Hummingbird Salamander(23)
In the video, Silvina railed against something called “Contila.” Which sounded like a new designer drug for a skin condition, but which I knew was Langer’s import-export business linked to wildlife traffickers.
Contila had members in South American countries, but also ties to organized crime in the U.S., Russia, and China. A man named John Hudgens had run Contila from a shell company in Miami, and then, as things got hot, Canada and then Mexico. Silvina had taken a special dislike to Hudgens, had been the one to provide authorities with the intel that made him have to move operations. Then Hudgens had died in the bombing, along with four others.
If Silvina was an indistinct smudge on the internet, Contila had only Interpol alerts and not much else. Vague stories about bribes at border crossings and containership checks at ports of call. Hundreds of endangered animal seizures they could have been behind. With Hudgens gone, someone else in management took over, but that name was buried deep in Interpol files or they truly didn’t know who ran it.
Langer was Hudgens’s “manager,” which to me meant an enforcer, promoted to some position that didn’t have a name after Hudgens exploded. The guy Hudgens turned to and said, “This has to happen,” and Langer did the dirty work or hired someone to. He’d been questioned by the feds, too, but they’d had to release him. Why?
It was hard to think of Silvina as “terrorist” or “murderer” compared to the people she’d been fighting.
That gap between the murder trial and being handed a note by a barista. Not just the four or five years of total absence, off the radar. But the rest of those fifteen years, about which such sparse information existed. Except Silvina had managed properties, stolen money from her father, given civic responsibility a go. Unitopia. Which just felt like a bad joke about storage palaces.
And what was this, from the video?
“The trees were whispering to me. The trees in the darkness wanted to tell me secrets.” As if there were some truth to my daughter’s cartoons.
And what was this, later?
“We have killed so much that perhaps we thought killing a little more wouldn’t matter. If it could save us for another year, another five years. Out of sight so we never saw most of it. Or, if we saw, we disbelieved the extent or it had already happened. Like roadkill. Like an accident. Not purposeful, or the purpose having fled. Not the order of things as we had imposed it.”
And what was this?
“‘Progress’: a word to choke on, a word to discard and then pick up again, hurl it in the oven like coal, watch it spurl out its own name in black smoke from the chimney of the hunting lodge. I embrace it, and I repeat it, and yet I know no word I or any other human could use will ever be the right word.”
And what was the next thing?
Around every corner something incendiary might lurk. Something personal. But also something searching for a polemic to leap into. To give it a body, a voice.
My point is that, in looking at everything I had about the Vilcapampa family, my initial analysis was the usual story of a daughter’s rebellion from a tyrannical father and a weak mother. That Silvina decided to become the opposite of them. To an extreme.
But even if I had already begun to create a version of Silvina, I still didn’t really have enough data points. This veil. This descent into speculation. As if the systems that I used, and that used me, deformed her. Kept changing her.
And me.
[31]
In the past, I had slept with strangers at conferences. Never knew the last names. As anonymous as I could be, to set the expectations.
Or, once upon a time, I did those things. I liked the idea of meeting strangers at conferences. I liked the bar, and maybe for the same kind of calm as the flight in, and the soft clunk and crunch of the ice in bronze-brown drinks that fooled me with a sophistication I thought I couldn’t find elsewhere. Sudden flood of mint or basil from the bartender’s stand. Rosemary. A kind of shock, an infiltration. Yet kept the job at bay. That fuzzy golden aura enveloping me. The glow pushing from the inside to the outside until I shone like the sun.
Most hotels had more than one conference going, so I would hang out near attendees for the other conference. Textiles. Medical. Pharmaceuticals. Entomology. Who would I be this time? A homicide detective? A veterinarian. A flight attendant.
The other main conference was construction, with an emphasis on innovative use of drywall, textures, and roofing. Perhaps I was in that business instead. This wasn’t me out of control. This was me in control.
I’d describe the hotel bar, except it was the usual. What I preferred. Dark-lit, not stools but high seats with backs. Some of the security conference attendees, gleaned from their lanyards, sat in the surrounding gloom at tables like murky islands with little flickering butter-white candles. Nothing much droned on, music-wise, beneath it. Like something flat moving around under the sparkly blue bad idea that was the carpet.
Even from the bar, I could hear their murmurs spiked with drunken exultations. The usual banter, among mostly men, with what I called “an appreciative audience.” They could swing their dicks around as much as they wanted back there. I wasn’t going to enter that fray.
I guess as I sat there, nursing a water after that drab day, I kept thinking about the significance of taxidermy. Of numbers found under a dead hummingbird’s eyes. Of Silvina and the video. It still felt like distraction or adventure. How exciting that she’d been an ecoterrorist. How exciting that she’d been tried for murder. How exciting that she’d had to fight extradition. How exciting that she came from a rich, important, fucked-up family … instead of just a fucked-up family.