.

  “Ever since the baby was born, it’s as if you don’t wanna make out with me anymore. Come on, whassup?”

  “It’s only been a coupla weeks, Deck. I’m tired, dat’s all.”

  “We used to have such good times in bed, baby. Come on . . . Make an effort, honey . . . Make me happy.”

  “I’m tired, Deck.”

  “You make your johns happy all night long, no problem there, no I’m tired there! Just suddenly when it’s my turn, the tap runs dry.”

  “Later, sweetie.”

  “Don’t you later-sweetie me. You know we gotta clear outta the room by noon, and I’m not allowed in your place up on the Plateau. I don’t like this, baby. I’m not gettin’ any and it pisses me off. I’m a normal guy with normal needs and you’re my gal, remember? Maybe you get your kicks elsewhere, but I sure as hell don’t . . .”

  “Lemme sleep, man. You should get some shut-eye, too. You had too much to drink.”

  Turning her back on him, she pulls the sheet up over her shoulder. He rips it away.

  “Don’t you tell me what to do, bitch. You’re not my mother.” He moves onto her.

  “Hang on, Deck . . . you wearin’ a safe?”

  Large animals—oxen?—writhing in agony. Their bulky bodies heave, they bellow.

  Awinita in the apartment on the Plateau Mont-Royal, chatting with her roommates. One of them—Deena, a young Mohawk Indian from the south of the province, also a bleached blonde—always gives her beauty tips.

  “Wow, Nita. You should get your hair done, you know that? Your roots are really visible.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get around to it. Soon as I’ve paid off my debt.”

  “I’ll be all paid up a month from now,” says Cheryl. “Got a terrific weekend job up at that new hotel near Trois-Rivières, Le Paradis des Sports.”

  “Lucky you! How’d you land that?”

  “Owner was in town coupla weeks ago. Guy named Cossette. Musta liked the way I went down on him.”

  “You’re goin’ up in the world, with all that goin’ down. Wow! Put in a good word for us, Cher!”

  They laugh.

  “Sure thing. Uh . . . Actually they say they don’t want native girls, to start out with . . . But at least you’re working again, Nita. That’s amazing. Got your figure right back, eh?”

  “Yeah, nobody’d ever guess you just had a baby just three weeks ago!”

  “Not even floppy around the tum.”

  “Hurts, dough,” Awinita says.

  “What hurts?”

  “Work.”

  “Yeah, I know,” says Lorraine who is older than the others, twenty-five or so. “Been through it twice.”

  “I never had a baby, but I can imagine.”

  “Your johns notice anything?”

  “Nah . . . but I do.”

  “Well, tell ‘em to be nice ‘n’ gentle with you.”

  “Yeah, sure,” says Awinita, and the four of them laugh.

  “You know what the best painkiller is, don’t you?” Lorraine says.

  “Uh . . . love?” says Awinita, and the four of them laugh.

  “Nope. Cold as ice. Keep guessin’ . . .”

  “Aspirin?”

  “Better’n love, but still barely lukewarm.”

  “Poppers?”

  “Gettin’ warmer . . .”

  CUT to Awinita and Lorraine locked into the bathroom together. Subjective camera: we’re seated on the toilet lid, our face visible in profile in the mirror above the sink. Close-up of a needle slipping into a vein in our inner arm.

  “It’s a gift, Nita. Won’t cost you a cent, this first time. Just a gift, to make you feel better.”

  Close-up of our face in the mirror. Slowly its muscles relax, its tensions dissolve, its contours fill with bliss. They melt and fade to whiteness . . . Yes, the divine milky whiteness of heroin you know so well, Milo, darling, and which you’ve always longed to convey on film. We could put Arvo Pärt’s Litany on the sound track. Our eyes close, our lips and mouth go slack and we sink deeper and deeper into the liquid ecstasy, floating in it as we did in our mother’s womb, hearing the soft throb of our mother’s heart, which is also our heart and that of Mother Earth, that Indian drumbeat we recognize from before . . . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . As our flesh melts and the universe dissolves around us, we nod off, our forehead pressed against the bathroom sink, but even that chill hard edge is a pleasure as exquisite as the first spoonful of vanilla ice cream on the tip of our tongue when we were three years old. Our hand falls off our lap, our arm flops to our side and dangles there. We open our eyes long enough to see Lorraine smile down at us and move away . . . CUT.

  Awinita has gone home for a visit.

  Full summer sunlight glancing off the high blond waving grasses of the Waswanipi Reserve, uncultivated land as far as the eye can see. She walks past the old folks sitting on benches beneath the eaves of their miserable huts. As they gaze after her, we see their brows knit at the way she walks and the way she is dressed. Their disapproval isn’t about her being a prostitute; it’s about her being a city chick, a stranger. Her demeanor can’t fit in here anymore. The community is losing its members one after the other, a slow hemorrhage.

  In the shade behind their shack, she sits down with her mother, a hunched and wizened woman of maybe forty-five. Their conversation will be in Cree with English subtitles.

  “Many moons it’s been,” says her mother, plaiting sweetgrass.

  “Yes. Too long.”

  “And the envelopes stopped coming. But now you’re here and it’s better than many, many envelopes.”

  “I had debts to repay. Life will be easier now, I hope.”

  “Difficulties come to us all, we face them. Your body is strong?”

  “My body is strong. The brothers and sisters?”

  “There was hunger this year in springtime, but none of us died. Life thrives. The world follows its course. And we must all go back to the earth our mother, who patiently waits for our time to come, her arms wide to welcome and hold us.”

  “Yes. When there’s more money, I send it to you.”

  “If you have extra, send it so I can buy more flour.”

  “Now I must go back to the city. The trip is a long one; night will be day before I arrive.”

  “Be joyful.”

  “Take advantage of life.”

  Gently, unsmilingly, the old woman presses the braid of sweet-grass into her daughter’s palm. Awinita rises and moves off. And, as the punishing sun finally starts to set . . . CUT.

  A series of toilet scenes, still and always from Awinita’s point of view.

  Seated on the throne of a toilet, now at Liz’s place, now in the cruddy bedroom on Saint Catherine, we wipe ourselves and twist around to check the toilet paper. It comes up bloodless.

  Time after time after time, we swivel to find no blood.

  Close-up of our impassive face in the bathroom mirror. Our hair is now half blond, half black.

  Sound track of men groaning and muttering, panting and swearing, zipping their flies up and down, unfastening and refastening their belt buckles.

  A frog tries to leap out of a well. It gathers tremendous energy for each leap
but never manages to reach the top. After each failure, it finds itself back where it started, only tireder. Sometimes it bangs its head on the stone wall, but it can’t help leaping; its urge to reach sunlight and fresh air is irresistible. At last it weakens and sinks beneath the water’s surface. There is light there, too, but of a different kind. A still, glazed-green light shrouds the frog.

  • • • • •

  1. Who gets your heart, baby, after nine?

  Is it mine, is it really all mine?

  When I’m away, do you toe the line?

  Who gets your heart, baby, after nine?

  VI

  FLOREIO

  In capoeira, any exercise involving dexterity or trickery; jogo 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?