Nancy Huston - Black Dance

“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?

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. .