by Joan Didion
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 int
erest 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.
<
br /> 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.