It was 1999, in a remote Amazonian village where Werner was making a movie. The movie was the story of Juliana, the only survivor of a plane accident on Christmas Eve of 1971, 28 years earlier. Juliana had had a horrific experience, dropping two miles from the sky, but somehow miraculously surviving, and Werner was making a movie about it. Now, after their longest day of filming, he was taking her to dinner.
Dinner, however, was a rustic affair, with the rain pouring down on the tin roofs of the small restaurant in a small Amazonian town. The food was good, and they were both used to Amazonian fare; Juliana in fact lived not too far away and was comfortable in the environment. He had chosen tonight to tell her his secret.
Making the movie had been hard for Juliana, and the rainstorm, or the downpour, was hard on her too. As it happened, it was a combination of being strapped in her airplane seat, coming down through the canopy, and landing right-side-up that had allowed her to live. She had woken up in the rainstorm with numerous broken bones and was entirely alone in the forest for over a week. The hardest part, the part they had filmed today, was the day when she came upon the body of her mother, who had been sitting next to her on the plane. All the other passengers, who also had fallen from two miles strapped to their chairs, had met a much crueler fate than Juliana. It had taken her a while to figure out that she was the only survivor.
Werner knew that, as a filmmaker, he had to handle the situation very delicately. She was in fact very emotional about the whole experience. He had promised to pay her well, and did, as she gave a very useful account of how she felt at each point of the journey, a journey which took her from the forest where she landed, to a small clearing, and from there to a stream, and then to a river landing where some fishermen were able to save her. His movie would show every step, every painful move she'd made.
The rain pounded on the roof of the restaurant and the servers seemed to know that they had something important to discuss, so they backed off a while, having ensured that they were well fed and had plenty of Amazonian coffee. Juliana was actually tough; she had come back to the rain forest to finish her parents' work as a biologist, and had made their base into a kind of reserve. She had been dealing with the psychological trauma of the accident for twenty-eight years, and told Werner that making the film actually helped her deal with the trauma and process it.
There was no real romantic attachment between Werner and Juliana; they were just very good friends, having worked together now for several weeks. Both had families and lives that were somewhat incompatible with each other; Werner, for example, traveled the world making films, while Juliana rarely left her base in the jungle and didn't even really want to. Werner thought, as he looked out the window at the pouring rain, that this might be the most memorable moment of his entire time in the Amazon. Juliana, as he looked at her, was beautiful, strong, and steady; she was the Amazon. She was entirely at home.
His secret was this: on the day of the crash, back on Christmas Eve of 1971, he was due to be on that plane, but he had canceled his flight, by chance, and wasn't on the plane. Of course he'd been riveted to the news when it came out that the plane had been struck by lightning, had blown up two miles up in the air, and had, in the end, only one survivor. He'd been somewhat fixated on the story for much of his adult llfe and now, being successful as a filmmaker, had a chance to explore the whole terrible mess that he had somehow, purely by chance, avoided. He told Juliana this story right as they were eating dinner. He told her how he'd imagined the crash for years and only now had a chance to really find out what had happened.
Juliana looked at him somewhat quizzically; it had never occurred to her, at least in the last twenty-five years or so, that there could be anyone else who could consider themselves a survivor of that accident. But Werner, in a sense, had survived the accident also. True, he had not suffered the way she did, crawling through the mud, getting extremely hungry, following the stream to the river. He had only experienced that much vicariously, by making the movie and by asking her numerous questions about what had happened. But now she had insight into why he was so interested, and it seemed kind of dark to her; like making the movie was laying out the elements of his subconscious fear of what could have been.
There was no question, her week-long ordeal was the worst thing that could have happened to anyone, not to mention a young girl, still attached to her mother, who woke up next to her mother's empty seat in the rainforest and in the rain; then had come upon dead bodies in that rain forest when, starving and depleted, she was trying to walk to safety. People had been staring at her and whispering in her presence, for years, as she was famous for what she'd gone through. Yet she'd come to live with that, and now most of the people in her circle of friends and other biologists, knew not only what she'd been through but also what it had done to her. It was just part of her life and of who she was.
As she talked to Werner, she realized that, for him, it was more of a secret - that he'd barely talked about it at all for twenty-eight years - so that msking the movie was hard for him a completely different way. She complimented him on his ability to bring difficult emotions out in filming. She also told him that he was very good at portraying the Amazon as it really was, without making it worse or better than it was anyway. It was remarkable, he said, watching as the rain died down a little, that she could get so used to its extremes.
Yes, she said, but the hard rain would always make her remember that day, waking up in the chair with all those broken bones. And nobody would ever appreciate a tin roof, or the ability to sit under it, as much as she did. Werner paid their check and they prepared to leave, both, in their own way, thinking of the scenes they had filmed earlier in the day.
(8-22)
I used to take real news stories and turn them into esl exercises. This is the same, but I'm not sure what I'll do with it. It is based on real life, though I have no idea if Werner actually met Juliana in a cafe; the particulars are fiction.
