“I’m Indian. I come from the south of Bahia, near Porto Seguro. My people are the Pataxo Hahahae.”
“Hahahae, a fine laughing name.”
“My husband was madingueiro, too. . He worked many years with Mestre Pastinha.”
“You say was. .?”
“Two years ago in a fishing expedition, he. . drown. Our children big already, live far …”
“I’m sorry. Life must be lonely for you sometimes.”
Other people pull him back into the conversation. It goes on and on. Later, Manoela comes back to Milo and says,
“Your skin is talking to mine.”
“Your skin is answering mine.”
CUT to the two of them making love that night, in Manoela’s more than modest bedroom. Afterward they lie in bed, holding each other.
“You’re Indian, just like me. . aren’t you, child?” she murmurs.
“How you know dat?”
“’Cause of your silence.”
“What do you mean? I spent de whole evening talkin’ my head off.”
“Can’t fool me with that, baby.”
They laugh and kiss and laugh and kiss. The next morning, as they drink strong coffee together on the doorstep, he tells her in a few words the tale of his birth, even adding (in a rare élan of total trust) that when he was three or four Awinita revealed his middle name to him, a Cree word meaning resistant.
“So she don’t leave you completely.”
“She did, Manoela.”
“No, child. You’re a little baby, she live with you a few days, look at you closely and see you going to make it. You understand? If she give you this name, it mean she got confidence in your fate.”
Several shots of Homer filming other capoeira performances in and around Salvador, Milo achieving a higher degree of integration each time. Learning as he goes, laughing, feinting and radiant, talking with people, making love now with women, now with men. Just before his departure, he undergoes a batizado ceremony and is given a new name, one that suits him to a T: Astuto.
On the flight back to New York, Milo and Homer go over their notes, talking about what’s in the reels and how to edit it, occasionally rocking with laughter.
CUT to Milo working alone in his Lower Manhattan apartment. The phone rings (in 1975, still one of those jangly, heavy black Bakelite contraptions) and he jumps out of his skin.
“What?” he yells at the phone before picking it up.
“Milo?” says a soft, high, wavering female voice at the other end: a French voice, but whose?
“Yeah. Who’s calling?”
“It’s your cousin. It’s Gabrielle.”
Through Milo’s eyes, we look out the window at a bric-a-brac of brick walls, fire exits, garbage cans and broken bottles.
“Milo, Mommy is dying. She wants to see you.”
“How did you find me?”
“Your friend Edith told me you were in New York, so I called information. Daddy asked me to get in touch with you, Milo, he’s all het up. . Mommy has womb cancer. I don’t want to bother you, I know you’ve got another life and you don’t think about us anymore. . but Mommy’s only got a few days left to live and she’s been asking to see you. She wants to apologize to you. . you know. . for the bonfire.”
“I got noting against you and Régis, Gabrielle. .” says Milo, interrupting softly. “I got noting at all against de two of you. .”
Very gently, he hangs up. . CUT.
THOSE YEARS, MILO says yes to any project, whether documentary or feature film, that will take him back to African soul dancing on American soil.
You see, Astuto? We were fated to meet. When I returned to the NYU Film School as an alumnus and gave a presentation of my new film on Haitian voodoo, it was inevitable that you’d come to the projection and I’d fall for you the minute I set eyes on you. I don’t know what you saw in me, apart from a supremely handsome, intelligent, gifted, almost-successful genius of a film director; anyway, we made love at your place that very night. . You amazed me in bed. No hang-ups, no shyness, no apologies or kinks. . Just eagerness, inventiveness and stupendous generosity.
We talked the next morning over breakfast, and the more I got to know you the more I wanted to work with you. . By the time we separated later that same day, I’d signed you up as cowriter on my next film.
A riffle through Milo’s travels, travails, trails and trials over the next few years. We see him attending film festivals, meeting directors, making a name for himself as a screenwriter. He’s not a writer in any usual sense of the word — avoids writing in his own name, even letters; doesn’t want people to know how to reach him, find him; often refrains from answering even phone calls (his telephone phobia will never leave him). Time shadows him always, hard on his heels, and he moves on, never stops moving, gingare, like a capoeirista in Bahia or an Indian in the forest, effacing his tracks as he goes along so as to leave no evidence behind. . He has no style of his own but has hit upon the perfect compromise between Neil’s ultraliterary tradition and Awinita’s oral one—writing orality. In his dark bedroom in Manhattan as in the closets of his childhood in Montreal or in front of the silent TV set in Mauricie, he listens intently to the voices in his head, then transcribes their words with confounding accuracy. Being half deaf in one ear has impaired his inner hearing not at all. .
JUNE 1980, MONTREAL World Film Festival. Close-up on Milo, not quite thirty, at a fancy dinner party. He glances around the table — white tablecloth, champagne, oysters, women in sparkling jewelry making long, careful curls bounce when they toss their heads back to laugh, men holding forth in loud proud voices — and thinks it is fine. Whatever. (He thinks his Lower Manhattan hole-in-the-wall is fine, too.)
A young actress, bleached blond, wearing a slinky, strapless black dress and teetering on stiletto heels, comes over and sits down next to him. At once they dive deeply into mutual seduction. . CUT.
In Milo’s room at the Ritz-Carlton on Sherbrooke (a mile or so west of the gray stone house in which Neil was once uncomfortably lodged by Judge and Mrs. McGuire), he and the blonde are making love. It turns out that this woman, whose name is Yolande or Yolaine, he’s not sure which, is even more beautiful without than with her makeup and fancy clothes.
“Hey, Milo Noirlac,” she whispers into his ear when they wake up in the morning, “I adore you, you know that? I’m not sure it’s wise of me but I can’t help it, I love the hell out of you.”
Milo smiles, presses her to him and, in the brilliant sunlight of a Sunday morning in Montreal, makes love to her again. They chat afterward, tapping silver knives through the shells of their soft-boiled, room-service eggs.
“Dis is incredible.”
“What’s incredible, Milo, love?”
“Dis whole thing. Being back in my hometown after all dese years. . Winning a festival prize. . Meeting you, Yolaine, de best actress in Quebec and de most beautiful woman in de world.”
“Especially meeting me.”
“Dat’s for sure!”
“Will you write a role for me one day?”
“Ha! You know de Belgian joke!”
“No?”
“How do you recognize an up-and-coming Belgian actress?”
“. . Well?”
“She’s de one who sleeps with de screenwriter.”
They let their chairs tip backward onto the bed and go at each other again, Yolande taking the initiative this time and Milo giving himself up rapturously to her caresses.
CUT to the bathroom: Yolaine murmuring sweet nothings into Milo’s ear as they shower together.
“I love your hair. . And I love the way you write. . And I love how gentle you are. . And I love how you’re going to take me with you on your trips. .”