Black Dance Read Online Free Page B

has. Tentatively he moves forward and is grasped and gently clasped to her welcoming flesh. She presses his face to her neck, not too tightly. Dizzy, he breathes in the commingling of perfume and sweat beneath her blouse. At last she draws back, smiles at the stunned child and murmurs, Come wit me? Come wit your mom?
    Taking him by the hand, she leads him out of the closet, down the hallway, out the front door and down the steps . . .
    Here we’ll need music, Astuto, for it’s a June day of insane felicity. The two of them go to a fair and ride on a merry-go-round together, laugh and lick ice cream cones as their horses go up, go down, yes, the laughter, the splendid music and the woman’s flashing smile, her arms that lift him to set him on the high horse, the licking, the laughing, the going round, her dark eyes so tender gazing at him, her arms that lift him down to set him on the ground, in fact it was probably then that she bought him the ice cream cone, for he would have needed both hands to hang on to the pole, his impressions are all mixed in child chronology, the woman waving good-bye to him, sunlight dancing on his mother’s blond hair, how could he know its real color was black, how could a three-year-old ever imagine that the most beautiful woman in the world would damage her own hair to make it blond? Be good now, son, be strong, little one. You’re gonna have to be strong, you know that? A resistant —whispering into his ear the Cree name that means resistant . . . Dat’s your real name, she said, and repeated it. Don’t forget it. It’ll help you. Opening the closet door . . . Come wit me, come wit your mom! What ya doin’ in de dark, little one? Shutting the closet door . . .
    Then sccccrrrratch —BLACKOUT.
    •    •    •    •    •

    Neil, May 1914
    A MEETING OF the Irish Volunteers, somewhere in Dublin. Men’s voices speaking in loud tones of urgency and anger. In the audience, Neil Kerrigan, at twenty-two, seems a different man. His features are graver, and he listens with all his might as gaunt, earnest poet and school director Padraic Pearse takes the floor.
    “May I read you a poem I’ve just written?”
    I have turned my face
    To this road before me
    To the deed that I see
    And the death I shall die . . .
    “Even the Daughters of Erin are arming themselves!” Thom McDonagh chimes in. “Arms, discipline and tactics, they say, should be the one thought, the one work, the one play of Irish men and women.”
    Never before has a revolution been led by poets, marvels Neil’s inner voice. All the brightest and most brilliant men—yes, and women, too.
    His cousin Thom had taken him to Monto and now he has brought him to Sinn Féin. Thom wants to make a man of him, and Neil is grateful: occasionally he even feels his blood stir with something akin to genuine indignation.
    Thom has been drilling, Neil has not. Thom has been marching up and down, running, hiding, taking rifles apart and putting them back together, aiming, doing target practice . . . Neil has been reading for his final examinations.
    “ Sinn Féin! ” Thom shouts, leaping to his feet along with the others (and this Gaelic expression will be translated as a subtitle: Ourselves alone! ).
    “Well, perhaps not quite entirely alone?” Neil whispers. “It does seem we’ve been seeking and receiving a fair amount of help from the Germans.”
    “Hasn’t politics always been the art of intelligent compromise?”
    “I s’pose so.”
    “No struggle is pure, Neil. The Germans have the same enemy as we do, and they’ve promised to argue for Irish independence at the peace conference after the war, if there is a war, and there will be a war. They have arms and ammunition and we do not, so we need and shall take their help. We shall do what must be done in order to win, conquer, establish and impose ourselves.”
    Neil’s right foot bounces impatiently on his left knee. Again we hear his thoughts in voice-over