Hummingbird Salamander(19)
If you could put a price on life in death.
And, apparently, you could.
PANORAMA
[26]
I did and didn’t enjoy air travel back then. The quiet, cool cocoon, the ice in the glass just so, the smooth camaraderie of seasoned travelers broken only on occasion by the person to whom it was all too new. The freedom to be alone, to think alone. The spotlight from above that pearled the scented air. Pointing at only the important things. The sense of being motionless once at altitude. Outside of time, outside of history. Even with weather delays, in first class you could almost forget the world was fucked.
But, even there, the seats weren’t always wide enough to be comfortable. Depended.
I had always been big—big-boned, broad-hipped, “shoulders like a linebacker,” my father would say, as he pulled on those shoulders and said “Straighten up.” The “son” implied. “Learn the clutch, not the automatic.” “Go hunt with me.” (I wouldn’t.) Until the day, sometime in college, when something my mother said made me realize he was just saying and doing all the things his father had said to and done with him. And I had a vision, down through history, of a series of dad-robots saying and doing the same things and other sons and daughters being caught up in those ghosts.
From then on, I never let my father pull my shoulders back. I didn’t like the idea that my grandfather’s ghost was there; I always hated him. Maybe, too, that’s why my father drank so much, and it had nothing to do with the farm or my mother’s condition. At first.
My mind roved so much on that flight. Hummingbird, salamander, life on the farm, my brother. Settled on Silvina, on the file, on her family.
Silvina’s parents were still alive, back in Argentina. I looked at the photos before the rest of the data—an old trick. The data always made the photos conform to a certain story. Sometimes the photos wanted to tell a different story.
The patriarch, Matias Vilcapampa, first glimpsed from a fairly recent picture, in his early seventies, with a great mane of silver hair and a ruddy, brooding, pockmarked face. A terrible flare of irritation to the eyes as he did nothing to soften his expression in the company photo. Perhaps even took pride in his anger, expressed. Yet in the bags under those eyes, an undecided quality to the set of the jaw, I decided I saw weakness or vulnerability or confusion that signified loss. Something the anger was meant to draw attention from or solve.
He fled repressive regimes in Argentina only to wash up in Miami even more absurdly wealthy and come back after to his native country with more influence, more millions, than his ranch-owning grandfather ever could have imagined. The empire he’d created during this time focused on mining, oil, and other dirty industries. Vied for wells and veins in African and Central Asian countries and then preyed upon the South American countries with the least regulation.
In Argentina, as if not to soil the nest, he stuck to cattle ranching, even gave to environmental organizations. Everywhere else: a major exploiter, extractor, and polluter, with his own private army of bodyguards, and ruthless tactics from a corresponding army of lawyers.
What did Matias do for recreation? A big game hunter, a trophy hunter. The glazed, open eyes of a giraffe, lion, water buffalo, bear, accompanied him across a grim progression of photographs. And in these I imagined the confusion was mitigated or canceled or briefly gone. Because there is, at the very least—and Silvina would call it less than least—a certainty of purpose, a calm in the aftermath. In death.
I knew this man. So close in kind to my clients. This was how they postured, how they showed off the size of their balls. Common knowledge that we tried not to think about: that some of our clients had their own security teams. People who were ex-military. People who would do things for their bosses beyond fixing their security systems.
Confirmation as to why there was so little information about Silvina’s death. Men like her father snuffed out controversy; it was the default. There, in the relative safety of my office, I imagined his reaction to my prying.
He would have been ashamed of her for decades, fighting with her about her life for decades. Even as the family name was a sham, a shame. A claim of indigenous blood, but from what I could tell, it wasn’t the original family name. It was a name he had invented when he became a businessman.
Had there come a point where Matias couldn’t take Silvina’s actions any longer?
I went on to the information about the mother, Catalina.
Catalina, amid rumors of Matias’s mistresses, was easy to diagnose, even before I turned to the text. Much like my own mother, although hard to talk about. She looked worn and haggard and her gray hair had thinned, and none of the lavish sequined dresses could distract from the fact that something in their life was leaching the life from her. Or laughing at her. Skip to the part where your husband spent most of his free time posing with dead animals.
Beloved she was to many for being the face of her husband’s charitable giving. Their endowment of libraries and university buildings. Some small controversy about the name “Vilcapampa” and what it meant to indigenous communities affixed itself to the charity. But, in the end, no one cared.
To many, they were not bad people, not even close. Pillars of the community. They believed in the future. They believed they were contributing to the future even as they took the future away. I had probably pumped gasoline into my car that came from the Vilcapampa Oil Company. Had components in my phone made from rare earth minerals extracted by various Vilcapampa mining concerns.