We Eat Our Own Read Free Page B

news reports on the Red Brigades station bombings, waiting for something better to do. He hadnever 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 waswatching 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!