We Eat Our Own (2 page)

Please! Richard yells, Please, don't—

But halfway through the next word, whoever is holding the camera catches up.

• • •

When you are gone, Kay will sort through the closet. She'll find the lumberjack shirt with the threadbare elbows, balled in a corner behind the laundry basket; she'll find the picture in the tin frame.

There's nothing else. You didn't know what to pack, so you took everything you could grab.

The frame is dented at one corner. The picture is of Kay herself: you took it, and your index finger is a pink flare along the upper edge of the shot.

She will lie down in your bed and listen to the radiator rush. The rain will turn to sleet and cling to the windows. You will not be there to see it, and you will never wonder how she must have felt: if this was the moment when she realized that you weren't coming back. The last time you left, you took this picture with you. She will wonder what it means, that this time you left it behind.

She will look at herself, standing on a shoal.

GIUDICE A LATERE:
Signor Velluto, you stand accused before the Corte d'Assise of three counts of murder in the second degree, criminal negligence, obscenity, incitements to violence, and conspiracy to commit violence. Do you understand that you will be tried by a panel of eight giudici—

VELLUTO:
Yes, yes.

GIUDICE A LATERE:
—two of whom have been selected from the primary judiciary and six from amongst the popolari in order to deliver an unbiased judgment—

VELLUTO:
Well, if it were unbiased, you'd throw the popolari out.

[Whereupon the procuratore capo whispers to his supporting counsel.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Is he drunk?

GIUDICE A LATERE:
Avvocato, please instruct your client to remain respectful of this court.

AVVOCATO:
I will, signore.

VELLUTO:
He will try, signore. I can't guarantee he'll succeed.

GIUDICE A LATERE:
That's enough. How does your client plead?

AVVOCATO:
We believe there is insufficient evidence to support these charges and request an immediate mistrial.

GIUDICE A LATERE:
The Pubblico Ministero has already issued his decree, signore.

AVVOCATO:
But there are no bodies.

GIUDICE A LATERE:
We have a list of three actors who are presumed dead.

VELLUTO:
Presumed.

GIUDICE A LATERE:
Teo Avati, actor and known associate of the accused.

VELLUTO:
“Known associate.” Like I'm a mafioso.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Swiss national Irena Brizzolari, actress and—

VELLUTO:
You can't confirm this. The film has no credits. You can't confirm.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
We have numerous testimonies from relatives, friends, crewmen on the film—

VELLUTO:
But no
bodies.

GIUDICE A LATERE:
I understand that these three actors die on tape.

AVVOCATO:
A feature film, sir, a simple—

[Wherein Signor Velluto laughs loudly
.
]

VELLUTO:
Listen to the man. There's tape!

AVVOCATO:
What my client means is—

VELLUTO:
That's beautiful. Who needs bodies when there's
tape
?

GIUDICE A LATERE:
Signor Velluto, are you done, or may we proceed?

VELLUTO:
Of course. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, just let me . . . Let's watch the tape! Come on, Giudice, let's see where those bodies are!

TEO

Ovidio

T
hree days after he arrived in Colombia, Teo Avati saw his first anaconda.

He wasn't sure what it was at first. His skin was hot with rage and he was walking fast down the riverbank, but then he glimpsed it. Ten meters off into the shallows. Something twisting. Brown scales and muscle. A shining knot, wide as a sidewalk and moving almost too slowly to see.

He made himself stop. He made his breath still. The snake was half underwater and coiled like a stacked rope pushed over in a rush. Every twist of its body was as thick as a man's waist and squeezing.

In the center of it, something was still alive, one black eye staring out from the center of the coils.

He stared into it, fascinated. He realized why: it reminded him of Anahi.

• • •

He finds Anahi later that night, like he has every night since he came here. He tells the woman at the front desk that something
in his room needs fixing. He requests that Anahi be the one who comes. But what he really wants is to ask her about the snake.

Are you sure it was brown? Like that? She nods toward the band of his wristwatch. She says it in Spanish: Teo studied it in school and can puzzle out cognates for the words he doesn't know.

She is standing on a chair, rigging mosquito netting over the door to his room. He wanted her to put it back up over his bed, but she refused. It is night. The darkness over the clearing they use as a parking lot is its own deep blue. She holds her breath to keep her balance, raises an arm over her head. He watches the knot of muscles move in each of her shoulder sockets.

He shrugs. Close to it. The water made it look darker.

And very long?

I don't know. It was muddy.

But thick as your waist? You're sure.

It was coiled. He takes a pull from his San Tomás and sets it down on the wood chips they've got carpeting the lot, leans his head back against the wall. I think so, but I'm not sure.

Anahi slips a nail out of the pocket of her jean shorts and holds it against the wall, taps lightly with the hammer so she won't wake the other guests. The hotel walls are tissue-thin, plywood, no insulation. Teo can hear the voices of the rest of the crew murmuring in Italian, quiet televisions, toothbrushes moving in mouths.

The humidity beads over the bridge of his nose. He drinks again.

But if it's the snake you're thinking of, he asks, what is it called?

Anahi searches for the name. In my family we call it mata toro, but we aren't from here. I think for most of the people here, it is anaconda.

How long are they, usually?

Sir, I don't really—

You know. Come on. I know you know.

She lowers her hammer to her side. She squints, deciding what she can say to him.

Why were you out there alone, anyway?

• • •

He could tell her the truth:

Because the director told him to shove the Indian as hard as he could into the tree, to jam his shotgun into the triangle of skin under the Indian's jaw and put as much pressure on it as he could stand. Because Teo did it, and the Indian yelped and screamed something in frantic Ticuna, and Teo pressed the gun harder into his jaw to close the man's mouth. The Indian writhed under the pressure, the grass skirt slipping open over his hip. Teo could see the bit of wriggling pink in his mouth where the man was biting the edge of his tongue. He sneered and laughed, let the full heat of his breath push into the Indian's face.

Teo could tell Anahi that he liked this part. But he doesn't want to scare her away; not yet.

The director nodded. Okay. Okay. That's enough.

Teo pushed the sweaty hair out of his eyes and let the gun fall to his side. He knew it was only a rehearsal, but still, his breath wouldn't slow, his nerves wouldn't relax. The cameramen were still clustered in the lunch tent, just visible through the trees. He watched one ladle a mound of what looked like meat onto a plate and laugh at something. The Indian put his hands on his knees and spat a pink rope of saliva onto the ground.

In his periphery, the director said: Di nuovo. Again.

It was the eighth time they'd done it. Teo had worked with
Ugo on a dozen films before, but they'd never rehearsed like this—and of course, Teo had never rehearsed with Ugo at all, not as an actor. In Italy, he'd worked as a grip, hoisting cameras up ladders and onto tripods and taken them down again as Ugo's mood dictated. They'd shot on soundstages that rented by the hour, wheeled wax palms in on dollies and knocked out every frame on a schedule drawn up to the minute. Ugo fed his actors their lines, and Teo had watched these men and women arrange their faces into expressions of horror or exhaustion or lust and pronounce the words straight to camera. And that was it; cut to print, no second takes. Getting out of character was as easy as shrugging off a thin coat, or at least it looked that way from the top of the crane. They'd make another one in six months, basically the same film but a different title,
Jungle Something, Something Massacre, Revenge of the Whatever the Fucks
.

But then Ugo had called Teo two weeks ago, at a weird mid-morning hour: I want to do another jungle film, fifteen thousand lire a week, are you in? His voice had sounded strange, muted, like the volume had been turned down on the receiver somehow. He was offering three times what he'd ever paid Teo in the past. When Teo asked why, Ugo had said he wanted Teo to act in the film. When Teo asked him what the hell he was talking about, Ugo had hung up.

Eight days later, a plane ticket arrived in the mail, Bogotá, one-way. No address on the envelope. No script, no mention of the role.

Teo called Ugo's flat and listened to the phone peal thirty-­two times.

He hadn't gotten a gig for three months, not since the union had gone on strike. He'd spent the time smoking in his apartment and watching the news reports on the Red Brigades station bombings, waiting for something better to do. He had
never really asked Ugo questions about what they were filming, not even when he was on set—never What do we shoot next, or Why is that character supposed to be killing that extra, or What's on the green screen now? He had the script. He knew how to mount a camera and dismantle a backing and break down a lighting setup. Ugo had the entire production planned to the minute; what more did Teo need to know? And acting, he suspected, was probably the same way. The actors Ugo hired in Italy were runners-up in rural beauty pageants or last year's conservatory grads or old-timers who survived off bit parts on cop dramas and shlock films like this. The women always brought their own wigs. The men were always ten centimeters shorter than their résumés said and needed apple boxes to stand on during kissing scenes. To Teo, the work they did seemed to take as much insight as being a plumber, and maybe half the skill. And anyway, he'd be kicked out of his apartment soon when he didn't make rent, and where else would he go?

But it was different to puzzle out passport restrictions and vaccinations, to show up at the airport at five in the morning with no idea why you were there. It was different to sit next to the director on the plane: thirteen hours of pressurized silence, Ugo stirring his cocktail straw, occasionally tilting his chin up to sleep.

The director had been mostly silent on set, too, besides those two words that had become a mantra over these last days: Di nuovo. Again. For the last week, they'd spent every day running through chase scenes in the mud, over and over, until Teo's quadriceps burned and the skin on his knees was raw from falling, yelling the same lines until the words morphed and lost all sense. Right away, he could tell: this was different from the soundstages. The point of all this wasn't to block the scene or frame the shot. Some days, they didn't shoot at all.
Ugo just stood on the sidelines with his arms folded, a crease in the center of his forehead and his eyes scanning behind his aviator-frame glasses. The best Teo could tell, Ugo wanted to exhaust him: wanted Teo to hear the direction so many times that it became a voice in his own head, a nerve impulse in the fibers of his wrist.

He would let the cameras roll only then—when Teo was tired and furious.

He was tired and furious. Ugo said, Marks.

The Indian's shoulder landed too hard on the bark. The scrape it left was faint pink and looked too complicated to be random, like a rune. Teo shoved his face close to the man's ear and said, in Italian, I'm going to kill you.

Too early, Ugo called. Wait for my signal.

The man murmured something at a high pitch; it could have been a prayer.

Di nuovo, the director said. You know what, fuck it. This time with film.

Teo could smell something leafy on the man's skin, the sour breath the man was holding inside his mouth. He leaned back and smiled, lowered the gun. He adjusted his grip.

But before the cameras were set to roll, something happened: the Indian shoved Teo back, both hands hard and flat against his ribs. The air left Teo's lungs in one rush. The Indian pivoted and ran, stumbled in the mud, his bare heels carving deep pits into the earth and his knees bowing out in a way that looked painful.

And then Teo's body was moving, too, without signal or warning from his brain, chasing after the Indian, the gun swinging in his fist. The Indian's head craned over his shoulder and that was when the butt of the gun hit him, hard, the pain sudden between his shoulder blades. Teo felt like he was
watching himself from above. A man with a gun, dark-haired and lunging; a quick grunt, and the Indian was down.

The cameramen barked something from the lunch tent and started to run. Behind Teo's back, the voices came closer.

Basta! Hey!

But Teo kept his gaze down on the Indian. Kept hitting. The butt of the gun, the barrel, and when the gun wasn't fast enough, his fists. The bone at the back of the Indian's neck looked painful and strange. It wasn't broken, but it was one of those bones in the body that looks fractured even when it's not. It bulged and shifted as the Indian curled into himself, as the Indian covered his skull with his hands.

Then the voices were right behind them, telling Teo to stop.

Then Teo made himself stand, made himself watch the way the Indian winced and drew one shaking hand forward and crawled, just an inch. His knuckles were white, gripping at slick earth.

Then Teo picked up the gun. Before the cameramen reached him, he bit his tongue to still the itch in his trigger finger and strode straight east, into the trees.

• • •

He doesn't tell Anahi any of this, of course. He doesn't want to scare her off.

Instead he pulls on his beer, squint-smiles at her, and says, You didn't answer
my
question. How long are those snakes?

She winces at the innuendo. I can't—

Come on. Answer mine and I'll answer yours.

The girl is sitting on the chair now. The mosquito net is hung up behind her, breathing in the breeze from the fan inside the room. A lightbulb is on in there, too, 15 watts under
a heavy lampshade. The net filters the glow down to a strange dim wash.

Why did you do it? she says. Today, when you hurt the Indian?

His beer pauses in its arc to his lips, How the fuck does she know? She wasn't there.

If you're acting, she says softly, couldn't you fake it?

Stop changing the subject, Teo says, his voice still bristling. He hasn't told Anahi that he isn't really an actor yet, and he decides instantly that he never will.

I'm sorry.

How did you even hear about that?

The maids gossip.

And here is where Teo recovers, softens his face and his voice back into a tone she can trust. Well, then, he says, tilting his head so his hair falls away from his eyes. The maids shouldn't gossip.

She hesitates. I know.

He narrows his eyes and takes in the size of her: smaller, now, than she seemed when she was standing on the chair. The span of her hips is probably no wider than the width of his hand if he spread his fingers out. He puts a laugh in his voice when he talks, to relax her: I was supposed to stay in character.

Anahi is biting the edge of her thumbnail, her posture rigid against the back of the chair. When she speaks, it's slow and careful: I don't think the Indians understand this.

Understand what?

What the movie is about.

I don't really know, either.

She looks at him. You don't?

Teo pulls the beer off his lips, makes a blah-blah motion with his hands. I think it's a play on an exploitation film, blood
thirsty savages, all that. You know. A teenage girl gets captured by the filthy natives. A journalist comes down to look for her, slaughters about a hundred of them. Blood and guts and grass skirts, all that bullshit.

From the way she's looking at him, he can tell she hasn't understood half the words he said. Her lips move so carefully when she talks: What happens to the girl?

Teo grins at her. I have no idea. We don't even have an actress to play her yet.

But you could ask the director, at least. You and the director at least understand each other.

He drinks, tries not to let on how much he's bullshitting. That's still not how it works.

You said he was your friend.

That's not exactly true. We work together.

But you speak the same language, at least. At least you can say no.

Immediately, Anahi looks like she regrets the words.

Teo stares at the side of her face, a feeling like hunger growing in his stomach. He smiles, glances up at the mosquito net: I don't think that net will stay up.

It will.

Check it.

I don't—

Stand on the chair and check it again for me.

She does. As she steps up onto the seat, he watches the sinews in her ankles move. The wood creaks as she shifts her weight onto it. He can hear her holding her breath, trying not to fall.

There's no script, Teo says.

What?