A Book of Common Prayer (24 page)

Another place I have no business being.

It seems to me now.

“Why did you bother agreeing to see me?” I said finally.

“My stepfather said he was putting you in touch with me because you had something important to tell me. I can see you don’t.”

I remember feeling ill and trying to control my dislike of Charlotte’s child.

“I didn’t understand your mother,” I said finally.

“Try a class analysis.”

I had not come ill to Buffalo to scream at Charlotte’s child. “Your mother disturbed me,” I said.

“She could certainly do that.”

I tried again. “She had you in her mind. She always kept you in her mind.”

“Not me,” Marin Bogart said. “Some pretty baby. Not me.”

“Could I have a glass of water,” I said after a while.

“We don’t have liquor.”

“I didn’t ask for liquor. Did I.” I could hear the fury in my voice and could not stop. “I didn’t ask for ‘liquor’ and I didn’t ask for ‘diet pills’ and I didn’t ask for Saran-Wrap and I didn’t ask for white bread and I didn’t ask for any of the other things I’m sure you make it a point not to have. I asked for a glass of water.”

Marin Bogart watched me without expression for a moment and then stood up and turned to the sink full of dirty dishes.

“Did you like the Tivoli Gardens,” I said suddenly.

“This water runs lukewarm. I better get you some ice, this is lukewarm water and I can at least get you some ice, can’t I.”

As she spoke she opened the refrigerator and took out an ice tray. Her movements were jerky and the tray was not frozen and the water splashed on the floor.

“I said did you like the Tivoli Gardens.”

“
Goddamn
people around here, somebody took it out last night and never put it back, I mean I had to put it back this morning, I don’t think—”

She was speaking very rapidly and for the first time something other than her eyes reminded me of Charlotte.

“—Anyone but me ever raises a finger around here, I honestly—”

“Tivoli,” I said.

Marin Bogart turned suddenly, and she put the tray on the table, and her face was tight, and then she broke exactly as her mother must have broken the morning the FBI first came to the house on California Street.

SIX

1

I
N THE END THERE WAS NOT MUCH TO TELL MARIN BOGART
that she could understand and there was even less to tell Leonard Douglas that he could not have guessed.

It did not go smoothly at all.

Since I was in New Orleans I know only a few facts.

Since I do not entirely trust Gerardo’s version of it I am certain of even fewer facts.

On the first day of what has come to be remembered as the October Violence the
guerrilleros
finally closed the airport altogether.

The final closing of the airport is what we usually call Day One.

I had flown out the night before, the evening of the day we usually call Day Minus One. I lost the gardenia in the crush at the airport.

The seat next to mine on the plane out was empty.

Charlotte was eating spiny lobster at the Jockey Club.

Day Minus One. Day One.

Day Two.

On Day Two the
guerrilleros
took over the radio stations.

On Day Three the
guerrilleros
neared the palace.

Those first three days went more or less as expected.

I have seen the troops on the palace roof waiting to pick off the
guerrilleros
before.

It was Day Four which did not go as planned. Day Four is supposed to end just after the heavy shooting at dawn, but this time it did not. The
guerrilleros
appeared not to know that they were on the board only to be gunned down at dawn of Day Four by the insurgent army under Antonio’s “new leadership.” The
guerrilleros
appeared to have more of everything than anyone except Leonard Douglas had supposed they had. Some say Kasindorf and Riley supplied the excess, some say other agencies. Some say Victor.

I think not Victor but have no empirical proof.

I also think (still) that Leonard Douglas was not involved but again this conclusion is not empirical.

In any case.

2

G
ERARDO HAD COUNTED ON A SMOOTH TRANSITION
.

Gerardo had counted on dinner at the Jockey Club the evening of Day Four.

By Day Seven Gerardo wanted to get out himself.

“I couldn’t possibly leave right now,” Charlotte said when Gerardo told her about the helicopter in Millonario.

“You don’t realize,” Gerardo said.

“I realize,” Charlotte said. “I do realize.”

“Charlotte. You don’t leave now, you’re not going to leave at all, because Antonio wants Carmen Arrellano on that chopper and not you.”

“Then take Carmen Arrellano. Carmen should get out, Carmen has connections here.”

“
So do you.
”

“No.” Charlotte had seemed vague and distant. “I don’t actually.”

“Charlotte.
Remember Victor. Remember me.
”

And Charlotte had looked at Gerardo for a while and smiled as she sometimes smiled at strangers.

“I wasn’t connected to you actually,” Charlotte had said.

Gerardo had only stared at her.

“I mean I’ve got two or three people in my mind but I don’t quite have you.”

I trust Gerardo’s version on this point.

I wasn’t connected to you actually
has the ring of Charlotte Douglas to me.

3

D
AY EIGHT
.

There had never been a Day Eight in Boca Grande before.

On Day Eight Charlotte appeared to have gone as usual to the clinic. She was reported to have stayed in her office all day but of course there would have been no callers for birth control devices on Day Eight. At five o’clock she closed the clinic and walked to the Caribe and apparently changed for dinner. At any rate she was wearing a clean linen dress when she left the Caribe at seven-thirty and began to walk in the direction of the Capilla del Mar.

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 seven-forty-three exactly she reached the barricade on the sidewalk outside the Capilla del Mar and she stopped and she showed her passport.

Soy norteamericana
, she said.

Soy una turista
, she said.

The passport was knocked from her hand by the butt of a carbine.

“Don’t you lay your fucking hands on me,” she said in English.

Goddamn you all
.

She was taken to the Escuela de los Niños Perdidos and detained overnight before she was transferred to the Estadio Nacional for interrogation. The moment and circumstances of her arrest are matters of record but the moment and circumstances of her death remain obscure. I do not even know which side killed her, who held the Estadio Nacional at the moment of death. I know that fire from either an AR–15 or an AR–16 entered her body just below the left shoulder-blade but I also know that all sides had both weapons.

Other than that I know only what Gerardo told me.

That she cried not for God but for Marin.

“She was shot in the back,” I said to Gerardo.

“Maybe she wanted to have it that way,” Gerardo said.

“She wouldn’t have wanted to have it that way.”

“Well,” Gerardo said, “she did.”

That Gerardo knew she cried for Marin suggests that Antonio was in charge of the Estadio Nacional at the moment of death but there are no real points in knowing one way or another.

As Leonard Douglas might say.

As Leonard Douglas did say, when I told him.

I no longer know where the real points are.

I am more like Charlotte than I thought I was.

On the day Antonio finally managed to take over Victor’s office the October Violence ended. On the day after that Victor flew back from Bariloche, I flew back from New Orleans, and Charlotte Douglas’s body was found, where it had been thrown, on the lawn of the American Embassy. Since all Embassy personnel had abandoned the building the point was lost on them.

Although not on me.

And possibly not even on Victor.

Norteamericana
cunt.

4

A
LL I CAN TELL YOU DIRECTLY ABOUT CHARLOTTE
Douglas’s death is that I sent her body to San Francisco. I had the body put in a coffin and I went to the airport with the coffin and I waited there until I could see, for myself, the coffin loaded into the hold of the first Pan American flight to leave Boca Grande after the October Violence. I wanted to lay a flag on the coffin but there were no American flags in Boca Grande that week and in the end I bought a child’s T-shirt in the gift shop at the airport. This T-shirt was printed like an American flag. I dropped this T-shirt on the coffin as it was loaded into the hold of the Boeing. I think this T-shirt did not have the correct number of stars or stripes but it did have the appearance of stars and stripes and it was red and it was white and it was blue. There were no real points in that either.

5

I
N SUMMARY
.

So you know the story.

Today we are clearing some coastal groves by slash-and-burn and a pall of smoke hangs over Boca Grande. The smoke colors everything. The smoke obscures the light. You will notice my use of the colonial pronoun, the overseer’s “we.” I mean it. I see now that I have no business in this place but I have been here too long to change. I mean “we.” I wish that I could see the light today but I recognize the necessity for clearing groves. I also recognize the equivocal nature of even the most empirical evidence. Some evidence I did not know about until quite recently, when crates of mail uncollected during the October Violence that year were located and distributed. This evidence came to me long after I had talked to Leonard Douglas and been put in touch with Marin Bogart in Buffalo. This evidence came to me long after I had seen Marin Bogart in Buffalo. Here it is. Early on the evening of her arrest, from a box between the Caribe and the Capilla del Mar, Charlotte Douglas mailed me Marin’s address. She also mailed me the big square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring. I wrote to Marin and told her I have the emerald but have received no reply. I did not mention to Marin that the emerald was a memento from the man who financed the Tupamaros.

Marin has no interest in the past.

I still do, but understand it no better.

All I know now is that when I think of Charlotte Douglas walking in the hot night wind toward the lights at the Capilla del Mar I am less and less certain that this story has been one of delusion.

Unless the delusion was mine.

When I am tired I remember what I was taught in Colorado. On Day Minus One in Boca Grande Charlotte remembered to bring me a gardenia for my trip. Her mother taught her that. Marin and I are inseparable. She had a straw hat one Easter, and a flowered lawn dress. Tell Charlotte she was wrong. Tell Marin she was wrong. Tell her that for me. She remembers everything. She remembers she bled. The wind is up and I will die and rather soon and all I know empirically is
I am told
.

I am told, and so she said.

I heard later.

According to her passport. It was reported.

Apparently.

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including
The Year of Magical Thinking
. Her collected nonfiction,
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.

B
OOKS BY
J
OAN
D
IDION

W
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URSELVES
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TORIES IN
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B
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ALSO BY
J
OAN
D
IDION

AFTER HENRY

In
After Henry
, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates, and gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy,
After Henry
is further proof of Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.