We Eat Our Own (18 page)

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Signor Velluto, you must admit that at least one member of your production was harmed during your six weeks in the Amazon.

[Whereupon Signor Velluto does not respond.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
We have documentation from the local medic in Ovidio. Would you like us to reopen the exhibit, or could you summarize this document for us instead?

[Whereupon Signor Velluto does not respond.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Signor Avvocato, please instruct your witness to answer the question.

VELLUTO:
I will not.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Is it because you do not wish to implicate yourself?

VELLUTO:
I was not responsible. It was a random event. It couldn't be helped.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
That's not the legal definition of responsibility, signore. You wrote the scene where this occurred. You hired the production designer—

VELLUTO:
He was a professional! He knew—

PROCURATORE CAPO:
You did not advise your cast or crew of the risks! At the very least, we can call that a form of negligence, no?

VELLUTO:
What am I on trial for? For not anticipating all contingencies? For planting the fucking Amazon rain forest? Did I found the nation of Colombia? What?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Criminal negligence is not about—

VELLUTO:
Remind me, please! I've forgotten! Because I thought I was just there to film a movie.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
That's exactly the problem, Signor Velluto. You filmed the entire incident.

VELLUTO:
No. No, I didn't see it happen. I would have stopped it.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I apologize, you're right. You filmed the
aftermath,
and did nothing to intervene.

[Whereupon Signor Velluto says nothing.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
We can play the tape. It's in the final version of the movie.

VELLUTO:
Don't.

[Whereupon the procuratore capo starts the video.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
You confirm, yes, that this shot is not the work of special effects? That this is authentic footage?

VELLUTO:
The scene won't be in the rerelease.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Because you regret this.

[Whereupon Signor Velluto pauses.]

VELLUTO:
Because the framing was off.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Signor Velluto, if you have any compassion for the man in this video, if you have any semblance of regret, you will identify him for the court now.

[Whereupon Signor Velluto leaves the witness stand and begins to move to exit the courtroom.]

GIUDICE:
Signor Avvocato, please instruct your client—

VELLUTO:
Turn off the tape.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
If you don't feel some measure of responsibility, Signor Velluto, why—

VELLUTO:
Turn it off. This isn't how I want my film to be seen. Turn it off.

GIUDICE:
Signore, you will be held in contempt of court if you do not return to the stand this instant.

VELLUTO:
I need water. I need a moment.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Who is this man on the tape, Velluto?

AVVOCATO:
We request a formal recess, and we apologize for this outburst. Please.

VELLUTO:
Open the doors. Open the doors.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Just say his name, Signor Velluto.

AVVOCATO:
Signor Procuratore—

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Why can't you say it, Signor Velluto?

MARINA, LA ARAÑA

Ovidio

T
hey'd had the fight again last night, just before the comandante came to take Juan Carlos to the cartel: Marina sitting up ramrod-straight on her cot on in the medical tent, Juan Carlos lying on his side, facing away. They've been fighting since they got here about this place, an evolution of the same fight they've had a hundred times on the drive from the safe house in Bogotá to Putumayo and the speedboat ride into the bush and the awful hike from the riverbank to wherever they were now. It was like they were following a script, by then, all the gestures written in: Marina raked eight fingernails from her sweaty hairline to the crown of her head and seethed. She told him that this place wasn't what he'd promised. She told him she needed to go home.

Juan Carlos said what he always said: they couldn't go anywhere, not until the war had begun.

Marina braced all her muscles against a fever chill and tried not to yell. There is no war, Juan Carlos.

Not yet, he'd said, calm as always. But there will be. They're planning a big siege down here, you know that.

They'
re
planning it. Not us. Not the people.

We're not comandantes yet, Marina, you know that. We just got here.

If we're not, then this isn't true socialism.

You don't—

I want you to sleep outside tonight, she'd said.

But Juan Carlos hadn't moved. Even when Marina scooped up a mosquito net and wrapped it tight around her own shoulders, dragged her aching bones out of the cot and threatened to go outside herself, he hadn't said a word. This is my bed, she'd rasped, her voice raw and weak. This is my movement. I have a right to this.

Marina, we're both too sick—

If you're comfortable being on the outside of all this, she said, then go be on the outside.

The fucking bugs will eat me alive by morning, Juan Carlos mumbled. I'm not leaving this tent.

Yes, you will. If you love me—

And then he'd looked at her, and said something he couldn't take back: Marina, we wouldn't even be here if you hadn't done that to Andres.

The timing was too perfect, but it was how it happened: this was the moment she heard the flap swish open, the comandante grunting as he ducked inside. Marina was still standing, the mosquito net slung over her shoulders, and Juan Carlos' words hung like smoke in the air between them, when the comandante announced that Juan Carlos needed to get up now.

There was a new complication with the cartel, something they needed a new face to help smooth out.

We're sending you now, he'd said to him. Your associate can stay here and rest, he'd mumbled, tilting his head toward Marina.

• • •

But Marina doesn't need to rest.

Or rather, what her body needs doesn't matter to her now. What her body needs is the opposite of what her instincts have been screaming for her to do, the opposite of the thought that thrashed in her skull like a trapped bird as she lay in her cot all last night, awake and alone. Since she got to Ovidio three days ago, Marina and Juan Carlos have done nothing
but
rest, lying together in the medical tent with army-issue rehydration drips jammed into their arms, still malarial and sweating through nightmares, waiting for the comandantes to say they're well enough to serve. If what Marina needed was just sleep, she wouldn't still have this same frantic urge to run, this same brain-spun feeling she's had since the moment she stood over Andres' body back in Bogotá.

She wouldn't have waited up, shaking and furious, until she was sure she could not sleep and Juan Carlos wasn't coming back that night.

She wouldn't have waited until she heard the patrol guards douse the fire just before dawn, and then listened to their footsteps, taking them back behind the camp to piss or nap or screw before the comandantes woke.

She wouldn't have thought to herself: Go. Wouldn't have braced herself and stood, looped the strap of the Kalashnikov across her chest, and stepped as quietly as she could into the bush.

Marina doesn't know where she's going, or why, or what she'll do when she gets there. But if all she needed was rest, she wouldn't have walked as far as she has already, the mid-­morning sunlight searing against her hairline and the skin of her heels screaming inside her boots. Marina knows no one is supposed to walk so far from base alone. Their camp is too close to the town. She is sick and lost and moving slow, and
she knows that if she goes too far, any tourist on a nature walk could wander up on her.

But Marina hikes. It's been hours by now; she doesn't have a watch, but she can tell by the height of the sun over the tree canopy, the bright slap of light ahead that tells her the river can't be that far off. She can tell by the way her lungs suck against the wall of her lungs—she didn't bring water—and by the new ache in her muscles, deeper than the fever, twanging muscle fibers that she's sure she's never used. Marina starts to feel something running down her ankle, under the pant leg and down into the shaft of her boot. She imagines a fat bead of sweat, or an ant, as big as her thumb knuckle, with a bite that a compañero told her early on to watch out for because it will make your leg swell and purple and burn for days.

Marina stops. She slaps her ankle and seethes and then takes a deep breath and forces herself to be still. She knows she needs to think. She didn't bring a compass or water or a map. She has no food and she hasn't eaten more than a mouthful of anything in days and what she's managed to get down she's thrown up. The strap of the rifle has cut into her collarbone and with every step the gun pounds an oval of ache deeper into her lower spine. She turns a half-circle, scanning for a path or an edible plant or a reason to go in any particular direction.

She turns another centimeter, and that is when she sees the women.

• • •

One of them is naked and pregnant and staring at the sky. The other is tall with short black hair and a bucket full of what looks like blood at her feet, and she is using both her hands to smear the other woman's body red.

Marina lowers to her stomach as quietly as she can, hunkers so her chin digs a shallow cup into the mud. She widens her eyes to see through the black tangle of the bush and tries not to breathe.

The women aren't alone; Marina can see past them to what must be a village, the sunlight vivid through the gaps in the trees. There are dozens of people there, and smells like food and woodsmoke that make her throat feel hollow. When she squints, she realizes there's a huge structure strung up in one enormous tree: a grid of what looks like huge nests tipped on their sides and suspended from the branches, like rooms with their fourth walls knocked out. She sees a man in blue jeans ease a huge ladder off the side of the tree, and then she sees the people that must have just climbed it: brown people with long black hair and grass skirts, curled up one to each nest and staring like they're waiting for something to begin. Something slithers over the back of Marina's knee but she doesn't react: she is maybe three meters from the women, twenty from all the rest.

The tall woman says something that Irena thinks she almost understands—Girare, like girar, could she be speaking Spanish? The pregnant woman looks puzzled, until the other takes her gently by the shoulders and rotates her a quarter turn.

The pregnant woman laughs. Oh.

Marina is thinking,
Is she one of the Indians?
when suddenly, something happens in the distance.

A whoop, a gunshot, then the low rumble of startled people. The tall woman stands up from her bucket of blood and turns to face the sound. Marina cannot believe she is close enough to see all this but there it is: at the base of the tree, a skinny white man talking into a camera in what sounds like English. A skinny white girl with brown hair, posing with a sound recorder. Another man with a lit torch, striding fast behind him, setting fire to the lowest empty nest.

A film, Marina realizes. They're filming.

But the fire is real. It is small at first, and then it rushes, turns the nest into a sphere of light.

The voices louden, and then there are the sounds of ­shrieking women, stabbing at the air. She can see the people in the lower nests leaping out and sprinting. She can see the people in the higher branches brace themselves and peer down at the long fall.

She can see the fire climb, searching for the nearest tangle of dry vines.

Marina's heart races, but the women close to her are calm. The tall one's hands are at her sides, palms out, so the blood won't stain her clothes. She is not pretty but there is an honesty to her posture that is unusual and magnetic to Marina; she is exhausted, and she shows it. She watches the fire leap from nest to nest like she's seen this exact scene so many times. Marina does not know why, but hot tears clot in the corners of her eyes now, a feeling like jealousy filling her mouth. She blinks the tears out, stunned, like a sudden wound has opened on her brow and leaked down.

The Indian says something, and the other woman looks at her and smiles, says something that must mean, It's okay. It isn't real.

The tears slick over Marina's cheeks and into the corners of her mouth, but why? Marina flattens one palm and swipes the wet out with the thinnest edge of her hand, quick as a knife draw, but the tears keep coming. Snot balloons inside her sinuses and she exhales hard as she can without making a sound but it refills. If she keeps on this way, she thinks, the women will hear her, the fucking people in the tree will see her crying in the mud when she should be invisible, and this—this is when the madness returns. This is when the wild thought starts pulsing desperately in the center of Marina's brain, forces out a tendril, and unfurls:

She could preempt it.

She grits her teeth around the sour taste of her own crying.

She could kill them all right now.

The semiautomatic is slung over her back like an afterthought. She has her fists if she runs out of ammunition. She has her teeth. They are all distracted, and whether she wants to admit it to herself or not, Marina has done terrible things before—done them so recently that when she closes her eyes at night she still feels the muscle on the inside of her trigger finger flare with blood and pulse until she has to make a fist. As Marina watches the women, silhouetted against a distant backdrop of fire, she cannot help it: she pictures herself rising out of the reeds, the wet whites of many eyes reflecting fire, looking at her. She could do it to protect the mission, or to slaughter the bourgeoisie. Or she could do it to ruin everything: the revolution, the cartel, so many plans. She could do it for no reason. She could do it alone.

How good would it feel: for the whole world to be, for once, as violent as the memories in her head? To force that symmetry with her body, her gun, her voice?

Marina pictures herself after it is done and they are all dead, waiting for voices to come through the trees behind her. She can almost hear them: compañeros shouting Bitch and then Coño, a gun firing off, What have you done? Then they will gun her down into the mud, and for the first time since she killed Andres, she will know relief.

She closes her eyes, thinking of these things.

She opens her eyes, and that is when she sees it: a man on fire, running toward the trees.

The people by the tree don't notice for a moment, but the women do. The Indian angles her chin like a strange animal has just loped past her, studying. The tall woman stiffens. Then she sprints.

She calls out a name, but Marina can't make it out.

The burning man is sprinting, too, and now everyone else sees him. The burning man is running toward the river that Marina didn't realize is just there through the trees, and then their voices and the fire and the river are so loud that Marina knows this is not part of the film, this is not a stunt, this is her best chance, right now, to run.

But then Marina realizes: the Indian woman hasn't moved at all.

She's still standing less than three meters away from Marina, her head cocked at the same angle, bloody from neck to knee, studying the beach. Before, it had seemed like the Indian didn't understand what the cameras were or what the movie was, but now, Marina realizes, she's grasped the concept, an instant too late. The Indian chews the tips of two fingers and smiles, amazed. It's like she's watching something remarkable on a screen.

When the rain comes, Marina seizes the moment and scuttles back, but the Indian still stands there. Marina runs, but when she stops behind a tree a dozen meters out and peeks, the woman hasn't moved. She is peeling her pregnant belly off her body, a prosthetic glued on with some adhesive that the rain must have melted. The people on the beach are screaming and the fire in the tree is battling the rain but the Indian woman is just there, holding the belly in front of her like an enormous bowl, blood running down her shoulders like it's coming from the sky itself.

• • •

By the time Marina gets back to camp, the rain has stopped.

It's almost dusk; it took her longer to get back than it had taken her to walk away, even walking what she thought was a straight line. She'd expected panic and fury, but no one seems
to have noticed she's been gone. The comandantes are nowhere, which means they're probably all huddled together in one of their shacks, discussing whatever they sent Juan Carlos to do last night. A few of their women are out in the cook yard stirring cans of beans in metal bowls, their children sprinting around the yard hollering. A compañera in a braided belt glances up at Marina as she passes, and from the woman's expression, Marina can imagine how her own face must look right then. She hasn't seen a mirror in over a week but she can picture the hollows of her cheeks, the animal shine of her eyes, the mud smeared down her front.

Juan Carlos is back in the med tent. He has one arm thrown over his face, the elbow pointed up at the ceiling like a shark fin rising through dim water. She can smell liquor coming off him in fumes, and something sweet, like wet rope and vomit. She lies on her back on top of the cot next to his and tries to breathe through her mouth.