Miriam Toews - Irma Voth

Diego: I don’t care about the Mennonites as a group. Not at all. I’m interested in the fact that nobody would understand their language and that they were uniform. There’s no distinction, one from the other, and so they are props, essentially, for pure emotion. Even their setting, you don’t know what era it is or where, blonds in Mexico, it doesn’t matter, ultimately, when all you want is to communicate an emotional truth.

Audience member: I read something in one of the papers here months ago that there had been a violent incident at the campo where you were making the film. Can you speak of that?

Diego: Yes, there was a shooting.

Audience member: Did it involve your crew or any people involved in the making of the film?

Diego: No. No, no, it was … there was a shooting at the farm down the road.

Audience member: In the paper it said that the shooting was drug related. I found that so surprising, that the Mennonites would be involved in that type of thing.

Diego: Yes, well … it is, I guess. I don’t know the details. I believe it was a debt of some kind.

Audience member: A drug debt?

Diego: Yeah … I think so. The guy who lived there was just … he just stored the drugs for … I don’t know who. It’s a very remote area so it’s a good place for that. The people are very poor. There were … there aren’t many opportunities. And apparently the person came to get the … to get it … and it wasn’t there and he became very angry and killed the … guy.

Audience member: In the paper it mentioned, I think, that the victim was related to a member of your crew.

Diego: Member of my crew? No, no, I don’t think … oh, yeah, well … the person I was talking about before, the girl I had hired as a translator for Marijke … that person … the victim … or … he was her relative.

Audience member: He was her father?

Diego: He was her husband.

Audience member: I understand you used natural lighting in the making of your film. I’m curious about how that worked for interior shots.

Diego: I’m sorry?

Audience member: I understand you used natural lighting in the making of your film. How did you manage to get enough light for the interior shots?

Diego: If there’s not a lot of natural light coming in from windows or with one or two lamps, then that’s how it is. The shot is dark. (He turns to the woman who introduced him, indicating that he’d like the question-and-answer period to be over.)

Woman: We only have time for one or two more questions. Yes?

Audience member: Are you in the process of working on something new? Are you writing another script?

Diego: Yes, of course. I’m always working on something new.

Audience member: Can you tell us what it’s about?

Diego: It’s not about Mennonites, that much I’ll say. (The audience laughs and Diego smiles and waves goodbye.)

Audience member: Is it—

Woman: I’m sorry, we’ll have to stop there. Thank you, Diego, for— (The audience bursts into applause and drowns out the woman and Diego waves again and leaves the stage.)

Aggie and I left the theatre and walked into a park across the street. It was very dark for Mexico City. We sat down on a small wooden bench and Aggie whispered things to me, the consolation of a thirteen-year-old. He came back! she said, beautiful words and sweet promises and hugs, while I wept. Aggie didn’t loosen her grip, though. Then later, at home, after she had fallen asleep with streaks of eyeliner on her face and Ximena had polished off her bottle and flung it at the wall, I took my notebook out and wrote a list of the sins I had committed. It’s good to have an itinerary even if it only leads to hell.

I broke a promise and told my father the truth, that Katie was planning to go to Vancouver, because I didn’t want her to leave and because of that she ended up dead.

I lied to the police about everything because I didn’t want my dad to go to jail and because of that we had to move to Mexico where the life gradually drained out of my mother.

By lying to the police I killed my soul and stopped believing in an afterlife because life after death seemed almost exactly the same as life before it.

I selfishly took a job as a translator which resulted in Aggie being curious about filmmaking and late nights and boys which resulted in her being beaten by our father.

I stole Jorge’s drugs to sell for money to run away from home and buy plane tickets with my little sisters so we wouldn’t end up being killed by my father. (I also took Diego’s truck for a while, which constituted more stealing.)

By stealing Jorge’s drugs to sell to Carlito Wiebe to save myself Jorge ended up dead.

I killed my sister.

I killed my mother.

I killed my husband.

I killed my soul.

I read over my sins. I hit myself on the side of my head. I pressed my hands into my face. I tried to push back. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I saw the red outlines of ten fingers on my face. I picked up the bottle that Ximena had thrown away and put it in the sink. I walked back into the bedroom and looked at my sleeping sisters. I remembered Jorge’s foaming shoes. How he waited on that corner. His shame. My shame. I didn’t know what to do. I wondered if this was how it always was when you realize big things, for instance, that you’re a serial murderer, that all you can do is go into different rooms and look at things and people and not understand. Marijke had been wrong. What’s terrible is not easy to endure and what’s good is not easy to get. Why had she looked so haunted in the movie? I don’t know. I touched the spot between my eyes, the source of my internal light and cosmic energy. I waited for something to happen but nothing did. I knelt beside the bed and covered my face again with my hands and prayed for forgiveness. Please God, I said. Help me to live. When I opened my eyes nothing had changed. I closed them again and again. I remembered Marijke telling me that she had done that too, in the desert, hoping that the next time she opened her eyes she’d see her son. And then I remembered that she had never told me why she’d stopped aging at fourteen. I closed my eyes and tried to see Jorge. I opened them again and went back into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub and washed my feet thoroughly and then dried them very carefully, between each toe, all over. I went to bed. I dreamed that I was standing in the front yard of my house in Canada and waving goodbye to everyone I loved. I had to go away, I didn’t know where, and the sun was shining beautifully and my grandma and my parents and my brothers and sisters and Jorge and all my friends from school were standing on the front steps and smiling and waving and telling me they loved me. Maybe they were crying a little bit but they were also trying to look happy and positive. And in that moment it was too much, I felt all the love, more than I had ever felt before in my life, a universal love, and I didn’t want to go after all. But in my dream I had to go. I didn’t know why.

After that day I developed a headache that wouldn’t go away. I saw lightning flashes in the corners of my eyes like two storms coming in slowly from both the east and the west. Aggie bought me a giant bottle of Tylenol and I popped them all day long while I tried to get my work done. Natalie said that it might be because of the changing season, it was spring and the jacarandas were exploding, or it might be allergies or it might be stress. Or it might be a brain tumour, said Aggie, pressing down on my optical nerve. It’s just storms, I’d say. I don’t know.

Do you hear thunder? said Aggie. Do you feel the wind picking up in your brain? She threw the giant bottle of Tylenol at me and I shook them straight out of the bottle into my mouth without using water to wash them down. Hubertus got me a bunch of vitamins and minerals and cod liver oil too, but none of that stuff worked at all. He told me not to work for a few days and lie in the dark with a cold cloth on my forehead so I tried doing that but lying around all day just made me restless and nervous. Aggie stayed home from school to take care of Ximena so I could rest but that wasn’t really working either because X. liked to crawl all over me and suck on the wet washcloth and Aggie was getting bored and pissed off. She wanted to go to school and she wanted to see Israel and get on with her regular life.