Your aunt Marie-Thérèse was born in June. She was a sweet, healthy wee thing; Marie-Jeanne sang and spoke to her in French. In Ireland, North and South were at each other’s throat. My mother wrote to say that she and my father were considering having their assets transferred to banks in Belfast. Yes, even Catholics, now — if they were wealthy and pro-British — were being targeted, terrorized, forced to flee.
Southern Ireland won its independence on Christmas Day, putting an end to seven centuries of British presence. But the minute the terms of the treaty were made public, the Dáil, the Sinn Féin and the IRA split apart and madness set in — that special form of madness known as civil war. Backs were stabbed and guts ripped open as South killed South, son killed father and brother killed brother, not only in Dublin but in the provinces, down to the tiniest of villages. As time went by, people forgot what the issues were; caught up in an unending concatenation of revenge and bitterness and misery, a festival of gore, an orgy of hatred, they simply fought to fight and killed to kill. The army got pushed up into the hills; thousands of men were jailed. Maud Gonne MacBride begged that the prisoners be treated with leniency, instead of which they were summarily shot. Executions are terrible, said the Minister for Home Affairs, but the murder of a nation is more terrible. Yeats, now deeply immersed in a phase of automatic writing with his wife, Georgie, saw symbols everywhere. Convinced that the Christian era was drawing to a close and that we had twenty centuries of undiluted horror in store for us, he wrote “The Second Coming”:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Meanwhile the leaves changed color, dropped and sprouted anew, the Saint-Maurice River and Lac des Piles froze and thawed, the sap in the maple trees rose and overflowed, my sweet wife’s breasts and tummy swelled and shrank, our children mewled and spewed and grew. One day I received a letter from my mother. I’m sorry to have to share this with you, Milo, but my history is part of yours and I feel you should know even the worst of it. . Judge Kerrigan being known for his pro-British legal decisions over the years. . our home had been broken into, our china smashed, our paintings slashed, our pillows eviscerated, our garden trampled. . and my younger sister, Dorothy, who happened to be at home alone playing the piano that day, savagely beaten and raped by IRA revolutionaries or whatever they claimed to be. She was lucky to escape with her life. . My family promptly fled to Belfast, a city in which I’d never once set foot.
After reading that letter, Milo, I spent the rest of the day vomiting — just as I had on the boat coming over. I now had no place to go home to.
In May 1923, sickened by the inanity of the fighting, Éamon de Valera surrendered and the civil war ground to a halt. It had lasted two years and caused several thousand deaths. . That fall, Willie Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I could not go on.
END OF PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE SHOT.
CLOSE-UP ON NEIL in December 1923, thirty-one and miserable, on his knees at Marie-Jeanne’s bedside as she nurses Marie-Thérèse.
“I can’t go on like this, Marie-Jeanne. I’m sorry. . I adore you, but I have to make some changes. . If I can’t write, I’ll go crazy. Listen. . I’m going to look for employment as a journalist in Montreal. I’m sure I’ll find something. . I promise to come back. You can trust me. .”
“Listen, Neil! I have something to tell you! It’s a secret, you’re not supposed to know yet. My father wanted it to be a surprise, for your Christmas present, but as of next spring he’s going to add a floor to the house, just for you. Isn’t that fantastic, Neil? He’s going to build you an office, and you’ll be able to write!”
Neil’s head sinks until his brow touches Marie-Jeanne’s smooth-skinned hand. Night falls over the endless winter forest of Mauricie.
FADE TO BLACK.
• • • • •
Awinita, October 1951. .
THIS WILL BE the roughest of the Awinita sections, Milo, darling, as your mother starts shooting up again and you grow inside her womb, your tiny heart guzzling heroin and pulsing it through your bloodstream into your just-forming brain, numbing all your nascent senses. A section with no dialogue, just fragmented images melting one into the next as your mother fades in and out of consciousness. . sits at the bar and drinks phony drinks with her johns and real ones with Declan. . smiles at the johns and frowns at Declan. . takes the johns’ money and gives it to Declan. . climbs up and down the stairs between bar and bedroom, bedroom and bar. . takes off her boots, stockings, blouse, bra and panties and puts them on again, all her clothes getting tighter and more uncomfortable on her body as you grow but of course she can’t afford a pregnancy wardrobe. . closing her eyes so as not to see the faceless needy men pushing into her, asking her to love and care about them, until they come and leave.
This time, if you agree, we could go all the way inside her mind and simply knit together a series of fantasies and nightmares, using a sound track now familiar to us — that endless series of belt-buckle and zipper noises, panting, swearwords and racist insults, moans and groans. Yes, I know, Milo — you’re worried that not only the MPAA but the audience itself might tire of hearing these sounds, but if they think about it they’ll realize that what seems annoyingly repetitious to us after five minutes must be soul-death to those who, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, devote months or years of their lives to helping strangers ejaculate. Okay, these sounds could be drowned out every now and then by the beating of native drums, how’s that? (In October 1951, the laws that for over half a century had forbidden African Brazilians from doing capoeira, and Indian Canadians from holding potlatches, powwows, and sun dances, had just been abolished. .)
A train rushes toward a tunnel at top speed — but it turns out that the black arch is only painted onto the concrete, and the train smashes into it headlong. Somehow all the passengers are squish-bounced out of the windows. They land gaily on their feet and run around laughing and shaking each other’s hands, congratulating each other on their good fortune.
A city plunged in darkness. No streetlamps or neon signs. Even the cars have no headlights, but their blindness neither increases their caution nor decreases their speed. They keep smashing into each other — this time the passengers get killed, and it is their ghosts who nimbly leap away from the wreckage. They are small, amorphous gray creatures who dart about, gesticulating helplessly, eyes widened in shock. They weep silently on each other’s shoulders and console one another.