A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  To this post-office box in Washington Charlotte addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on the subject of Boca Grande.

  She never received an answer but first Kasindorf and then Riley and finally Tuck Bradley received word that she was in the country.

  In case they had missed her.

  Nor did Charlotte receive answers from most of the other officials and agencies and writers and editors to whom she addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on a wide range of subjects.

  I believe mainly “other” changes.

  The only bad time of these days Charlotte spent at the Caribe was about four o’clock.

  At about four o’clock the shine of plausibility would seem to go off her projects.

  At about four o’clock she would find herself sitting in the room at the Caribe remembering something.

  She would sometimes call me up at four o’clock and tell me what she was remembering.

  For example.

  Those crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room of the house on California Street.

  Those crossed spots were too bright, or too exposed, she could not determine which.

  Those spots had always been too bright, too exposed.

  She should perhaps have them recessed in the ceiling.

  What did I think.

  At a certain point during each of these calls the possession would seem to fade from her voice, and by the time she hung up she would sound almost at peace. She would go downstairs then and sit by the pool and she would watch the peacocks hiding from the heat under the jacaranda trees and she would watch the blocks of ice being dragged across the concrete into the Caribe kitchen. She would imagine the various bacteria waiting in each block of ice. She counted bacteria instead of sheep. After a while a great lassitude would come over her and she would want to sleep, and sometimes she did sleep, there by the Caribe pool in the late afternoons, but at night in the apartment on the Avenida del Mar she did not sleep at all.

  8

  WE COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THIS ALL OUR LIVES.

  We should do this all our lives.

  Tell her I said it’s all the same.

  Tell her that for me.

  Tell Charlotte she was wrong.

  I never told Charlotte what Warren Bogart said.

  I think she heard him say it every night.

  She would get up some nights when Gerardo was asleep and she would pick up the half-filled glasses with which the strangers who came to her “evenings” had littered the empty rooms of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar and she would walk by herself to a theater downtown which showed dolorous Mexican movies all night, tales of betrayal and stolen babies and other sexual punishments. Other nights she would not leave the apartment but would only stand in the living room by the window and listen to the radio. Radio Boca Grande was allowed to broadcast only during restricted hours by that time but she could usually get Radio Jamaica and sometimes even Radio British Honduras and the Voice of the Caribbean from the Central American Mission in San José, Costa Rica. She thought she had New Orleans or Miami one night, dance music from some hotel or another in New Orleans or Miami, but it turned out to be only a pick-up from the Caribe. She recognized the accordionist.

  Some nights when she could not even get Radio Jamaica she called San Francisco.

  She did not call the number of the house on California Street in San Francisco.

  She did not call the number of anyone she knew in San Francisco.

  She called a number in San Francisco which gave, over and over again in a voice so monotonous as to seem to come from beyond the grave, the taped “road condition” report of the California Highway Patrol.

  Interstate 80 Donner Pass was open.

  U.S. 50 Echo Summit was closed.

  State Route 88 Carson Pass was open.

  State Route 89 Lassen Loop was closed, State Route 108 Sonora was closed, State Route 120 Tioga Pass was closed.

  These calls were routed through Quito and Miami and took quite a long time to place.

  By the end of May every road regularly reported upon by the California Highway Patrol was open.

  According to Victor.

  Who duly heard these calls and believed them coded.

  “Quite frankly I don’t think the California Highway Patrol is hooked up with the guerrilleros,” I said to Victor.

  “Then give me one reason for these calls.”

  “She’s lonely, Victor.” In fact “lonely” was never a word I would have used to characterize Charlotte Douglas but conversation with Victor requires broad strokes. “She’s ‘a woman alone.’ As I believe you used to call her.”

  “She is no longer a woman alone. May I point out. On the occasion of all but one of these calls your son has been spending the night in this apartment. Where Bebe Chicago has been a frequent visitor.”

  “If I were you I’d listen to Bebe Chicago’s calls and forget Charlotte’s.”

  “Bebe Chicago’s calls. Spare me any more of Bebe Chicago’s calls.” Victor mimicked a whispery falsetto. “ ‘Ricardo? It’s me. C’est moi, chéri. Bebe.’ ”

  “Actually you aren’t good at voices, Victor. What is it you want to know?”

  “What I want to know, Grace, is what your son is doing while she makes these calls.”

  “Sleeping.”

  “ ‘Sleeping’?”

  “ ‘Sleeping.’ Yes.”

  Victor looked at me awhile, and then at his nails. “Sleeping,” he said finally. “What kind of man would be sleeping.”

  I was tired of Victor that spring.

  I was also tired of whatever game Gerardo was playing with Bebe Chicago and the guerrilleros and the strangers he invited to Charlotte’s “evenings” on the Avenida del Mar.

  Charlotte’s “evenings.”

  I would go sometimes.

  There were always these strangers there, third-rate people Gerardo was using in his game, the object of which seemed to be to place his marker in Victor’s office in as few moves as possible. His marker that year happened to be Antonio, but who it was mattered not at all to Gerardo. Gerardo plays only for the action. Part of the action in this case was the artful manipulation of what passed for the intelligentsia in Boca Grande, the point being to create an illusion of support for the guerrilleros, and it was the members of this “intelligentsia” who littered the apartment on the Avenida del Mar with half-filled glasses two or three nights a week. Of course Bebe Chicago was usually there, and a few “poets” who had published verses in anthologies with titles like Fresh Wind in the Caribbean, and the usual complement of translators and teachers and film critics who supported themselves stringing for newspapers and playing at politics. I recall one who read out loud at Charlotte’s dinner table a paper he was writing called “The Singular Position of Intellectuals with Respect to the Crisis of the Underdeveloped World” and then read it again, over Charlotte’s telephone, to a friend in Tenerife. I recall another who made marionettes to perform the plays of Arnold Wesker in schoolyards.

  I have no idea what Charlotte thought of these people.

  She told me she found them “terribly stimulating to listen to,” but I never saw her “listen to” any one of them.

  She had in the dining room of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar a large round table around which these people sat and talked about what they always called “the truly existential situation of the Central American,” and Charlotte would sit at this table in her gray chiffon dress, but she seemed not to be there at all. She only stared at the kerosene lamp in the center of the table and watched moths batter themselves against the glass chimney. As the moths fell stunned to the table she would brush them toward her with a napkin, like someone dreaming. At the end of such an evening there would be moths drifted beneath her chair and moth wings caught in her gray chiffon skirt and no trace in her mind of what had been said. So dimly did Charlotte appear to perceive the nature of her evenings that sh
e would sometimes invite Victor, and Victor would sit stiffly and finger his pistol and say that he did not quite comprehend why the situation of the Central American was so truly existential.

  “What’s to be done about it in any case,” I recall Victor saying one night. “What does it mean.”

  Whenever I saw Victor at one of Charlotte’s “evenings” I found myself rather liking him.

  At least he was serious.

  Unlike Gerardo.

  “Don’t worry about what it means,” Gerardo said that night.

  “ ‘What does it mean,’ ” Bebe Chicago said. “A knotty question.”

  “I find it touching,” the most offensive of the poets said. His name was Raúl Lara and he was working on a sequence of Mother-and-Child sonnets to present to the people of Cuba and all that evening he had been studying a mango, spitting on it, polishing it, holding it in different lights.

  Raúl Lara held the mango now in front of Victor’s eyes.

  “A Strasser-Mendana. A man of action. Trapped in the quicksand of time and he asks us what does it mean. Give him Fanon. Give him Debray. Give him this fat mango.”

  Raúl Lara dropped the mango in Victor’s lap.

  With considerable dignity Victor stood up and placed the mango on the table in front of Charlotte.

  The table fell silent.

  Charlotte seemed to force herself to look away from the moths and at the mango. “Did someone need a fruit knife,” she said finally.

  “You weren’t listening,” Victor said gently.

  “She never listens,” Gerardo said.

  “Why don’t you listen,” Victor said to Charlotte.

  Charlotte smiled vaguely.

  “Maybe she doesn’t listen because she’s afraid of what she’ll hear,” Raúl Lara said. “New ideas. Very threatening.”

  Charlotte looked directly at Raúl Lara for the first time that evening. She seemed tired. She seemed older. “I’ve heard some new ideas,” she said after a while. “In my time.”

  Other than that Charlotte seemed to make no judgments at all on the people who came to the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, no judgments on them and no distinctions among them.

  Among us.

  I was there too.

  We were voices. We were voices no different from the voices in Mexican movies. We were voices no different from the voices on Radio Jamaica or on the California Highway Patrol road reports. We were voices to fill the hours until it was time to go to the Caribe for breakfast.

  Sometimes I forget that I was there too.

  Charlotte’s breakfasts at the Caribe.

  Charlotte went to the Caribe for breakfast every morning for a while.

  She went to the Caribe for breakfast because she worried about three children who every morning would crawl under the Caribe fence and leap screaming into the deep end of the pool. They did not seem to know how to swim. They would flounder and gasp to the side and leap in again. There was no lifeguard and the water was green with algae and Charlotte could never see the children beneath the surface of the water but every morning she would take her breakfast to the pool and try to insure that the children did not drown. She tried to distinguish their particular shrieks. She counted their heads compulsively. Because she believed that in the instant of a blink one of the heads would slip beneath the surface and stay there unseen she tried not to blink.

  “There are no children registered at the hotel,” the manager of the Caribe said when she mentioned the children in the pool. “So they aren’t supposed to be there.”

  “But they are there.”

  “They aren’t supposed to be there,” the manager said, enunciating each word very carefully, “because there are no children registered at the hotel.”

  On the morning she could only see two of the three children for thirty straight seconds she screamed, and jumped into the pool with her clothes on. She choked and the murky water blinded her and when she came up all three children were standing on the edge of the pool fighting over her handbag. She watched them run away with the bag and she went upstairs and she stood for a long while in the lukewarm trickle from the shower and she thought about the pale wash of green Marin got in her hair every summer from the chlorine in pools.

  California pools.

  Swimming pools for children who knew how to swim.

  She tried to stop thinking about swimming pools but could not.

  “You don’t seem to have heard of chlorine here,” she said to me.

  “We don’t want to emphasize technology at the expense of traditional culture,” I said.

  I thought she was in a less literal mood than usual but apparently she was not.

  “I see,” she said.

  “I wasn’t serious,” I said. “It was a joke. Irony.”

  “Is cheap,” she said. Her expression did not change.

  After that morning at the pool she stopped spending her days at the Caribe and volunteered as an advisor at the birth control clinic. She seemed to have entirely forgotten Colonel Higuera and the Lederle cholera vaccine, her previous essay into good works. She was a source of some exasperation at the birth control clinic, because she kept advising the women to request diaphragms they would never use instead of intrauterine devices they could not remove, but the job of “advisor” was largely academic anyway since only intrauterine devices were available. In any case Charlotte took her work very seriously and it seemed to lend a purpose to her days.

  “Anyone can learn to use a diaphragm,” she announced at my house one evening when I suggested that the diaphragm, however favored it might be in the practices of San Francisco gynecologists, was not generally considered the most practical means of birth control in underdeveloped countries. “I certainly did.”

  “You certainly did what?” Gerardo said.

  “I certainly learned to use a diaphragm.”

  “Of course you did,” Gerardo said. “What’s that got to do with it? Grace wasn’t talking about you.”

  “Grace was talking,” Charlotte said, “about the difficulty of using diaphragms. And I said there wasn’t any. Difficulty. Because I had no trouble whatsoever learning how.”

  Gerardo looked at me.

  I think this was perhaps Gerardo’s first exposure not to the norteamericana in Charlotte but to the westerner in Charlotte, the Hollister ranch child in Charlotte, the strain in Charlotte which insisted that the world was peopled with others exactly like herself.

  “What is she saying,” Gerardo said to me.

  “Charlotte is an egalitarian,” I said to Gerardo. “So am I. You are not.”

  “I am only saying,” Charlotte said patiently, “that if I could learn to use a diaphragm then anyone could.”

  “Bullshit,” Gerardo said.

  Charlotte looked at Gerardo levelly for quite a long time.

  There was a flicker of Warren Bogart on her face.

  “Then don’t you talk at me any more about what ‘the people’ can do,” she said finally.

  No irony.

  However cheap.

  I liked Charlotte very much that night but she still tended to take whatever Gerardo said precisely at face value. Gerardo only talked about “the people” that spring as a move in the particular game he was playing. As a matter of fact Charlotte tended to take what anyone said precisely at face value. When she showed me her next attempt at writing about Boca Grande, the next of those “Letters from Central America” which were the only one of her projects to survive the incident at the Caribe pool, the typed manuscript began: “A nation that refuses to emphasize technology at the expense of its traditional culture, Boca Grande is …”

  Boca Grande is.

  9

  “YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT,” I SAID TO VICTOR the day Antonio’s Bentley exploded in front of the Caribe, killing the chauffeur. Antonio had not even been using the Bentley. Carmen Arrellano had been using the Bentley, but at the instant of the explosion Carmen Arrellano had been having her legs waxed in the
Caribe beauty shop. In short the job had been inept in the extreme, but this was not the aspect I wanted to stress with Victor. “You really shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t,” Victor said. “I’m appalled you think I did. Appalled. Shocked. Hurt. It’s an obscene accusation.” I said nothing.

  “If you think I did it,” Victor said after a while, “then you know why I did it. You’re aware of what Antonio’s trying to do.”

  I said nothing.

  “I suppose your son told you,” Victor said.

  “Actually no.”

  “I suppose you prefer Antonio to me,” Victor said.

  “Not particularly.”

  Victor sat in silence for a while. He had come to visit in the middle of the afternoon. He never used to visit in the middle of the afternoon. Victor did not seem to know what to do with his afternoons that summer.

  “Then why aren’t you helping me,” he said finally. “You know what Antonio’s doing, you—”

  “I don’t know. I just suppose.”

  “—You suppose you know what Antonio’s doing, why don’t you discuss it with me? Why aren’t you with me?”

  “Because it doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said.

  Victor sat slumped in a chair.

  I have liked Victor on some occasions and pitied him on many. Edgar called him stupid. Luis laughed at him. Even Antonio was making a fool of him.

  I took his ridiculous manicured hand.

  “Because it’s going to happen,” I said. “Just let it happen. With grace.”

  “I can’t do that,” Victor said after a while.

  I knew he couldn’t do that.

  Within the next two weeks three more explosions occurred in locations where Antonio might normally have been, killing six and injuring fourteen, and then there was the usual odd calm.