One Man Dancing

by Patricia Keeney

  The television is coaxed into releasing its treasures. Mostly, he watches soap operas — Days of Our Lives, Tomorrow’s Children — the unfolding of birth and death, betrayal and passion. All without a drop of sweat or blood, or a hair out of place. All with polished nails and immaculate clothes.

  When Beth returns, they eat. She has bought a bottle of wine for them.

  The silences are awkward.

  While Beth sleeps, he watches Three’s Company, along with Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson. America flickers at him in black and white through a seventeen-inch box. Late night America with its easy charm and its cool swagger. Maybe he can be a black Johnny Carson. Talk to people about their lives, make people laugh.

  At the end of a week, Beth announces that he must find work.

  “You can’t lie around here all day watching TV.”

  “I’m studying my craft,” he tells her.

  “Study it at night. You have to support yourself. I can’t do it for us both.”

  “I’ll cook the meals and keep this place clean. I don’t mind.” He has already begun shopping and making dinners. Aromatic African food awaits her most evenings. He also does some minimal housework.

  Beth knows that as his sponsor, she has signed a multi-year agreement. The possibility of him lying on her sofa watching television for a decade depresses her. She wonders whether she really can persuade him to find paid employment. Or go back.

  “Back to where?” he demands, deeply hurt.

  Her words have catapulted him into darkness. In Canada for only two weeks and already he is to be exiled. He is also indignant and offended.

  The next afternoon, he decides to call Immigration and informs them that his wife-to-be is refusing marriage. He asks if that happened, would he have to return to Rome? He is told that his refugee status is unconditional, not dependent on a marriage.

  Relieved, he keeps this information from Beth. Knowing he can stay in Canada, he becomes more conciliatory, trying to comply with her wishes, trying not to upset her.

  She helps him get a job as a waiter at the hotel where she works.

  It reminds him of the Nigerian Embassy in Rome, breezily conveying trays of coffee and drinks with a flourish and a flair through the chatty posturing of official gatherings. Again, he embraces the role with joy, wheeling a dazzling white cart along carpeted hotel halls, listening to life in the rooms, behind doors: a football game, a quarrel, the giggle of love.

  He knocks on those doors. With a flutter of clothing and limbs, the weekend lovers welcome him shyly in, past rumpled beds exuding sweat and perfume, to a window, pale with morning cloud.

  He relishes his part in these little drawing room comedies from which Robert tried so passionately to rescue them. But he is good at enlightened subservience. He is paid to entertain this couple. Or that official. He plays for them and with them.

  With easy aplomb, he becomes the butler in some British TV comedy who knows what is hidden from the protagonists. His speech is full of theatrical double meaning. The stage story is transparent to him though his own high drama remains opaque.

  Unspoken in his mind and heart.

  Stopped and mute.

  After six months, he and Beth have grown to care enough about one another again to share the warmth of a bed once more. Charles, pushing for Canadian security, has asked Beth to marry him.

  “If it becomes a problem for you,” he tells her seriously, “we can separate. We can divorce. I need you to give me this security.”

  They both know it will not be a marriage of profound love and lifetime commitment, but it could be a marriage of convenience. Eventually Beth, against her better judgement, agrees.

  They pick a date and marry in a judge’s office without religious ceremony or significant celebration. It is a sleety afternoon in early winter. As they leave the room, Beth takes Charles’ hand and thanks him for her flowers.

  “You are safe now, Charles. You can live whatever life you want. You can make your own life in Canada. I will let you go whenever you ask.”

  This is his second empty marriage. The first was merely civilian; this one merely civil. Why, he thinks bitterly, is he denied the fulfilment of real union? He and Beth both know that their original infatuation was deeper — born in the sparking electricity of collective creation — and this new-world love, merely a sad echo of their Roman holiday. Now they are both so grown up and responsible in a cold world where the future somehow feels like eternal winter.

  It is the inhospitableness of the climate that numbs his bones. He longs for pure African light, a warm radiance melting ice. Wants again to be a small boy nuzzling a mother’s breast, a son on a bicycle with his father, tearing along bush tracks, lifetimes away.

  “Let’s at least have a special lunch,” says Charles, needing to flee from the pain of memory. Beth knows a good restaurant nearby.

  “The food isn’t African, but it’s spicey. And the room is warm.”

  Shelter. It is what he needs. What she offers him. And he lets himself be taken. After food and warmth, on a long walk through the city’s dark drizzle, needling his skin and stinging his eyes.

  To their place of love. Sneaking into the city greenhouse.

  In dreams, he is a child again, cooling his feet in a trickling river bed. A green dome rustling far above him. Rocks in the imaginary stream, tawny in filtered light. Behind him, long yellow grasses curl up to meet the sun. He gathers fine strong leaves on long thick stems to bring to Mother, bobbing through the water with them, in a little victory march home, anticipating her smile when he offers them up, his shiny flags of health and pleasure. Vital leaves grow from one deep root, in the forest. Just for him.

  “Charles.”

  She is calling him back.

  “Mother, I am so glad to be home.”

  “I’ve missed you, Charles.”

  Her arms wind around him. Back and forth they rock together, just as they used to under the banana plants in the village garden. When he was one with her, when she was his whole world.

  Beth whispers. “Look. Rows and rows of African violets.” And he sees silky star bursts of purple and mauve around tiny yellow beads, spidery filaments on furry leaves, soft honey-coloured stems.

  He is alone with Beth. In a place where their dreams and longing can take root.

  They make love in their minds among petals and stalks, on beds of sweet moist soil. Crying and sighing. Gazing up through windows, while lazy flakes hover down, winking at them through rags of cloud, sticking onto the sloping glass walls of this flower house until the lovers are covered with immaculate frozen air.

  When Charles finally wakes from his two-month coma in the hospital, he does not recognize his own body. It is huge. And alien. Like a ship upon which his consciousness rocks precariously, far up in the crow’s nest, occasionally spying a bit of land — a mirage, a trick of wave and sky — then subsiding again in the endless blue.

  Charles is a vessel full of complicated rigging, piloted by others.

  He is a wrecked whale inching through ocean.

  There is pain everywhere. It is all he knows. Some tiny and acute, jabbing away on the hide of the stunned animal he has become. But there is another pain that throbs deep inside his mind, beating at him where nothing should, in a place he takes for granted, that always worked magically and perfectly, never bothering him, an internal place that has always functioned silently, invisibly, superbly on its own.

  Now, it has been invaded by all the drums he has ever heard, using him as their instrument. Banging out a language he cannot understand.

  “Jonah and the whale,” he cries to a startled figure at the foot of the hospital bed, the one who has waited for this moment, willed it to happen.

  “No,” she cries joyfully. “You are Makonde. And you have come back.”

  Charles wails from deep inside.
“I have been in the huge black belly of the whale. Punished by God.” He does not recognize the woman speaking to him so gently, patiently.

  “For what?” she weeps softly.

  “I left her. They all died.”

  His eyes — the only part of him that can move — punctuate this declaration, jabbing at this soft figure before him, come at last to absolve him of guilt. “I am the only survivor. I am responsible for all their suffering.” He stops, startled, stranded between his own hell and some immaculate place that invites him, with quietly humming machines, small red and green lights blinking wisely. This is not heaven because there is no joy. Perhaps the waiting room before heaven.

  “Who are you?” he asks Beth, whose face he knows from some distant past.

  “Angela did not die,” Beth whispers reassuringly. “Angela is okay. She is at home with her children.

  But the Angel Lady will always blame him, already telling people it was his fault.

  The vivid stillness of coma, the belly of a whale, a hot suffocating cave, moves the sinner slowly and painfully through boundless waters of his semi-consciousness.

  As the cave mouth opens, an ocean roars out hurling him onto dry land, thrusting him into painful light, where he squirms at every searing sensation, the very air rending his skin, slicing like a knife.

  Makonde. Carvings. From the dark wood of the Makonde tree. The workers in wood tell their story from the images they create. The Makonde Theatre Company.

  The word wanders through his gradual awakening.

  Charles and Beth want to try. Send a tender root down into the packed soil of this difficult place. A little transplanted part of their authentic selves, to take hold, grow. Oh, grow into whatever it can.

  “We will call it Makonde,” says Charles. “It will be Edmonton’s first African theatre troupe.”

  It has been so long since she’s looked at him without pity or resentment. He has excited her. “Now you are Robert.” Her voice is like honey.

  He resists its thick sweetness. “No, I am myself, what he made me. His work has become my work.”

  They find their people. Some are Asian. Some are white. They all think they know theatre and want an opportunity to practice it. On wintry days in the vast cobwebby basement of a school he’s found they can use, Charles inspires them. They’ve never heard the things he’s saying they can do, this dancelike way of performing.

  “Your body is your instrument. It’s your language. It will take you beyond words but it will give voice to your own culture.”

  Far underground, among the pipes and vents, the cylinders and scrap lumber, this largely immigrant population will tell its stories. Edmonton will celebrate them. All Canada will celebrate them. Perhaps.…

  Charles loves the preparation, the rehearsal. Drums playing behind them, stretching and straining into rhythmic complication, the asymmetricality they are starting to feel, slightly askew from the prevailing order.

  Up from the deep wells of their own past and pain the images come tumbling in pieces, hard minerals buried so long that even in the forced light of this cavernous cellar they can find rainbows, colours connecting over their heads and under their feet.

  More and more people come to see the work, myriad reflections of self, the shattering and scattering of mirrors through which identity is puzzled out.

  But Makonde does not pay salaries. And Charles knows he cannot continue being a dumb waiter in a Noel Coward play. He needs a job. A member of the group tells him there are jobs available in a meat-packing plant where pay is good and no experience necessary.

  He is hired. He will work in the Ice House.

  Charles soon realizes he has hired himself out to a death house for animals where workers wring the necks of chickens and butcher cows.

  Even here, Charles finds a way to use his theatre skills. He becomes spokesman for the many immigrants employed there, speechifying at union meetings about the callous abuse of rights and privileges rampant in the company.

  Strikes are discussed.

  “But if we lose our jobs, then our families will really suffer.”

  “You will gain nothing without risk,” says Charles, interrupted for a moment by the memory of a child in Sweden, the lead weight of responsibility.

  “They can’t hire replacements for everyone,” he tells them. “We’ll close down the whole operation.”

  His conviction is palpable. Endurance speaks through him. He is the living embodiment of suffering and survival.

  Resurrecting so many dead selves, Charles also becomes a star of the company soccer team. Beth watches him on the field, his prancing feet propelling him like a comet, scorching earth everywhere he stops — mid-flight — then breaking into a solo run, arcing the ball hard, angling it into it to the net.

  She is amused by his quick rise to fame with the Canada Packers Pirates, composed as it is mostly of Asians, Africans, and South Americans he has come to know during this time in Edmonton. New friends who represent distant cultures to one another.

  “We’ll win Saturday,” says Mr. Uruguay to Charles, whom he affectionately refers to as Mr. Uganda. “Yes, we will,” says Charles. “See you at the club tonight.”

  Charles often goes to the club alone but rarely stays single for long. Beth can smell women and whiskey on his breath when he finally comes home but says nothing. She knows she is losing him again, popular man-about-town prancing in and out of his various worlds.

  Charles moves seductively with his dance partners far into the morning. Sometimes with Beth. Sometimes with Chantal or Jia or Consuela. Laughing as they are swung through the air by this always mysterious African who never fails to tell them of the royal kabaka and his beloved cow Suna.

  During Makonde’s increasingly popular public rehearsals, Charles puts on another self with the traditional garb of his people, trimmed around arms and neck, accentuating the smooth dark skin it softly drapes. Gazing into the mirror, thinking himself into something else, an ancestor’s story he makes his own. Embodying another image to project, something from his ancestral past: with candles and gleaming water, a shaman raising up or the flame tree with its hard bark and crown of red flowers triumphing in dry savannah lands, channelling lightning. Amarykiti.

  But non-theatre audiences misunderstand most of these attempts. As Beth knew they would. Even when he personally invites some of the so-called professional theatre reviewers, they only write about exoticism and difference. About Beth’s bare breasts and the drumming that compels.

  They stop at what startles them.

  Why is he unable to take them further?

  Makonde eventually raises enough money to stage a full production. This one, he tells Beth, will be both celebratory and doom-laden. He barrages the press with descriptions, calling his play a tale that weeps inconsolably, a play that will cause reluctant membranes to wrinkle up over stinging flesh wounds, a performance that will gleam pink under rough scabs, a myth that is sensitive and tentative.

  And Namanve is like that. Charles and his cast re-create the grim forest where a man wanders to the plaintive cries of the dead. Namanve. Calling through the trees, filled with people lost to one another. A deep wound.

  In the dark forest of Namanve, Charles and his tiny company sing, cry, and dance the atrocities they have seen. They struggle and suffer. They fight and die. In the blackness. Yet from harrowing agony emerges a tongue of fire that will not go out.

  The stage flickers with flame as the play ends.

  Namanve sets Edmonton’s Fringe Festival ablaze. In his press interviews, Charles speaks often of Abafumi and Robert although no one has really heard of either. He realizes, though, how much effect they have had, here where audiences are beginning to understand the high calling of theatre.

  Robert would certainly have approved of Old Strathcona, a curious space where Makonde performs. Funky and historic
, the festival puts on a special trolley car to get audiences there, a trolley provided by something called the Radial Railway Society. You climb aboard with your “Fringe Friendly” button and join a happy throng, rumbling through Edmonton’s Old Town with its upright Victorian Post Office, its brick Farmers’ Market, its shops and boutiques, nineteenth-century lamp standards and elegant memories, now extended as far as Yardbird Suite and TransAlta Power.

  “Visceral and primeval” rave the reviews.

  They are responding largely to Charles himself, the tightly tuned actor “whose every muscle registers emotion.” He emerges alone from the total darkness of the stage carrying candles, singing his way through, singing his dead friends back from the depths. Slowly, he resurrects them all — Mr. Makuba, Robert, Byron, Willy, and Susi — into the dream of life.

  The reviewers vie with one another to say what they’ve seen and felt. “It will rip you apart,” one writer tells her readers.

  For the next few months Charles builds his new company, around the stories that brought them to Canada, stories of persecution, escape, and diaspora. Not actors in any traditional sense, these new Canadians speak with their bodies and faces, with drums and stringed instruments.

  Coaxed and encouraged by Charles, they strip themselves raw, trying to recapture the spirit of Abafumi.

  They are hurt and they cry; they resist and are murdered. They pray and chant, find joy in the frenzy of dance. Devastating those who see their performances. Earning over and over again their reputation of being “a company without fear.”

  Charles talks to reporters, tells them that Makonde Total Theatre is the new Abafumi. When he says this, his eyes burn, “and he glows,” as one writer puts it, “like the candles that light up the darkness of Namanve.”

  “Why don’t you let some of the others do the interviews?” demands Beth, now concerned with his growing ego. “Share the spotlight.”