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 serially 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.