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 doesnt make any difference to you that this West Indian is financing the guerrilleros?
It doesnt make any difference to you either. If it did youd arrest him.
I dont arrest him because I dont 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 dont arrest him.
You dont arrest him because you want to know whos financing him. Thats why you dont 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 Peoples 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 dont know that either. Empirically.
I suppose you do know whos 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 whos running the West Indian and one day you might deign to tell me?
How would I know whos running the West Indian, Victor? Im not the Minister of Defense. You might want to watch that flask youre banging around, its 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 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 M3 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 peoples 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 Charlottes 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.
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 Douglass 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 didnt 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 didnt just do that. Higuera didnt go far enough.
How far should he have gone, Gerardo said, and smiled slightly at me.
Shed 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 Gerardos 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.