A Book of Common Prayer (19 page)

“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

A
S 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

W
HEN 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

W
HAT 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.