A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  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 law
n. “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.