We Eat Our Own (5 page)

• • •

Here is something you do not know:

The name of the girl who puts her tongue in the hollow of your ear as you dance. (Luz.)

Why her breath is so quick. (She has never danced with a man before.)

Why she limps as you spin her slowly to the music, her hips pressed tight against yours and held there, immobile, her hands clasped together behind your neck. You don't notice, as you turn, that she looks at her friends over your shoulder and mouths the word
Dios
, and later, Ayúdame, laughing. Even if you saw it, you couldn't decipher what she means. You're gripping her waist too hard. You're staring at the porno women projected on the wall, running their hands over each other's corsets, their expressions so bored. You're trying too hard not to let what you're feeling show.

You're not drunk. You don't kiss Luz, but you don't stop her from kissing you, either. The lightning never came at
The Lightning Field,
and you have that feeling now, that feeling of waiting for something. A low red field, dusk. A charge in the air that makes you nauseous, all your skin alert to something you can't see but know is coming.

The women on the wall tie each other up in leather ropes.

The music is in English, but you still can't understand it.

You said to Kay, This is bullshit. How long are we supposed to wait for something to happen?

Kay looked confused. But waiting for it is the best part.

Here is something you don't know:

Luz and her friends had followed her brother Andres to the club that night, waited outside until he left again ten minutes later with six teeners of coke sweating in the waistband of his underpants. Of course Luz didn't know about the cocaine. She doesn't know, still, about the copy of
Das Kapital
wedged in the space between his bed and the wall, or that he's going to sell the cocaine to a man down the block from this club for a handshake and four grenades in a shoe box. Just like you, she doesn't know about the revolution, but that is because she is thirteen and her mother hides the newspapers, won't let her go downtown without someone to watch her.

A few years from now, the minister of justice will be shot by a teenager riding a moped with an Uzi in his fist, and that teenager will be Luz's boyfriend.

But for now, Luz is dancing. For now, Luz doesn't know about the car bombs, or what the M-19s are, or that her brother Andres is one of them. She doesn't know how to kiss, and that is why her heart flips over as she puts her tongue into your ear, whispers something in Spanish that you can't understand, that she is far too young to understand herself.

• • •

The next morning, you sit down to write Kay a letter.

The pen doesn't work. You try to carve her name into the paper with the inkless tip, but the paper is thin and keeps breaking. You are so tired. You are tired because you never went to bed.

Then the pen is on the floor across the room where you've just hurled it, and hot tears are clotted up in the corners of your eyes,
the telephone in your hand. You're spinning the dial without thinking, missing the country code, yelling Shit and pounding the hang-up button and swiping furiously through the numbers again. Your thoughts are so loud—Fuck the hotel bill, I don't care if it costs seven bucks a minute—that when you hear the sound of Kay's phone ringing, it barely registers. Your blood is pumping hard in your ears. When you hear Kay's voice, it punctures you.

Hello?

The air-conditioning whirs. You swallow salt. It's me, you manage. It's me, I'm here.

There is static on the line. She says your name and hangs a question mark on it.

I'm in Colombia, you say. I got a movie. I'm sorry I couldn't talk about it, I—it was a sudden thing.

There is a silence. When her voice comes back, it is striped by static.

You have to talk—I can't hear—tell me where—

Kay, you're breaking up.

Static. Please—

You shout every syllable: I'm in Co-lo-mbia!

A terrible electronic sound scribbles out of the phone.

Kay?

Static.

Kay!

Your face is wet and your palms are wet and the phone is wet in your hand. The static changes pitch and squeals for a full minute before you give yourself permission to hang up.

As soon as you do it, the phone rings again, so loud it makes the nightstand tremble. You pick it up quick and shout her name.

On the other end, someone is speaking English with an Italian accent. A man.

Who is Kay? he says.

You can't remember your own language. The plastic blinds slap in the breeze from the air conditioner. Your suitcase is already packed and zipped, lying at a diagonal across the brown carpet. You will never feel a quiet again like you have in this room: humid, incomplete.

My girlfriend, you say, as slow as you can. Kay is my girlfriend, I was just talking to her. I'm sorry. Who is this?

The voice is aggravated, speaking too fast. He tells you he is an associate of the producer, and that he's left the meter running in the taxi. That we are very late and need to leave for the airport. Please to get down here, now?

A surreal heat spreads through your face and down the veins of your neck. Your mouth moves by some mechanism you're not controlling. Now? We're leaving now?

The associate sighs loudly and hangs up the phone.

Before you leave, you stand in the door with your suitcase, the teeth of the key biting into your palm. If you stay right here, facing into the hotel room, you can feel the churning cold of the air-conditioning on your front and the laundry-room heat of the hallway behind you, each in equal measure, dividing your body into two exact halves.

• • •

In the final cut of
Jungle Bloodbath,
there are no shots of your character on a plane, no mention of how he got to the jungle. Just smash cut from the opening sequence, and there he is: Richard, sitting on the bench of a canoe. He is slipping off a lens cover, filming the center buttons of his own shirt as he struggles with the focus. Then he picks the camera up and holds it high above his head to block the sun out of his eyes.

Richard in safari khaki, in a green boat floating over khaki-­
colored water. He squints straight into the lens and says, Veronica Perez went missing six weeks ago.

The delivery is uncertain. By this point in filming, you won't even know who plays Veronica—if anyone will play Veronica, or if, by the time you find her, Veronica will be reduced to a couple of prop limbs and a gallon jug of corn-syrup blood splashed across a sacrificial altar. You'll shoot this scene at high noon, a weird midday wind loud over the camera's built-in mic, water flashing at the edges of the frame. Two other actors will be in the boat behind you, rowing at the stern and the midship thwart, but the camera's angled so you can't see them yet. The director will be offscreen, watching from the shore.

Richard speaks: From what we've gathered, ah, Veronica and her parents, famed anthropologists Amanda and Esteban Perez of Houst—
Abilene,
Texas . . .

(You'll make up all the names, of course. With the director staring at you, you'll be too nervous to come up with better ones.)

—they came down here to study the Yanomamö people's cannibal rites, and um—unfortunately, it seems, were . . . ­
abducted
themselves.

(The director will have fed you the premise but not the specifics, told you to ad-lib the lines. You will tell him you're no good at improv. He won't respond to that. He'll be the one who rolls up his pant legs and walks into the mud, pushes your boat out onto the water.)

The deaths of Amanda and Esteban seem all but confirmed, unfortunately. Richard says: But Veronica, we still have hope for her. She was last seen by a traveling—um—
fisherman,
north of a Yakuma settlement, after an intertribal fertility ceremony. We're headed there now.

And here Richard pauses. His brow lowers to a squint and
his gaze spans out over the water, in a way you must think looks thoughtful, unaffected, a genius aiming his vision at the future of his medium. The oars lap and lap. Someone in the background murmurs Avvicinati, get closer—Ugo to the sound guy, floating in a nearby boat—but it's quiet enough that the sound editor will mistake it for a whisper of water and leave it in the final cut.

This isn't a rescue mission, Richard says, finally. I'm a journalist. I'm not equipped to be a hero. But if what we find out here leads us to Veronica—if we don't have time to signal to the capital, to wait for the heroes to arrive—well . . .

He lowers the camera. If you look closely, you can make out the actors behind him: a woman at the stern, a man sitting wet-assed in the middle of the boat, rowing and looking annoyed.

The heroes have failed, Richard says. So far. If a journalist has to be the one—

This is when the boat pitches.

The frame tilts. The woman in the back of the boat yips, flashes into the center of the frame: brown hair, a white shirt over a skinny rib cage, her oar flailing. There's a loud thump in the built-in mic and a ray of sun flares as you hoist the camera higher. It happens in the space of a second: the whole boat turns over.

The water will be hotter than river water should be. There will be an animal circling at your ankles, you'll be sure, a crocodile or a river dolphin, or maybe just long ropes of kelp. You will keep the camera high, somehow. It will keep recording as you dog-paddle, filming the sun, the cloudless blank of the sky, trees and trees and trees, and finally, when you've adjusted your grip, the underseam of the boat, flipped and bobbing, gleaming wet in the light.

Your chin will be craned high. You'll be terrified of the water, of the parasites in it sloshing into your mouth.

The actress will be laughing, pushing sheets of hair back from her face.

The other actor, Teo, will be stern-faced and crawl-stroking, righting the boat.

This should be an outtake, but it won't be. Postproduction will tone down the background noise, the producers' voices shouting, Get back in the boat, madre di Dio! They'll salvage the film, in an airtight box full of kitty litter to leach out the moisture, a month after all of you are gone.

This should be an outtake, in any other film it would be, but this—this is exactly the kind of footage the director wants. The negatives scraped raw by silt. The unpredictable, rising like a creature out of the water, bucking the shot. The director on the beach, out of frame, nodding and nodding.

• • •

The lobby of the Hotel Ignacio is painted teal and beige and has only one lightbulb, hung two steps in front of the desk. That is where the driver stands: directly underneath it, in an amber circle of light. He is hunched over a road map, squinting. He is one of the shortest men you've ever seen, his shoulders narrow like a twelve-year-old's, the muscles in his arms wiry and dense. When he looks up at you, you see a tattoo on his neck: an upside-down tree, rooted at the jawbone and bursting into a snarl of leafless branches just under the shirt collar.

You will never learn the driver's name, or what the tattoo means. His car won't have a license plate and the roads to the airport will all be eight-lane highways, roundabouts, the lanes inclined toward a background of skyscrapers and black
mountains. You will think of the tattoo again and again, the red parrot in the branches hung by its feet and peering sideways across the hollow of the driver's neck. It is impossible and it is insane and you know it, but in the next weeks, you will think that all this was part of the movie, somehow. The director, he wanted it this way.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And you were aware, Signor Velluto, of the precarious political situation in the area at this time?

VELLUTO:
No more precarious than here.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
More than seventeen nations have issued travel warnings due to threats of domestic terrorism and cartel violence in Colombia, correct? Ovidio sits at a largely unpoliced region between these two nations, correct? This was the state of things during the time you were scouting for production? I'll refer the jury to subexhibit 5C, producer Baldo Palaggio's production notes.

VELLUTO:
Have you read
La Repubblica
today?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Let me ask the questions.

VELLUTO:
The Red Brigades bombed six trash cans outside the Defense Department this morning. Seven blocks from here.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
We are not discussing Italy.

VELLUTO:
We should.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Well, then, pardon me. But bombing trash cans isn't quite the same thing as kidnapping international dignitaries.

VELLUTO:
You'd forget the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I would never forget, but our state police have worked tirelessly to neutralize—

VELLUTO:
They are not neutralized. Terror is never neutralized. Not in Italy, not anywhere.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Sir,
you
are the one on trial here.

VELLUTO:
And what about the student revolutionaries, the neofascists, who else—

GIUDICE PRESIDENT:
Signor Avvocato, please instruct your client to comply.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I believe our giudici are aware that our
country has its own issues with guerilla insurrection at the moment, signore. Please answer my question.

VELLUTO:
Answer mine. You say all of those—the Red Brigades, the neofascists, the students, all those together are not as bad the M-19s?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Please answer my question.

VELLUTO:
Setting aside that Colombia has about twice as many guerilla and paramilitary fuckheads as Italy—the
FARC
, the
ELN
, the
AUC
, I could go on—­setting all that aside, you think the fucking teenagers in the M-19 were the kings and queens of this prom?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
They're not all teenagers.

VELLUTO:
But you
concede
that—

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Signor Velluto, let's get to the point. Were you aware of the political climate in Colombia when you selected your location?

AVVOCATO:
Objection, relevance.

VELLUTO:
Oh, nice of you to finally join us, friend!

PROCURATORE CAPO:
This goes toward establishing Signor Velluto's disregard for his actors' safety.

VELLUTO:
And I'm saying that doesn't matter. They were just as endangered in Colombia as they are here in Italy. No more.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And the American? What about him?
His
home country is not in a state of domestic war.

[Whereupon Signor Velluto laughs loudly, and Giudice ­Palermo calls counsel to the bar.]