Nancy Huston - Black Dance

Litany. Song that signals the beginning of a capoeira roda, before the game begins.

Milo, 2010/1990

DONT WORRY, ASTUTO, Ill do the keyboard this time. Ill capture it or seize it, as the French say. That was always your job, on pretext that you typed faster than me. . yeah, but chances were youd either get your computer ripped off in a train station or accidentally eraseOops, goddamn it! a whole month of our work including backup, so this time you can relax and let me handle it. Take advantage of the fact that youre flat on your back and hooked up to a drip to give your ten fingers a rest.

I love you, you bastard. Tell me your tale. Yeah, or at least a piece of it, ha-ha. Dont make me laugh, youll make me cry. Come on, Milo, get serious. In all likelihood, this will be the last screenplay cowritten by Milo Noirlac and Paul Schwarz, directed by Paul Schwarz and produced by Blackout Films so lets get it right, babe, lets get it really right. Kiss me. Come on, kiss me, you meshuga bastard, I wont catch anything. I love your ass off.

OKAY, THIS IS just a suggestion. . INTERIOR DAY. The camera finds Milo Noirlac graying mahogany ponytail hanging halfway down his back, black cowboy hat, cowboy boots, white pants and Paul Schwarz wearing a new, unbleached linen suit that makes him look even svelter and more sensual than usual in the crowded foyer of a tiny cultural center in Rios Zona Norte. Its late morning, theyve just screened their film for the men and women of the neighborhood who played bit parts in it, the response has been warm, people come up to hug, congratulate and thank them.

Given that the important producer/director of the film has a whole slew of important appointments with important distributors set up for the afternoon, hell be driven to Centro by an important taxi. The more modest (though naturally no less handsome) screenwriter announces his intention of returning on foot to their hotel in Gloria. Are you out of your mind? Thats a five-mile walk and its forty degrees Celsius out there! says his gifted collaborator and favorite lay, who has never held much truck with high temperatures, as he mops his brow.

But Milo, giving his beloved a last touch on the arm, turns and saunters out into the street. As he moves away, close-up on that beautiful ass of his, charmingly molded by his white pants. Dont worry, baby much as Id like to, I wont overdo it. . Well be with you, inside of you, subjective camera: in your brain we hear the distinctive atabaque rhythm of capoeirata, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . must be a roda going on nearby.

Upon emerging from the low white building, Milo turns left instead of right on Rua General Roca and heads for the hills. We follow him following the drumbeat beneath the hot sun. If theres a roda going on, he wants to join it, but he cant hear the twang of the berimbau, only the drumbeat, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . the one we listened to night after night as we lay in bed together in Arraial dAjuda the one you recognized all those years ago on our first trip to Salvador, the one you think of as your heart call, your root call, the rhythm of your mothers voice. Important to establish that right from the start.

The drumbeat intensifies.

The minute General Roca starts up the hill, the Saens Pea area a flat, dreary patch of urban sprawl with the sort of gray ten- and fifteen-story high-rises that can be found anywhere in the developing world falls away and the neighborhood swiftly slides from moderate to abject poverty. No more whites or light browns, nothing but blacks. Milos arms swing at his side, his hands are empty. Images of the Dublin slums, the Waswanipi Cree reserve, his fathers rooming house in Montreal ricochet and reverberate in the scorching sunlight. Sweat pours down his brow and neck and back but he doesnt wipe it off. Men idling in doorways stare as he passes and he lets them stare. .

(Oh, Milo! I once thought of it as rashness; your ex-wife Yolaine used to call it passivity. . If you leave me, you leave me, you once told her, and today, were a crack addict to threaten you at gunpoint, youd look him calmly in the eye and say, If you kill me, you kill me. . But its neither recklessness nor passivity, its capoeira. Lack of fear and jealousy, openness, curiosity, indifference all your character traits derive from the capoeira attitude, which youd espoused long before you discovered the Brazilian fight-dance.)

As Milo advances the incline grows steeper, the drumbeat louder, the sun hotter. A bright green church looms up on the hill above him and again, because of the color green, he thinks of Ireland, a country hes never set foot in. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . He sees dilapidated three- and four-story concrete blocks, their walls painted in peeling pastel colors and streaked with graffiti, and because of the corrugated tin roofs, he again thinks of the reserve, which he also doesnt know. Sunlight. Black people staring at him. Tropical greenery. Tough dusty roots and grasses, leaves and vines. Gutted buildings. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. Cement walls give onto gapingly empty ideas of rooms. The rise steepens again. He passes a staircase drowning in creepers and studded with broken glass, sees the remains of a candombl altar, nothing left of it but an electric cross with all but one of its lightbulbs smashed, a few chipped statues of African gods and goddesses amidst dust and cigarette butts. The world reverberates, beats and glitters, summoning Milo with dreamlike intensity. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. .

Turning a corner, he finds himself face-to-face with a wild-haired, middle-aged black woman. His mothers age? No, his own, give or take a bit. The woman mutters something but he cant hear what she says because the atabaque beat now fills his head completely. Come, says the drum, youre almost there. From a terrace higher up the hill, a straggly group of teenage boys frown down at him, hostile, daring him to come up any farther. Whats with this crazy cowboy?

Hes directly below the green church now, and though the drumbeat is almost deafening, instead of a roda he sees only a series of overflowing dustbins. Then his eye catches the smallest of movements amidst the rubbish in the gutter and he freezes. Abruptly the drumbeat softens into heartbeat. The camera becomes his eye. This was what had summoned him a human heart beating from within a ripped-off, rolled-up tiny piece of cloth. A discarded newborn. Black. A useless, half-dead, famished, thrown-away boy. The madwomans? No, shes beyond childbearing years. He approaches, his steps making no sound at all. When he reaches down to turn it over, the thing quivers.

Suddenly Milos brain fills with a soft cascade of men and womens voices from the past in French and English, German and Dutch, Cree and Gaelic. They gurgle and babble and blend as he stares at the unwanted infant. Is it breathing? Yes, it is. Milo sits down for a minute on the concrete steps that lead up to the church, in the thick shade of a rubber tree. Gets to his feet again, removes his black Stetson and sets it next to the babys head so that its eyes will be protected from the sun, even once the sun has moved. Stands there. Moves a step away, a step back. Crosses the street, looks around, returns to the kid.

Finally, he turns and heads back down the hill. Watching, we sense an invisible rope stretched taut between the nearly quadragenarian gringo screenwriter and the tiny, dark-skinned, scarcely breathing bitty baby in the gutter.