This book is for Brenda Berger Garner,
for James Jerrett Didion,
and also for Allene Talmey and Henry Robbins.
I WILL BE HER WITNESS.
That would translate seré su testigo, and will not appear in your travelers’ phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler.
Here is what happened: she left one man, she left a second man, she traveled again with the first; she let him die alone. She lost one child to “history” and another to “complications” (I offer in each instance the evaluation of others), she imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande, a tourist. Una turista. So she said. In fact she came here less a tourist than a sojourner but she did not make that distinction.
She made not enough distinctions.
She dreamed her life.
She died, hopeful. In summary. So you know the story. Of course the story had extenuating circumstances, weather, cracked sidewalks and paregorina, but only for the living.
Charlotte would call her story one of passion. I believe I would call it one of delusion. My name is Grace Strasser-Mendana, née Tabor, and I have been for fifty of my sixty years a student of delusion, a prudent traveler from Denver, Colorado. My mother died of influenza one morning when I was eight. My father died of gunshot wounds, not self-inflicted, one afternoon when I was ten. From that afternoon until my sixteenth birthday I lived alone in our suite at the Brown Palace Hotel. I have lived in equatorial America since 1935 and only twice had fever. I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos. I studied under Kroeber at California and worked with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo, classified several societies, catalogued their rites and attitudes on occasions of birth, copulation, initiation and death; did extensive and well-regarded studies on the rearing of female children in the Mato Grosso and along certain tributaries of the Rio Xingu, and still I did not know why any one of these female children did or did not do anything at all.
Let me go further.
I did not know why I did or did not do anything at all.
As a result I “retired” from that field, married a planter of San Blas Green coconut palms here in Boca Grande and took up the amateur study of biochemistry, a discipline in which demonstrable answers are commonplace and “personality” absent. I am interested for example in learning that such a “personality” trait as fear of the dark exists irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the Mato Grosso or in Denver, Colorado. Fear of the dark can be synthesized in the laboratory. Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids. Fear of the dark is a protein. I once diagrammed this protein for Charlotte. “I don’t quite see why calling it a protein makes it any different,” Charlotte said, her eyes flickering covertly back to a battered Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue she had received in the mail that morning in May. She had reached that stage in her sojourn when she lived for mail, sent away for every catalogue, filled out every coupon, wrote many letters and received some answers. “I mean I don’t quite see your point.”
I explained my point.
“I’ve never been afraid of the dark,” Charlotte said after a while, and then, tearing out a photograph of a small child in a crocheted dress: “This would be pretty on Marin.”
Since Marin was the child Charlotte had lost to history and was at the time of her disappearance eighteen years old, I could conclude only that Charlotte did not care to pursue my point.
Also, for the record, Charlotte was afraid of the dark.
Give me the molecular structure of the protein which defined Charlotte Douglas.
In at least two of the several impenetrably euphemistic “Letters from Central America” which Charlotte wrote during her stay here and tried unsuccessfully to sell to The New Yorker, she characterized Boca Grande as a “land of contrasts.” Boca Grande is not a land of contrasts. On the contrary Boca Grande is relentlessly “the same”: the cathedral is not Spanish Colonial but corrugated aluminum. There is a local currency but the American dollar is legal tender. The politics of the country at first appear to offer contrast, involving as they do the “colorful” Latin juxtaposition of guerrilleros and colonels, but when the tanks are put away and the airport reopens nothing has actually changed in Boca Grande. There are no waterfalls of note, no ruins of interest, no chic boutiques (Charlotte went so far as to rent a storefront for one such boutique, but my son Gerardo turned the storefront to his own purposes and it has been since the October Violence a Pentecostal reading room) to provide dramatic cultural foil to voodoo in the hills.
In fact there is no voodoo in the hills.
In fact there are no hills, only the flat bush and the lifeless sea.
And the light. The opaque equatorial light. The bush and the sea do not reflect the light but absorb it, suck it in, then glow morbidly.
Boca Grande is the name of the country and Boca Grande is also the name of the city, as if the place defeated the imagination of even its first settler. At least once each year, usually on the afternoon of the Anniversary of Independence, the Boca Grande Intellectual Union sponsors a debate, followed by a no-host cocktail party, as to who that first settler might have been, but the arguments are desultory, arbitrary. Information is missing here. Evidence goes unrecorded. Every time the sun falls on a day in Boca Grande that day appears to vanish from local memory, to be reinvented if necessary but never recalled. I once asked the librarian at the Intellectual Union to recommend for Charlotte a history of Boca Grande. “Boca Grande has no history,” the librarian said, and he seemed gratified that I had asked, as if we had together hit upon a catechistic point of national pride.
“Boca Grande has no history,” I repeated to Charlotte, but again Charlotte did not quite see my point. Charlotte was at that time preparing a “Letter” describing Boca Grande as the “economic fulcrum of the Americas.” It was true that planes between, say, Los Angeles and Bogotá, or New York and Quito, sometimes stopped in Boca Grande to refuel, and paid an inflated landing fee. It was also true that passengers on such flights often left a dollar or two in the airport slot machines during the time required for refueling, but revenue from an airport landing fee and eighteen slot machines did not seem to me to constitute, in the classical sense, an economic fulcrum.
I suggested this to Charlotte.
Boca Grande exported copra, Charlotte said. Principally your own.
Boca Grande did export copra, principally my own, and, in about the same dollar volume, Boca Grande also exported parrots, anaconda skins, and macramé shawls.
What I was overlooking entirely, Charlotte said, was what Boca Grande “could become.”
A “Letter” from a city or country, I suggested, was conventionally understood to be a factual report on that city or country, not as it “could become” but as it “was.”
Not necessarily, Charlotte said.
Another of Charlotte’s Letters covered the “spirit of hope” she divined in the Boca Grande favelas. Boca Grande has no favelas, even the word is Portuguese. There is poverty here, but it is obdurately indistinguishable from comfort. We all live in cinderblock houses. Charlotte wanted color. By way of color I could tell her only that the Hotel del Caribe was said to have Central America’s largest ballroom, but Charlotte was not satisfied with that. Nor with the light.
CALL THIS MY OWN LETTER FROM BOCA GRANDE.
No. Call it what I said. Call it my witness to Charlotte Douglas.
One or two facts about the place where Charlotte died and I live. Boca Grande means “big mouth,” or big bay, and describes the country’s principal physical feature precisely as it appears. Almost everything in Boca Grande describes itself precisely as it appears, as if any ambiguity in the naming of things might cause the present to sink as tracelessly as the past. The Rio Blanco looks white. The Rio Colorado looks red. The Avenida del Mar runs by the sea, the Avenida de la Punta Verde runs by the green point. The green point is in fact green. On reflection I know only two place names in Boca Grande which evoke an idea or an event or a person, which suggest a past either Indian or colonial.
One of these two exceptions is “Millonario.”
As in Millonario Province.
So named because our palms grow there and our copra is milled there, and my husband’s father was the rich man, the millonario, a St. Louis confidence man named Victor Strasser who at age twenty-three floated some Missouri money to buy oil rights, at age twenty-four fled Mexico after an abortive attempt to invade Sonora, and at age twenty-five arrived in Boca Grande. Upon his recovery from cholera he married a Mendana and proceeded to divest her family of interior Boca Grande.
Victor Strasser died at ninety-five and for the last sixty years of his life preferred to be addressed as Don Victor.
I called him Mr. Strasser.
There is Millonario and there is also “Progreso.” In fact there are two Progresos, El Progreso primero and El Progreso otro. The first Progreso was the grand design of my brother-in-law Luis, the toy of his fifteen-month presidency, his new city, his capital, twenty matched glass pyramids intersected by four eight-lane boulevards, all laid out on fill in the bay and connected to the mainland until recently by causeway. The matched glass pyramids were never finished but the eight-lane boulevards were. Until a few years ago, when the causeway collapsed, I would take lunch out to the first Progreso and eat there alone, sitting on the site of a projected monument where all four empty boulevards converged. On the fill between the boulevards bamboo grew up through the big Bechtel cranes, abandoned the day Luis was shot. Luis was the last of my brothers-in-law to place himself in so exposed a position as that of El Presidente. Since Luis they have tended to favor the Ministry of Defense for themselves, and the presidency for expendable cousins by marriage. In the years after Luis was shot water hyacinths clogged the culverts at Progreso and after rain the boulevards would remain all day in shallow flood, the film of water shimmering with mosquito larvae and with the rainbow slick from rusting oil tanks. Until the collapse I would go out there maybe once a week, and stay most of the afternoon. It occurs to me that I was perhaps the only person in Boca Grande inconvenienced by the collapse of the Progreso causeway.
At some point after the collapse Gerardo took Charlotte to Progreso by boat.
I recall asking Charlotte at dinner if she found Progreso primero as peaceful as I did.
Charlotte began to cry.
As for Progreso otro, which might have even more radically challenged Charlotte’s rather teleological view of human settlement, I have not seen it in some years. Neither has anyone else. This second Progreso was another new city, in the interior, built on leased land (ours) by an American aluminum combine during the bauxite chimera here. (There was bauxite, yes, but not as much as the geologists had predicted, not enough to justify Progreso otro.) After the mines closed a handful of engineers stayed on, trying to find some economic use for the aluminous laterite which made up the bulk of the deposit, but one by one they got fever or quit or moved to the combine’s operation in Venezuela. The last two left in 1965. The road in, which cost thirty-four-million American dollars to build, can still be discerned from the air, quite clearly, a straight line of paler vegetation. My husband wanted to maintain the road, said always that the interior had things we might want access to, but after Edgar died I let it grow over. What I wanted from the interior had nothing to do with access.
Edgar was the oldest of the four sons of Victor Strasser and Alicia Mendana.
It was the brother nearest Edgar’s age, Luis, who was shot on the steps of the presidential palace in April 1959.
You will have gathered that I married into one of the three or four solvent families in Boca Grande. In fact Edgar’s death left me in putative control of fifty-nine-point-eight percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process in La República (recently La República Libre) de Boca Grande. El Presidente this year wears a yachting cap. The two younger Strasser-Mendana brothers, Little Victor and Antonio, the two Edgar and Luis called los mosquitos, participate in the estate only via a trust administered by me. Victor and Antonio do not much like this arrangement, nor do their wives Bianca and Isabel, nor does Luis’s widow Elena, but there it is. The joint decision of Edgar and his father. Fait accompli on the morning Edgar died. There it was and there it is. (A small example of why it is. The day Luis was shot Elena flew to exile in Geneva, a theatrical gesture but unnecessary, since even before her plane left the runway the coup was over and Little Victor had assumed temporary control of the government. The wife of any other Latin president would have known immediately that a coup in which the airport remained open was a coup doomed to fail, but Elena had no instinct for being the wife of a Latin president. Nor does she make a particularly appropriate presidential widow. In any case. A few weeks later Elena came back. Edgar and his father and I met her at the airport. She was wearing tinted glasses and a new Balenciaga coat, lettuce-green. She was carrying a matching parrot. She had not taken this parrot with her from Boca Grande. She had bought this parrot that morning in Geneva, for seven hundred dollars.) In any event there is not as much money in all of Boca Grande as Victor and Bianca and Antonio and Isabel and Elena accuse me of having secreted in Switzerland.
Strike Bianca.
Bianca does not accuse me of having secreted money in Switzerland because Bianca was taught at Sacre Coeur in New Orleans that discussions of money are not genteel. Also strike Isabel. Isabel does not accuse me of having secreted money in Switzerland because Isabel is so rarely here, and has been told by her doctor in Arizona that discussions of money disturb the flow of transcendental energy.
I continue to live here only because I like the light.
And because I am intermittently engaged by the efforts of my extant brothers-in-law to turn a profit on the Red Cross.
And because my days are too numbered to spend them in New York or Paris or Denver imagining the light in Boca Grande, how flat it is, how harsh and still. How dead white at noon.
One thing at least I share with Charlotte: I lost my child. Gerardo is lost to me. I hear from him regularly, see him all too often, talk to him about politics and new films and the bud rot we are experiencing in the interior groves, but I talk to him as an acquaintance. In Boca Grande he drives an Alfa Romeo 1750. In Paris, where he has lived off and on for fifteen years on a succession of student visas, he rides a Suzuki 500 motorcycle. I always think of Gerardo on wheels, or skis. I like him but not too much any more. Gerardo embodies many of the failings of this part of the world, the rather wishful machismo, the defeating touchiness, the conviction that his heritage must be aristocratic; a general attitude I do not admire. Gerardo is the grandson of two American wildcatters who got rich, my father in Colorado minerals and Edgar’s father in Boca Grande politics, and of the Irish nursemaid and the mestiza from the interior they respectively married. Still he persists in tracing his line to the court of Castile. On the delusion front I would have to say that Gerardo and Charlotte were well met.
I tell you these things about myself only to legitimize my voice. We are uneasy about a story until we know who is telling it. In no other sense does it matter who “I” am: “the narrator” plays no motive role in this narrative, nor would I want to.
Gerardo of course does play a motive role. I do not delude myself there.
Unlike Charlotte I do not dream my life.
I try to make enough distinctions.
I will die (and rather soon, of pancreatic cancer) neither hopeful nor its opposite. I am interested in Charlotte Douglas only insofar as she passed through Boca Grande, only insofar as the meaning of that sojourn continues to elude me.
ACCORDING TO HER PASSPORT, ENTRY VISA, AND INTERNATIONAL Certificate of Vaccination, Charlotte Amelia Douglas was born in Hollister, California, forty years before her entry into Boca Grande; was at the time of that entry a married resident of San Francisco, California; was five-feet-five-inches tall, had red hair, brown eyes, and no visible distinguishing marks; and had been successfully inoculated against smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, and paratyphoid A and B. The passport had been renewed four months before at New Orleans, Louisiana, and bore entry and departure stamps for Antigua and Guadeloupe, unused visas for Australia and the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, a Mexican tourist card stamped at Mérida, a visa and entry stamp for Boca Grande, and no indication that the bearer had reentered the United States during the four months since the renewal of the passport. Nationality NORTEAMERICANA. Type of Visa TURISTA. Occupation MADRE.
There seemed to me many elusive anomalies on these documents, not the least of them Charlotte Amelia Douglas’s decision to enter Boca Grande, but none of these nuances suggested themselves to Victor, Little Victor, who had ordered the passport surreptitiously removed from the Hotel del Caribe safe because its number appeared on a United States Department of State list indicating travelers who were to receive certain special treatment.
WHEN CHARLOTTE FIRST CAME TO BOCA GRANDE SHE was referred to always as la norteamericana. La norteamericana had been heard typing in her room at the Caribe all night, la norteamericana had woken a doctor at two in the morning to ask the symptoms of infant framboesia. La norteamericana had advised the manager of the Caribe that he was derelict in allowing the maids to fill the water carafes from the tap. La norteamericana had asked a waiter at the Jockey Club if marijuana was in general use in the kitchen. La norteamericana had come downstairs in a thin cotton dressing gown one night when the Caribe generator failed and sat alone in the dark at the ballroom piano until three A.M., picking out with one hand, over and over again and in every possible tempo, the melodic line of a single song. This story was told to me by a bellman at the Caribe, the brother of a woman who cooked for Victor and Bianca, and he tried to hum the song that la norteamericana had played over and over again. The song was “Mountain Greenery.”
In those first few weeks before any of us had met her she seemed to appear only in the evenings. An hour or so after the sunset one could see her walking through the empty casino at the Caribe, nodding pleasantly at the idle croupiers and the national police assigned to the casino, breathing deeply at the windows quite as if fresh air could possibly penetrate the dusty blue velvet curtains that lined the room. She would inspect the tables one by one but did not play. After this ritual turn through the casino she would walk on out through the lobby, her step buoyant, purposeful. Later one could see her eating alone on the porch at the Capilla del Mar or at the Jockey Club, always the same table at the Jockey Club, the table beneath the photograph of the Venezuelan polo team which visited Boca Grande in 1948. She would draw the legs of a spiny lobster between her remarkably white teeth and read the Miami Herald, reading the classified as attentively as she read the front page, reading both as avidly and as thoroughly as she ate the spiny lobster.
I saw her at the Jockey Club on a few evenings, and heard about her on others. Like so many works of man in Boca Grande the Jockey Club is less than it seems: an aluminum-sided bungalow with rattan card tables and a menu written in French but translated in the kitchen into ambiguous gumbos based mainly on plantains and rice. Although any traveler could obtain a guest card to the Jockey Club by asking for one at an airline ticket office, not many bothered. There was once a nine-hole golf course, but the greens first went spongy and then reverted to swamp. There was once an artificial lake for swimming, but the lake first became infested with freshwater snails and then with the Schistosoma mansoni worms that infest the snails. The lake was not drained until after one of Antonio and Isabel’s children suffered gastrointestinal bleeding from what was diagnosed in New Orleans as schistosomiasis. The draining of the artificial lake did not go unremarked upon at the Jockey Club. Elena opposed it. Elena recently resigned from the Jockey Club after the membership, led by Victor, defeated her motion to rename the club Le Cercle Sportif. Elena was born and raised on the Guatemalan coast but favors all things French. Elena’s resignation did not go unremarked upon at the Jockey Club.
In short.
The presence at the same table night after night of this conspicuous norteamericana was not likely to go unremarked upon at the Jockey Club. Actually it would have been hard to overlook Charlotte Douglas anywhere. There was the extreme and volatile thinness of the woman. There was the pale red hair which curled in the damp heat and stood out around her face and seemed almost more weight than she could bear. There was the large square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring, there were the expensive clothes that seemed to betray in their just perceptible disrepair (the safety pin that puckered the hem of the Irish linen skirt, the clasp that did not quite close the six-hundred-dollar handbag) some equivalent disrepair of the morale, some vulnerability, or abandon.
And there was that strain of exhibitionism, perverse and sometimes witty until it bloomed too long, and tired the observer. If Charlotte Douglas heard someone speaking English at another table she would invade the conversation, offer suggestions for touring, sights not to be missed. As there were neither any conventional “sights” in Boca Grande nor any tourists, only the occasional mineral geologist or CIA man traveling on one or another incorporeal AID mission, these encounters tended to end in obscurely sexual misunderstandings and bewilderment. After dinner she would walk back to the hotel alone, walking very deliberately, tying and retying a scarf which whipped in the hot night wind, seeming to concentrate on the scarf as if oblivious to the potholes in the sidewalk and the places where waste ran into the gutters. At the Caribe desk she would ask for her messages in a halting but flawlessly memorized Castilian Spanish which the night clerk found difficult to understand. As reported to Victor there were never any messages in any case.
UNTIL I LOST A FILLING AND HAD OCCASION TO SEE A dentist in Miami I never knew what la norteamericana did during the day. At least one thing she did during the day those first few weeks was this: she went to the airport. She did not go to the airport to catch a plane, nor to meet one. She just went to the airport. She was at the counter of the airport coffee shop the morning I left for Miami, not sitting at the counter but standing behind it, holding a watch in her hand. “I certainly wouldn’t think yet,” she said to the sullen girl whose space she had arrogated, and she tapped the face of the watch with her fingernail. “Nine minutes more. See for yourself.”
The girl stared at Charlotte Douglas a moment and then, without speaking, plunged her index finger into the sugar bowl on the counter. Still gazing at Charlotte she licked the sugar from her finger. In another country she might have gone the extra step, made her point explicit, jammed her grimy finger between la norteamericana’s teeth, but the expression of proletarian resentment in Boca Grande remains largely symbolic. The guerrilleros here would have nothing to say to this girl in the airport. The guerrilleros here spend their time theorizing in the interior, and are covertly encouraged to emerge from time to time as foils to the actual politics of the country. Our notoriously frequent revolutions are made not by the guerrilleros but entirely by people we know. This is a hard point for the outsider of romantic sensibility to grasp.
“Gastrointestinal infection is the leading natural cause of death in this country,” Charlotte said after a while. She said it in English and did not look at the girl. “If you call it natural.”
The girl sucked the last grains of sugar from under her scabbed fingernail and rolled it again in the bowl.
“Which I don’t particularly.”
When the water for Charlotte Douglas’s tea had boiled the requisite twenty minutes she made the tea herself, took it to a table by the window and sat there reading an article on the cultivation of vanilla in Revista Boca Grande. She moved her lips slightly and seemed entirely absorbed in what she read. When the Miami plane was called she continued reading Revista Boca Grande. She never looked up, or out the window. The next afternoon when I came back from Miami Charlotte Douglas was sitting at the same table reading the same copy of Revista Boca Grande. It did not occur to me that day that I would ever have reason to consider Charlotte an outsider of romantic sensibility. In any case I am no longer sure that she was. Possibly this is the question I am trying to answer.
Once I knew Charlotte I realized that although she spoke Spanish she had trouble reading it, and tended to lose the sense of even the simplest newspaper story somewhere in the first paragraph, but it could not have mattered in this case since she had no interest in the cultivation of vanilla.
Or in the reform of the Boca Grande tax structure.
Or in the contradiction inherent in a Central American common market.
All of which topics, and others, Charlotte Douglas read about in the Boca Grande airport, her concentration apparently passionate, her expression miming comprehension, here a nod of approval, there a moue of disagreement; her eyes scanning the Spanish words as if she understood them.
When there was nothing else to read.
When, say, the Miami Herald did not come in and she had already committed to memory the revised schedules of all five airlines chartered to land at Boca Grande.
THE STATE DEPARTMENT LIST ON WHICH CHARLOTTE Douglas’s name and passport number appeared stated simply that the United States Embassy should be advised of the entry, the departure, the arrest, the hospitalization, or the participation in civil disorder of anyone listed. Various forms were provided for this purpose, but the immigration officer in charge of the list had mislaid them; as far as he could remember Charlotte Douglas was the only person on the list ever to enter Boca Grande. Victor himself had never before heard of the list, had seen it for the first time when the immigration officer’s report on Charlotte Douglas arrived on his desk at the Ministry of Defense, and he regarded the thin leaflet with the eagle on the top page as a mesmeric challenge to his powers of deduction. The list animated a slow week for Victor. The list was a code Victor could not crack. The list so obsessed Victor that he had even solicited Antonio’s opinion as to whether those listed were politically suspect, criminal, indigent, or very important.
“Scratch indigent,” I suggested.
“The little brother suggested indigent.”
Victor routinely referred to Antonio as “the little brother,” I think in a stab at ironic distance. Antonio was at that time Minister of Public Works, whatever “Public Works” mean in Boca Grande.
“I don’t think indigent,” I said.
“Then what.”
“Show me the list.”
“The list is for official eyes only.”
“You won’t show me the list, how should I know ‘what.’ Ask Bradley.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I’m not the American ambassador, Victor, Bradley is.”
Victor sucked at his teeth and drummed his glossy fingernails on a Steuben paperweight Bradley had given him as a gesture of ambassadorial good will. Victor believed the pale moons of his fingernails to be evidence of noble blood and had a manicurist meet him every day at noon to shape his cuticles and perform other services characterized by Elena as beyond Bianca’s range. Elena’s faith in the sexual virtuosity of working women was touching and childlike. If I did not completely misapprehend Victor the cuticles came first.
“Ask Bradley,” I repeated. “Call the Embassy and ask Bradley.”
“We don’t run this country at Bradley’s convenience.”
Put a Strasser-Mendana behind a desk and you have a tableau vivant of the famous touchiness of command. Antonio once urinated on the foot of an Italian newspaper woman who suggested that Boca Grande was perhaps not ready to join the nuclear club. Victor was displeased with Bradley because the week before Bradley had allowed his wife to leave one of Victor’s official lunches in the courtyard at three-thirty, before the food was served, pleading faintness from the heat. Victor felt insulted by Americans who grew faint before lunch, even Americans who were, as Ardis Bradley was, forty-four years old and seven months pregnant.
“In any case.” Victor studied his nails. “In fact. Bradley is in Caracas.”
In any case in fact Bradley was not in Caracas, I had seen him the night before, but it was a theme of Victor’s that Tuck Bradley neglected Boca Grande for livelier capitals.
“About those four o’clock lunches in the courtyard,” I said.
“I wasn’t aware we were talking about any four o’clock lunches in the courtyard.”
“Just one detail. While I think of it. Pass it on to Bianca. I don’t think the baba au rhum should be out in the sun from twelve-thirty on.”
Victor said that he had not called me into his office for advice on serving baba au rhum.
I asked if he had called me into his office to admire the new 380 Mauser automatic pistol mounted on his desk.
Victor snapped his fingers. The aide at the door sprang to my chair and bowed.
“As another norteamericana you could meet her,” Victor said as I got up. He did not look at me. That he continued this conversation at all confirmed his obsession with the list, because it was past noon. At noon exactly his car always took him to meet his manicurist at the apartment he kept in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. The Residencia was only a block and a half from the Ministry but Victor fancied that his car, a black Mercedes limousine with the license BOCA GRANDE 2 (Victor always allowed El Presidente the BOCA GRANDE 1 plate), was the discreet way to go. “In the most natural way you could meet this woman. You could ask her for a coffee. Or a drink.”
“Or a baba au rhum.”
Victor swiveled his chair to face the window. Many of my visits to Victor’s office at the Ministry ended this way, and still do, although the office is now Antonio’s. I suppose Isabel is pleased that the office is finally Antonio’s but Isabel is spending her usual season at the private hospital her doctor operates in Arizona.
When it was reported to Victor that Charlotte Douglas went to the airport every day he construed immediately that her presence on the list had to do with Kasindorf and Riley. Kasindorf was Bradley’s cultural attaché at the Embassy and Riley was a young man who ran an OAS “educational” office called “Operación Simpático” downtown. The connection with Charlotte Douglas, transparent to Victor, was that Kasindorf and Riley also went to the airport every day, met there for coffee at precisely seven-thirty A.M., a time which coincided with the arrival of the night Braniff from Mexico.
In fact Kasindorf and Riley went to the airport not because of the night Braniff from Mexico but because they assumed correctly that Victor had microphones in their offices.
In fact Charlotte Douglas just went to the airport.
LA NORTEAMERICANA TOLD A STORY ABOUT PLAYING hide-and-seek with Marin among the thousand trunks of the Great Banyan at the Calcutta Botanical Garden. It had been “the most lyrical” day. She and Marin had “devoured” coconut ice for lunch. She and Marin had wandered be-beneath the Great Banyan at noon and stayed until after dark.
She leaned toward Victor and me as if the end of the story were a secret never before revealed. “And when Leonard finished his meeting and couldn’t find us at the Hilton he was wild, he had people combing Calcutta for us, it was hilarious.”
The absence of banyan trees at the American Embassy reminded Charlotte Douglas of this story.
She told a story about sitting in the rain in a limousine at Lod Airport eating caviar with an Israeli general. They had “devoured” the caviar from the tin with their fingers and pieces of unsalted matzoh. The Israeli and Leonard could meet only between planes and the Israeli had brought the caviar.
Again she leaned toward us. “And when Leonard saw the Iranian seal on the tin he wouldn’t eat the caviar, and the general said ‘don’t be a fool, don’t make me go to war for it,’ it was hilarious.”
The absence of caviar at the American Embassy Christmas party reminded Charlotte Douglas of this story.
She talked constantly. She talked feverishly. She talked as if Victor had released her from vows of silence by walking up to where she stood with Ardis Bradley and offering her a crab puff. Every memory was “lyrical,” every denouement “hilarious,” and sometimes “ironic” as well. Her face was flushed but she was not drunk: she stood very straight and refused even the weak rum punches the Bradleys favored for general entertainments. She seemed to be receiving these pointless but bizarrely arresting stories out of some deep vacuum of nervous exhaustion, transmitting them dutifully in a voice soft and clear and oddly confidential. She used words as a seven-year-old might, as if she had heard them and liked their adult sound but had only the haziest idea of their meaning, and she also mentioned names as a seven-year-old might, with a bewildering disregard for who was listening. “Leonard,” she would say, as if we would naturally know who Leonard was, as if the Minister of Defense of a Central American republic and his norteamericana sister-in-law, acquaintances of an hour in the crush of an official reception, were of course privy to all the people and places in her life.
There was “Leonard.”
There was “Warren.”
There was “Marin.”
There was the house on California Street in San Francisco and there were the meetings in Calcutta and La Paz and in limousines at Lod Airport.
There were the hotel suites, always “flooded with flowers.”
There was the missed plane and its happy ending: Air Force One.
“Imagine Leonard on Air Force One.” She had one of those odd intimate laughs that seemed simultaneously to include everyone within hearing and to exclude all possibility of inquiry. “Ardis. Tell them. You know Leonard.”
“Actually I don’t quite,” Ardis Bradley said.
“For that matter imagine Leonard on a camel,” Charlotte Douglas said.
“Leonard,” Victor said tentatively, looking at Ardis Bradley. “Leonard would be her—”
“Actually I think Tuck might know him,” Ardis Bradley said. Ardis had spent twenty years in places like Sierra Leone and Boca Grande and Chevy Chase learning to go look for Tuck when she did not want to answer a question. “Actually I don’t want Tuck to miss this.”
“Leonard on that camel.” Still laughing Charlotte Douglas touched Victor’s arm. “After lunch one day in Kuwait.”
Victor had the look of someone who had waded out too far. Ardis Bradley had vanished. I was myself unclear as to why this Leonard declined Iranian caviar in one story and lunched in Kuwait in another.
“The inevitable five-course lunch. In the inevitable Valerian Rybar dining room. Followed by the inevitable camel. I tried to postpone the camel part, I kept eating and eating, everything had this vile mint taste, I kept trying to distract the sheikh, I kept asking him what I could—”
She broke off abruptly and shrugged.
“What you could—?”
“It was hilarious.” She was looking around the room as if unsure how she had gotten there. “I used to like mint but I don’t any more, do you?”
“You kept asking the sheikh what you could—?”
“I suppose it’s one of those abandoned tastes. As opposed to acquired. Mint.” She focused on Victor with difficulty. “I kept asking the sheikh what I could send him from America. Of course.”
“And then,” Victor prompted.
“He wanted eight-track cassettes and flowered sheets.” Her voice was absent. “They all do.”
“But after lunch?”
“After lunch?”
“The camel?”
“The camel.” She seemed relieved to be handed the thread to her story but had lost interest in telling it. “So Leonard rode the camel. Of course. Leonard had to ride the camel.”
“Leonard would be—”
“You know how the Kuwaiti are.”
“Your husband? Leonard would be your husband?”
“One of them.” Her voice was still absent. “I mean they lay on a camel, you have to ride the camel.”
“And he has occasion to travel a great deal.” Victor was not to be deflected. “Your husband. Leonard. He travels. For business. For pleasure. For whatever.”
“He runs guns,” Charlotte Douglas said. “I wish they had caviar.”
Victor stared at her.
She speared a shrimp, dipped it in mayonnaise and offered it to Victor. Victor made no response.
“I don’t mean literally.” She spoke with disinterested patience and still held out the shrimp to Victor. “I don’t mean he literally buys and sells the hardware.”
“The hardware,” Victor said.
She ate the shrimp herself and seemed about to drop the toothpick into the six-hundred-dollar handbag with the broken clasp when Tuck Bradley appeared. To my astonishment she handed Tuck Bradley the toothpick. To my further astonishment he stood there holding it, between two fingers, looking prissy and foolish. Beyond handing him the toothpick Charlotte seemed entirely unaware of Tuck Bradley’s presence. “He’s kind of a lawyer,” she said finally. “He’s kind of a lawyer in San Francisco.”
“If you’re talking about Leonard he’s a very well-known lawyer,” Tuck Bradley said.
“In a way,” Charlotte said.
“In San Francisco,” Tuck Bradley said.
“And in some other places,” Charlotte said.
And then, her animation returning, she again touched Victor’s arm in that way she had of physically touching strangers, of reaching out unconsciously and then drawing back as if she had just realized the gesture’s sexual freight; that mannerism, that tic, that way of barely suggesting impossible intimacy. She did this only to strangers but she did not do it to all strangers. I never saw her do it to a woman and I never saw her do it to Antonio. She never did it to Gerardo either but that was because Gerardo did it first, to her. Sexual freight was another area in which I would have to say that Gerardo and Charlotte were well met.
“You know what you need here,” she said to Victor, lifting her fingers from his arm as if burned. “You know what Boca Grande needs.”
“We’re making great headway with the People-to-People program,” Tuck Bradley said. “Leaps and bounds.”
Neither Charlotte nor Victor looked at him.
“I know what you need here,” Charlotte said.
“What do I need here,” Victor said. His voice was almost hoarse. “Say it.”
She studied the square emerald on the hand that had touched Victor and slid it up and down. She seemed aware of nothing she was doing. She was reflexively seductive. I did not want to watch this happening. I did not want to think of Victor and this woman in the apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio and I did not want to see the black Mercedes limousine with the BOCA GRANDE 2 plates parked outside the Caribe.
“Think of what made Acapulco,” she said finally. “Think of what turned Acapulco around overnight.”
Victor stared at the emerald as if transfixed.
Tuck Bradley snapped the toothpick in two.
I looked away.
“I’m not sure Mrs. Douglas realizes the problems,” Tuck Bradley said.
“Think,” Charlotte repeated.
“Say it,” Victor repeated.
“A film festival,” Charlotte Douglas said.
“You won’t want the details but it’s rather a tragic situation,” Ardis Bradley said. “Tuck could tell you better than I.”
“I won’t bore you with the details but it’s rather an interesting situation,” Tuck Bradley said. “Don’t ask her about her daughter.”
I could not have asked Charlotte Douglas about her daughter in any case because Charlotte Douglas had already left, with Victor. I went as planned to Victor’s and ate with Bianca, alone. The black Mercedes limousine with the BOCA GRANDE 2 plates was seen first at the Residencia Vista del Palacio and later at the Caribe. Bianca did not then and docs not now go out, nor does she express interest in her husband’s arrivals and departures. That is another example of the genteel behavior Bianca was taught at Sacre Coeur in New Orleans.
The next afternoon when I saw Charlotte Douglas arguing with the pharmacist in the big drugstore on the Avenida Centrale she did not look at me. She looked disheveled and unwell, her eyes puffy beneath dark glasses, her bright hair unkempt and only partly covered by a bandana.
“You tell me chloromycetin.” The pharmacist slapped the counter with his palm. “I give you chloromycetin.”
“This is tincture of opium.”
“Different type chloromycetin.”
“I can smell it, it’s opium.”
“Same thing. Para la disentería.”
“But they’re not the same thing at all.” Even in her distress she seemed determined to instruct him on this point. “They’re both para la disentería, but they’re quite different. Chloromycetin is a—”
“I give you chloromycetin.”
“Forget the whole thing,” she said, her voice low and her eyes averted from where I stood.
Later that afternoon I sent a maid to the Caribe with twenty chloromycetin and a note asking Charlotte Douglas to have dinner when she was recovered.
“CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS IS ILL,” I SAID AFTER CHRISTMAS lunch in the courtyard at Victor and Bianca’s.
No one had spoken for twenty minutes. I had timed it. I had counted the minutes while I watched two mating flies try to extricate themselves from a melting chocolate shaving on the untouched Bûche de Noël. The children had already been trundled off quarreling to distribute nut cups to veterans, Gerardo had already made his filial call from St. Moritz, Elena had already been photographed in her Red Cross uniform and had changed back into magenta crepe de chine pajamas. Isabel had drunk enough champagne to begin crying softly. Antonio had grown irritable enough with Isabel’s mournful hiccups to borrow a pistol from the guard at the gate and take aim at a lizard in the creche behind Bianca’s fountain. Antonio was always handling guns, or smashing plates. As a gesture toward the spirit of Christmas he had refrained from smashing any plates at lunch, but the effort seemed to have exhausted his capacity for congeniality. Had Antonio been born in other circumstances he would have been put away early as a sociopath.
Bianca remained oblivious.
Bianca remained immersed in the floor plan for an apartment she wanted Victor to take for her in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. Bianca had never been apprised of the fact that Victor already had an apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. For five of these twenty minutes it had seemed to me up in the air whether Antonio was about to shoot up Bianca’s creche or tell Bianca about the Residencia Vista del Palacio.
“I said la norteamericana is sick.”
“Send her to Dr. Schiff,” Antonio muttered. Dr. Schiff was Isabel’s doctor in Arizona. “Let the great healer tell la norteamericana who’s making her sick.”
Victor only gazed at the sky. I did not know whether Victor had seen Charlotte Douglas since the night he took her from the Embassy to the Residencia but I did know that a Ministry courier had delivered twenty-four white roses to the Caribe on Christmas Eve.
“So is Jackie Onassis sick,” Elena said. Elena was leafing fretfully through a back issue of Paris-Match. “Or she was in September.”
“So am I sick,” Isabel said. “I need complete quiet.”
“I should think that’s what you have,” Elena said.
“Not like Arizona,” Isabel said. “I should have stayed through December, Dr. Schiff begged me. The air. The solitude. The long walks, the simple meals. Yoghurt at sunset. You can’t imagine the sunsets.”
“Sounds very lively,” Elena said without looking up. “I wonder if Gerardo knows Jackie Onassis.”
“If that’s the norteamericana Grace is talking about I think she had every right to marry the Greek,” Bianca said. “Not that I would ever care to live in Athens. I wonder about the view from the Residencia.”
“Grace was talking about a different norteamericana, Bianca.” Victor leaned back and clipped a cigar. “Of no interest to you. Or Grace.”
“This norteamericana is of interest only to Victor.” Antonio seemed to be having trouble drawing a bead on the lizard. “But she could tell you about the view from the Residencia. She’s an expert on the view from the Residencia. Victor should introduce you to her.”
“I don’t meet strangers,” Bianca said. “As you know. I take no interest. Look here, the plan for the eleventh floor. If we lived up that high we’d have clear air. No fevers.”
“Almost like Arizona,” Elena said. “I wonder if Gerardo knows Jacqueline de Ribes.”
“Arizona,” Isabel said. “I wonder what Dr. Schiff is doing today.”
Antonio fired twice at the lizard.
The lizard darted away.
Two porcelain wise men shattered.
“Eating yoghurt in the sunset I presume,” Elena said.
“Dr. Schiff doesn’t believe in guns,” Isabel said.
“What do you mean exactly, Isabel, ‘Dr. Schiff doesn’t believe in guns’?” Antonio thrust the pistol into Isabel’s line of sight. “Does Dr. Schiff not believe in the ‘existence’ of guns? Look at it. Touch it. It’s there. What does Dr. Schiff mean exactly?”
Isabel closed her eyes.
Elena closed the copy of Paris-Match.
Bianca began to gather up the fragments of porcelain.
Victor looked at me and spoke very deliberately. “There’s no longer any need for you to see the norteamericana, Grace. An extremely silly woman.”
“But then so is your manicurist,” Elena murmured.
“If I could live on the eleventh floor I think I’d take an interest again,” Bianca said.
“Quite frankly it’s better when you don’t,” Isabel said, abruptly and unsettlingly lucid, and in the silence that followed she stood up and put her arms around Bianca.
For a moment two of my three sisters-in-law stood there in the courtyard with the guard at the gate on Christmas afternoon and buried their faces in each other’s shoulders and stroked each other’s hair. Only their silence suggested their tears. They were little sisters crying.
Elena rubbed at a drop of champagne on her magenta crepe de chine pajamas.
Antonio drummed his nails on the table.
“It might be better if you left,” Victor said to Antonio.
“Maybe I’ll go get your norteamericana to sit on my face,” Antonio said to Victor.
Victor smoked his cigar and looked at me. “Feliz Navidad,” he said after a while.
Here is what Charlotte Douglas was said by Elena to have done with the twenty-four white roses Victor sent her on Christmas Eve: left them untouched in their box and laid the box in the hallway for the night maid.
“IT’S DEPRESSING TO BE SICK IN A HOTEL.”
“I don’t mind it.” She said it as a child might, and she said nothing more.
“At Christmas.”
“I didn’t mind.”
I tried again. “You’re at the mercy of the maids.”
“They’re very nice here.”
I watched Charlotte Douglas unwrap a cracker and fold the cellophane into a neat packet. She had insisted that we meet not at my house but at the Capilla del Mar, that I be her guest.
“Actually I’m never depressed.” The act of saying this seemed to convince her that it was so, and she picked up the wine list in a show of resolute conviviality. “Actually I don’t believe in being depressed. It’s hard to keep wine in this climate, isn’t it? Wine and crackers?”
Through two courses of that difficult dinner she never mentioned Victor.
She guided every topic to its most general application.
She talked as if she had no specific history of her own.
No Leonard.
No Warren.
As dessert was served she mentioned Marin for the first time: she said that she preferred the Capilla del Mar to the Jockey Club because the colored lights strung outside the Capilla del Mar reminded her of the Tivoli Gardens, where she had once flown with Marin for the weekend. Her face came alive with pleasure as she described this adult’s dream of a weekend a child might like, described the puppet shows, the watermills, the picnics with the child. They had made dinners of salami and petits fours. They had scarcely slept. They had wandered beneath the colored lights until Marin’s heels blistered, and then they had taken off their shoes and wandered barefoot.
“And when we got back to the hotel we ordered cocoa from room service.” Charlotte Douglas leaned across the table. “And I let Marin place the order and tip the waiter and I taught her how to wash out her underwear at night.”
I asked if her husband had gone to Copenhagen on business, but she said no. Her husband had not gone to Copenhagen at all. She had just woken up one morning in the house on California Street and decided to fly Marin to Copenhagen. “To see Tivoli. I mean before she was too old to like it.”
Her eyes were fixed on the colored lights strung over our table on the porch at the Capilla del Mar. The lights at the Capilla del Mar were not Christmas lights but souvenirs of the season I married Edgar in São Paulo, the season a deranged Haitian dentist convinced the Minister of Health to string the entire city of Boca Grande with a web of colored lights as a specific against typhoid. The red and blue strings mostly shorted out in the first rain, leaving the city in the evening bathed in a necrotic yellow. So it was the night Edgar and I first arrived in Boca Grande from São Paulo. Edgar took me directly to Millonario and left me there until the epidemic waned. When I next saw the city many people had died and the rest seemed immune and the only lights left were at the Capilla del Mar.
I mentioned this to Charlotte.
“That’s very interesting,” Charlotte said politely, her eyes still on the lights. She had been smoking a cigarette as I talked and there was no ashtray and now, instead of just tossing the cigarette over the porch railing, she flicked off the lighted head with her fingernail, stripped the paper with the same fingernail and crumbled the tobacco neatly into the loam of a potted plant. I had seen men do this often and I had seen women do it in the field but I had never before seen a woman in a beige silk St. Laurent dress do it in a restaurant which passed for fashionable, and the casual dispatch with which Charlotte Douglas did it seemed at distinct odds with her rather demented account of the trip to Copenhagen. “By the way,” she said then. “Marin and I are inseparable.”
Some weeks later Charlotte again mentioned the weekend she had taken Marin to see Tivoli before she was too old to like it. She said that because Marin had run a fever all weekend, a reaction to her smallpox vaccination, they had never left the Hôtel Angleterre. She had obtained a doctor who was very understanding and nice. The manager at the Angleterre had been very understanding and nice and had sent Marin a marzipan carousel to make up for not seeing Tivoli. In any case it had rained all weekend.
One of two things was true: either Charlotte had gone with Marin to the Tivoli Gardens or Charlotte had wanted to go with Marin to the Tivoli Gardens.
Type of Visa TURISTA. Occupation MADRE.
THE NEXT TIME I SAW CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS SHE GRABBED up a chicken on the run and snapped the vertebrae in its neck. I had taken her to the annual picnic for the children of the workers in the Millonario groves and the men were killing chickens with machetes but Charlotte’s kill was clean. There was no blood. She killed this chicken as efficiently and reflexively as she had field-stripped the cigarette at the Capilla del Mar.
“All the children have red shoes,” she said to me and Elena as she handed the dead chicken to the man who had been trying to catch it. She had only smiled vaguely at the man’s attempt to congratulate her. She seemed entirely unaware that for a guest of the dueña to kill a chicken with her hands was at Millonario an event worth remark. Even Elena had forgotten her sulky pique at being in Millonario and was staring at Charlotte, speechless.
“Red cardboard patent-leather shoes,” Charlotte said. “All of them. Why do the children wear red shoes?”
“That chicken,” Elena said.
“I mean you see them all over the tropics. Those red shoes.”
“How exactly did you kill that chicken?” Elena said.
“Not the right way at all, actually.” Charlotte’s expression did not change. “Actually they’re better if you bleed them live. Marin wanted a pair of red shoes once. When she was six. She cried, I wouldn’t buy them.”
Charlotte looked away and lifted the hair off her neck.
“I did have a baby who had red shoes,” she said after a while. She stood up then and rinsed her hands in a ditch and when she straightened up she dried her hands on her skirt and gazed for a long time at the men still killing chickens with machetes. “You ought to tell them, chickens are better if you bleed them live. There was no reason not to buy Marin those shoes.”
Nationality NORTEAMERICANA.
A GOLD CIGARETTE LIGHTER ENGRAVED “D.N.C. ATLANTIC CITY ’64.”
A letter of introduction from the Wells-Fargo Bank in San Francisco to the Banco de la República, collapsed two regimes back.
A California drivers’ license, recently expired, and credit cards from American Express, Gulf Oil, the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue.
$26 American and an equivalent amount in local currency.
An unsealed envelope addressed only to a post-office box in Buffalo, New York. An unfinished letter describing the resemblance of the Capilla del Mar to the Tivoli Gardens.
Two lipsticks, one broken pencil, a folded envelope containing four sulfathalidine and two salt tablets, a vial containing a scent predominantly gardenia, a fortune-cookie tape printed “A surprise is in store for someone you love,” and a frayed clipping of one day’s horoscope from Prensa Latina.
This is a list of the items said to be in Charlotte Douglas’s possession (and later returned to the manager of the Hotel del Caribe) at the time of her death in the Estadio Nacional. The square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring was neither listed nor returned. I took the gold cigarette lighter to Marin in Buffalo but Marin said she had no interest in the past. I do.