day 6

Today we returned to meet Marlene. She was in a cheerful mood. We put a radio mic on her and we did some filming of her walking through La Plaza de San Francisco. She also showed us the contents of her box, which as I mentioned earlier is borrowed. It featured a photograph of her son and nephew, polish, rags, coins, and various tins of creams. Her hands are in very bad condition, the nails look painful. I can't imagine the type of infections they must get, when the polish gets into the open wounds. After showing us the contents of her box we took a walk around the area. While filming this her nephew approached her with a swollen eye and a plastic bag filled with rice and chicken. The two put down the shoeshine boxes and sat down in the middle of the sidewalk. 'Who hit you,' she asked, while he tore open the bag and scooped out a ball of rice with his hand and stuffed it in his mouth. He looked up and sported a pretty nasty bruise on his eye.

'Nobody,' he said. Marlene tore off a chunk of the chicken and ate it, and so did he. She kept pressing him to tell her who hit him, but the more she asked the softer his voice got, till it was almost a whisper. After a while the two got up and went their separate ways. Marlene was clearly sad, almost on the verge of tears. I think she must experience more emotions in one day than most people do in a year. Her pace was slow now, her shoulders sadly hunched, her feet trudging along the pavement, her shoeshine box dangling from her blackened fingers. If there was a crater in the ground I'm pretty sure she would have jumped into it in that moment. But there was no crater, just the sidewalk, which led her back to probably the last place on Earth she felt like being: La Plaza.

After filming Marlene we went for lunch at a local restaurant frequented mainly by foreigners (Brits and Americans). We all had the same dish: steak sandwich, fries, and a Mocha Cooler milkshake. Then Fabio and I bought gifts for our wives and returned to San Francisco where Cynthia was waiting, fresh wounds across her cheeks. She had cut herself last night. Her reason? She had attacked her boyfriend Milton and cut him. And he told her that since he now had a scar she should have one too. So if she did not cut herself he would leave her. So she did- with a piece of glass. While interviewing her a police woman interrupts her and brings her to the prison, just a few hundred yards away. I've been told it can be very tricky dealing with the police over here so Fabio and I hang back and try to shoot it from far away. But they are moving quick, fading deeper and deeper within the crowd. The only thing that I manage to pick out is Cynthia's scarf, a bright pink. She wears it at all times, and uses one of the corners to soak in glue, which she then inhales pretty much every time I've seen her. But that scarf, even in that crowd, that scarf was impossible to miss. It reminded me of the girl in the red coat in Spielberg's Shindler's List, the only spot of colour in an otherwise dark sea of faces, jackets, boots, hair.

We followed them into the buiding and spoke to the officers. They explained that she had robbed someone and so had been arrested. I peered down a small hallway and saw her pacing in a tiny jail cell. She looked tired and disinterested. Fabio asked if we could speak to one of the officers on camera but to no avail. We didn't want to push these guys, so left it. An hour later Cynthia was out, still sniffing her scarf. 'I was scared,' she said, 'I didn't want them to take me'. We ended things there and joined Monique and Guillermo. Guillermo is the cousin of Luis. He is a studious young man of 19 and has a knack for learning the equipment. In only four days he has already learnt how to assemble and take apart the camera, set up the tripod, hook up the radio mics, and use the reflector. The guy has become Fabio's camera assistant with no training whatsoever.

While we were shooting the breeze we saw four children playing with two dead rats. It had to be one of the most unsettling images we had seen. They picked it up by the tail and swung it around, and then tossed it towards each other's mouth's to see who could gross the other out most. They started smashing the rat with a huge stone, and then they'd peel off the tiny corpse with their finges. Fabio was horrified, and had them come over, and poured an entire bottle of anti-bacterial cream into their hands. After witnessing that he said he felt like he needed to take a shower in the stuff.