A Book of Common Prayer (21 page)

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

“Y
OU 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.
”