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 echoin
g 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.