Nancy Huston - Black Dance

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. How 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.”

• • • • •

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.