Meanwhile the leaves changed color, dropped and sprouted anew, the Saint-Maurice River and Lac des Piles froze and thawed, the sap in the maple trees rose and overflowed, my sweet wife’s breasts and tummy swelled and shrank, our children mewled and spewed and grew. One day I received a letter from my mother. I’m sorry to have to share this with you, Milo, but my history is part of yours and I feel you should know even the worst of it . . . Judge Kerrigan being known for his pro-British legal decisions over the years . . . our home had been broken into, our china smashed, our paintings slashed, our pillows eviscerated, our garden trampled . . . and my younger sister, Dorothy, who happened to be at home alone playing the piano that day, savagely beaten and raped by IRA revolutionaries or whatever they claimed to be. She was lucky to escape with her life . . . My family promptly fled to Belfast, a city in which I’d never once set foot.
After reading that letter, Milo, I spent the rest of the day vomiting—just as I had on the boat coming over. I now had no place to go home to.
In May 1923, sickened by the inanity of the fighting, Éamon de Valera surrendered and the civil war ground to a halt. It had lasted two years and caused several thousand deaths . . . That fall, Willie Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I could not go on.
END OF PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE SHOT.
CLOSE-UP ON NEIL in December 1923, thirty-one and miserable, on his knees at Marie-Jeanne’s bedside as she nurses Marie-Thérèse.
“I can’t go on like this, Marie-Jeanne. I’m sorry . . . I adore you, but I have to make some changes . . . If I can’t write, I’ll go crazy. Listen . . . I’m going to look for employment as a journalist in Montreal. I’m sure I’ll find something . . . I promise to come back. You can trust me . . .”
“Listen, Neil! I have something to tell you! It’s a secret, you’re not supposed to know yet. My father wanted it to be a surprise, for your Christmas present, but as of next spring he’s going to add a floor to the house, just for you. Isn’t that fantastic, Neil? He’s going to build you an office, and you’ll be able to write!”
Neil’s head sinks until his brow touches Marie-Jeanne’s smooth-skinned hand. Night falls over the endless winter forest of Mauricie.
FADE TO BLACK.
• • • • •
Awinita, October 1951 . . .
THIS WILL BE the roughest of the Awinita sections, Milo, darling, as your mother starts shooting up again and you grow inside her womb, your tiny heart guzzling heroin and pulsing it through your bloodstream into your just-forming brain, numbing all your nascent senses. A section with no dialogue, just fragmented images melting one into the next as your mother fades in and out of consciousness . . . sits at the bar and drinks phony drinks with her johns and real ones with Declan . . . smiles at the johns and frowns at Declan . . . takes the johns’ money and gives it to Declan . . . climbs up and down the stairs between bar and bedroom, bedroom and bar . . . takes off her boots, stockings, blouse, bra and panties and puts them on again, all her clothes getting tighter and more uncomfortable on her body as you grow but of course she can’t afford a pregnancy wardrobe . . . closing her eyes so as not to see the faceless needy men pushing into her, asking her to love and care about them, until they come and leave.
This time, if you agree, we could go all the way inside her mind and simply knit together a series of fantasies and nightmares, using a sound track now familiar to us—that endless series of belt-buckle and zipper noises, panting, swearwords and racist insults, moans and groans. Yes, I know, Milo—you’re worried that not only the MPAA but the audience itself might tire of hearing these sounds, but if they think about it they’ll realize that what seems annoyingly repetitious to us after five minutes must be soul-death to those who, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, devote months or years of their lives to helping strangers ejaculate. Okay, these sounds could be drowned out every now and then by the beating of native drums, how’s that? (In October 1951, the laws that for over half a century had forbidden African Brazilians from doing capoeira, and Indian Canadians from holding potlatches, powwows, and sun dances, had just been abolished . . .)
A train rushes toward a tunnel at top speed—but it turns out that the black arch is only painted onto the concrete, and the train smashes into it headlong. Somehow all the passengers are squish-bounced out of the windows. They land gaily on their feet and run around laughing and shaking each other’s hands, congratulating each other on their good fortune.
A city plunged in darkness. No streetlamps or neon signs. Even the cars have no headlights, but their blindness neither increases their caution nor decreases their speed. They keep smashing into each other—this time the passengers get killed, and it is their ghosts who nimbly leap away from the wreckage. They are small, amorphous gray creatures who dart about, gesticulating helplessly, eyes widened in shock. They weep silently on each other’s shoulders and console one another.
A narrow, glossy black snake’s head emerges from a hole in the ground. The snake twists its neck around to make sure that no one is watching, then hoists the rest of its body out of the hole. It is shockingly fat and clumsy, like an obese woman dressed in a black leotard, with a couple of extra limbs and bulges. The snake clumps around in a meaningless, ugly shuffle-dance, then rolls disgustingly on the ground.
A baseball goes soaring through the air in slow motion. The stitching comes apart while the ball is still in flight, and hundreds of tiny white parachutes drop gracefully from its insides.
A man shouts in anger. Suddenly his voice undergoes all its metamorphoses in reverse, and within seconds he is a howling baby.
Bodies plummet, human bodies hurtle downward through the air with groans of fear that sound like droning airplanes. A white flower opens with searing grace and purity.
The flame of a candle—now steady, now flickering, but always burning—reflects the sundry images with which it comes into contact. There is a vague procession of people, animals, buildings . . .
A green shoot comes up from the dark earth. It sprouts two tiny bright leaves, then stops growing.
A milk bottle cap shoots off; the milk spews upward and falls in a thick white curve of milk.
That thick white curve of milk showers gently and felicitously down upon you both, Awinita and Milo, covering your bodies in a fountain of warmth, the mellow marrow-ecstasy of heroin. Eyes close gently, breathing slows, lips relax, hands open—oh, abandonment, oh, utter abandonment—woman and womb, skin and membrane, the mother a child to her child, the child a mother to its mother, adult and infant curled up around and inside of each other, outside of Time.
• • • • •
IX
NEGAÇA
Deception, provocation. Pretending to do one thing (a movement, an attack) and in fact doing another to surprise one’s adversary.
Milo, 1975–90
A NIGHT SCENE, lit by torches, on Terreiro de Jesus in Salvador de Bahia’s upper city—a large and beautiful square surrounded by old churches and cafés. Young black men in white pants have formed a street roda and passersby are being drawn into it. Radiating from the central berimbau, energy circulates from one body, voice and soul to the other; by turn, the capoeiristas sing and kick and spin and wheel and cartwheel, beat drums and shake tambourines—ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA—smiling always, even when they miss a beat and fall or accidentally strike an adversary. The rhythm is hypnotic and insistent, monotonous and precise. It’s not by virtue of making an effort that they play together; rather they are part of a single body, the pulsating joyful body of the fight-dance. Raising your foot in a kick-spin, you all but graze your adversary’s face, the beauty is to miss him but just barely, if he dances well he’ll feel the blow coming and be ready to second-guess you and avoid it, knock you off balance and gracefully threaten you in turn, as the two of you watch and duck, swing and smile and wheel and dive and lollop, the beat carries you forward, then your turn is over and, moving to watch the next pa
ir bow to salute each other in front of the central berimbau, you encourage them with our singing, drumming, clapping and your smiles. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . There’s no winning or losing in this game, only playing, endless playing, you want your adversary to be strong not weak, smart not dumb, you’re delighted to trick him and delighted to be tricked by him, boy learns from girl, white learns from black, old learns from young, the teaching is the doing is the beauty is the grace is the humor, endlessly you go on learning, smiling, moving, feinting, never missing a beat. Gingare, the dance of life: the controlled, prolonged, sustained, ineffable excitement of capoeira is like an endless climax.
Receding from the vortex of the event, our camera turns and finds itself nose to nose with . . . another camera. Shooting the roda in black and white is a film crew from New York, Milo among them . . . Moment of mutual embarrassment. Like dogs, the two cameras sniff each other out, moving around to see what’s going on in the back.
Because Milo’s body has begun to move of its own volition, he is being gradually but imperiously included in the performance. The Bahians watch him, approving with nods and gestures the precise élan of his limbs . . .
OH, MILO, WHAT wouldn’t I give to have witnessed that scene! Your other forms of physical training were all reactivated at once: hockey for clever swerves, swivels, pivots, and feints; boxing for swiftness, lightness of footwork and accuracy of arm thrusts; sex with Paul Schwarz for sensual, graceful interaction with other male bodies. This was what you’d been looking for all your life. The Bahians saw it, too. No room for doubt—buoyed up by the solid, attentive warmth and approval of the crowd, your head went down, your legs went up, the speed increased, and your body, like that of the other young men, became a pure, moving cipher. Eyes wide open, you gave yourself up to the capoeira rhythm as it irrigated your flesh. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . You knew this beat from before, long before, from your mother’s heart that gently, rhythmically played her ancestors’ tales into your ears when you lived inside of her, Milo, yes, you had this beat in your blood and could feel it now, coming up from the ground of Terreiro de Jesus, zinging through the sacred berimbau and galvanizing your whole being. Unexpectedly, at age twenty-three, you felt at home for the first time in your life.
Sorry. Yes, of course we’ll go back to the third person. And yes, of course we’ll change the name, don’t worry. What’s in a name? (To call your mother Nita is to destroy the meaning of her name, which is fawn . . .)
CUT TO THE following day: a gathering in a tiny open-air café at São Joaquim, Salvador’s outdoor market. Seated with several of the capoeira initiates, you’re smoking cigarettes, drinking weak beer and chewing the rag. Your friend Homer, the African American director of the candomblé film you’ve come to work on, translates for you from the Portuguese.
“. . . They wanna know where you learned capoeira.” Milo shrugs and grins.
“Dey taught me.”
“. . . They say you’re one of them.”
“I feel it, too. An honor. Ask dem if I may pay for de next round.”
That evening, the New York crew is invited to the home of a local capoeira mestre. Smiles follow plates of fejoada and glasses of caipirinha around the table. Several shots from different angles, to show hours passing, elation rising. Late in the evening, a corpulent woman of sixty or so, sexily swathed in a green cotton print dress, comes to sit next to Milo. Her skin is copper-colored, her teeth bright white, her English halting but clear.
“I saw you dance last night. The fire was in you.”
“Oh, so dat’s what it was!” Milo laughs. “I wondered.”
“You’re Milo Noirlac, a French person from Quebec. I asked around. My name’s Manoela.”
“Trilled to meet you, Manoela.”
“I’m Indian. I come from the south of Bahia, near Porto Seguro. My people are the Pataxo Hahahae.”
“Hahahae, a fine laughing name.”
“My husband was madingueiro, too . . . He worked many years with Mestre Pastinha.”
“You say was . . .?”
“Two years ago in a fishing expedition, he . . . drown. Our children big already, live far …”
“I’m sorry. Life must be lonely for you sometimes.”
Other people pull him back into the conversation. It goes on and on. Later, Manoela comes back to Milo and says,
“Your skin is talking to mine.”
“Your skin is answering mine.”
CUT to the two of them making love that night, in Manoela’s more than modest bedroom. Afterward they lie in bed, holding each other.
“You’re Indian, just like me . . . aren’t you, child?” she murmurs.
“How you know dat?”
“’Cause of your silence.”
“What do you mean? I spent de whole evening talkin’ my head off.”
“Can’t fool me with that, baby.”
They laugh and kiss and laugh and kiss. The next morning, as they drink strong coffee together on the doorstep, he tells her in a few words the tale of his birth, even adding (in a rare élan of total trust) that when he was three or four Awinita revealed his middle name to him, a Cree word meaning resistant.
“So she don’t leave you completely.”
“She did, Manoela.”
“No, child. You’re a little baby, she live with you a few days, look at you closely and see you going to make it. You understand? If she give you this name, it mean she got confidence in your fate.”
Several shots of Homer filming other capoeira performances in and around Salvador, Milo achieving a higher degree of integration each time. Learning as he goes, laughing, feinting and radiant, talking with people, making love now with women, now with men. Just before his departure, he undergoes a batizado ceremony and is given a new name, one that suits him to a T: Astuto.
On the flight back to New York, Milo and Homer go over their notes, talking about what’s in the reels and how to edit it, occasionally rocking with laughter.
CUT to Milo working alone in his Lower Manhattan apartment. The phone rings (in 1975, still one of those jangly, heavy black Bakelite contraptions) and he jumps out of his skin.
“What?” he yells at the phone before picking it up.
“Milo?” says a soft, high, wavering female voice at the other end: a French voice, but whose?
“Yeah. Who’s calling?”
“It’s your cousin. It’s Gabrielle.”
Through Milo’s eyes, we look out the window at a bric-a-brac of brick walls, fire exits, garbage cans and broken bottles.
“Milo, Mommy is dying. She wants to see you.”
“How did you find me?”
“Your friend Edith told me you were in New York, so I called information. Daddy asked me to get in touch with you, Milo, he’s all het up . . . Mommy has womb cancer. I don’t want to bother you, I know you’ve got another life and you don’t think about us anymore . . . but Mommy’s only got a few days left to live and she’s been asking to see you. She wants to apologize to you . . . you know . . . for the bonfire.”
“I got noting against you and Régis, Gabrielle . . .” says Milo, interrupting softly. “I got noting at all against de two of you . . .”
Very gently, he hangs up . . . CUT.
THOSE YEARS, MILO says yes to any project, whether documentary or feature film, that will take him back to African soul dancing on American soil.
You see, Astuto? We were fated to meet. When I returned to the NYU Film School as an alumnus and gave a presentation of my new film on Haitian voodoo, it was inevitable that you’d come to the projection and I’d fall for you the minute I set eyes on you. I don’t know what you saw in me, apart from a supremely handsome, intelligent, gifted, almost-successful genius of a film director; anyway, we made love at your place that very night . . . You amazed me in bed. No hang-ups, no shyness, no apologies or kinks . . . Just eagerness, inventiveness and stupendous generosity.
We talked the next m
orning over breakfast, and the more I got to know you the more I wanted to work with you . . . By the time we separated later that same day, I’d signed you up as cowriter on my next film.
A riffle through Milo’s travels, travails, trails and trials over the next few years. We see him attending film festivals, meeting directors, making a name for himself as a screenwriter. He’s not a writer in any usual sense of the word—avoids writing in his own name, even letters; doesn’t want people to know how to reach him, find him; often refrains from answering even phone calls (his telephone phobia will never leave him). Time shadows him always, hard on his heels, and he moves on, never stops moving, gingare, like a capoeirista in Bahia or an Indian in the forest, effacing his tracks as he goes along so as to leave no evidence behind . . . He has no style of his own but has hit upon the perfect compromise between Neil’s ultraliterary tradition and Awinita’s oral one—writing orality. In his dark bedroom in Manhattan as in the closets of his childhood in Montreal or in front of the silent TV set in Mauricie, he listens intently to the voices in his head, then transcribes their words with confounding accuracy. Being half deaf in one ear has impaired his inner hearing not at all . . .
JUNE 1980, MONTREAL World Film Festival. Close-up on Milo, not quite thirty, at a fancy dinner party. He glances around the table—white tablecloth, champagne, oysters, women in sparkling jewelry making long, careful curls bounce when they toss their heads back to laugh, men holding forth in loud proud voices—and thinks it is fine. Whatever. (He thinks his Lower Manhattan hole-in-the-wall is fine, too.)
A young actress, bleached blond, wearing a slinky, strapless black dress and teetering on stiletto heels, comes over and sits down next to him. At once they dive deeply into mutual seduction . . . CUT.
In Milo’s room at the Ritz-Carlton on Sherbrooke (a mile or so west of the gray stone house in which Neil was once uncomfortably lodged by Judge and Mrs. McGuire), he and the blonde are making love. It turns out that this woman, whose name is Yolande or Yolaine, he’s not sure which, is even more beautiful without than with her makeup and fancy clothes.