We're fucked, said the Frenchman. He said it in a friendly way, so I pointed out that it had been a long time since the shooting had stopped and probably it was only a few people who had ambushed us, maybe a couple of bandits who were as scared as we were. That's bullshit, said the Frenchman, this village is empty. Only then did I realize that there was no one else in the square and see that it wasn't normal and that the Frenchman was probably right. Instead of being afraid, I was angry.
I got out of the car and urinated lengthily against the nearest wall. Then I went over to the Chevy, took a look at the engine, and didn't see anything that would prevent us from getting out of there the same way we'd come. I took several pictures of poor Luigi. The Frenchman and the driver watched me without saying anything. Then Jean-Pierre, as if he'd considered it carefully, requested that I take a picture of him. I did as he asked without protest. I photographed him and the driver and then I asked the driver to photograph Jean-Pierre and me, and then I told Jean-Pierre to photograph me with Luigi, but he refused, saying he thought it was the height of morbidity, and the friendship that had begun to grow between us was shattered again. I think I swore at him. I think he swore at me. Then the two of us got back in the Chevy, Jean-Pierre next to the driver and me next to Luigi. We must have been there for more than an hour. During that time Jean-Pierre and I suggested more than once that we should forget the cook and hightail it out of there, but the driver refused to listen.
At some point during the wait, I think I fell into a brief, uneasy sleep, but it was sleep nonetheless, and I probably dreamed about Luigi and a terrible toothache. The pain was worse than the certainty that the Italian was dead. When I woke up, covered in sweat, I saw Jean-Pierre sleeping with his head on the driver's shoulder while the driver smoked another cigarette, staring straight ahead at the funereal yellow of the deserted square, his rifle lying across his knees.
Finally our guide appeared.
Walking beside him was a thin woman whom we at first took for his mother but who turned out to be his wife, and a boy of about eight, dressed in a red shirt and blue shorts. We're going to have to leave Luigi, said Jean-Pierre, there isn't room for everybody. For a few minutes we argued. The guide and the driver were on Jean-Pierre's side and in the end I had to give in. I hung Luigi's cameras around my neck and emptied his pockets. Between the driver and me we lifted him out of the Chevy and laid him in the shade of a kind of thatch. The guide's wife said something in her language. It was the first time she had spoken, and Jean-Pierre turned to look at her and asked the cook to translate. At first the cook was reluctant, but then he said that his wife had said that it would be better to put the body inside one of the houses on the square. Why? Jean-Pierre and I asked in unison. So silent and serene was the woman that although she was ravaged, she had a queenly air, or so it seemed to us at that moment. Because the dogs will eat it there, she said, pointing to where the body lay. Jean-Pierre and I looked at each other and laughed, of course, said the Frenchman, why didn't we think of that, naturally. So we lifted Luigi's body again and after the driver had kicked in the weakest-looking door, we carried the body into a room with a packed-earth floor. The room was piled with mats and empty cardboard boxes, and its smell was so unbearable that we left the Italian and got out as fast as we could.
When the driver started the Chevy we all jumped, except for the old men who were still watching us from under the eaves. Where are we going? said Jean-Pierre. The driver made a gesture as if to say that we shouldn't bother him or that he didn't know. We're taking a different road, said the guide. Only then did I notice the boy: he had wrapped his arms around his father's legs and was asleep. Let's go where they say, I said to Jean-Pierre.
For a while we drove the deserted streets of the village. When we left the square we headed down a straight street, then we turned left and the Chevy inched forward, almost scraping the walls of the houses and the eaves of the thatch roofs, until we came out into an open space where there was a big, single-story zinc shed, as big as a warehouse. On its side we could read "CE-RE-PA, Ltd.," in big red letters, and below that: "toy factory, Black Creek & Brownsville." This shitty town is called Brownsville, not Black Creek, I heard Jean-Pierre say. The driver, the guide, and I corrected him without turning our gaze from the shed. The town was Black Creek, and Brownsville was probably a little farther east, but for no good reason Jean-Pierre kept saying that we were in Brownsville, not Black Creek, which had been the deal. The Chevy crossed the open space and started down a road that ran through dense forest. Now we really are in Africa, I said to Jean-Pierre, trying vainly to raise his spirits, but he only replied with some incoherent remark about the toy factory we had just passed.
The trip lasted only fifteen minutes. The Chevy stopped three times and the driver said that the engine, with luck, wouldn't make it past Brownsville, and that was if we were lucky. Brownsville, as we would soon find out, was scarcely thirty houses in a clearing. We got there after driving over four bare hills. Like Black Creek, the town was half deserted. Our Chevy, with "press" written on the windshield, attracted the attention of the only inhabitants, who waved to us from the door of a wooden house, long like a factory shed, the biggest in the town. Two armed men appeared on the threshold and started to shout at us. The car stopped a few hundred feet away and the driver and guide got out to talk. As they moved toward the house I remember Jean-Pierre said to me that if we wanted to save ourselves we should run into the woods. I asked the woman who the men were. She said that they were Mandingo. The boy was asleep with his head in her lap, a little thread of saliva escaping from between his lips. I told Jean-Pierre that we were among friends, at least in theory. The Frenchman made a sarcastic reply, but physically I could see the calm (a liquid calm) spread over every wrinkle of his face. I remember it and it makes me feel bad, but at the time I was glad. The guide and the driver were laughing with the strangers. Then three more people came out of the long house, also armed to the teeth, and stood there staring at us as the guide and the driver came back to the car accompanied by the first two men. Shots sounded in the distance and Jean-Pierre and I ducked our heads. Then I rose, got out of the car, and greeted them, and one of the black men greeted me and the other hardly looked at me, busy as he was lifting the hood of the Chevy and checking the irreparably dead engine and then I thought that they weren't going to kill us and I looked toward the long house and I saw six or seven armed men and among them I saw two white guys walking toward us. One of them had a beard and was carrying two cameras bandolier-style, a fellow photographer, that much was obvious, although at that moment, while he was still at a distance, I was unaware of the fame that preceded him everywhere he went, by which I mean that I knew his name and his work, like everyone in the business, but I had never seen him in person, not even in a photograph. The other was Arturo Belano.