We Eat Our Own (14 page)

You don't watch horror movies, but even as Irena describes it, you know this hasn't been done before. Cinéma vérité, she calls it, “found” footage, eventually a guerilla marketing campaign to match: it's a breakthrough. A new addition to the entire horror genre.

Next to that, the premise is cartoonishly simple, but you're too excited to notice. Richard has led his crew down to the jungle to recover Veronica Perez and the presumed remains of her parents, bumbling anthropologists that they'll probably cast in Italy and shoot quick takes of on a soundstage. They're presumed victims of the tribe they studied, the Yanomamö, a reclusive people known only for cannibalism, tribal war and nearly constant
nudity, save the occasional braided straw skirt. The crew has only three members: a cameraman named Joe, Gayle with her shotgun mic and her sound meter and Richard himself, straightening the hems of his safari shirt, his hair brushed to a gleam.

Here is what Irena doesn't spell out: that the crew spends an entire act in transit, on canoes and on foot, full of gory digressions. There are long shots of eagles shredding the innards of rodents, grand caimans sunning themselves after a river massacre, the water full of mud and pink. Ugo will get the footage in the morning, out on the river on his own with a long-range lens, and then he'll cut in your reaction shots later from the outtakes. Truthfully, it's aimless, all the dead animals, the gratuitous nudity, a full five-minute sequence that she and Ugo will shoot by themselves of Irena bathing lasciviously in the brown river. You've never seen an exploitation film, and Irena can tell. There's no sense trying to explain what it is, why so much of the movie will be devoted to ocelots gnawing on corpses, tits and safari khaki, blood spattering on bark, all of it set to a minor-key synthesizer drone.

So she sticks to the plot points.

Richard finds the village, stands awed under a tree full of human-sized nests. They scout out the tribe, spy on their fertility rituals and their intertribal war, watch them rape their women with stone obelisks. They formulate a plan to infiltrate, to make an attempt at rescue, and here there is a standoff. A twist. Ugo hasn't even told Irena what it will be.

It's part of his method, to keep all of you in the dark.

• • •

All day on set, you can't sit still. All day, Irena and Ugo and a few extras go off into the jungle to rehearse, and it takes every
ounce of self-control you have not to stomp straight into the trees and find them. You just want to get started—to take the prosthetic leg up to the director and hack it to bits before his eyes, to show him that you're ready. He didn't make a mistake. He's got his man. Now that you know what kind of film this is, you are in this. Hyperrealism. Now that you know, you will do anything he asks you to—you just needed to be told what to do.

Irena stays late on set with Ugo, so you sit alone on the canoe and then the bus, your mind still racing over the possibilities: Richard with this tic, Richard with this kind of walk. Back at the hotel you can't sleep, so you pace the room, faucet to bedframe and back, your feet tripping on the thick, pebbly gristle of the carpet. You try to turn on the twelve-inch
TV
staring blankly from the corner of the room, get frustrated, give up. You decide to do Meisner exercises until you're tired, a favorite of your improv classes back in New York. You're supposed to have a partner, and you think of finding Irena, of her golden legs against the purple stripe of the bedspread, but you beat the thought back. You'll do it alone. You stare into the mirror and speak your character's intentions aloud, alternating assertions with questions until you've fully convinced your own reflection.

You are ready for this. I am ready for this? You are ready for this.

You are here on a mission. I am here on a mission? You are here on a mission. You are here on a mission? You are here on a mission.

You will find Veronica Perez. I will find Veronica Perez? You will find Veronica Perez.

You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I
am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent? You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent?

You are Richard Trent. I am Richard Trent.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And what do you say to the testimony from certain female crew members that the atmosphere on set was unnecessarily sexually charged?

VELLUTO:
I fail to see how that is relevant to the accusations I'm facing, Signor Procuratore. This isn't a harassment trial.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
We've heard testimony from one of your special-effects artists, Agata Binasco, that the native women were often subjected to—

VELLUTO:
Agata didn't speak the native language. She had no idea what the Indians were saying.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
But you must admit that
you
don't speak the native languages of the region, either. That you were unable to communicate with the native members of your cast and crew throughout the entire production. Is that correct, that you didn't hire a translator of Ticuna or Yagua?

VELLUTO:
Our expectations were explained to them before filming started.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
By whom?

VELLUTO:
By the man who coordinated the extras for us.

PROCURATORE:
And who was that?

VELLUTO:
The local proprietor, Hank Vance.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
The proprietor of what, Signor Velluto?

VELLUTO:
The hotel. The bar. The canoes, just about everything, I gather. He built the town from nothing

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And is this the same Hank Vance who has since been indicted on charges of aiding and abetting major figures in the Brazilian and Colombian drug trafficking cartels, including the Comando Vermelho, the Medellín, the Primeiro Comando da Capital; this man was your translator?

VELLUTO:
I don't see how his criminal history has anything to do—

PROCURATORE CAPO:
All I'm saying is, Hank Vance was certainly a busy man.

VELLUTO:
He was a periodic resource to us. We couldn't afford the expense of a full-time translator on set. That's all.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Then what about your lead actress, Irena Brizzolari? She wasn't a member of your usual ensemble, is that correct?

VELLUTO:
No, she was not.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Your casting agent found her at an acting conservatory in—what was it, Switzerland? And she had no experience whatsoever on feature films? Why was that necessary?

VELLUTO:
We wanted to cast fresh faces.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Fresh.
You mean actors who no one would miss if they went missing.

AVVOCATO:
Objection.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Withdrawn. Signor Velluto, did Irena Brizzolari understand what would be asked of her during the filming?

VELLUTO:
I'm sure she did.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
But we can't ask her. She's among the missing, correct?

[Whereupon Velluto pauses.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Can you produce Signorina Brizzolari in this courtroom? We'd all love to hear her testimony.

VELLUTO:
Watch the tape. She knew what she was getting into. She was game.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Or maybe she was just a fine actress. Maybe she was terrified and decided that sexually exploiting herself was the best way to protect—

[Whereupon Velluto laughs.]

VELLUTO:
You've clearly never met Irena.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
The question stands, Signor Velluto. Did Signorina Brizzolari understand the sexual things she would be asked to do in your film? Did you pressure her in any way?

VELLUTO:
Let me reassure you, Procuratore: Signorina Brizzolari could take care of herself.

IRENA

Ovidio

W
hen Irena screams, it starts from the core of her, scrapes up the walls of her throat and past her teeth and changes the air. When she does it again, it's the same, and the fourth time, and the tenth, and the twentieth and on. The trees shake with it. The river pulses. She articulates her tongue and makes the sound kick and rasp. She pivots and does it in a sprint.

Ugo never talks much on set, but she can tell he is impressed.

This is what Irena is best at, and it's what she did all day, alone with Ugo and the cameramen in the jungle. Ugo told her to writhe in the mud, afraid, and she did it. He told her to take off her clothes and step into the river and she turned a dial in her brain and she was a different girl. She closed her eyes and moaned, rolled her head around on her neck so her wet hair trailed over collarbone, neck, shoulder blades.

These were all throwaway shots and she knew it, just some gratuitous nudity and violence to pad out the first act. But she was so good that Ugo ended up spending hours on it, choreographing extras from the Indian village to spy from the reeds or the trees or a boat on the horizon line. He stopped once,
near dusk, and asked if she was tired. She broke character and laughed: Are you kidding? Let's keep going. Let's film all night.

• • •

She really would have done it: if the light hadn't gone and the
DP
said they should call it a day, if she had just been able to convince the director to stay out and keep rehearsing.

The crew is all exhausted and sweat-soaked by the time they're done, but Irena has so much energy. She springs after Ugo as he helps them pack up the canoes, chattering about how
good
she felt out there, and could she at least hear the audio playback, and when will he have scene work for her? When will she get to film with Richard?

Ugo sponges the back of his neck with a handkerchief, stiff-jawed. The new American isn't ready yet.

Why not?

He hoists a boom pole over the edge of the boat. You'll know the shot order when everyone else does.

She smiles. Well, can I warm him up for you, somehow?

But the sound guy had dropped his
DAT
recorder in the river, and Ugo had gone stomping out into the water after him, barking instructions.

When they get back to the hotel, Ugo goes straight to his room and the extras to wherever they live, down wood-chip trails winding past the edge of the lot and out into the trees. Irena is supposed to go to bed, too, but no part of her is tired. She smokes in her doorway, scanning. Richard must already be asleep, or at least locked in his hotel room, reading acting manuals or elocution texts, rehearsing for a part he might not have.

Irena is thinking of going to wake him up, when she hears Teo under the awning where they eat their meals.

Irena pauses, considering the back of his head, the shape of the four beer bottles lined up on the table in front of him. She could run up and surprise him, clap hands over his eyes and shriek. She could tease him about the little hotel maid she's seen him harassing the last few nights, the only reason she can think of why he hasn't been spending any time with her. She blows a smoke trail out of the side of her mouth, inhales again, and feels all the air in her lungs simmering off. An idea blooms in its place.

She strides straight over, slams open a beer on the side of the table before Teo has a chance to offer.

So I just talked to Ugo, she lies, and I think you need to start working on your American accent.

• • •

Irena has always been the best at elocution.

Because that's all speech is: a tool you have to concentrate to use, a weapon that you aim. If talking to the new American was like making a glottal consonant in an accent that isn't yours—the tongue bucking against the skin of the soft palate, the secret, lush precision that can make anyone believe—then lying to Teo feels native, double-speed, Katharine Hepburn galloping through a monologue to a cowed Cary Grant.

Irena tells him that Ugo isn't sure that the new American will play Richard. She leans in across the picnic table and whispers it like a secret: don't let this get around, but he's thinking of casting you after all.

The only problem is, your accent is terrible.

Teo looks bored and skeptical, but Irena makes him improvise with her anyway. Teo says he just wants to drink, says he doesn't care what part he plays, but she goads him until he repeats all the Richard lines she can remember, critiques his
accent with every pass. Get a shot of this, quick, Gayle. Get a shot of this, quick, Gayle. Get a shot of this. But he has no control over his palate. She can hear how tight the back of his throat is, how it makes the vowels round up like Italian. When he says the word
shoot,
the
O
s gather at his lips and pinch off too fast, and Irena feels it like a flick straight to the nerve.

She leans over the table and puts a thumb into his mouth.

What the fuck are you doing? He chokes.

She swills. I don't have any candy, or I'd use that.

Candy?

She shrugs. That's how I learned to do it.

What are you talking about?

My dialect coach. She swirls the beer bottle in her hand and watches the foam twist like a vortex. That's how she taught me to do the American
O
s.

Teo sniffs and runs his tongue over his teeth behind his lip, tries not to look curious. How?

You suck on a peppermint until it's sticky, she says. And then you have to fix it to the roof of your mouth, as far back as you can stand.

And then, what, you talk around it?

Irena grins. No, you sing.

Teo rolls his eyes and spits, tugs the top button of his shirt open. Irena tilts her head.

Why don't you know know this stuff, anyway? You've never used a dialect coach?

No, I haven't. Teo picks at his beer label, annoyed.

Why didn't Ugo hire one for you? I thought you worked with Ugo on these jungle films all the time.

I don't know.

Irena sneers. What do you mean you don't know? Ugo doesn't want you to sound like actual Americans?

I mean I wasn't an actor before. I was a grip. I don't know.

Irena lets a pause hang in the air between them, her mouth hanging open, staring a straight line through the dark. Then she laughs as loud as she can. No shit!

I mean, I've worked on a lot of these
,
Teo says defensively, picking at his beer label. I was there.

You're
crew
?

The actors he hires aren't virtuosos, Teo says, his voice a shade too mean. He made those films for about fifty lire each. He shot them in front of green screens and put in a bunch of stock footage later, palm trees and apes and shit. They
were
shit.

Yeah, but you still take
pride
—

I'm saying it wasn't like this film. I'm saying no one was looking for realism.

Who's
no one
?
Irena laughed. You mean Ugo?

Yes, Ugo. Of course Ugo.

Irena unbuckles one of her sandals under the table and rubs at the raw spot between two toes. I know you're just crew, Teo, she says, but you've got to realize: the director isn't the one who makes the film.

What are you talking about?

I'm saying, who cares what Ugo thinks anyway?

He's our director.

He's some crazy guy who got an idea for a movie. She grins. You're an actor now. You
are
the movie.

Teo hesitates. You'd never say that to his face.

Fuck no, but you know it's true. Irena points the tip of her cigarette at him. Actors are the powerful ones.

Teo scratches a new mosquito bite on the side of his throat and squints into the dark behind her, thinking. He's not crazy.

Half the crew thinks he is. You don't hear them gossip?

No.

They think he's gone full Colonel Kurtz. They think he's going to run away into the jungle to live with the natives and leave us all stranded.

No one's saying that.

I don't know. I heard him walking laps around the hotel last night. Four in the fucking morning.

He's working out the script.

He was murmuring to himself.
Richard, Richard, Richard.

You're making that up.

Hey, I'm not insulting him. She laughs. I'm sure he's a brilliant, brilliant maniac.

He's not—

I'm just saying, I'd watch out. Irena leers, preparing for a lie. If you don't figure out how to pronounce your
O
s, he might not give you the part. Hell, he might even snap.

She claps her hands together fast, but Teo doesn't startle. He keeps clawing at the new mosquito bite on his throat, hard enough that Irena can see the welt start to rise. As she watches it, she thinks: even if the new American wasn't playing Richard, she could probably get him to kiss her. But Teo is harder. Teo she'll have to convince.

She kills her own beer, grabs Teo's out of his hand and swallows down the last of his, too.

Well, huh, it looks like we're out of beers now, she says, holding the bottle up to the light. Why don't we go into town?

He laughs. What town?

There's a little town, down the road. You really haven't been?

To get the beers, yeah, but not at night. And I'd hardly call it a
town
.

Well, let's go now.

You know we're not supposed to.

Everything is open at night.

You'd have to cut through the jungle.

There's a
road,
scemo.

Yes. A road. A road through the fucking jungle. He gnaws at something in his cheek and looks away. Those fences don't keep anything out.

We'll be fine.

Teo looks at her. You don't really know the producers yet, do you?

So?

Baldo is crazy about the insurance. He'd kill us.

She tilts the empty bottle in her fist, aiming the neck of it at him like a flashlight. Teases: You're scared.

Teo looks away. She can tell he's picked up on the provocation, floating over her words like a phantom note in a chord, and he's deciding if he should answer it, or if it's better just to disengage. Engage, she thinks. Come on. I'm ready.

But then his features flatten.

You know what, he says, I'm tired.

No you're not.

You're right. I'm not. Teo slides off the bench, picks up the bottles, and starts to walk away. But
you're
drunk, and
you
should go to bed, he calls over his shoulder.

Irena stubs out her cigarette and watches Teo go. Asshole, she calls after him after a while, but he says nothing, focuses on finding his footing in the dark. She could make Teo her boyfriend, but he'll never be able to make a glottal consonant: he couldn't make the uvula flare, the soft flesh shifting in the dark. He has something steely about him that she doesn't like, that she can't bend, no matter how much heat she applies. She tells herself: I don't want you anyway.

So Irena goes into the town alone.

• • •

The road to the town has fences, but they're low enough for something well muscled and wild to leap right over. It's paved with wood chips half decomposed by the winter rains, mossed over and made soft underfoot. Irena could tell someone had tried to hack back the tree limbs and the vines to clear the way, but the taller branches lean down, weighted by new nests made overnight, new clutches of just-grown seedpods that clatter as she brushes against in them in the dark.

Irena stumbles, but it doesn't bother her. She's paying more attention to listening than to looking. The jungle releases a constant sound that fascinates her: it buzzes over the sweat on her skin like sonar locating something in the dark. She thinks it could be insects or frogs or night birds, but it seems more elemental than that, somehow. Irena's taken this path into town almost every night since she came to Colombia, and she's come to think of the sound like an electrochemical force, an invisible process that works directly on the cells.

As she walks, she practices releasing her jaw and tenting the soft skin at the roof of her mouth to imitate the noise.

The town should be familiar to her by now. But there's something about the way it comes up out of the bush; the random arrangement of low-lying buildings and the single crooked street; the kerosene lamps that hang a low orange haze in the air between branches; the shadows of men; the sprinting shadows of children. There's something about the imperfect silence of the town that makes it feel mobile, somehow, like the buildings can shift and scuttle and become something else whenever she turns her back. Irena can't shake the feeling that if she ran up on it from behind, she would see a flicker of a different city for a moment: someplace bright and lean, halogen
and metal, full of music and vivid smells. As she comes up on it, she watches for a gleam brimming out of the trees, as if by watching she could somehow summon it.

She does summon it: the lit end of a cigarette. Then a silhouette in the doorway; voices. As Irena walks closer to the town, she knows it will look the same as it has every night. But she wills it to open just another millimeter to her, to flirt, just a bit, with showing her its true arrangement. She knows soon it will call out her name: Irena, once, in an American accent.

When she hears it, she will call back: Hank!

• • •

Hank is the one who built everything in Ovidio: the hotel, the bar, the store, the airport, all the huts for the workers. He had come to Colombia, broke, twenty years ago, from a city in southern Georgia Irena had never heard of, and he'd built himself up here, sent for freighters loaded down with particle board and buckets of plaster, whole buildings flat-packed inside boxes. On the night they'd met, he'd tapped the edge of the pool table in the middle of the bar and said, This thing had its own damn boat. He was the one who brought in workers from Brazil and gave the Indians jobs, made a civilization here out in the middle of goddamn bedlam. The president of goddamned Colombia, as he put it, had written him a letter a month ago; the president was sending a crew through the jungle with a telephone wire, bringing the phone system all the way from Puerto Asís to his town.
His
town; Ovidio was somewhere, because Hank had made it somewhere. He never stopped saying it, but you could tell even by the way he moved, the firm-knuckled sense of ownership in the way he grasped at things, his hand pawing the dip in Irena's waist as she leaned into a corner shot.