by Joan Didion
On Day Three the guerrilleros neared the palace.
Those first three days went more or less as expected.
I have seen the troops on the palace roof waiting to pick off the guerrilleros before.
It was Day Four which did not go as planned. Day Four is supposed to end just after the heavy shooting at dawn, but this time it did not. The guerrilleros appeared not to know that they were on the board only to be gunned down at dawn of Day Four by the insurgent army under Antonio’s “new leadership.” The guerrilleros appeared to have more of everything than anyone except Leonard Douglas had supposed they had. Some say Kasindorf and Riley supplied the excess, some say other agencies. Some say Victor.
I think not Victor but have no empirical proof.
I also think (still) that Leonard Douglas was not involved but again this conclusion is not empirical.
In any case.
2
GERARDO HAD COUNTED ON A SMOOTH TRANSITION.
Gerardo had counted on dinner at the Jockey Club the evening of Day Four.
By Day Seven Gerardo wanted to get out himself.
“I couldn’t possibly leave right now,” Charlotte said when Gerardo told her about the helicopter in Millonario.
“You don’t realize,” Gerardo said.
“I realize,” Charlotte said. “I do realize.”
“Charlotte. You don’t leave now, you’re not going to leave at all, because Antonio wants Carmen Arrellano on that chopper and not you.”
“Then take Carmen Arrellano. Carmen should get out, Carmen has connections here.”
“So do you.”
“No.” Charlotte had seemed vague and distant. “I don’t actually.”
“Charlotte. Remember Victor. Remember me.”
And Charlotte had looked at Gerardo for a while and smiled as she sometimes smiled at strangers.
“I wasn’t connected to you actually,” Charlotte had said.
Gerardo had only stared at her.
“I mean I’ve got two or three people in my mind but I don’t quite have you.”
I trust Gerardo’s version on this point.
I wasn’t connected to you actually has the ring of Charlotte Douglas to me.
3
DAY EIGHT.
There had never been a Day Eight in Boca Grande before.
On Day Eight Charlotte appeared to have gone as usual to the clinic. She was reported to have stayed in her office all day but of course there would have been no callers for birth control devices on Day Eight. At five o’clock she closed the clinic and walked to the Caribe and apparently changed for dinner. At any rate she was wearing a clean linen dress when she left the Caribe at seven-thirty and began to walk in the direction of the Capilla del Mar.
Walking very deliberately.
Tying and retying a scarf which whipped in the hot night wind.
Seeming to concentrate on the scarf as if oblivious to the potholes in the sidewalk and the places where waste ran into the gutters.
At seven-forty-three exactly she reached the barricade on the sidewalk outside the Capilla del Mar and she stopped and she showed her passport.
Soy norteamericana, she said.
Soy una turista, she said.
The passport was knocked from her hand by the butt of a carbine.
“Don’t you lay your fucking hands on me,” she said in English.
Goddamn you all.
She was taken to the Escuela de los Niños Perdidos and detained overnight before she was transferred to the Estadio Nacional for interrogation. The moment and circumstances of her arrest are matters of record but the moment and circumstances of her death remain obscure. I do not even know which side killed her, who held the Estadio Nacional at the moment of death. I know that fire from either an AR–15 or an AR–16 entered her body just below the left shoulder-blade but I also know that all sides had both weapons.
Other than that I know only what Gerardo told me.
That she cried not for God but for Marin.
“She was shot in the back,” I said to Gerardo.
“Maybe she wanted to have it that way,” Gerardo said.
“She wouldn’t have wanted to have it that way.”
“Well,” Gerardo said, “she did.”
That Gerardo knew she cried for Marin suggests that Antonio was in charge of the Estadio Nacional at the moment of death but there are no real points in knowing one way or another.
As Leonard Douglas might say.
As Leonard Douglas did say, when I told him.
I no longer know where the real points are.
I am more like Charlotte than I thought I was.
On the day Antonio finally managed to take over Victor’s office the October Violence ended. On the day after that Victor flew back from Bariloche, I flew back from New Orleans, and Charlotte Douglas’s body was found, where it had been thrown, on the lawn of the American Embassy. Since all Embassy personnel had abandoned the building the point was lost on them.
Although not on me.
And possibly not even on Victor.
Norteamericana cunt.
4
ALL I CAN TELL YOU DIRECTLY ABOUT CHARLOTTE Douglas’s death is that I sent her body to San Francisco. I had the body put in a coffin and I went to the airport with the coffin and I waited there until I could see, for myself, the coffin loaded into the hold of the first Pan American flight to leave Boca Grande after the October Violence. I wanted to lay a flag on the coffin but there were no American flags in Boca Grande that week and in the end I bought a child’s T-shirt in the gift shop at the airport. This T-shirt was printed like an American flag. I dropped this T-shirt on the coffin as it was loaded into the hold of the Boeing. I think this T-shirt did not have the correct number of stars or stripes but it did have the appearance of stars and stripes and it was red and it was white and it was blue. There were no real points in that either.
5
IN SUMMARY.
So you know the story.
Today we are clearing some coastal groves by slash-and-burn and a pall of smoke hangs over Boca Grande. The smoke colors everything. The smoke obscures the light. You will notice my use of the colonial pronoun, the overseer’s “we.” I mean it. I see now that I have no business in this place but I have been here too long to change. I mean “we.” I wish that I could see the light today but I recognize the necessity for clearing groves. I also recognize the equivocal nature of even the most empirical evidence. Some evidence I did not know about until quite recently, when crates of mail uncollected during the October Violence that year were located and distributed. This evidence came to me long after I had talked to Leonard Douglas and been put in touch with Marin Bogart in Buffalo. This evidence came to me long after I had seen Marin Bogart in Buffalo. Here it is. Early on the evening of her arrest, from a box between the Caribe and the Capilla del Mar, Charlotte Douglas mailed me Marin’s address. She also mailed me the big square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring. I wrote to Marin and told her I have the emerald but have received no reply. I did not mention to Marin that the emerald was a memento from the man who financed the Tupamaros.
Marin has no interest in the past.
I still do, but understand it no better.
All I know now is that when I think of Charlotte Douglas walking in the hot night wind toward the lights at the Capilla del Mar I am less and less certain that this story has been one of delusion.
Unless the delusion was mine.
When I am tired I remember what I was taught in Colorado. On Day Minus One in Boca Grande Charlotte remembered to bring me a gardenia for my trip. Her mother taught her that. Marin and I are inseparable. She had a straw hat one Easter, and a flowered lawn dress. Tell Charlotte she was wrong. Tell Marin she was wrong. Tell her that for me. She remembers everything. She remembers she bled. The wind is up and I will die and rather soon and all I know empirically is I am told.
I am told, and so she said.
I heard later.
>
According to her passport. It was reported.
Apparently.
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.
BOOKS BY JOAN DIDION
WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
WHERE I WAS FROM
POLITICAL FICTIONS
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
AFTER HENRY
MIAMI
DEMOCRACY
SALVADOR
THE WHITE ALBUM
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
RUN RIVER
ALSO BY JOAN DIDION
AFTER HENRY
In After Henry, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates, and gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.
Current Affairs/Essays/978-0-679-74539-6
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness that has made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. Charlotte Douglas has come to the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75486-2
DEMOCRACY
Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of the losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget Inez’s father is a murderer. Moving deftly between romance, farce and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75485-5
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena’s father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal—a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75285-1
MIAMI
No one has observed Miami’s pastel surfaces and murky intrigues more astutely than Joan Didion. As this unerring social commentator follows Miami’s drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion and hypocrisy—and of political violence turned as personal as a family feud.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-78180-6
POLITICAL FICTIONS
In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
Essays/Political/978-0-375-71890-8
RUN RIVER
Joan Didion’s electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75250-9
SALVADOR
“Terror is the given of the place.” The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country’s particular brand of terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As she travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-75183-0
WHERE I WAS FROM
In this moving and insightful book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.
History/Memoir/978-0-679-75286-8
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Memoir/978-1-4000-7843-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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