A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion
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It occurs to me that I was perhaps the only person in Boca Grande inconvenienced by the collapse of the Progreso causeway.
At some point after the collapse Gerardo took Charlotte to Progreso by boat.
I recall asking Charlotte at dinner if she found Progreso primero as peaceful as I did.
Charlotte began to cry.
As for Progreso otro, which might have even more radically challenged Charlotte’s rather teleological view of human settlement, I have not seen it in some years. Neither has anyone else. This second Progreso was another new city, in the interior, built on leased land (ours) by an American aluminum combine during the bauxite chimera here. (There was bauxite, yes, but not as much as the geologists had predicted, not enough to justify Progreso otro.) After the mines closed a handful of engineers stayed on, trying to find some economic use for the aluminous laterite which made up the bulk of the deposit, but one by one they got fever or quit or moved to the combine’s operation in Venezuela. The last two left in 1965. The road in, which cost thirty-four-million American dollars to build, can still be discerned from the air, quite clearly, a straight line of paler vegetation. My husband wanted to maintain the road, said always that the interior had things we might want access to, but after Edgar died I let it grow over. What I wanted from the interior had nothing to do with access.
Edgar was the oldest of the four sons of Victor Strasser and Alicia Mendana.
It was the brother nearest Edgar’s age, Luis, who was shot on the steps of the presidential palace in April 1959.
You will have gathered that I married into one of the three or four solvent families in Boca Grande. In fact Edgar’s death left me in putative control of fifty-nine-point-eight percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process in La República (recently La República Libre) de Boca Grande. El Presidente this year wears a yachting cap. The two younger Strasser-Mendana brothers, Little Victor and Antonio, the two Edgar and Luis called los mosquitos, participate in the estate only via a trust administered by me. Victor and Antonio do not much like this arrangement, nor do their wives Bianca and Isabel, nor does Luis’s widow Elena, but there it is. The joint decision of Edgar and his father. Fait accompli on the morning Edgar died. There it was and there it is. (A small example of why it is. The day Luis was shot Elena flew to exile in Geneva, a theatrical gesture but unnecessary, since even before her plane left the runway the coup was over and Little Victor had assumed temporary control of the government. The wife of any other Latin president would have known immediately that a coup in which the airport remained open was a coup doomed to fail, but Elena had no instinct for being the wife of a Latin president. Nor does she make a particularly appropriate presidential widow. In any case. A few weeks later Elena came back. Edgar and his father and I met her at the airport. She was wearing tinted glasses and a new Balenciaga coat, lettuce-green. She was carrying a matching parrot. She had not taken this parrot with her from Boca Grande. She had bought this parrot that morning in Geneva, for seven hundred dollars.) In any event there is not as much money in all of Boca Grande as Victor and Bianca and Antonio and Isabel and Elena accuse me of having secreted in Switzerland.
Strike Bianca.
Bianca does not accuse me of having secreted money in Switzerland because Bianca was taught at Sacre Coeur in New Orleans that discussions of money are not genteel. Also strike Isabel. Isabel does not accuse me of having secreted money in Switzerland because Isabel is so rarely here, and has been told by her doctor in Arizona that discussions of money disturb the flow of transcendental energy.
I continue to live here only because I like the light.
And because I am intermittently engaged by the efforts of my extant brothers-in-law to turn a profit on the Red Cross.
And because my days are too numbered to spend them in New York or Paris or Denver imagining the light in Boca Grande, how flat it is, how harsh and still. How dead white at noon.
One thing at least I share with Charlotte: I lost my child. Gerardo is lost to me. I hear from him regularly, see him all too often, talk to him about politics and new films and the bud rot we are experiencing in the interior groves, but I talk to him as an acquaintance. In Boca Grande he drives an Alfa Romeo 1750. In Paris, where he has lived off and on for fifteen years on a succession of student visas, he rides a Suzuki 500 motorcycle. I always think of Gerardo on wheels, or skis. I like him but not too much any more. Gerardo embodies many of the failings of this part of the world, the rather wishful machismo, the defeating touchiness, the conviction that his heritage must be aristocratic; a general attitude I do not admire. Gerardo is the grandson of two American wildcatters who got rich, my father in Colorado minerals and Edgar’s father in Boca Grande politics, and of the Irish nursemaid and the mestiza from the interior they respectively married. Still he persists in tracing his line to the court of Castile. On the delusion front I would have to say that Gerardo and Charlotte were well met.
I tell you these things about myself only to legitimize my voice. We are uneasy about a story until we know who is telling it. In no other sense does it matter who “I” am: “the narrator” plays no motive role in this narrative, nor would I want to.
Gerardo of course does play a motive role. I do not delude myself there.
Unlike Charlotte I do not dream my life.
I try to make enough distinctions.
I will die (and rather soon, of pancreatic cancer) neither hopeful nor its opposite. I am interested in Charlotte Douglas only insofar as she passed through Boca Grande, only insofar as the meaning of that sojourn continues to elude me.
3
ACCORDING TO HER PASSPORT, ENTRY VISA, AND INTERNATIONAL Certificate of Vaccination, Charlotte Amelia Douglas was born in Hollister, California, forty years before her entry into Boca Grande; was at the time of that entry a married resident of San Francisco, California; was five-feet-five-inches tall, had red hair, brown eyes, and no visible distinguishing marks; and had been successfully inoculated against smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, and paratyphoid A and B. The passport had been renewed four months before at New Orleans, Louisiana, and bore entry and departure stamps for Antigua and Guadeloupe, unused visas for Australia and the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, a Mexican tourist card stamped at Mérida, a visa and entry stamp for Boca Grande, and no indication that the bearer had reentered the United States during the four months since the renewal of the passport. Nationality NORTEAMERICANA. Type of Visa TURISTA. Occupation MADRE.
There seemed to me many elusive anomalies on these documents, not the least of them Charlotte Amelia Douglas’s decision to enter Boca Grande, but none of these nuances suggested themselves to Victor, Little Victor, who had ordered the passport surreptitiously removed from the Hotel del Caribe safe because its number appeared on a United States Department of State list indicating travelers who were to receive certain special treatment.
4
WHEN CHARLOTTE FIRST CAME TO BOCA GRANDE SHE was referred to always as la norteamericana. La norteamericana had been heard typing in her room at the Caribe all night, la norteamericana had woken a doctor at two in the morning to ask the symptoms of infant framboesia. La norteamericana had advised the manager of the Caribe that he was derelict in allowing the maids to fill the water carafes from the tap. La norteamericana had asked a waiter at the Jockey Club if marijuana was in general use in the kitchen. La norteamericana had come downstairs in a thin cotton dressing gown one night when the Caribe generator failed and sat alone in the dark at the ballroom piano until three A.M., picking out with one hand, over and over again and in every possible tempo, the melodic line of a single song. This story was told to me by a bellman at the Caribe, the brother of a woman who cooked for Victor and Bianca, and he tried to hum the song that la norteamericana had played over and over again. The song was “Mountain Greenery.”
In those first few weeks before any of us had met her she seemed to appear only in the evenings. An hour or so after the sunset one could see her walking through the empty casino at the Caribe, nodding pleasantly at the idle croupiers and the national police assigned to the casino, breathing deeply at the windows quite as if fresh