A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion
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know why I did or did not do anything at all.
As a result I “retired” from that field, married a planter of San Blas Green coconut palms here in Boca Grande and took up the amateur study of biochemistry, a discipline in which demonstrable answers are commonplace and “personality” absent. I am interested for example in learning that such a “personality” trait as fear of the dark exists irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the Mato Grosso or in Denver, Colorado. Fear of the dark can be synthesized in the laboratory. Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids. Fear of the dark is a protein. I once diagrammed this protein for Charlotte. “I don’t quite see why calling it a protein makes it any different,” Charlotte said, her eyes flickering covertly back to a battered Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue she had received in the mail that morning in May. She had reached that stage in her sojourn when she lived for mail, sent away for every catalogue, filled out every coupon, wrote many letters and received some answers. “I mean I don’t quite see your point.”
I explained my point.
“I’ve never been afraid of the dark,” Charlotte said after a while, and then, tearing out a photograph of a small child in a crocheted dress: “This would be pretty on Marin.”
Since Marin was the child Charlotte had lost to history and was at the time of her disappearance eighteen years old, I could conclude only that Charlotte did not care to pursue my point.
Also, for the record, Charlotte was afraid of the dark.
Give me the molecular structure of the protein which defined Charlotte Douglas.
In at least two of the several impenetrably euphemistic “Letters from Central America” which Charlotte wrote during her stay here and tried unsuccessfully to sell to The New Yorker, she characterized Boca Grande as a “land of contrasts.” Boca Grande is not a land of contrasts. On the contrary Boca Grande is relentlessly “the same”: the cathedral is not Spanish Colonial but corrugated aluminum. There is a local currency but the American dollar is legal tender. The politics of the country at first appear to offer contrast, involving as they do the “colorful” Latin juxtaposition of guerrilleros and colonels, but when the tanks are put away and the airport reopens nothing has actually changed in Boca Grande. There are no waterfalls of note, no ruins of interest, no chic boutiques (Charlotte went so far as to rent a storefront for one such boutique, but my son Gerardo turned the storefront to his own purposes and it has been since the October Violence a Pentecostal reading room) to provide dramatic cultural foil to voodoo in the hills.
In fact there is no voodoo in the hills.
In fact there are no hills, only the flat bush and the lifeless sea.
And the light. The opaque equatorial light. The bush and the sea do not reflect the light but absorb it, suck it in, then glow morbidly.
Boca Grande is the name of the country and Boca Grande is also the name of the city, as if the place defeated the imagination of even its first settler. At least once each year, usually on the afternoon of the Anniversary of Independence, the Boca Grande Intellectual Union sponsors a debate, followed by a no-host cocktail party, as to who that first settler might have been, but the arguments are desultory, arbitrary. Information is missing here. Evidence goes unrecorded. Every time the sun falls on a day in Boca Grande that day appears to vanish from local memory, to be reinvented if necessary but never recalled. I once asked the librarian at the Intellectual Union to recommend for Charlotte a history of Boca Grande. “Boca Grande has no history,” the librarian said, and he seemed gratified that I had asked, as if we had together hit upon a catechistic point of national pride.
“Boca Grande has no history,” I repeated to Charlotte, but again Charlotte did not quite see my point. Charlotte was at that time preparing a “Letter” describing Boca Grande as the “economic fulcrum of the Americas.” It was true that planes between, say, Los Angeles and Bogotá, or New York and Quito, sometimes stopped in Boca Grande to refuel, and paid an inflated landing fee. It was also true that passengers on such flights often left a dollar or two in the airport slot machines during the time required for refueling, but revenue from an airport landing fee and eighteen slot machines did not seem to me to constitute, in the classical sense, an economic fulcrum.
I suggested this to Charlotte.
Boca Grande exported copra, Charlotte said. Principally your own.
Boca Grande did export copra, principally my own, and, in about the same dollar volume, Boca Grande also exported parrots, anaconda skins, and macramé shawls.
What I was overlooking entirely, Charlotte said, was what Boca Grande “could become.”
A “Letter” from a city or country, I suggested, was conventionally understood to be a factual report on that city or country, not as it “could become” but as it “was.”
Not necessarily, Charlotte said.
Another of Charlotte’s Letters covered the “spirit of hope” she divined in the Boca Grande favelas. Boca Grande has no favelas, even the word is Portuguese. There is poverty here, but it is obdurately indistinguishable from comfort. We all live in cinderblock houses. Charlotte wanted color. By way of color I could tell her only that the Hotel del Caribe was said to have Central America’s largest ballroom, but Charlotte was not satisfied with that. Nor with the light.
2
CALL THIS MY OWN LETTER FROM BOCA GRANDE.
No. Call it what I said. Call it my witness to Charlotte Douglas.
One or two facts about the place where Charlotte died and I live. Boca Grande means “big mouth,” or big bay, and describes the country’s principal physical feature precisely as it appears. Almost everything in Boca Grande describes itself precisely as it appears, as if any ambiguity in the naming of things might cause the present to sink as tracelessly as the past. The Rio Blanco looks white. The Rio Colorado looks red. The Avenida del Mar runs by the sea, the Avenida de la Punta Verde runs by the green point. The green point is in fact green. On reflection I know only two place names in Boca Grande which evoke an idea or an event or a person, which suggest a past either Indian or colonial.
One of these two exceptions is “Millonario.”
As in Millonario Province.
So named because our palms grow there and our copra is milled there, and my husband’s father was the rich man, the millonario, a St. Louis confidence man named Victor Strasser who at age twenty-three floated some Missouri money to buy oil rights, at age twenty-four fled Mexico after an abortive attempt to invade Sonora, and at age twenty-five arrived in Boca Grande. Upon his recovery from cholera he married a Mendana and proceeded to divest her family of interior Boca Grande.
Victor Strasser died at ninety-five and for the last sixty years of his life preferred to be addressed as Don Victor.
I called him Mr. Strasser.
There is Millonario and there is also “Progreso.” In fact there are two Progresos, El Progreso primero and El Progreso otro. The first Progreso was the grand design of my brother-in-law Luis, the toy of his fifteen-month presidency, his new city, his capital, twenty matched glass pyramids intersected by four eight-lane boulevards, all laid out on fill in the bay and connected to the mainland until recently by causeway. The matched glass pyramids were never finished but the eight-lane boulevards were. Until a few years ago, when the causeway collapsed, I would take lunch out to the first Progreso and eat there alone, sitting on the site of a projected monument where all four empty boulevards converged. On the fill between the boulevards bamboo grew up through the big Bechtel cranes, abandoned the day Luis was shot. Luis was the last of my brothers-in-law to place himself in so exposed a position as that of El Presidente. Since Luis they have tended to favor the Ministry of Defense for themselves, and the presidency for expendable cousins by marriage. In the years after Luis was shot water hyacinths clogged the culverts at Progreso and after rain the boulevards would remain all day in shallow flood, the film of water shimmering with mosquito larvae and with the rainbow slick from rusting oil tanks. Until the collapse I would go out there maybe once a week, and