A Book of Common Prayer

1

OIL WELLS ABOUT TO COME IN HAVE A SOUND THE ATTENTIVE ear can detect.

As do earthquakes.

Volcanoes about to erupt transmit for days or weeks before their convulsion a signal called “the harmonic tremor.”

Similarly I know for months before the fact when there is about to be a “transition” in Boca Grande. There is the occasional tank on the Avenida Centrale. Sentries with carbines appear on the roof of the presidential palace. For reasons I have never understood the postal rates begin to fluctuate mysteriously. There is a mounting mania for construction, for getting one’s cut while the government lasts: dummy corporations multiply, phantom payrolls metastasize. No one has an office but everyone has a mail drop. A game is underway, the “winner” being the player who lands his marker in the Ministry of Defense, and the play has certain ritual moves: whoever wants the Ministry that year must first get the guerrilleros into the game The guerrilleros seem always to believe that they are playing on their own, but they are actually a diversion, a disruptive element placed on the board only to be “quelled” by “stronger leadership.” Guns and money begin to reach the guerrilleros via the usual channels. Mimeographed communiqués begin to appear, and twenty people are detained for questioning. A few are reported as prison suicides and a few more reported in exile but months later, again mysteriously, the same twenty are detained for questioning.

A mounting giddiness about the proximity of the guerrilleros sets the social tone of the city: many tea dances are planned, many adulterous liaisons initiated.

Many citizens adopt eccentric schedules to comply with the terms of their kidnapping insurance.

El Presidente, whoever is playing El Presidente at the moment, falls ill, and is urged to convalesce at Bariloche, in Argentina.

Gerardo arrives, and stays for the action.

These events in Boca Grande are inflexibly reported on the outside as signs of a popular uprising, but they are not. “NEW LEASE ON DEMOCRACY IN BOCA GRANDE” is one headline I recall from the New York Times. I believe Victor was the lessor of democracy in question.

I told Charlotte all along that I was hearing the harmonic tremor but Charlotte paid no attention.

Charlotte appeared to have used up all her attention.

2

I THINK NOW THAT IN THE BEGINNING SHE STAYED ON in Boca Grande precisely because it seemed not to demand attentiveness. I recall having made, in the early days of my marriage to Edgar, somewhat the same mistake about Boca Grande, as well as about Edgar himself, but I revised my impressions to coincide with reality. Charlotte did the reverse. The city must have seemed to her at once familiar and distant, potentially “colorful” but in no way unmanageable, a place not unlike the matchbox model village that she and Dickie had once laid out along an irrigation ditch on the Hollister ranch: a place she could revise to suit herself as she had not been able to revise the other points on her recent itinerary. Here in Boca Grande there was the matchbox hotel in which one stayed, there was the matchbox hotel in which one did not stay. There was the “best” restaurant, there was the “second-best” restaurant, there were the districts in which nurses pushed baby carriages on Sunday afternoons and the districts in which nurses did not push baby carriages on Sunday afternoons.

There was no intimidating social life but only the Jockey Club, a place where a norteamericana in a good linen dress might well have expected to pass unnoticed.

There was no intimidating history but only the Museo de la República, a place where a norteamericana with a six-hundred-dollar handbag might well have expected to spend an undemanding hour studying cracked spinets and bronzed Winged Victories and other Strasser-Mendana family artifacts.

There were what seemed to Charlotte the “enchanting” children selling contraband Marlboro cigarettes outside the Caribe and there was what seemed to Charlotte the “amusing” accordionist playing “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” in the Caribe lobby on Saturday nights and there were what must have seemed to Charlotte the toy soldiers with their toy carbines on the roof of the matchbox palace. The night Victor met Charlotte at the American Embassy Christmas party and took her for the first time to his apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio, Charlotte pulled back the curtains, gazed down at the palace, and pronounced its roof “ideal” for the fireworks which would officially open the mirage she was already calling the “Boca Grande Festival de Cine, First Annual.” By the time Charlotte left Victor’s apartment that night her festival was not only the First Annual but Internacional.

A few things about Boca Grande Charlotte did not perceive as toy.

She saw the American Embassy as “real” and she left her calling cards there in little lined envelopes embossed “Tiffany et Cie” and she never noticed the workmen who every morning scrubbed obscenities from the white limestone walls.

She saw the proximity of Caracas as “real” and she looked at a map every day to reassure herself on this point and she never knew that the four-lane Carretera del Libertador to Venezuela, marked so clearly on the maps, existed only on the maps, and possibly in the memory of whoever diverted the Alianza funding for the Carretera into the construction of the Residencia Vista del Palacio.

I believe this was Victor but it may have been Antonio.

It was certainly not Luis.

Luis was the Libertador to have been memorialized.

It occurs to me now that it could even have been Edgar but there remain some areas in which I, like Charlotte, prefer my own version.

As a matter of fact Charlotte saw everything about the actual geographical location of Boca Grande as “real,” and crucial to her: in a certain dim way Charlotte believed that she had located herself at the very cervix of the world, the place through which a child lost to history must eventually pass. That Marin would turn up in Boca Grande Charlotte did not literally believe but never really doubted, at least until that day in September when Leonard told her where Marin actually was. Until that day when she learned for certain that Marin was not a victim of circumstance Charlotte believed without ever thinking it that she would be sitting at the Jockey Club one night and the waiter would tell her that a light-haired child who resembled her had come to the kitchen, applied for work as a waitress. Until that day when she learned for certain that Marin was not looking for her Charlotte believed instinctively that she would be buying the Miami Herald at the airport one morning and would hear a voice like her own on the tarmac.

Charlotte and Marin would share a room, order hot chocolate from room service, sit on the bed and catch up.

Charlotte and Marin would buy Marin a dress, get Marin a manicure, cure Marin’s nerves with consommé and naps.

And when Marin was herself again Charlotte and Marin would drive to Caracas on the four-lane Carretera del Libertador, Charlotte and Marin would fly to Bogotá, Charlotte would show her only child the Andes.

Her only child.

Her oldest child.

The only child she ever dressed in flowered lawn for Easter.

One more thing in Boca Grande Charlotte saw as “real”: the airport.

Of course the airport.

Perhaps because Charlotte believed in the airport and in the American Embassy and in the four-lane Carretera del Libertador to Venezuela she did not at first experience the weightless isolation which afflicts most visitors to Boca Grande. Perhaps because in those early days Charlotte had no letters to send or receive she did not notice that mail service was increasingly sporadic, that mailboxes all over the city were left to overflow and there was developing a currency market in stamps. Perhaps because for a while Charlotte had no calls to make or get she did not notice that the telephone lines were down more and more of the time, that calls to Miami were being routed through Quito and the American Embassy was resorting to ham radio to make routine contact with its consulate in Millonario.

She noticed that the lights at the Capilla del Mar resembled those at the Tivoli Gardens.

She did not notice that the pits in the porch railing at the Capilla del Mar resembled those made by carbine fire.

“Actually it doesn’t involve me in the least,” Charlotte told me. “I mean does it.”

When I told Charlotte in March that there would come a day when it might be possible to interpret her presence in certain situations as “political.”

“Actually I’m not ‘political’ in the least,” Charlotte told me. “I mean my mind doesn’t run that way.”

When I told Charlotte in April that there would come a day when she should leave Boca Grande.

Meanwhile Charlotte would wait for Marin in this miniature capital where nothing need be real. Charlotte would remain as she waited an interested observer of everything she saw. Charlotte would remain a tourist, a traveler with good will and good credentials and no memory of how bougainvillea grew on a hotel wall in Mérida or how peonies could swell in a hospital room in New Orleans. Had Gerardo never come home Charlotte might have managed to maintain this fiction, although increasingly I doubt it.

Perhaps Gerardo does not play the motive role in this narrative I thought he did.

Perhaps only Charlotte Douglas and her husbands do.

Perhaps only Charlotte Douglas does, since it was Charlotte who chose to stay.

3

“YOU SMELL AMERICAN,” WAS THE FIRST THING GERARDO ever said to Charlotte Douglas.

“I wonder if that could be because she is,” Elena said.

“I wonder if I do,” Ardis Bradley said.

I cannot now think how I happened to invite Charlotte for drinks that afternoon. It was Gerardo’s second day home and he had asked to see only the family, and Tuck and Ardis Bradley, and Carmen Arrellano, who had been cultivating Antonio since Gerardo’s last visit and on this particular afternoon was sulking in a hammock and ignoring her cousin, who happened to be passing the shrimp. As far as that went the only person Carmen Arrellano had acknowledged all afternoon was Antonio, and she had not exactly spoken to him. She had merely arched her back slightly whenever he passed the hammock where she lay.

But Charlotte.

I was not yet that close to Charlotte.

She had arrived in Boca Grande in November, Victor and I had met her at the Embassy in December, and when Gerardo came home it was late January, early February. I had not yet seen the pictures in Vogue of the last night she spent with her second husband. I had not yet met her first in New Orleans. I was just beginning cobalt, and was quite often tired, and impatient, and generally more absorbed with some gram-negative bacteria I was studying than with this woman I did not understand.

I suppose I might have invited Charlotte only to discomfit Victor.

Victor flatters himself that any woman he touches is rendered unfit for normal social encounter.

In fact I have no idea why I invited Charlotte.

I only remember Charlotte arriving late and the sun just falling and Gerardo watching her as she walked across the lawn with the last light behind her. I remember her dress, a thin batiste dress with pale wildflowers to her ankles. I remember her high-heeled sandals. I remember thinking that she looked at once absurdly frivolous and mildly “tragic,” a word I do not use easily or with any great approval.

“Look at her bébé dress,” Elena said. Elena was watching Gerardo. “Not that she is a bébé.”

“So original actually,” Ardis Bradley said. “If you like that.”

But Gerardo only watched Charlotte Douglas.

I remember that the grass was wet and that Charlotte walked very slowly and that when she stumbled once on a sprinkler head she stopped and took off the high-heeled sandals and then walked on toward us, barefoot.

“Very déjeuner sur l’herbe,” Elena said.

“California,” Ardis Bradley said.

I remember that Charlotte only kissed me absently and dropped into a wicker chair and did not speak.

You smell American.

I wonder if that could be because she is.

I wonder if I do.

And still Charlotte said nothing at all.

“You haven’t met my son,” I remember saying in the silence. “Gerardo. Mrs. Douglas. Mrs. Douglas is staying at the Caribe.”

But Gerardo said nothing, only touched Charlotte’s hair, a touch so tentative that it was almost not a touch at all.

Almost not a touch.

But it was.

“Extraordinary,” Elena said.

“I wonder what ‘American’ smells like exactly,” Ardis Bradley said.

Charlotte stood up then and without taking her eyes from Gerardo she brushed back her hair where he had touched it. She did not seem to know what to do with her hands after that and she fingered the batiste of her skirt. She looked unsteady, ill, stricken by some fever she did not understand, and when I put out my hand to steady her she flinched and pulled away.

“I don’t like the Caribe,” was the second thing Gerardo ever said to Charlotte Douglas.

His voice was low but so conversational and so unexceptional that for the moment after he spoke I could see Ardis Bradley marshaling opinions on the Caribe, pro and con.

Not Elena.

Elena’s only developed instinct is for the presence of the sexual current.

“I want you to take an apartment,” was the third thing Gerardo ever said to Charlotte Douglas.

4

SEXUAL CURRENT.

The retreat into pastoral imagery to suggest this current has always seemed to me curious and decadent.

The dissolve through the goldenrod.

The romance of the rose.

Equally specious.

As usual I favor a mechanical view.

What Charlotte and Gerardo did that afternoon was reverse the entire neutron field on my lawn, exhausting and disturbing and altering not only the mood but possibly the cell structure (I am interested in this possibility) of everyone there. Charlotte never spoke at all to Gerardo, only turned away and engaged Tuck Bradley in one of those reflexive monologues she tended to initiate at the instant of distraction. It sometimes seemed to me that these monologues had for Charlotte the same protective function that ink has for a squid. This one touched on whether or not Tuck Bradley had ever been in the courtroom when Leonard did “one of his really dazzling redirects” (Tuck Bradley had not); what Tuck Bradley thought about the national lottery (Tuck Bradley saw both its “good points” and its “bad points”); what Tuck Bradley thought about assassination in the United States (Tuck Bradley thought it “deplorable”); and what “offbeat” hotels Tuck Bradley could recommend in Paris.

Tuck Bradley recommended the George V.

“What about London,” Charlotte said, her voice suddenly weary. She did not turn to meet Gerardo’s gaze.

“I would say …” Tuck Bradley tamped his pipe. “The Savoy.”

Charlotte took a drink from a tray and I waited to see what she would do with it. Charlotte never exactly “drank” a drink. Sometimes she drained it like a child and sometimes she just played with the ice and quite often she dropped it. This time she set it on a tiled bench, quite carefully, without tasting it.

“Or Claridge’s,” Tuck Bradley said.

There was a silence.

“I want to jot all this down,” Charlotte said vaguely, and then she turned away from Tuck Bradley.

Gerardo watched her as she ran across the lawn.

Victor watched her as she ran across the lawn.

Antonio crouched on the lawn by Carmen Arrellano’s hammock and watched Gerardo and Victor.

“This is so absorbing but you can take me home now,” Carmen Arrellano said to Antonio.

“Norteamericana cunt,” Antonio said without moving.

“And I suppose another choice in Paris would be …” Tuck Bradley was still intent on his pipe. “The Plaza Athénée.”

“She’ll definitely want to jot that down,” Elena said. “Possibly you could catch her and tell her. The Plaza Athénée. Are we going to get dinner? Is anyone going to le Jockey?”

“Did Charlotte Douglas say she was going to Paris?” Ardis Bradley said.

“ ‘Le Jockey,’ ” Carmen Arrellano said to Antonio. “Listen to Elena. Your interesting sister-in-law thinks she’s in Paris. I don’t want dinner.”

“I mean if she is going to Paris,” Ardis Bradley said, “she’s going to miss her husband.”

I looked at Ardis Bradley.

She could not have had more than two drinks but she did not drink well.

No one else seemed to have heard what she said.

“I want dinner,” Elena said. “And I also want to go to Paris.”

“Go to Paris.” Antonio rose from his crouch. Some chemical exchange in his brain seemed to have switched on another of his rages. I used to be interested in Antonio’s cell metabolism. “Go to Paris, go to Geneva. Buy a parrot. Buy two parrots, give one to your friend the norteamericana cunt.”

“The norteamericana cunt is not your sister-in-law’s friend,” Carmen Arrellano murmured from the depths of the hammock. “The norteamericana cunt is Victor’s friend.”

“Gerardo will drop you home now, Carmen.” Victor spoke very clearly in a tired voice. His eyes were closed. “Won’t you. Gerardo.”

“No,” Antonio said. “He won’t.”

“Antonio is going to drop Carmen home,” Gerardo said. He was still gazing across the lawn. “Antonio is either going to drop Carmen home or Antonio is going to drop Carmen in Arizona. With Isabel and Dr. Schiff. Carmen’s choice. Why is she here?”

“Who?” Victor said.

“Mrs. Douglas.”

“More to the point, why are you here?” Victor did not open his eyes. “Why aren’t you off bobsledding somewhere.”

“I thought my country needed me,” Gerardo said. He did not turn around. “Patria, Victor. Right or wrong. Where exactly is Mr. Douglas?”

The only sound was that of the DDT truck which grinds past this house early each evening to spray.

“Caracas,” Ardis Bradley said.

This time everyone seemed to have heard what Ardis Bradley said.

“Or he was when he called Tuck.”

Victor opened his eyes and stared at her.

“Wasn’t it Caracas? Tuck?”

“I have no idea.” Tuck Bradley stood up. “It’s time, Ardis.”

“I have always loathed that phrase. ‘It’s time, Ardis.’ You told me Caracas.”

“We’ll get dinner, Ardis.”

Ardis Bradley stood up unsteadily.

I watched the cloud of DDT settle over the spindly roses at the far end of the lawn.

It occurred to me that my attempt to grow roses and a lawn at the equator was a delusion worthy of Charlotte Douglas.

One of whose husbands appeared to be in Caracas.

Not a delusion at all.

“Is he coming here?” Victor said suddenly.

“I would rather hope not,” Tuck Bradley said, and he smiled, and he took Ardis Bradley’s arm and after they left no one spoke for a long time. I think no one bothered to get dinner that night except Charlotte, who was seen at the Jockey Club as usual and was reported to have eaten not only the plato frío and the spiny lobster but two orders of flan.

At the time this surprised me.

At the time I had no real idea of how oblivious Charlotte Douglas was to the disturbance she could cause in the neutron field of a room, or a lawn.

5

AS A MATTER OF FACT LEONARD DOUGLAS DID NOT COME to Boca Grande that spring.

Leonard Douglas did not come to Boca Grande until early September, at a time when the airport was closed at least part of every day while the carriers negotiated with the guerrilleros and when visitors to the Caribe were routinely frisked before they could enter the dining room.

I have no idea whether he had even intended to come in the spring, or what he had called Tuck Bradley to say.

Or to ask.

Neither Ardis nor Tuck Bradley ever mentioned the call from Caracas again.

If he had called from Caracas to ask about Charlotte he never took the next step and called Charlotte herself: Victor had her calls monitored, both at the Caribe and at the apartment on the Avenida del Mar she rented the week after she met Gerardo, and, at least until the week the guerrilleros knocked out the central monitoring system, there was no record of a call from Leonard Douglas to Charlotte Douglas.

Nor, on the other hand, was there any record of a call from Leonard Douglas to Tuck Bradley, which made Victor depressed and suspicious about his Embassy surveillance team.

I believe he put the entire team under what he called “internal surveillance,” but it turned out to be just another case of mechanical failure.

Most things at the Ministry did.

I recall thinking that Victor would not be entirely sorry to turn over the Ministry to whoever was trying to get it that year.

“You’re aware Gerardo’s still seeing the norteamericana,” Victor said one morning in March.

I knew that he was disturbed because he had come to see me in my laboratory. Victor does not like to see me in my laboratory. His forehead sweats, his pupils contract. I have observed taboo systems in enough cultures to know precisely how Victor feels about me in my laboratory: Victor distrusts the scientific method, and my familiarity with it gives me a certain power over him.

In my laboratory I am therefore particularly taboo.

To Victor.

For some years I used this taboo to my advantage but I am no longer so sure that Victor was not right.

“I believe they’re ‘dating,’ Victor.” I did not look up from what I was doing. “I see her too. What about it.”

“I’m not talking about you seeing her.”

“I took her to Millonario. She killed a chicken. With her bare hands.”

“I’m not talking about you seeing her and I’m not talking about any chickens seeing her. I’m talking about Gerardo seeing her. Observed at all hours. Entering and leaving. I don’t like it.”

“Why don’t you have him deported,” I said.

Victor took another tack.

“You’re very sophisticated these days.”

I said nothing.

“Very tolerant.”

I said nothing.

“I suppose with your vast sophistication and tolerance you don’t mind the fact that your son also spends time with the faggot. The West Indian faggot. Whatever his circus name is, I’m not familiar with it.”

I transferred a piece of tissue from one solution to another.

Victor meant Bebe Chicago.

Victor was as familiar with Bebe Chicago’s name as I was, probably more familiar, since Victor received a detailed report on Bebe Chicago every morning at nine o’clock.

With his coffee.

“I sometimes wonder if your son has leanings. That way.”

“No need to worry about the norteamericana, then.”

Victor drummed his fingers on a flask and watched me for a long time without speaking.

“The West Indian is financing the guerrilleros,” he said suddenly. “I happen to know that.”

“I know you ‘happen to know that,’ Victor. You told me a year ago. When Gerardo and Elena were such a burden to you.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you that this West Indian is financing the guerrilleros?”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you either. If it did you’d arrest him.”

“I don’t arrest him because I don’t want to embarrass your son.”

I said nothing.

Victor would have arrested me if he thought he could carry it off.

“All right then,” Victor said. “You tell me why I don’t arrest him.”

“You don’t arrest him because you want to know who’s financing him. That’s why you don’t arrest him.”

Victor sat in silence drumming his fingers on the flask.

It was the usual unsolved equation of the harmonic tremor in Boca Grande.

If Bebe Chicago was running the guerrilleros then X must be running Bebe Chicago.

Who was X.

This time.

There you had it. The guerrilleros would stage their “expropriations” and leave their communiqués about the “People’s Revolution” and everyone would know who was financing the guerrilleros but for a while no one would know for whose benefit the guerrilleros were being financed. In the end the guerrilleros would all be shot and the true players would be revealed.

Mirabile dictu.

People we knew.

I remembered Luis using the guerrilleros against Anastasio Mendana-Lopez and I also remember Victor using the guerrilleros, against Luis.

I only think that.

I never knew that. Empirically.

In this case of course it would turn out to be Antonio who was using the guerrilleros, against Victor, but no one understood this in March.

Except Gerardo.

Gerardo understood it in March.

Maybe Carmen Arrellano understood it in March too.

Charlotte never did understand it.

I don’t know that either. Empirically.

“I suppose you do know who’s running the West Indian?” Victor said after a while. He was still drumming his fingers on the flask, a barrage of little taps, a tattoo. “I suppose in your infinite wisdom you know who’s running the West Indian and one day you might deign to tell me?”

“How would I know who’s running the West Indian, Victor? I’m not the Minister of Defense. You might want to watch that flask you’re banging around, it’s cancer virus.” It was not cancer virus but I liked to reinforce the taboo. “Live.”

Victor stood up abruptly.

“Disgusting,” he said finally. “Filthy. Crude. The thought of it makes me retch.”

“Are you talking about the cancer virus or the guerrilleros?”

“I am talking,” he whispered, his voice strangled, “about the kind of woman who would kill a chicken with her bare hands.”

It occurred to me that morning that Charlotte Douglas was acquiring certain properties of taboo.

Which might have stood her in good stead.

Had Victor been in charge at the Estadio Nacional instead of waiting it out with El Presidente at Bariloche.

6

WHEN MARIN BOGART ASKED ME WITHOUT MUCH INTEREST what her mother had “done” in Boca Grande there was very little I could think to say.

Very little that Marin Bogart would have understood.

A lost child in a dirty room in Buffalo.

A child who claimed no interest in the past.

Or the future.

Or the present.

As far as I could see.

“She did some work in a clinic,” I said.

“Charity,” Marin Bogart said.

The indictment lay between us for a while.

“Cholera actually,” I said.

Marin Bogart shrugged.

Cholera was something Marin Bogart had been protected against, along with diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, and undue dental decay.

Cholera was one more word Marin Bogart did not understand.

“And after that she worked in a birth control clinic.”

“Classic,” Marin Bogart said. “Absolutely classic.”

“How exactly is it ‘classic.’ ”

“Birth control is the most flagrant example of how the ruling class practices genocide.”

“Maybe not the most flagrant,” I said.

A lost daughter in a dirty room in Buffalo with dishes in the sink and an M–3 on the bed.

A daughter who never had much use for words but had finally learned to string them together so that they sounded almost like sentences.

A daughter who chose to believe that her mother had died on the wrong side of a “people’s revolution.”

“There was no ‘right side,’ ” I said. “There was no issue. There were only—”

“That is a typically—”

“There were only personalities.”

“—A typically bourgeois view of the revolutionary process.”

She had Charlotte’s eyes.

Maybe there is no motive role in this narrative.

Maybe it is just something that happened.

Then why is it in my mind when nothing else is.

7

WHAT HAD CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS “DONE” IN BOCA GRANDE.

I have no idea whether Marin Bogart was asking me that day what her mother had “done” with her life in Boca Grande or what her mother had “done” to get killed in Boca Grande.

In either case the answer is obscure.

The question of Charlotte Douglas has never been “settled” for me.

Never “decided.”

I know how to make models of life itself, DNA, RNA, helices double and single and squared, but I try to make a model of Charlotte Douglas’s “character” and I see only a shimmer.

Like the shimmer of the oil slick on the boulevards after rain in Progreso.

Let me try a less holistic approach to the model.

We had the cholera epidemic in April that year.

The cholera epidemic in which Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping.

I gave inoculations with Charlotte, but only for a few hours the first morning, because I had no patience with the fact that almost no one in Boca Grande would cross the street to be inoculated. They were all fatalistas about cholera. Cholera was an opportunity for God to prove His love.

“Then let Him prove it,” I said to Charlotte at the end of the first morning.

“We have to make it attractive,” Charlotte said. “Obviously.”

And she did.

She set out to make each inoculation seem to the inoculee not a hedge against the hereafter but an occasion of mild profit in the here and now. She left the clinic for an hour and she bought chocolates wrapped in pink tinfoil from the Caribe kitchen and she made a deal for whisky miniatures with an unemployed Braniff steward who had access to the airport catering trucks and, until the remaining vaccine was appropriated by a colonel named Rafael Higuera, she dispensed these favors with every 1.5 cc. shot of Lederle Cholera Strains Ogawa-Inaba.

“Why didn’t she just lie down and open her legs for them,” Antonio said to Gerardo in my living room. It was the evening of the day the vaccine had been appropriated and Antonio had already expressed his conviction that Higuera had performed a public service by preventing Charlotte from further contaminating the populace with her American vaccine. I have never known why Antonio was so particularly enraged by everything Charlotte did. I suppose she was a norteamericana, she was a woman, she was an unpredictable element. I suppose she was a version of me at whom he could vent his rage. “Ask the great lady why she didn’t just do that. Higuera didn’t go far enough.”

“How far should he have gone,” Gerardo said, and smiled slightly at me.

“She’d throw her apron on my feet once,” Antonio said. “Just once.”

“What would you do,” Gerardo said.

“Drop her,” Antonio said.

“Drop her,” Gerardo said.

“Between the eyes.”

“Seems extreme,” Gerardo said.

“How can you be entertained by this?” I said to Gerardo.

“How can you not be?” Gerardo said to me.

During the week after the appropriation of the vaccine Charlotte spoke not at all to me, spoke only in a glazed and distracted way to Gerardo, and was known to have placed two telephone calls to Leonard Douglas, neither of them completed. At the end of the week she gave me her revised version of the appropriation of the vaccine, the version in which the army was lending its resources to the inoculation program, the version in which she had simply misunderstood Higuera, the version in which he had never offered to sell her the vaccine but had simply expressed concern as to whether she herself had been inoculated; once she had arrived at this version Charlotte never mentioned cholera again, although people continued dying from it for several weeks.

After the cholera epidemic she appeared for a while that May and June to retreat into unspecified gastrointestinal infection less often, and she perfected that frenetic public energy which made many people, particularly Elena, suspect her of a reliance on major amphetamines. Even after she had moved most of her things into the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, even after she had with her own hands whitewashed all the walls and filled the empty rooms with flowers and begun to have what she called her “evenings” there, she kept her room at the Caribe, and she would go there every day for breakfast and to spend most of the day.

She began her “writing” during these days she spent alone at the Caribe.

She remembered her “film festival,” and she drew up endless lists of names: actors, directors, agents, former agents who were then studio executives, former studio executives who were then independent producers, and what I once heard her call “other movers and shakers.” She had met many of these people with Leonard and she was certain that they would be delighted to lend their names and films, once she put it to them.

Which she intended to do as soon as she completed the lists.

She got the idea for her “boutique,” and she planned her projected inventory: needlepoint canvases of her own design and Porthault linens, the market for which in Boca Grande would have seemed to be limited to Elena, Bianca, Isabel, and me. She had enlisted Gerardo’s help in finding a storefront to rent and she was certain that the boutique would pick up the character of the entire neighborhood, once she got it in shape for the opening.

Which she intended to do as soon as Bebe Chicago got his Dominicans out of the storefront.

“Imagine cymbidiums,” she said on the afternoon she showed me her storefront. “Masses of them. In hemp baskets. The illusion of the tropics. That’s the effect to strive for.”

As a matter of fact the illusion of the tropics seemed to me an odd effect to strive for in a city rotting on the equator, but the actual condition of the storefront was such that I could only nod. The room was cramped and grimy and the single window was blacked out. Outside the afternoon sun was blazing but inside there was only the light from two bare bulbs. In the room, besides Charlotte and me, there were several sleeping bags, a hot plate, an open and unflushed toilet, a cheap dinette chair in which Bebe Chicago sat talking on the telephone, and a table at which a man whom Charlotte had introduced as “Mr. Sanchez” seemed to be translating a United States Army arms manual into Spanish.

Charlotte appeared oblivious.

“Lighten, brighten, open it up. The perfect creamy white on the walls, maybe the palest robin’s-egg on the ceiling. And lattice. Lots of lattice. Mr. Sanchez is doing the lattice for me.” Charlotte smiled fondly at the man at the table. He did not smile back. “Aren’t you.”

“Mr. Sanchez” stared at Charlotte as if she were a moth he had never before observed and turned to Bebe Chicago. “Are we interested in the AR–16?” he said in Spanish.

“AR–15 only.” Bebe Chicago hung up the telephone and smiled at me. “Gerardo’s mama naturally speaks Spanish, mon chéri.”

“Think of a lath-house crossed with a Givenchy perfume box,” Charlotte said.

“Can I offer Gerardo’s mama a café-filtre,” Bebe Chicago said. He stood up with a magician’s flourish and placed the dinette chair in front of me. “Can I offer Gerardo’s mama this superb example of post-industrial craftsmanship.”

I remained standing.

“Possibly gardenias,” Charlotte said. “No. Cymbidiums.”

Bebe Chicago smiled and sat in the chair himself.

“Then can I tell Gerardo’s mama how much I admire her shoes,” he said. “Can I at least tell her that.”

“You can tell her what that Bren gun is doing behind the toilet,” I said.

“That’s not a Bren at all,” Bebe Chicago said after only the slightest beat, his voice still silky. “That’s a Kalashnikov. Russian. Out of Syria. The Chinese make one too, but it’s inferior to the Russian. The Russian is the best. A really super weapon.”

“Don’t talk about guns,” Charlotte said, and her voice was low and abrupt, and after that day she seemed to lose interest in her boutique.

During this period Charlotte also had her “research.”

She had her “paperwork.”

In other words she would sit alone in her room at the Caribe and she would try to read books and she would try to write letters. She tried to read a book about illiteracy in Latin America, but in lieu of finishing it she wrote a letter to Prensa Latina offering her services as author of a daily “literacy lesson.” She tried to read Alberto Masferrer’s El Minimum Vital but she still had difficulty reading Spanish, and she had read a hundred pages of El Minimum Vital before she learned from Gerardo that it was about the progressive tax. She borrowed from Ardis Bradley a volume that was obviously a CIA-sponsored “handbook” on Boca Grande, and she discovered in the introduction to this handbook an invitation to address her suggestions “for factual or interpretive or other changes” to a post-office box in Washington.

To this post-office box in Washington Charlotte addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on the subject of Boca Grande.

She never received an answer but first Kasindorf and then Riley and finally Tuck Bradley received word that she was in the country.

In case they had missed her.

Nor did Charlotte receive answers from most of the other officials and agencies and writers and editors to whom she addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on a wide range of subjects.

I believe mainly “other” changes.

The only bad time of these days Charlotte spent at the Caribe was about four o’clock.

At about four o’clock the shine of plausibility would seem to go off her projects.

At about four o’clock she would find herself sitting in the room at the Caribe remembering something.

She would sometimes call me up at four o’clock and tell me what she was remembering.

For example.

Those crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room of the house on California Street.

Those crossed spots were too bright, or too exposed, she could not determine which.

Those spots had always been too bright, too exposed.

She should perhaps have them recessed in the ceiling.

What did I think.

At a certain point during each of these calls the possession would seem to fade from her voice, and by the time she hung up she would sound almost at peace. She would go downstairs then and sit by the pool and she would watch the peacocks hiding from the heat under the jacaranda trees and she would watch the blocks of ice being dragged across the concrete into the Caribe kitchen. She would imagine the various bacteria waiting in each block of ice. She counted bacteria instead of sheep. After a while a great lassitude would come over her and she would want to sleep, and sometimes she did sleep, there by the Caribe pool in the late afternoons, but at night in the apartment on the Avenida del Mar she did not sleep at all.

8

WE COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THIS ALL OUR LIVES.

We should do this all our lives.

Tell her I said it’s all the same.

Tell her that for me.

Tell Charlotte she was wrong.

I never told Charlotte what Warren Bogart said.

I think she heard him say it every night.

She would get up some nights when Gerardo was asleep and she would pick up the half-filled glasses with which the strangers who came to her “evenings” had littered the empty rooms of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar and she would walk by herself to a theater downtown which showed dolorous Mexican movies all night, tales of betrayal and stolen babies and other sexual punishments. Other nights she would not leave the apartment but would only stand in the living room by the window and listen to the radio. Radio Boca Grande was allowed to broadcast only during restricted hours by that time but she could usually get Radio Jamaica and sometimes even Radio British Honduras and the Voice of the Caribbean from the Central American Mission in San José, Costa Rica. She thought she had New Orleans or Miami one night, dance music from some hotel or another in New Orleans or Miami, but it turned out to be only a pick-up from the Caribe. She recognized the accordionist.

Some nights when she could not even get Radio Jamaica she called San Francisco.

She did not call the number of the house on California Street in San Francisco.

She did not call the number of anyone she knew in San Francisco.

She called a number in San Francisco which gave, over and over again in a voice so monotonous as to seem to come from beyond the grave, the taped “road condition” report of the California Highway Patrol.

Interstate 80 Donner Pass was open.

U.S. 50 Echo Summit was closed.

State Route 88 Carson Pass was open.

State Route 89 Lassen Loop was closed, State Route 108 Sonora was closed, State Route 120 Tioga Pass was closed.

These calls were routed through Quito and Miami and took quite a long time to place.

By the end of May every road regularly reported upon by the California Highway Patrol was open.

According to Victor.

Who duly heard these calls and believed them coded.

“Quite frankly I don’t think the California Highway Patrol is hooked up with the guerrilleros,” I said to Victor.

“Then give me one reason for these calls.”

“She’s lonely, Victor.” In fact “lonely” was never a word I would have used to characterize Charlotte Douglas but conversation with Victor requires broad strokes. “She’s ‘a woman alone.’ As I believe you used to call her.”

“She is no longer a woman alone. May I point out. On the occasion of all but one of these calls your son has been spending the night in this apartment. Where Bebe Chicago has been a frequent visitor.”

“If I were you I’d listen to Bebe Chicago’s calls and forget Charlotte’s.”

“Bebe Chicago’s calls. Spare me any more of Bebe Chicago’s calls.” Victor mimicked a whispery falsetto. “ ‘Ricardo? It’s me. C’est moi, chéri. Bebe.’ ”

“Actually you aren’t good at voices, Victor. What is it you want to know?”

“What I want to know, Grace, is what your son is doing while she makes these calls.”

“Sleeping.”

“ ‘Sleeping’?”

“ ‘Sleeping.’ Yes.”

Victor looked at me awhile, and then at his nails. “Sleeping,” he said finally. “What kind of man would be sleeping.”

I was tired of Victor that spring.

I was also tired of whatever game Gerardo was playing with Bebe Chicago and the guerrilleros and the strangers he invited to Charlotte’s “evenings” on the Avenida del Mar.

Charlotte’s “evenings.”

I would go sometimes.

There were always these strangers there, third-rate people Gerardo was using in his game, the object of which seemed to be to place his marker in Victor’s office in as few moves as possible. His marker that year happened to be Antonio, but who it was mattered not at all to Gerardo. Gerardo plays only for the action. Part of the action in this case was the artful manipulation of what passed for the intelligentsia in Boca Grande, the point being to create an illusion of support for the guerrilleros, and it was the members of this “intelligentsia” who littered the apartment on the Avenida del Mar with half-filled glasses two or three nights a week. Of course Bebe Chicago was usually there, and a few “poets” who had published verses in anthologies with titles like Fresh Wind in the Caribbean, and the usual complement of translators and teachers and film critics who supported themselves stringing for newspapers and playing at politics. I recall one who read out loud at Charlotte’s dinner table a paper he was writing called “The Singular Position of Intellectuals with Respect to the Crisis of the Underdeveloped World” and then read it again, over Charlotte’s telephone, to a friend in Tenerife. I recall another who made marionettes to perform the plays of Arnold Wesker in schoolyards.

I have no idea what Charlotte thought of these people.

She told me she found them “terribly stimulating to listen to,” but I never saw her “listen to” any one of them.

She had in the dining room of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar a large round table around which these people sat and talked about what they always called “the truly existential situation of the Central American,” and Charlotte would sit at this table in her gray chiffon dress, but she seemed not to be there at all. She only stared at the kerosene lamp in the center of the table and watched moths batter themselves against the glass chimney. As the moths fell stunned to the table she would brush them toward her with a napkin, like someone dreaming. At the end of such an evening there would be moths drifted beneath her chair and moth wings caught in her gray chiffon skirt and no trace in her mind of what had been said. So dimly did Charlotte appear to perceive the nature of her evenings that she would sometimes invite Victor, and Victor would sit stiffly and finger his pistol and say that he did not quite comprehend why the situation of the Central American was so truly existential.

“What’s to be done about it in any case,” I recall Victor saying one night. “What does it mean.”

Whenever I saw Victor at one of Charlotte’s “evenings” I found myself rather liking him.

At least he was serious.

Unlike Gerardo.

“Don’t worry about what it means,” Gerardo said that night.

“ ‘What does it mean,’ ” Bebe Chicago said. “A knotty question.”

“I find it touching,” the most offensive of the poets said. His name was Raúl Lara and he was working on a sequence of Mother-and-Child sonnets to present to the people of Cuba and all that evening he had been studying a mango, spitting on it, polishing it, holding it in different lights.

Raúl Lara held the mango now in front of Victor’s eyes.

“A Strasser-Mendana. A man of action. Trapped in the quicksand of time and he asks us what does it mean. Give him Fanon. Give him Debray. Give him this fat mango.”

Raúl Lara dropped the mango in Victor’s lap.

With considerable dignity Victor stood up and placed the mango on the table in front of Charlotte.

The table fell silent.

Charlotte seemed to force herself to look away from the moths and at the mango. “Did someone need a fruit knife,” she said finally.

“You weren’t listening,” Victor said gently.

“She never listens,” Gerardo said.

“Why don’t you listen,” Victor said to Charlotte.

Charlotte smiled vaguely.

“Maybe she doesn’t listen because she’s afraid of what she’ll hear,” Raúl Lara said. “New ideas. Very threatening.”

Charlotte looked directly at Raúl Lara for the first time that evening. She seemed tired. She seemed older. “I’ve heard some new ideas,” she said after a while. “In my time.”

Other than that Charlotte seemed to make no judgments at all on the people who came to the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, no judgments on them and no distinctions among them.

Among us.

I was there too.

We were voices. We were voices no different from the voices in Mexican movies. We were voices no different from the voices on Radio Jamaica or on the California Highway Patrol road reports. We were voices to fill the hours until it was time to go to the Caribe for breakfast.

Sometimes I forget that I was there too.

Charlotte’s breakfasts at the Caribe.

Charlotte went to the Caribe for breakfast every morning for a while.

She went to the Caribe for breakfast because she worried about three children who every morning would crawl under the Caribe fence and leap screaming into the deep end of the pool. They did not seem to know how to swim. They would flounder and gasp to the side and leap in again. There was no lifeguard and the water was green with algae and Charlotte could never see the children beneath the surface of the water but every morning she would take her breakfast to the pool and try to insure that the children did not drown. She tried to distinguish their particular shrieks. She counted their heads compulsively. Because she believed that in the instant of a blink one of the heads would slip beneath the surface and stay there unseen she tried not to blink.

“There are no children registered at the hotel,” the manager of the Caribe said when she mentioned the children in the pool. “So they aren’t supposed to be there.”

“But they are there.”

“They aren’t supposed to be there,” the manager said, enunciating each word very carefully, “because there are no children registered at the hotel.”

On the morning she could only see two of the three children for thirty straight seconds she screamed, and jumped into the pool with her clothes on. She choked and the murky water blinded her and when she came up all three children were standing on the edge of the pool fighting over her handbag. She watched them run away with the bag and she went upstairs and she stood for a long while in the lukewarm trickle from the shower and she thought about the pale wash of green Marin got in her hair every summer from the chlorine in pools.

California pools.

Swimming pools for children who knew how to swim.

She tried to stop thinking about swimming pools but could not.

“You don’t seem to have heard of chlorine here,” she said to me.

“We don’t want to emphasize technology at the expense of traditional culture,” I said.

I thought she was in a less literal mood than usual but apparently she was not.

“I see,” she said.

“I wasn’t serious,” I said. “It was a joke. Irony.”

“Is cheap,” she said. Her expression did not change.

After that morning at the pool she stopped spending her days at the Caribe and volunteered as an advisor at the birth control clinic. She seemed to have entirely forgotten Colonel Higuera and the Lederle cholera vaccine, her previous essay into good works. She was a source of some exasperation at the birth control clinic, because she kept advising the women to request diaphragms they would never use instead of intrauterine devices they could not remove, but the job of “advisor” was largely academic anyway since only intrauterine devices were available. In any case Charlotte took her work very seriously and it seemed to lend a purpose to her days.

“Anyone can learn to use a diaphragm,” she announced at my house one evening when I suggested that the diaphragm, however favored it might be in the practices of San Francisco gynecologists, was not generally considered the most practical means of birth control in underdeveloped countries. “I certainly did.”

“You certainly did what?” Gerardo said.

“I certainly learned to use a diaphragm.”

“Of course you did,” Gerardo said. “What’s that got to do with it? Grace wasn’t talking about you.”

“Grace was talking,” Charlotte said, “about the difficulty of using diaphragms. And I said there wasn’t any. Difficulty. Because I had no trouble whatsoever learning how.”

Gerardo looked at me.

I think this was perhaps Gerardo’s first exposure not to the norteamericana in Charlotte but to the westerner in Charlotte, the Hollister ranch child in Charlotte, the strain in Charlotte which insisted that the world was peopled with others exactly like herself.

“What is she saying,” Gerardo said to me.

“Charlotte is an egalitarian,” I said to Gerardo. “So am I. You are not.”

“I am only saying,” Charlotte said patiently, “that if I could learn to use a diaphragm then anyone could.”

“Bullshit,” Gerardo said.

Charlotte looked at Gerardo levelly for quite a long time.

There was a flicker of Warren Bogart on her face.

“Then don’t you talk at me any more about what ‘the people’ can do,” she said finally.

No irony.

However cheap.

I liked Charlotte very much that night but she still tended to take whatever Gerardo said precisely at face value. Gerardo only talked about “the people” that spring as a move in the particular game he was playing. As a matter of fact Charlotte tended to take what anyone said precisely at face value. When she showed me her next attempt at writing about Boca Grande, the next of those “Letters from Central America” which were the only one of her projects to survive the incident at the Caribe pool, the typed manuscript began: “A nation that refuses to emphasize technology at the expense of its traditional culture, Boca Grande is …”

Boca Grande is.

9

“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT,” I SAID TO VICTOR the day Antonio’s Bentley exploded in front of the Caribe, killing the chauffeur. Antonio had not even been using the Bentley. Carmen Arrellano had been using the Bentley, but at the instant of the explosion Carmen Arrellano had been having her legs waxed in the Caribe beauty shop. In short the job had been inept in the extreme, but this was not the aspect I wanted to stress with Victor. “You really shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t,” Victor said. “I’m appalled you think I did. Appalled. Shocked. Hurt. It’s an obscene accusation.” I said nothing.

“If you think I did it,” Victor said after a while, “then you know why I did it. You’re aware of what Antonio’s trying to do.”

I said nothing.

“I suppose your son told you,” Victor said.

“Actually no.”

“I suppose you prefer Antonio to me,” Victor said.

“Not particularly.”

Victor sat in silence for a while. He had come to visit in the middle of the afternoon. He never used to visit in the middle of the afternoon. Victor did not seem to know what to do with his afternoons that summer.

“Then why aren’t you helping me,” he said finally. “You know what Antonio’s doing, you—”

“I don’t know. I just suppose.”

“—You suppose you know what Antonio’s doing, why don’t you discuss it with me? Why aren’t you with me?”

“Because it doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said.

Victor sat slumped in a chair.

I have liked Victor on some occasions and pitied him on many. Edgar called him stupid. Luis laughed at him. Even Antonio was making a fool of him.

I took his ridiculous manicured hand.

“Because it’s going to happen,” I said. “Just let it happen. With grace.”

“I can’t do that,” Victor said after a while.

I knew he couldn’t do that.

Within the next two weeks three more explosions occurred in locations where Antonio might normally have been, killing six and injuring fourteen, and then there was the usual odd calm.

“ ‘The outlook is not all bright.’ ” Charlotte was reading me the draft of an unfinished Letter from Central America. “ ‘Nor is the outlook all black.’ Paragraph. ‘Nonetheless—’ ”

She broke off.

“That’s where I seem to be blocked.”

“I don’t wonder,” I said.

“What do you mean.”

“ ‘Nevertheless’ what? I mean, Charlotte. If you say ‘the outlook is not all bright’ and then you say ‘nor is the outlook all black,’ then you can’t start the next sentence with ‘nevertheless.’ It can’t possibly mean anything.”

“I didn’t start the next sentence with ‘nevertheless,’ ” Charlotte said. “I started it with ‘nonetheless.’ ”

I said nothing.

“Anyway.” Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. “It’s not just a new sentence. It’s a new paragraph.”

It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.

Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.

If the organism under scrutiny is Charlotte.

“In any case,” Charlotte said after a while. “It’ll all fall together when I’m away.”

“You’re going away, then.”

“Of course I’m going away. I mean I don’t live here, do I.”

“When?”

“I’m not quite sure when.”

“Where?”

“I have to see someone.”

I did not ask who.

“Or rather I want to see someone. My husband.”

I did not ask which one.

“But I mean there’s no immediate rush about it. Is there.”

“I think there is, Charlotte.” I was suddenly tired. “As a matter of fact I think it’s imperative that you go very soon.”

“No.” She seemed abruptly agitated. “It is not imperative. At all. He is not dying.”

I sat without speaking awhile.

The tissue around Charlotte’s eyes was reddening but she did not cry.

Tell Charlotte she was wrong.

“I didn’t mean that it’s imperative you go anywhere in particular,” I said finally. “I don’t care where you go. Go to Caracas, go to Managua. Just get out of here.”

She put on her dark glasses and tried to smile.

“Just leave,” I said.

“I don’t believe I can quite manage this display of hospitality.” There was in Charlotte’s voice an inflection of which she seemed entirely unaware, an inflection I had heard before only in the Garden District of New Orleans. “Here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry, seems about the size of it.”

Here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry.

Mrs. Fayard’s been learning West Texas manners.

Tell Charlotte she was wrong.

“Charlotte.” I felt as if I were talking to a child. “I’ve told you before, there is trouble here. There is going to be more trouble here. You are going to find yourself in the middle of this trouble which is not your business.”

“I don’t know anything about any trouble. So how could I possibly be in the middle of it.”

“Because Gerardo is.”

She looked at me as if I had mentioned someone she had met a long time before and did not quite remember.

I think I fucked you one Easter.

I think I did that and forgot it.

I think she did forget it.

“In any case I’m not affected,” she said after a while. “Because I’m simply not interested in any causes or issues.”

“Neither is anyone here.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“Charlotte.” I tried again. “What do you think all those people were doing at your dining-room table?”

Charlotte looked at me.

“You were there too,” she said finally.

That was July.

Boca Grande is.

10

I RECALL IT NOW AS A YEAR WHEN WE ACTUALLY HAD “seasons.”

Definite “changes.”

Changes not in the weather but in the caliber of the harmonic tremor.

I am not sure when everyone else realized that Antonio had diverted enough “secret” support from Victor’s army to be finally immune from Victor but I know when I realized it. I realized it the evening Gerardo and Charlotte came back from Progreso and Charlotte began to cry at dinner.

“What upset her?” I said to Gerardo when Charlotte had left the table.

Gerardo was picking the meat from a crab and did not look at me.

“I suppose she didn’t like Progreso,” he said after a while. “I suppose she got tired. A day’s outing. Very tiring.”

“I said what upset her.”

“I suppose she didn’t find Progreso as peaceful as you claim to.” Gerardo placed the crabmeat as he picked it on Charlotte’s plate. “I suppose it’s a special taste.”

“I want to know what upset her out there.”

“M–3’s,” Charlotte said from the doorway.

She had washed her face clean of makeup and she seemed entirely composed.

“I grew up with shotguns but I can’t stand carbines.” She sat down and picked up her napkin. “Why are you staring at me?”

There was a silence.

“Whose carbines?” I said.

Gerardo avoided my eyes. “Grace hasn’t been out to Progreso lately, Charlotte. Grace hasn’t seen — what did you call it? Did you call it ‘the machinery’?”

“I called it the hardware,” Charlotte said.

“She calls it the hardware,” Gerardo said.

“I don’t have cancer of the ear,” I said. “Whose hardware is it?”

“Antonio’s got some of the army with him. Of course.” Gerardo shrugged. The only clear evidence I have of Gerardo’s intelligence is that he has always known how to cut his losses, yield the position, supply the information. Gerardo differs in that respect from Victor. “Actually it wasn’t the guns that upset Charlotte. It was Antonio. Antonio and Carmen. Antonio gave Carmen an M–3 and let her shoot up the place.”

Charlotte picked up her fork and laid it down again.

“You have a rather bizarre idea of a day’s outing,” I said to Gerardo.

“Carmen wasn’t using an M–3,” Charlotte said. She leaned forward slightly and her face was entirely grave. “Antonio was. Carmen was using an M–16.”

Gerardo looked away.

“And they weren’t shooting up ‘the place,’ Gerardo. I mean what is ‘the place.’ ‘The place’ is some rusted Cats and five flamingoes. They were only shooting the crates.”

Something about Charlotte’s querulous precision seemed extreme, and unnatural.

“What crates?” I said.

Charlotte looked at me.

“The crates of vaccine,” she said. “The Lederle vaccine.”

Charlotte never changed her expression.

“Unopened crates of Lederle vaccine,” she said. “Cholera. It ran on the street when they shot up the crates.”

I looked at her for a long time.

“It ran on the street,” she repeated. “If you call that a street.”

I think I loved Charlotte in that moment as a parent loves the child who has just fallen from a bicycle, met a pervert, lost a prize, come up in any way against the hardness of the world.

I think I was also angry at her, again like a parent, furious that she hadn’t known better, furious that she had been wrong.

Tell Charlotte she was wrong.

What had Charlotte been wrong about exactly.

Who was wrong here.

I looked away from her.

“Why are you doing this with Antonio?” I said to Gerardo.

“I’m not ‘doing’ it, it’s done. It’s in progress. Underway. Its own momentum now.”

“I know that,” I said. “I want to know why you did it.”

“It was something to do,” Gerardo said.

“I happen to know about M–16’s because Marin had one when she went to Utah,” Charlotte said. Charlotte always referred to the day Marin hijacked the L–1011 and burned it on the Bonneville Salt Flats as “when Marin went to Utah,” as if it had been a tour of National Parks. Charlotte was not looking at me any more. “Or so they told me.”

“Get her out before it happens,” I said to Gerardo.

“The M–16 is supposed to be the ‘ideal’ submachine gun,” Charlotte said. “Leonard called it ideal. They didn’t.”

“Tell me when it’s time,” I said to Gerardo.

“You always hear it,” Gerardo said. “Eat that crab, Charlotte. I picked that crab for you.”

I always did hear it.

I heard it because I listened.

Charlotte heard even more than I heard but Charlotte seemed not to listen.

Charlotte seemed not to see.

Charlotte had stood out there in the bamboo at Progreso and let the sun burn her face and heard Antonio call her norteamericana cunt and heard Carmen Arrellano call her la bonne bourgeoise and heard the carbine fire shatter the vials of clear American vaccine and still she did not listen. Charlotte had watched the clear American vaccine shimmer on the boulevards of Progreso and still she did not see.

That was August.

Boca Grande is.

Boca Grande was.

Boca Grande shall be.

11

LAND OF CONTRASTS.

Economic fulcrum of the Americas.

By the day in early September when Leonard Douglas finally arrived in Boca Grande it was clear that Victor was only playing for time. His couriers shuttled between Boca Grande and Geneva carrying heavy pouches. Military passes had been canceled. All day long Radio Boca Grande broadcast a single message, delivered by two voices, one male, one female, each threatening terrorists and saboteurs with death. It was clear that Victor would be leaving soon to convalesce in Bariloche. El Presidente had in fact already left to convalesce in Bariloche, omitting even the traditional move in which he first spends a week confined to the palace with a respiratory infection complicated by extreme exhaustion. Ardis Bradley had discovered a pressing need to take her children to Boston for school interviews. Tuck Bradley had stayed on but had twenty seats reserved on every flight leaving Boca Grande for any destination. I had two.

One for me.

One for Charlotte.

In other words.

All the markers were on the board.

“I’m Charlotte Douglas’s husband,” Leonard Douglas said to me.

“I know you are,” I said to Leonard Douglas.

I knew that he had arrived in Boca Grande on one of the two or three flights that had managed to land the day before. He had gone directly to the Caribe and after a while he and Charlotte had been observed walking on the Avenida del Mar. It had been assumed that they were walking to her apartment but instead they had turned onto Calle 11 and entered the birth control clinic.

Victor had told me that.

Tuck Bradley had also told me that.

Gerardo had told me that he had no interest in Charlotte Douglas’s former life.

“I wouldn’t call yesterday her ‘former life’ exactly,” I had said to Gerardo.

Gerardo had told me that I had too literal a mind.

Charlotte had told me nothing at all.

I got Leonard Douglas a drink.

He sat in my living room and drank it.

“I met your husband once,” he said finally.

“He’s dead now.”

“I know that.”

I got him another drink.

He put it on the table untouched.

“In Bogotá,” he said. “I met him in Bogotá.”

“When was that?”

“Before he died.”

“Not after, then.”

The acerbity in my voice went unnoticed.

“We had some business.”

Leonard Douglas seemed absorbed in some contemplation of either Bogotá or Edgar, I did not know which.

I recall being uneasy.

“Where’s Charlotte?” I said abruptly. “Did Charlotte send you to see me?”

“No.” Leonard Douglas picked up the drink and put it down again. “I liked him. Your husband. I think he liked me. He gave me an emerald. As I was leaving. He gave me an emerald to take to Charlotte.”

The square emerald.

The big square emerald Charlotte wore in place of a wedding ring.

The big square emerald Leonard had brought her from wherever he was when he met the man who financed the Tupamaros.

Bogotá.

Quito.

Charlotte had no idea whether it was Bogotá or Quito.

It was Bogotá.

I had no idea.

I prided myself on listening and seeing and I had never even heard or seen that Edgar played the same games Gerardo played.

Leonard Douglas was watching me.

“Why did you tell me that,” I said finally.

“I wanted you to know that I understand what’s going on here.”

“Why.”

“Because,” Leonard Douglas said, “I want you to get Charlotte out.”

“It could be smooth,” I said after a while. I did not believe that it would be smooth. “Sometimes it’s smooth.”

“It’s not going to be smooth,” Leonard Douglas said.

“How do you know.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m involved here.”

“Nobody said you were.”

“I want you to believe me.” Leonard Douglas seemed to tense as he spoke. “I have no interest here.”

“I believe you.”

As a matter of fact I did believe him.

I also believed him about Edgar.

I still do.

It still disturbs me and I still believe him.

“It’s not going to be smooth,” he repeated. “I’m not involved but I hear things.”

I said nothing.

“I hear there’s more outside hardware than there’s supposed to be. You know what I mean.”

I did know what he meant.

He meant that someone had outplayed Gerardo and Antonio.

He meant that the guerrilleros were not going to just serve their purpose and get gunned down on the fourth day by an insurgent army under Antonio’s command.

He meant that for a certain number of days or weeks no one at all could be certain of knowing the right people in Boca Grande.

“So get her out,” he said finally.

“Why don’t you take her out?”

“She won’t go with me.”

“Why not?”

Leonard Douglas sat for a while and ran his finger around the rim of his glass.

“She remembers everything,” he said after a while.

And then: “You met Warren Bogart.”

It was a question.

“Once. In New Orleans. He said he was dying.”

“Yes. Well.” Leonard Douglas looked suddenly exhausted. “He was right.”

12

“WHO WAS THERE,” CHARLOTTE HAD SAID WHEN LEONARD told her that Warren Bogart was dead.

As he sat in my living room and told me what she had said he kept repeating the words as if he could not believe them: who was there.

He remembered that she said it at the corner of Avenida del Mar and Calle 11.

He had come to Boca Grande to tell her three things.

He had come to tell her that certain of his former clients had put him in touch with someone in the underground who had put him in touch with Marin.

He had come to tell her to get out of Boca Grande.

He had come to tell her that he had buried Warren Bogart a few days before in New Orleans.

He told her none of these things until they were out of the Caribe and walking on the Avenida del Mar where they could not be heard.

He told her that Marin was living with six other people in a semi-detached house in the industrial section of Buffalo and she said nothing at all. She began to cry and she kept on walking and she said nothing at all. He told her to get out of Boca Grande and she said nothing at all. She folded and refolded the piece of paper he had given her with the number of the post-office box in Buffalo and she said nothing at all. He told her that he had buried Warren Bogart and she walked until they reached the corner of Avenida del Mar and Calle 11 and as they turned the corner onto Calle 11 she said something. He remembered that he had just realized that she was walking not idly but toward a specific destination and then she said something.

She said who was there.

“I told you. He was alone. He’d been in and out of Ochsner for a month and this time he just walked out without anybody knowing and he was alone on the street. And he collapsed. And they took him to Long Memorial and they put him on life-support but he never woke up.”

“Who was there.”

“Charlotte. No one was there. He had a letter in his coat with the number on California Street. Your number and Porter’s number. They tried to get Porter and they couldn’t. Porter was in New York. They tried to get you and they got me. He was on the machine for the rest of the day and he died before I got there.”

“Who was there,” Charlotte repeated. “When he was buried. You said you buried him. Who came.”

“I got hold of Porter. Porter came.”

She seemed to be waiting for something.

“A couple of people I didn’t know.”

She still seemed to be waiting for something.

“And six FBI.”

She had stopped in front of a building on Calle 11 and still she seemed to be waiting.

“It was fine, Charlotte. He didn’t want anyone there. The letter said so. The letter they found in his coat. All he wanted was nobody there and somebody singing ‘Didn’t I Ramble.’ ”

Charlotte said nothing.

The letter in Warren Bogart’s coat also had a message for Charlotte and Marin but Leonard did not mention the message.

“He carried it in his coat. The letter.” Leonard shook his head. “He did. Didn’t he.”

“He did what.”

“He did ramble.”

The message for Charlotte and Marin had read only “you were both wrong but it’s all the same in the end” and Leonard did not mention the message.

“Not a letter really,” he said. “A note. On the back of an envelope.”

“This is where I work,” Charlotte said. “I’m quite late now.”

She looked directly at Leonard as she spoke and then she turned and walked inside and down a corridor and into an office. When he followed her into the office she was standing at the window smoking a cigarette and staring out at the blank wall of the adjoining building and she did not turn around.

“Would you go to the desk for me,” she said after a while. She did not turn from the window. “Would you tell them I can’t see anyone for a few minutes. Twenty minutes.”

“I’ll call.” Leonard picked up the telephone and jiggled it. “How do you call?”

“You don’t. The switchboard’s out. Or something. Since the bomb.”

He stared at her.

“You had a bomb here?”

“Or something.”

“When was the bomb? Or something.”

“I don’t know. Yesterday. No, it was the day before, because I still had the curse, I was changing a Tampax when it went off. Would you please go to the desk?”

Leonard put the telephone down and watched Charlotte crush her cigarette on the ledge outside the window.

“I want you to come with me,” he said after a while. “I never told you what to do but I’m telling you now. I want you to come with me to the airport. Now.”

“Actually I can’t.” Charlotte said, and then she turned abruptly from the window. “Didn’t Marin come.”

“She couldn’t have, Charlotte. I told you. The FBI were there. Naturally the FBI were there.”

“Did you tell Marin.”

“Yes.”

“Did she want to come.”

There was a silence.

“I don’t know,” Leonard said.

“Tell her she was wrong,” Charlotte said. “Tell her that for me.”

13

“AND WHAT ABOUT THIS FUCKING BOMB,” LEONARD Douglas said to me.

He had finally drunk his second drink and then a third and a fourth. He was in no way drunk but he gave off the sense of a man who normally had one drink, maybe two when politesse required it, a man who prized control and had been pushed in a single week almost beyond it.

He had found Marin Bogart in an empty room in Buffalo.

He had buried Warren Bogart in an empty grave in New Orleans.

He had come to save Charlotte from an empty revolution in Boca Grande and Charlotte was not listening.

He had found his way to me and in my house there were flowers in the vases and ice cubes in the carafes and clean uniforms on the maids. In my house it did not seem so empty and I was listening.

“ ‘A bomb or something,’ she says. Don’t miss the or something. I look around, I discover the back wing of the building blew up three days ago, I find four people died outright and the fifth’s dying now, peritonitis, this fifth one got caught on the table, the doctor jumped and punctured this one’s fucking—”

Leonard Douglas seemed to have rendered himself temporarily mute.

“Uterus,” I said. “I heard there was a bomb. Before you came. I asked Charlotte about it. Charlotte said—”

I broke off. Charlotte had said that when the bomb went off she was in the bathroom and she had forgotten about her Tampax and had spotted blood all over the clinic without realizing it.

That was all she had said.

“She said it wasn’t near her office,” I said.

“Never mind where it wasn’t. Because she goes charging in where it was, the ceiling’s still falling, she gets three people out, she’s a heroine, she’s mad as hell, she’s shouting ‘Goddamn you all’ the whole time. They tell me that. Charlotte doesn’t. All Charlotte remembers about this bomb is it went off while she was changing her fucking Tampax.”

“She bled.” I did not know what else to say. “She remembers she bled all over the clinic.”

Leonard Douglas looked at me a long while.

He loosened his tie and closed his eyes.

It was just sundown and I could hear the DDT truck outside.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “She remembers she bled.”

The DDT truck was gone before he spoke again.

“You didn’t know about Bogotá, did you.”

“No.”

“I shouldn’t have told you. It upset you.”

“I should have known.”

“She should have known too.” Leonard Douglas stood up and picked up his jacket. He did not seem to be talking to me at all. “It wasn’t the way she thought it was either. I wasn’t the way she thought I was and Marin wasn’t the way she thought Marin was and Warren wasn’t the way she thought Warren was. She didn’t know any of us.”

“She remembers everything,” I said. “You said she remembers everything.”

“No,” Leonard Douglas said. “She remembers she bled.”

14

A FEW DAYS AFTER LEONARD DOUGLAS LEFT BOCA GRANDE Charlotte told me that he had “passed through” but had left before she could “arrange an evening” for him.

“An ‘evening,’ ” I remember saying. An evening for a man who had just found her child and buried her child’s father. An evening for such a man in an equatorial city under martial law and rigid curfew. “What kind of ‘evening’ exactly did you have in mind?”

“An evening to meet everyone. Of course. I particularly wanted him to meet you.”

“He did meet me,” I said after a while. “He spent three hours here in this room. He told me about Marin. He told me about Warren.”

She looked away before she spoke.

“I know he did,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Charlotte stood up then and walked out onto the terrace and across the lawn to where the roses grew. I remembered her walking across the lawn the night she met Gerardo and I remembered Elena and I remembered Ardis Bradley and I remembered Carmen Arrellano and I wished suddenly that Charlotte had gone to Paris.

You smell American.

I wonder what American smells like exactly.

Norteamericana cunt.

When Charlotte came back inside she did not look at me.

When Charlotte came back inside she was already talking and her voice was low.

Charlotte wondered if she had ever told me about the night Marin was born. Marin was born at Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York. Warren hit the head nurse on the maternity floor. The head nurse brought assault charges but later dropped them. Marin weighed six-eight at birth but only six-two by the time they took her home. Charlotte supposed that was normal. Warren was afraid to hold Marin in the taxi going home. Charlotte supposed he had been drinking. Instead of holding Marin he held his hands an inch or so above the soft spot on her head to protect it if the taxi bumped and he said over and over again that he did not want her to go to Smith and marry some eighth-rate ass from Sullivan and Cromwell.

“And I don’t guess she ever will,” Charlotte said finally. Her voice was devoid of expression. “I guess he got that wish.”

There was a silence.

“Now you can see her,” I said.

“No,” Charlotte said. “I can’t exactly.”

“But you know how to reach her.”

“She’s always known how to reach me,” Charlotte said. “If you want to look at it that way.”

I said nothing.

“So in the first place it’s not even Marin.”

I think she meant that it was not the Marin she remembered.

There was nothing to say.

“Marin would have found Warren. Marin would have found me.”

Tell Marin she was wrong. Tell her that for me.

Goddamn you all.

She remembers she bled.

15

ON THE AFTERNOON I WENT TO THE CARIBE TO TELL Charlotte that she and I were leaving for New Orleans, that the last planes were getting out, that Tuck Bradley was closing the Embassy, Charlotte only shook her head.

“Not just yet,” she said.

She was sitting in the lobby of the Caribe staring at a television screen which for days had shown only the emblem of La República de Boca Grande, with military music played over the emblem.

“Charlotte. Look at me. You plan to wait until they announce it on television?”

“I just want to see what happens.”

“All that happens is that people get hurt. People get killed. You’re maybe going to get killed if you stay here.”

“Don’t be operatic, Grace, I’m not staying here. I’m just not leaving tonight.”

I said nothing.

“In the first place I don’t like New Orleans. In the second place, take my word for it, it’s going to be a very tedious flight with Tuck Bradley aboard. Carrying his flag.”

“Charlotte. I’m going tonight.”

“Of course you are. Remember to tell Tuck when you land, he’s supposed to get off with the flag showing. Folded. Under his arm. But showing.”

“I promised Leonard I’d take you out with me.”

“I promised Leonard.” Her voice was all gentle reproach and I never heard the steel in it until after she was dead. “I promised I’d see him very soon. There was no call for him to worry you. We talked about it.”

She was still gazing at the television screen.

“In any case you’re not to worry,” she said without looking up. “I told Leonard what I was going to do.”

I had asked Victor to make her leave and Victor had said he had no authority.

I had asked Gerardo to make her leave and Gerardo had said he would get her out.

I had asked Antonio to make her leave and Antonio had said norteamericana cunt.

Before I left for the airport that night Charlotte came to the house with presents for my trip: a travel-sized vial of Grès perfume, a gardenia for my dress, and all the latest magazines and papers. She was on her way to the Jockey Club for dinner.

16

IN FACT SHE HAD.

Told Leonard what she was going to do.

She was going to stay.

Not “stay” precisely.

“Not leave” is more like it.

“I walked away from places all my life and I’m not going to walk away from here,” is exactly what she said to him.

She had said it to him at the clinic and she had said it to him at the Caribe and she had said it to him for the last time the night he left, while they waited for his flight to get clearance out.

I did not know the exact words until after she was dead.

I walked away from places all my life and I’m not going to walk away from here.

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from,” Leonard had said that night at the airport. The waiting room was empty and the runways were lit up with crossfire from the hardware that the guerrilleros were not supposed to have had. “This isn’t one of those places. It’s the wrong place, Charlotte.”

“I think that’s a song,” Charlotte had said. “ ‘The wrong place, the right face’? Is that how it goes?”

“Charlotte—”

“Sing it for me. No.” She touched his lips with her fingers. “You have a terrible voice. Tell me about the terrific dinner we’re going to have the next time we’re in Paris.”

“What about Marin.”

“Get that big suite at the Plaza Athénée.”

“Marin wants to see you.”

“And get — she didn’t say that. Did she.”

Leonard said nothing.

Charlotte took Leonard’s hand and she kissed each finger, very lightly, very precisely.

“I knew she didn’t say that,” she said then. “Another thing I knew, I knew you wouldn’t lie to me. You lie for a living but you never lie to me.”

“You don’t get any real points for staying here, Charlotte.”

“I can’t seem to tell what you do get the real points for,” Charlotte said. “So I guess I’ll stick around here awhile.”

And when his plane was cleared to leave she had walked out to the gate with him and he had said again don’t you want to see Marin and she had said I don’t have to see Marin because I have Marin in my mind and Marin has me in her mind and they closed the gate and that was the last time Leonard Douglas ever saw Charlotte alive.

The last time I ever saw Charlotte alive was the night two weeks later when I left for New Orleans.

When she pinned her gardenia on my dress.

When she dabbed her Grès perfume on my wrists.

Like a child helping her mother dress for a party.

17

I don’t have to see Marin because I have Marin in my mind.

I don’t have to see Marin because Marin has me in her mind.

In that dirty room in Buffalo those seemed increasingly ambiguous propositions.

“All right,” I said finally to Marin Bogart. “You tell me. You tell me what you think your mother did in Boca Grande.”

“I think she played tennis all day,” Marin Bogart said.

“She didn’t ever play tennis,” I said.

“All day. Every day. I only remember her in a tennis dress.”

“I never saw her in a tennis dress.”

As a matter of fact Charlotte had told me that she and Marin once modeled matching tennis dresses in a fashion show at the Burlingame Country Club and that because she did not play tennis she had needed to ask Marin how to hold the racquet correctly.

“I’m quite sure your mother didn’t play tennis,” I said.

“She always wore a tennis dress,” Marin Bogart said.

“More than once?”

“Always.”

“Didn’t you play tennis?”

“Tennis,” Marin Bogart said, “is just one more mode of teaching an elitest strategy. If you subject it to a revolutionary analysis you’ll see that. Not that I think you will.”

We sat facing each other in the bleak room.

You were both wrong but it’s all the same in the end.

We all remember what we need to remember.

Marin remembered Charlotte in a tennis dress and Charlotte remembered Marin in a straw hat for Easter. I remembered Edgar, I did not remember Edgar as the man who financed the Tupamaros. Charlotte remembered she bled. I remembered the light in Boca Grande. I sat in this room in Buffalo where I had no business being and I talked to this child who was not mine and I remembered the light in Boca Grande.

Another place I have no business being.

It seems to me now.

“Why did you bother agreeing to see me?” I said finally.

“My stepfather said he was putting you in touch with me because you had something important to tell me. I can see you don’t.”

I remember feeling ill and trying to control my dislike of Charlotte’s child.

“I didn’t understand your mother,” I said finally.

“Try a class analysis.”

I had not come ill to Buffalo to scream at Charlotte’s child. “Your mother disturbed me,” I said.

“She could certainly do that.”

I tried again. “She had you in her mind. She always kept you in her mind.”

“Not me,” Marin Bogart said. “Some pretty baby. Not me.”

“Could I have a glass of water,” I said after a while.

“We don’t have liquor.”

“I didn’t ask for liquor. Did I.” I could hear the fury in my voice and could not stop. “I didn’t ask for ‘liquor’ and I didn’t ask for ‘diet pills’ and I didn’t ask for Saran-Wrap and I didn’t ask for white bread and I didn’t ask for any of the other things I’m sure you make it a point not to have. I asked for a glass of water.”

Marin Bogart watched me without expression for a moment and then stood up and turned to the sink full of dirty dishes.

“Did you like the Tivoli Gardens,” I said suddenly.

“This water runs lukewarm. I better get you some ice, this is lukewarm water and I can at least get you some ice, can’t I.”

As she spoke she opened the refrigerator and took out an ice tray. Her movements were jerky and the tray was not frozen and the water splashed on the floor.

“I said did you like the Tivoli Gardens.”

“Goddamn people around here, somebody took it out last night and never put it back, I mean I had to put it back this morning, I don’t think—”

She was speaking very rapidly and for the first time something other than her eyes reminded me of Charlotte.

“—Anyone but me ever raises a finger around here, I honestly—”

“Tivoli,” I said.

Marin Bogart turned suddenly, and she put the tray on the table, and her face was tight, and then she broke exactly as her mother must have broken the morning the FBI first came to the house on California Street.