Nancy Huston - Black Dance

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

Viviane looks at him adoringly.

“Sounds beautiful!” she says. “Who’s it by?”

“Yeats.”

“Never heard of him.”

“A great Irish poet from the beginning of the century. Good friend of my grandfather’s.”

“Boy, that grandfather of yours sure made a big impression on you. You talk about him all the time. You gonna introduce me to your folks one of these days?”

“Absolutely.”

Milo grins broadly. . and, to keep her from asking more questions, plants a fierce kiss on her mouth. Just then, in a deafening beating of wings, the wild geese alight in the field next to them and the couple bursts apart. It’s as if they had caused the event — as if a thousand large white birds had landed just to watch them kiss. They contemplate this living, threshing sea of whiteness at close range.

CUT to a red Chevy convertible, Viviane at the wheel, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, speeding through the state of Nevada. As the sun beats down on his face, Milo leans back in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard.

CUT to the two of them making torrid love in a small hotel room in Reno, Viviane on top.

CUT to a private home in L.A., a couple of deck chairs by a swimming pool. Dressed in a skimpy bikini, Viviane is sipping a gin and tonic through a straw and letting a tall, dark, handsome stranger talk her up. Milo and their host are playing chess at a table under a pergola a few yards away. From time to time, Milo glances over to check out the scene next to the swimming pool, and the host watches him watching. When Viviane and the stranger rise and glide toward the house hand in hand, Milo moves his queen.

“Well, well,” the host says. “I wonder where that lovely girlfriend of yours has wandered off to.”

“Checkmate,” says Milo.

CUT to Milo running alone on the beach as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. A long, searingly beautiful shot.

He and Viviane hug each other good-bye. She puts her suitcase into the trunk of a white Chrysler convertible and the handsome stranger drives her away.

Milo and his host at midnight, next to a campfire on the beach. After dropping a couple of tabs of psilocybin, they make sublime love in the sand. The camera politely turns upward to film more shooting stars overhead, but we gather from the sound track that Milo’s sex pushing warmly into him is making the host so happy that he weeps. Milo shouts when he comes — a gorgeous shout.

(Important decision that summer: you take advantage of the hospitality and kindness of this wealthy Californian to shake your drug habit. Even in the ideal conditions your host provides for you, your withdrawal — like your mother’s twenty years earlier — lasts a full month and is undiluted hell. . but you wade through it, Astuto wonder, and come out on the other side. I love you for that, though I admit I haven’t got the slightest idea how to film it.)

At summer’s end, Milo drives Viviane’s red car back east through Canada. Stops in Saskatchewan to pick up a female hitchhiker with carrot-colored hair. The girl is wearing blue jean cutoffs, a bright pink shirt knotted above her midriff, dirty old sandals and a black Stetson, pulled down past her eyebrows so the wind won’t blow it off. Milo chats with her as country-western music blares from the radio (Patsy Cline? yeah, let’s say Patsy Cline). The girl laughs a lot, crinkling her eyes at his jokes. Her name is Roxanne. Milo and Roxanne make love in a cheap motel room. Close-up on the bedside table: we recognize a packet of birth control pills. Times have changed.

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. .