A Book of Common Prayer - Joan Didion

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lined the room. She would inspect the tables one by one but did not play. After this ritual turn through the casino she would walk on out through the lobby, her step buoyant, purposeful. Later one could see her eating alone on the porch at the Capilla del Mar or at the Jockey Club, always the same table at the Jockey Club, the table beneath the photograph of the Venezuelan polo team which visited Boca Grande in 1948. She would draw the legs of a spiny lobster between her remarkably white teeth and read the Miami Herald, reading the classified as attentively as she read the front page, reading both as avidly and as thoroughly as she ate the spiny lobster.

      I saw her at the Jockey Club on a few evenings, and heard about her on others. Like so many works of man in Boca Grande the Jockey Club is less than it seems: an aluminum-sided bungalow with rattan card tables and a menu written in French but translated in the kitchen into ambiguous gumbos based mainly on plantains and rice. Although any traveler could obtain a guest card to the Jockey Club by asking for one at an airline ticket office, not many bothered. There was once a nine-hole golf course, but the greens first went spongy and then reverted to swamp. There was once an artificial lake for swimming, but the lake first became infested with freshwater snails and then with the Schistosoma mansoni worms that infest the snails. The lake was not drained until after one of Antonio and Isabel’s children suffered gastrointestinal bleeding from what was diagnosed in New Orleans as schistosomiasis. The draining of the artificial lake did not go unremarked upon at the Jockey Club. Elena opposed it. Elena recently resigned from the Jockey Club after the membership, led by Victor, defeated her motion to rename the club Le Cercle Sportif. Elena was born and raised on the Guatemalan coast but favors all things French. Elena’s resignation did not go unremarked upon at the Jockey Club.

      In short.

      The presence at the same table night after night of this conspicuous norteamericana was not likely to go unremarked upon at the Jockey Club. Actually it would have been hard to overlook Charlotte Douglas anywhere. There was the extreme and volatile thinness of the woman. There was the pale red hair which curled in the damp heat and stood out around her face and seemed almost more weight than she could bear. There was the large square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring, there were the expensive clothes that seemed to betray in their just perceptible disrepair (the safety pin that puckered the hem of the Irish linen skirt, the clasp that did not quite close the six-hundred-dollar handbag) some equivalent disrepair of the morale, some vulnerability, or abandon.

      And there was that strain of exhibitionism, perverse and sometimes witty until it bloomed too long, and tired the observer. If Charlotte Douglas heard someone speaking English at another table she would invade the conversation, offer suggestions for touring, sights not to be missed. As there were neither any conventional “sights” in Boca Grande nor any tourists, only the occasional mineral geologist or CIA man traveling on one or another incorporeal AID mission, these encounters tended to end in obscurely sexual misunderstandings and bewilderment. After dinner she would walk back to the hotel alone, 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 the Caribe desk she would ask for her messages in a halting but flawlessly memorized Castilian Spanish which the night clerk found difficult to understand. As reported to Victor there were never any messages in any case.

      5

      UNTIL I LOST A FILLING AND HAD OCCASION TO SEE A dentist in Miami I never knew what la norteamericana did during the day. At least one thing she did during the day those first few weeks was this: she went to the airport. She did not go to the airport to catch a plane, nor to meet one. She just went to the airport. She was at the counter of the airport coffee shop the morning I left for Miami, not sitting at the counter but standing behind it, holding a watch in her hand. “I certainly wouldn’t think yet,” she said to the sullen girl whose space she had arrogated, and she tapped the face of the watch with her fingernail. “Nine minutes more. See for yourself.”

      The girl stared at Charlotte Douglas a moment and then, without speaking, plunged her index finger into the sugar bowl on the counter. Still gazing at Charlotte she licked the sugar from her finger. In another country she might have gone the extra step, made her point explicit, jammed her grimy finger between la norteamericana’s teeth, but the expression of proletarian resentment in Boca Grande remains largely symbolic. The guerrilleros here would have nothing to say to this girl in the airport. The guerrilleros here spend their time theorizing in the interior, and are covertly encouraged to emerge from time to time as foils to the actual politics of the country. Our notoriously frequent revolutions are made not by the guerrilleros but entirely by people we know. This is a hard point for the outsider of romantic sensibility to grasp.

      “Gastrointestinal infection is the leading natural cause of death in this country,” Charlotte said after a while. She said it in English and did not look at the girl. “If you call it natural.”

      The girl sucked the last grains of sugar from under her scabbed fingernail and rolled it again in the bowl.

      “Which I don’t particularly.”

      When the water for Charlotte Douglas’s tea had boiled the requisite twenty minutes she made the tea herself, took it to a table by the window and sat there reading an article on the cultivation of vanilla in Revista Boca Grande. She moved her lips slightly and seemed entirely absorbed in what she read. When the Miami plane was called she continued reading Revista Boca Grande. She never looked up, or out the window. The next afternoon when I came back from Miami Charlotte Douglas was sitting at the same table reading the same copy of Revista Boca Grande. It did not occur to me that day that I would ever have reason to consider Charlotte an outsider of romantic sensibility. In any case I am no longer sure that she was. Possibly this is the question I am trying to answer.

      Once I knew Charlotte I realized that although she spoke Spanish she had trouble reading it, and tended to lose the sense of even the simplest newspaper story somewhere in the first paragraph, but it could not have mattered in this case since she had no interest in the cultivation of vanilla.

      Or in the reform of the Boca Grande tax structure.

      Or in the contradiction inherent in a Central American common market.

      All of which topics, and others, Charlotte Douglas read about in the Boca Grande airport, her concentration apparently passionate, her expression miming comprehension, here a nod of approval, there a moue of disagreement; her eyes scanning the Spanish words as if she understood them.

      When there was nothing else to read.

      When, say, the Miami Herald did not come in and she had already committed to memory the revised schedules of all five airlines chartered to land at Boca Grande.

      6

      THE STATE DEPARTMENT LIST ON WHICH CHARLOTTE Douglas’s name and passport number appeared stated simply that the United States Embassy should be advised of the entry, the departure, the arrest, the hospitalization, or the participation in civil disorder of anyone listed. Various forms were provided for this purpose, but the immigration officer in charge of the list had mislaid them; as far as he could remember Charlotte Douglas was the only person on the list ever to enter Boca Grande. Victor himself had never before heard of the list, had seen it for the first time when the immigration officer’s report on Charlotte Douglas arrived on his desk at the Ministry of Defense, and he regarded the thin leaflet with the eagle on the top page as a mesmeric challenge to his powers of deduction. The list animated a slow week for Victor. The list was a code Victor could not crack. The list so obsessed Victor that he had even solicited Antonio’s opinion as to whether those listed were politically suspect, criminal, indigent, or very important.

      “Scratch indigent,” I suggested.

      “The little brother suggested indigent.”

      Victor routinely referred to Antonio as “the little brother,” I think in a stab at ironic distance. Antonio was at that time Minister of Public Works, whatever “Public Works” mean in Boca Grande.

      “I don’t think indigent,” I said.

      “Then

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