Last Tango in Montreal

He always felt that he had given away too much of himself in it, that if he had a chance to do it again – as if any sequence in <i>The Last Tango In Paris</i> needed a retake! – he would revert to what he had been doing for years: fooling people, guarding his inner most pain by way of tall tales, oblique statements, and dark, sometimes cruel humor. All of these are in <i>Tango</i> too, of course, but between bouts of bullshit, his real self, his real pain.

It’s in its purest distillation in the scene where, toying with a harmonica, he confesses an experience from his Nebraska upbringing; it’s evident in the telling that he still feels the humiliation he suffered from that time he took a prize girl out, not knowing he had cow shit on his shoes. Such sufferings are the things from which great actors – and great moments by great actors - are made; their need to please the public is a reparation for having felt at some point in their lives inferior or unworthy of them.

Had it been me instead of Marlon Brando in that film, I know exactly what story I would have recounted; it’s nowhere near as dramatic or as memorable, but it conjures in me, even to this day, the same cinematically-conducive pang that the cow shit story evoked in him.

We are not in Nebraska anymore, we are in a squeaky suburb of Montreal, mid-winter. A kid brings some object or other into my Grade Four class - I couldn’t even tell you what; only that it impresses both the hard-to-please teacher and my equally hard-to-please classmates. Determined to do same, I spread a rumor during recess that I, too, will be bringing in a major surprise for the class this week. I can already see the delighted expressions on the faces of both my teacher and my peers as she unveils the thing that will make me the new class Golden Boy: a gleaming new fishbowl for the class fish (somehow, my family has a spare.)

Instead, I get an unwelcome lesson in the delicate nature of audience expectation. All through the remainder of the day, at intervals of every few seconds it seems, classmates of all stripes are sharing their unreasonably high expectations with me: is it candy for the entire class? Is it new set of puppets, inspiring our teacher to forego class work to put on an all-afternoon performance? Is it an expensive new model airplane all the boys in the class will be put to work on?

The next morning, my family’s spare fishbowl in tow, I begin to cross the mile-high snow that in that season is my backyard. Halfway across, I look down upon the fish bowl, not long ago the container not of not only our class fish but of my dreams. Once a simple token in a game of give-and-reward, this bowl, with its simple, round shape, now looks to me like a globe; a representation of a world beyond my understanding.

Leaving it here in the snow would be beyond my mother’s world, to whom I would have to confess my situation. And yet this bowl is far too petty a prize to present to my classmates.

Deciding that the taunts and wrath of the empty-handed are prospectively less painful than the ones directed at those who cast swine before pearls, I decide that I must get rid of this thing. I take the logical route and bury it in the snow.

My home-made mittens scraping hard against the snow's top layer is the sound of Brando’s shoes as they are set free from cow shit.