Somewhere in the vast Amazonian forest . . . among plants whose indigenous, Spanish and Latin names . . . compete with one another outside of their awareness. Three species stood out self-consciously. There was the ancient red bark tree by the name of Ring Kittle. And in his shady undergrowth the Elmore Vella, a species of flytrap, used to go quietly about her deadly business.
The Vella and Kittle must be the only plants to be named after the people who caused their extinction rather than their discovery: two actors that were signed to the Roxboro studios in the thirties. Miss Elmore Vella made her stage name immortal with her fondness for the flytrap’s sedative gasses. That came off its leaves as they wrapped around her tongue.
In the days of the plants venomous reign its only enemy came in the form of a moth that made full use of its architecture. Rather than being digested by the toxic leaves it would hollow them out. . Transforming the plant into a cocoon that was conveniently positioned on a stalk. With the flytraps disappearance from the jungle the moth became homeless.
Its name, just like yours, was Alfgar Dalio.
This puzzling information came to me in the form of a trailer playing in a cinema in Wadena, Ohio . . . a small town I had just moved to, to start a new job. I walked out disorientated and rang my father from the phone in the lobby. ‘All your mother and I were told, he answered nervously . . . was that you were a child from the hidden fallout of Hollywood. The consequence of an on-screen glance converted to off-screen electricity . . . which culminated in a paper-mâché four-poster bed. . And that you had been named Alfgar Dalio. When you came to us we chose not to tell you that you were adopted . . . as we were sure it was before the formation of your first memory.‘
I left the cinema in a daze. Here is a building, I thought with curious contempt . . . that is rudely broadcasting the secret of my existence every night. Something that, up till now had been unknown to me. The Kinorama playhouse was the only cinema in the country that was still playing the Roxboro classics. Its always-deserted interior looked like it had been dipped in the lipstick of the elderly lady knitting in the ticket booth. The octogenarian proprietor circled around the cinema’s exterior . . . as if he were the dial on a clock.
I bravely returned the next evening . . . but when the feature started I anxiously tightened my grip on the cinema seat . . . clutching its velvet like a monkey to its terry-cloth mother in a Harlow experiment. Over the course of a few years I saw all the Roxboro films. Elmore Vella and Ring Kittle turned out to have very minor roles in these productions. Their names only sometimes appeared on the credits.
Scrutinizing their mask-like over-lit faces . . . I was trying to find something that was familiar or even recognizable. But as the grain of the films became finer, bringing them closer to me plastic surgery pushed them further away. Until one day I realized I had overtaken them in years . . . leaving them behind their celluloid curtain in an unaging past.
Watching the films, however, I realized a memory had slowly started to form. . And with it came an emotion forgotten since childhood. A woman in the shape of Elmore carrying me around on her hip in a moist green environment . . . collecting Hummingbird eggs the size of tic-tac sweets. Was I building fiction in the void of reality or was this an actual memory. I decided to ask the cashier if she could tell me anything about Vella and Kittle. Without putting down her knitting she started hesitantly: You won’t find them on screen in colour, dear . . .
They disappeared in the jungle in 1922 where they were to star in their first feature together. A film celebrating the invention of Kinemacolor, the old green and red stock . . . ‘ Elmore Vella was suffering from what in the profession was called the “falling eye” . . . In her presence sets would fold in, camera men tripped on wires . . . and whole rows of can-can dancers would keel off the stage like domino pieces. You could say that with her condition, it was an oversight that the studio flew her out to the Peruvian jungle. Because after waking from her afternoon nap she stared out of the window of the small plane until she noticed the earth approaching faster and faster... As the trees tore open its fusilage . . . her seat spiralled down like a sycamore seed and amazingly she touched the floor almost unharmed. She undid her seat buckle, straightened her taffeta dress, and stepped out as if proceeding over a red carpet.
The debris of the plane was suspended in the blanket of thick vegetation above. Magenta evening dresses and swaying tuxedos hung in the canopy like a cloud of butterflies. A ghost banquet she wasn’t invited to but its irrelevance was clearer than ever . . . Leaving the artificial world of cinema behind she stepped into the deceitful theatre of plants . . . Without knowing the laws of the jungle she could sense her obvious loss in its game. For days she walked through the dark curtain of trees . . . Her brain withdrawn to a trance-like now. Her saviour came in the shape of a large tree trunk . . . along which a meandering line of ants was still following the contours of a long gone obstruction. Unaware that a change had taken place which forced them down this peculiar route initially, they had created a temporary moving negative . . . It was that of a man slumped against a tree with a large sombrero. She knew it was the contour of her co-lead . . . Ring kittle; A handsome man who had barely made it from silent to spoken as he suffered badly from verbal vertigo.
She followed the line of ants until it halted at his trailer. He had obviously found the wreckage of the plane already ... As he was reeling strips of celluloid into a noxious bonfire.
‘The camphor keeps the mosquitoes away.’; she heard him say as she passed out in his arms. He carried her to the four-poster bed( which ? ) he had assembled from the debris .
They waited for months for news from the studio . . . But as the jungle fenced them in just as the much longed for stardom would have . . . the fickle gods of filmdom had other plans . . .
Finally a local man from a nearby river settlement came to announce that Technicolor had been invented . . . so funds got shifted and the project cancelled. As the ma n entered their trailer his taxonomic eye fell immediately on the flytrap plants strewn across the floor. Coxocotl . . . he exclaimed, a species long lost to his generation. A plant with mildly hallucinogenic qualities that his elders had taken in their continuous search for visual peace . . . in the densely leafed jungle . . . Elmore explained that she had been picking them from the crash site . . .
where young saplings had sprung up out of the giant ashtray. The plane had upturned the earth and given seeds that lay dormant there for 50 years the chance to bud. Her Hollywood nose for opiates had her crash the plane on the jungle’s oldest natural barbiturates. The man’s tribe decided to rename the plant in her honour . . . Not aware that her habit would single handedly make it extinct again . . . and leave the Alfgar Dalio moth whose life depended on it homeless.
I didn’t need to ask the lady how she knew all this.
How she could have witnessed the unwitnessable. I figured that both her and mister Kittle must have known back then that their reappearance could never compete . .. with their almost mythical disappearance . . . Vanishing had been a good career move. but leaving what was only ever a very dim limelight behind had obviously become their greatest torment. Not the jungle and its unpredictable character but the meaninglessness of not being observed
