Milo moves his things into Roxanne’s dark little apartment in East Toronto.
CUT to an interview with the dean at the University of Toronto.
“Yes, Mr. Noirlac, I’ve grasped the fact that your girlfriend is registered in the nursing program here, but I’m afraid that does not qualify you ipso facto for our theater program. We absolutely must have access to your school record, at least some sort of proof that you graduated high school.”
“I understand, sir, but alas, my school it is in ze rural Quebec, and it burn down in ze spring.”
“I see. Well, it’s probably just as well you left; all hell’s breaking loose up in La Belle Province, as they call it. Large numbers of Quebeckers will be leaving soon, if you want my opinion. Large numbers of anglophones, especially, taking their money with them. An independent Quebec won’t have an economic leg to stand on. Be that as it may, if you wish to attend this institution, you’ll need to take entrance examinations.”
“No problem, sir.”
CUT to the dean warmly shaking Milo’s hand as he winds up a short speech on Opening Day.
“Not only did Milo Noirlac pass those exams with flying colors, ladies and gentlemen, but I’m proud to announce that the university has awarded him a scholarship to cover his tuition for the next two years.”
The audience applauds.
Voice-over (actually I’m not sure of this, but we can put it in now and take it out later): beyond the drone of Opening Day speeches at this institution formerly known as King’s College, maybe we could hear Neil’s thoughts during his commencement ceremony at Trinity half a century earlier: 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 flames?
Yes, Trinity College in Dublin and King’s College in Toronto—founded some two and a half centuries apart but both under the auspices of a friggin’ British monarch, eh? . . .
IN RAPID ALTERNATION between English and French: scenes from the year 1970–71, the Toronto scenes shot in studio, the Quebec scenes taken from press archives. Sound track: excerpts from the FLQ Manifesto, maybe mixed with rock music from the time (Charlebois or Joplin) . . . and always, faintly, in the background, the capoeira beat.
Milo sitting up late into the night, working with gusto at the kitchen table, smiling as he writes . . . Like more and more Quebeckers, we are fed up with paying taxes that Ottawa’s envoy to Quebec wants to hand over to anglophone bosses to “incite” them, if you please, to speak French and negotiate in French. Repeat after me: main-d’oeuvre à bon marché means cheap labor; British diplomat James Richard Cross and Labour Minister Pierre Laporte are kidnapped by the Front de Libération du Québec. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . .
Milo and Roxanne walking in Toronto Island on a Sunday afternoon—cottages, gardens, paths, sunlight trickling through red leaves and dappling the sidewalks . . . fed up with our obsequious government, bending over backward to seduce American millionaires, begging them to come and invest in Quebec, that Beautiful Province in which thousands of square miles of forests full of game and lakes full of fish are the exclusive property of these all-powerful lords of the twentieth century . . . Pierre Elliott Trudeau announces the implementation of the War Measures Act. Mounted police gallop madly through the streets of Montreal . . . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . Canadian army helicopters whir overhead.
Milo and Roxanne making love . . . fed up with hypocrites like Bourassa, who use the armored cars of Brink’s, that perfect symbol of foreign occupation of Quebec, to maintain the province’s poor “natives” in the terror of poverty and unemployment to which they are so well accustomed . . . Sirens, flashing lights, police searches . . . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . Posted on every street corner in downtown Montreal, thousands of helmeted, camouflage-uniformed soldiers hold their machine guns at the ready . . .
Milo and Roxanne quarreling in the kitchen—Roxanne throws a cup at Milo; it grazes his forehead and smashes against the wall; he leaves the house. Fed up with promises of employment and prosperity, whereas we’ll always be the eager servants and bootlickers of the big shots . . . Civil liberties are suspended. Huge demonstrations are held. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . People are beaten, kicked and dragged by the police; blood runs down their faces. Five hundred well-known artists, writers, organizers and militants are arrested and thrown in jail.
Milo watching TV, a six-pack of Molson and a carton of Player’s at his side . . . As long as there are Westmounts, Mount Royals, Hampsteads and Outremonts, those impregnable fortresses of Saint Jacques Street and Wall Street high finance, we Quebeckers will resort to any means necessary, including dynamite and guns, to kick out the big bosses of economy and politics, knowing they will stop at nothing to screw us over . . . Pierre Laporte’s dead body is found in the trunk of a car, a chain around its neck. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . .
Silence. CUT.
Milo in bed. The Black Hole has got him.
Roxanne (wearing different clothes, to show that days are passing) bends over him solicitously: “What’s the matter, my love?” . . .
“Are you going to get up today?” . . . “You haven’t left the house in more than a week.” . . . “What’s the matter, my love?” . . . “Did something happen?” . . . “Did something happen, Milo? Are you depressed?” . . . “Do you want me to call a doctor?”
Turning away from her, Milo pulls the blankets up over his head and feigns sleep. Sleep is still and always a problem for him. (Even today, my love, even today . . .)
The telephone rings. He sits bolt upright in bed and yells.
Roxanne rushes into the bedroom: “What’s the matter? Jesus Christ . . . You scared the shit out of me.”
She bursts into tears. Milo holds out his arms to her in hopes that she will comfort him.
“It’s okay,” they whisper to each other. “We’ll be all right.”
“I just made some tea,” says Roxanne. “Do you want a cup?”
Milo nods. Slowly gets out of bed and hobbles into the kitchen. Can’t look at Roxanne. Sits down at the table. Pours salt instead of sugar into his tea.
“Milo!”
They look at each other . . . then avert their eyes, each embarrassed to see the other knows they know that it is not okay. They will not be all right. No, not at all . . .
I’VE SEEN YOU that way, Astuto. I’ve seen you sink into lots of black holes over the years and lose lots of stuff in their depths—and when I say stuff, I mean fairly important stuff. Language. Your name . . . your profession . . . your age . . . your wallet . . . your computer . . . track of time. Yeah, I’ve seen you vanish, man. Turn into a void before my fuckin’ eyes—and a lasting void, at that! No way anyone can kiss you then. Nothing anyone can do but let you stare at the wall for as long as it takes you to snap out of it. It’s pretty impressive. You succumb utterly to your malaise. Surrender all arms. Relinquish language and revert to pure, animal survival. Say nothing, see no one, stay home, stare at the wall. A triumph of inertia. A splendor of blackness. All your energy condensed into an invisible point in the depths of you, one that takes up no space but freezes everything around it. It feels like turning to ice, I remember your telling me once. Yeah, like Glacier—the white giant of Indian legend who invaded the northern lands in prehistory, shaping hills, polishing stones, slowly displacing millions of tons of rocks and gravel, covering all, paralyzing all for thousands of years. But ice is nice, you added. Can’t do much wit water. Ice, you can sculpt.
I don’t know how many times I saw you endure these crises of inexistence. Far from improving as you grew older, they grew worse—because you’d earned your stripes as a screenwriter; people knew you were brilliant and they expected you to perform. All of a sudden, strangled by anxiety, you’d find yourself unable to write. You’d miss deadlines and appointm
ents, break promises and contracts, fall behind on obligations. Money would stop coming in, unpaid bills would pile up, bankers and tax inspectors would start harassing you. You would unplug your phone and stop checking your mailbox—no one could get in touch with you. And of course, the worse it got, the worse it got. The idea of their mounting resentment would make you cringe with shame, so you’d crawl further still into your hole.
At last, after weeks or even months of hibernation, something would move and it would be over. In one fell swoop, your light would be and your strength would come rushing back a hundred-fold. You’d write feverishly, day and night, pouring your innermost being onto the page . . . And people would forgive you every time, because what you wrote in those phases was just, unassailably, excellent.
I’ve always loved you, Milo, neither despite nor because of your black holes. With them . . .
SUCH, HOWEVER, WAS not the case with Roxanne. After two years of riding your soul’s roller coaster with you, hanging on for dear life, she got fed up and kicked you out. Bequeathed you her black hat and left you to your black holes. You were twenty-one, with a college diploma and not a red cent to your name . . .
There was only one place in the world you could head: New York City.
Odd jobs: waiter, taxi driver, fishmonger, lighting technician, nurse’s aid . . . You take up boxing for a while, discover you have a gift for the sport, start making good money at it and even consider going professional . . . but one day you’re fighting this humongous black man and you knock him out. Looking at him lying motionless on the floor, you realize this sport could kill you, so you hang up your gloves: your mother wouldn’t want you to meet so pointless an end.
Riffling through the Times one evening in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Seventh Avenue (in 1974 if I’m not mistaken), you’re brought up short by a headline—Seán MacBride, cofounder of Amnesty International, has just received the Nobel Peace Prize. The name rings a bell. MacBride . . . MacBride . . . You close your eyes and your grandfather’s voice comes arcing back to you over the thousand miles and days: Poor Mrs. MacBride was reduced to following Irish news from abroad . . . for fear that, were she to leave France, she’d lose legal custody of young Seagan.
Seán and Seagan: homo homo? Yes, Milo. Same man. His mother, Maud Gonne, had fought her whole life long for the rights and the release of political prisoners, she’d even founded an association called Amnesty—and now, by God, her little boy had gone and won the fucking Nobel! You’ll drink to that! Hightailing it out of Dunkin’ Donuts, you head for an Irish pub you’re partial to on Forty-Second Street—and, in loving memory of your grandpa Neil, dead these five years, down half a dozen pints of Guinness, that near-black beer topped by a stripe of creamy foam . . .
FADE TO WHITE.
• • • • •
Neil, 1920–1923
SOUND TRACK of live music: Québécois songs accompanied by fiddle and accordion.
(We’ll need to get a researcher working on this, Milo; I’ll bet you’ve got no idea what songs would have been sung at sugaring-off parties in the 1920s, am I wrong?)
The large barn space, next to the shed in which Neil was trying to write about exile when his ephemeral son Thom was born, has been temporarily converted into a dining/dancing hall. Long tables have been set up. Squeezed together on benches, several dozen men, women and children wolf down heaping platefuls of fried potatoes, fried sausages, hotcakes, tomatoes and toast, all drenched in maple syrup. Behind them, others dance, stomp and clap in time to the tunes stirred up by the little orchestra.
As she gracefully lifts her skirts to twirl beneath her cavalier’s raised arm, we see that Marie-Jeanne’s stomach is rounded by the beginnings of a new child. Close-up on their feet, Neil’s now heavily booted and Marie-Jeanne’s sensibly shoed, moving not too clumsily round and round, toeing in and toeing out. Close-up on their faces: Neil’s red-bearded; Marie-Jeanne’s rosy-cheeked and sparkly-eyed.
“T’es pas vertigineuse?”
“On dit pas t’es pas vertigineuse, on dit t’as pas le vertige!”
“T’as pas la faim?”
“On dit pas t’as pas la faim, on dit t’as pas faim!”
“T’as pas fatigue?”
“On dit pas t’as pas fatigue, on dit t’es fatiguée!”
“Oh! I give up. Elle est trop perverse, votre langue.”
“Anyway, I’m neither dizzy nor hungry nor tired . . . Just immensely happy. What about you?”
“I’m all right.”
“You worried about Ireland?”
“Yes.”
“Quebec is your country now, Neil. Even if he speaks English, the boy I’m carrying won’t be an Irishman, he’ll be a French Canadian. Are you sure it’s a good idea to read the Irish press all the time? It keeps you from sleeping at night, and in the daytime it keeps you from being where you are, sharing our joys and miseries. We’re your family now!”
“You don’t understand what’s happening over there,” says Neil in a low voice. “My comrades-in-arms are in the front lines. How am I to think of anything else? The IRA shoots eleven master spies from Britain who were following them everywhere, and how do the police respond? By shooting into the crowd at a rugby match! Twelve dead and seventy-two wounded! It’s insane, Marie-Jeanne!”
“I agree completely, it’s an unforgivable sin. The British will have to answer to God for Bloody Sunday . . . But as for you, Neil Noirlac, you should stop worrying your head about all that. You’ve been here two years already . . . It’s time you cut the umbilical cord between you and your native country!”
NEIL’S MEMORIES OF Bloody Sunday would come back to you, Milo darling, when a similar massacre took place in Brazil in August 1993. On pretext that four cops had been murdered by young drug lords, the Rio police stormed into cafés and private homes in the favela of Vigário Geral, opening fire at random. Twenty-one people were killed, none of whom was connected to the drug world in any way. History repeats itself, horrors rhyme and you, Astuto, were so porous, so sensitive to the tales of others, and yourself so unrooted in a particular time and place that the bloody rebellions and repressions that haunted your bad dreams and black holes could have been unfolding in Dublin, Montreal, or Rio . . .
CUT TO A sumptuous panoramic shot of the Mauricie region from on high. The camera will move simultaneously through space and time. Trees sprout leaves that change color, fall off, sprout green again (we’re reminded of one of Awinita’s cartoon fantasies) . . . Snow falls and melts, animals materialize and vanish . . . And in each season we will see Neil—dressed now in heavy winter gear, now in a T-shirt and light trousers, now in a red-and-black- or green-and-black-checkered wool shirt—working with other men, lopping branches off trees, inserting taps into trunks, pouring golden syrup from barrels into bottles, making maple taffy . . .
Voice-over: Neil as an old man, talking to his grandson.
It wasn’t easy for me to get used to living here, Milo. It felt uncanny, not to say immoral, to be dealing with moose and maple syrup as my country sank into hell. A month after Bloody Sunday, in December 1920, Westminster passed Lloyd George’s Government of Ireland Act, effectively separating Northern from Southern Ireland. The North said yea, the South said nay, and they’ve never changed their minds since. All through the spring I could think of nothing else. I was desperate to join the Irish Republican Army, now run by Michael Collins and the brilliant, ebullient young Seán MacBride. Remember I told you about Maud Gonne and John MacBride? Well, this was their son. Like myself a few years earlier, he was taking a law degree when politics claimed his soul. At sixteen, he became the youngest lieutenant in the Irish Republican Army. In May, they took over the Customhouse and laid waste to it. Milo, it took my breath away! The Customhouse—the most conspicuous and detested symbol of British power in Ireland, after Dublin Castle—a heap of smoking ruins! The whole British administration paralyzed! Meanwhile Yeats, in London, went on churning out Irish plays and poetry; Joyce, in Paris, went on s
erially publishing his masterpiece Ulysses; and I, I, Milo—who had played such an important role in Ireland as lawyer, poet and rebel—what was I doing? Sitting here in Mauricie eating pork ‘n’ beans with Marie-Jeanne’s family. From the outside, an ordinary man among ordinary men. But from the inside: raging, suffering, crippled by my brain in a world of brawn.
Your aunt Marie-Thérèse was born in June. She was a sweet, healthy wee thing; Marie-Jeanne sang and spoke to her in French. In Ireland, North and South were at each other’s throat. My mother wrote to say that she and my father were considering having their assets transferred to banks in Belfast. Yes, even Catholics, now—if they were wealthy and pro-British—were being targeted, terrorized, forced to flee.
Southern Ireland won its independence on Christmas Day, putting an end to seven centuries of British presence. But the minute the terms of the treaty were made public, the Dáil, the Sinn Féin and the IRA split apart and madness set in—that special form of madness known as civil war. Backs were stabbed and guts ripped open as South killed South, son killed father and brother killed brother, not only in Dublin but in the provinces, down to the tiniest of villages. As time went by, people forgot what the issues were; caught up in an unending concatenation of revenge and bitterness and misery, a festival of gore, an orgy of hatred, they simply fought to fight and killed to kill. The army got pushed up into the hills; thousands of men were jailed. Maud Gonne MacBride begged that the prisoners be treated with leniency, instead of which they were summarily shot. Executions are terrible, said the Minister for Home Affairs, but the murder of a nation is more terrible. Yeats, now deeply immersed in a phase of automatic writing with his wife, Georgie, saw symbols everywhere. Convinced that the Christian era was drawing to a close and that we had twenty centuries of undiluted horror in store for us, he wrote “The Second Coming”:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?