A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion

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СКАЧАТЬ of Visa TURISTA. Occupation MADRE.

      10

      THE NEXT TIME I SAW CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS SHE GRABBED up a chicken on the run and snapped the vertebrae in its neck. I had taken her to the annual picnic for the children of the workers in the Millonario groves and the men were killing chickens with machetes but Charlotte’s kill was clean. There was no blood. She killed this chicken as efficiently and reflexively as she had field-stripped the cigarette at the Capilla del Mar.

      “All the children have red shoes,” she said to me and Elena as she handed the dead chicken to the man who had been trying to catch it. She had only smiled vaguely at the man’s attempt to congratulate her. She seemed entirely unaware that for a guest of the dueña to kill a chicken with her hands was at Millonario an event worth remark. Even Elena had forgotten her sulky pique at being in Millonario and was staring at Charlotte, speechless.

      “Red cardboard patent-leather shoes,” Charlotte said. “All of them. Why do the children wear red shoes?”

      “That chicken,” Elena said.

      “I mean you see them all over the tropics. Those red shoes.”

      “How exactly did you kill that chicken?” Elena said.

      “Not the right way at all, actually.” Charlotte’s expression did not change. “Actually they’re better if you bleed them live. Marin wanted a pair of red shoes once. When she was six. She cried, I wouldn’t buy them.”

      Charlotte looked away and lifted the hair off her neck.

      “I did have a baby who had red shoes,” she said after a while. She stood up then and rinsed her hands in a ditch and when she straightened up she dried her hands on her skirt and gazed for a long time at the men still killing chickens with machetes. “You ought to tell them, chickens are better if you bleed them live. There was no reason not to buy Marin those shoes.”

      Nationality NORTEAMERICANA.

      11

      A GOLD CIGARETTE LIGHTER ENGRAVED “D.N.C. ATLANTIC CITY ’64.”

      A letter of introduction from the Wells-Fargo Bank in San Francisco to the Banco de la República, collapsed two regimes back.

      A California drivers’ license, recently expired, and credit cards from American Express, Gulf Oil, the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue.

      $26 American and an equivalent amount in local currency.

      An unsealed envelope addressed only to a post-office box in Buffalo, New York. An unfinished letter describing the resemblance of the Capilla del Mar to the Tivoli Gardens.

      Two lipsticks, one broken pencil, a folded envelope containing four sulfathalidine and two salt tablets, a vial containing a scent predominantly gardenia, a fortune-cookie tape printed “A surprise is in store for someone you love,” and a frayed clipping of one day’s horoscope from Prensa Latina.

      This is a list of the items said to be in Charlotte Douglas’s possession (and later returned to the manager of the Hotel del Caribe) at the time of her death in the Estadio Nacional. The square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring was neither listed nor returned. I took the gold cigarette lighter to Marin in Buffalo but Marin said she had no interest in the past. I do.

TWO

      1

      THE WIND IS UP TONIGHT.

      Palm fronds clatter.

      Shutters bang against the sills but I cannot close the windows because the house smells of cancer. Gerardo is somewhere over the sea, due home on the midnight Air France. When I think of the sea here tonight I imagine the water abruptly receding, then swelling back in the tidal surge, la marejada, drowning the sea wall, silencing the dogs, softening my burning skin and rinsing my brittle hair and floating the Liberian tanker in the harbor across the submerged boulevards of Progreso primero.

      Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep

      Where the winds are all asleep.

      Wishful thinking.

      La marejada will not come tonight, nor will I die tonight.

      All that will happen tonight is that the generator will fail as usual and I will sit in the dark reciting Matthew Arnold as usual and when Gerardo arrives from the airport I will pretend to be asleep.

      Again as usual.

      Since Charlotte’s death Gerardo and I have had to learn how to make conversation by day and avoid it in the dark, how to pretend together that my indifference to his presence derives from my being asleep, or in pain, or hallucinating. I am not in such pain that I hallucinate but other people prefer to think that I am. When I speak above a whisper Gerardo and Elena and Victor and Antonio avert their eyes. Even Isabel and Bianca avert their eyes. Even the dim Mendana cousin they brought in from Millonario to nurse me averts her eyes, and crosses herself every time I vomit or ask for a rum-and-quinine or suggest that she is repeating herself. This particularly tedious Mendana was trained as a Sister of Mercy, left the order in 1944 but continues to wear her full habit around Millonario and at family deathbeds, and fancies herself the dispatch-rider between the rest of us and heaven. When I interrupt her accounts of local miracles on the third telling she consoles herself by dismissing me as “de afuera,” an outsider. I am de afuera. I have been de afuera all my life. I was de afuera even at the Brown Palace Hotel. It is a little more than a year now since Charlotte Douglas’s death and almost two years since her arrival in Boca Grande.

      Charlotte Douglas’s death.

      Charlotte Douglas’s murder.

      Neither word works.

      Charlotte Douglas’s previous engagement.

      Some of what I know about Marin Bogart’s disappearance I know from Charlotte. Some of it I know from Leonard Douglas. Some of it I know from having once seen Warren Bogart and some of it I know from having once seen Marin but most of what I know, the most reliable part of what I know, derives from my training in human behavior.

      I do not mean my training under Kroeber at California, nor with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo.

      I mean my training in being de afuera.

      Nothing I know about Marin’s disappearance comes from the “pages” Charlotte apparently wrote during her first weeks in Boca Grande, the pages she was heard typing at night in her room at the Caribe, the pages given to me with her other personal effects by the manager of the Caribe. On those pages she had tried only to rid herself of her dreams, and these dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life. We all have the same dreams.

      2

      THE MORNING THE FBI MEN FIRST CAME TO THE HOUSE on California Street Charlotte did not understand why. She had read newspaper accounts of the events they recited, she listened attentively to everything they said, but she could make no connection between the pitiless revolutionist they described and Marin, who at seven had stood on a chair to make her own breakfast and wept helplessly when asked to clean her closet.

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