I said nothing. Bebe Chicago was a West Indian homosexual who after some years at the London School of Economics and a few more organizing Caribbean “liberation fronts” out of Mexico had turned up in Boca Grande to see what he could promote. His name was François Parmentier but everyone called him Bebe Chicago. I have no idea why. He was said to have connections with the guerrilleros. I heard about him frequently, from both Victor and Tuck Bradley. People like Bebe Chicago come and go in Boca Grande, and the main mark they leave is to have provided inadvertent employment for the many other people required to follow them around and tap their telephones.
“Grace thinks Bebe Chicago and I are using you,” Gerardo said.
“Delicious,” Elena said. “Do it.”
“Actually that’s not the dynamic.” Gerardo smiled at me and Elena. “Actually I’m using Bebe Chicago. Listen to this girl. I like the lisp and the pinafore together. Very nice.”
“All you think about is sex,” Elena said.
“You wish that were true,” Gerardo said. “But it’s not.”
“She bores me,” Carmen Arrellano said sullenly. Carmen had been arranged since dinner in a corner of the room where she could gaze at herself in a mirror. “It bores me.”
“Of course it bores you,” Gerardo said. “You don’t like sex. You can’t dress for it, there are never any photographers. Or is that what bores you?”
“The radio,” Carmen said sullenly.
“I didn’t dream you were listening,” Elena said. “I thought you were devising a new makeup. Have you ever thought of bleaching your eyebrows?”
“I said this is boring me,” Carmen said to Gerardo.
Gerardo held up a hand to silence her and moved closer to the radio.
“This was really a terribly amusing party you missed last night,” Elena said to Carmen.
Carmen picked up a magazine.
“Steel band,” Elena said. Actually Elena had not found the “party” amusing at all. Actually Elena had complained before she stopped speaking to me that Gerardo’s friends did not dance but sat around a filthy room watching a Cuban film about sugar production. Elena smiled at Carmen. “Lots of Dominicans and these frightful Cubans. We danced until five this morning. Are you still bored?”
“Carmen is always bored,” Gerardo said. “Excuse me. Camilla is always bored. I want to hear this lisp.”
“We shall reply to repression with liberation. We shall reply to the terrorism of the dictatorship with the terrorism of the revolution.”
Elena continued to smile benignly at Carmen.
Carmen dropped her magazine on the floor and stood up.
“We’re tiring your mother,” Carmen announced to Gerardo. “And your amusing aunt.”
“I should say,” Elena said. “It’s nearly nine.”
“I’ll take you home when this is over,” Gerardo said. “Meanwhile you might listen.”
“Pinched little parrot talking about capitalism,” Carmen said. “Who cares about capitalism.”
“That’s very interesting, Carmen.” Gerardo was turning the radio dials to keep the relay from fading. “It’s very interesting because there’s a body of thought that capitalism is precisely what ruined your character.”
There was a silence.
Elena giggled.
“Also yours,” Gerardo said to Elena. “Not that I agree entirely.”
I was relieved when the relay faded out.
I was equally tired of listening to Gerardo and Elena and Carmen Arrellano and the little girl on the tape.
I recall that none of the four had my sympathy that night.
6
THE NIGHT CHARLOTTE FIRST HEARD THE TAPE SHE apparently tried to transcribe it word for word, so that she could explain to Leonard and Warren what Marin had in mind. She got only as far as the part where Marin discussed what she called the revolutionary character of her organization. “Now I would like to discuss the revolutionary character of our organization,” Marin definitely said on the tape. “The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary.”
Charlotte read this sentence several times. She wondered if she had misheard Marin, or missed an important clause. The tape was still running and Marin could still be heard, talking about “expropriation” and “firepower” and “revolutionary justice” and about how the Transamerica Building was one of many symbols of imperialist latifundismo in San Francisco, but Charlotte was still fixed on that one sentence. The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary. She could parse the sentence but she could make no sense of it, could find no way to rephrase it so that Leonard and Warren would understand.
As it turned out she did not need to explain the sentence to Leonard because when he arrived from the airport at midnight he said that the sentence was not original with Marin but had been lifted from a handbook by a Brazilian guerrilla theorist named Marighela.
“I’ve got just one thing to say about the operation,” Leonard said.
Charlotte waited.
“I know where they got their rhetoric but I’d like to know where they got their hardware.”
As it turned out Charlotte did not need to explain the sentence to Warren either because when he called from New York at two that morning he had already heard the tape and, like Leonard, he had just one thing to say about the operation.
“Fuck Marin,” he said.
I think Warren Bogart would have had my sympathy that night.
7
WHEN I MARRIED EDGAR STRASSER-MENDANA I RECEIVED, from an aunt in Denver who had been taken as a bride to a United Fruit station in Cuba, twenty-four Haviland dessert plates in the “Windsor Rose” pattern and a letter of instructions for living in the tropics. I was to allow no nightsoil on my kitchen garden, boil water for douches as well as for drinking, preserve my husband’s books with a thin creosote solution, schedule regular hours for sketching or writing and regard the playing of bridge as an avoidance of reality to be indulged only at biweekly intervals and never with depressive acquaintances. In this regime I could perhaps escape what the letter called the fever and disquiet of the latitudes. That I had been living in these same latitudes unmarried for some years made no difference to my aunt: she appeared to locate the marriage bed as the true tropic of fever and disquiet.
So in many ways did Charlotte.
As it happens I understand this position, having observed it for years in societies quite distant from San Francisco and Denver, but some women do not. Some women lie easily in whatever beds they make. They marry or do not marry with equanimity. They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They sleep dreamlessly, get up and scramble eggs.
Not Charlotte.
Never Charlotte.
I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not. Whenever I saw her with both Victor and Gerardo it struck me that her every movement was freighted with this question. Who had prior claim. Whose call on her was most insistent. To whom did she owe what. If Gerardo’s hand brushed hers in front of Victor her face would flush, her eyes drop. If she needed a bottle of wine opened on those dismal valiant occasions when she put on her gray chiffon dress and tried to “entertain” she could never just hand the corkscrew to Gerardo. Nor could she hand the corkscrew to Victor. Instead she would evade the question by opening the wine herself, usually breaking the cork. I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male’s totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. “I mean that’s pretty much what happens everywhere, isn’t it,” she said. “Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn’t show?”