A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  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.

  3

  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.

  4

  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.

  5

  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.

  6

  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 d
o 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.

  7

  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.”