Nancy Huston - Black Dance

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 echoing their verdict back and forth in the icy silence. Forty below!