“I can’t get it up,” Warren said when she tried to wake him. “Baby, baby, I can’t get it up.”
“I don’t want it,” she said. “That’s not what I want.”
“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me again.”
“How could I leave you. Don’t wake up.”
How could I leave you.
The same way you left everybody.
“You like it too much,” Warren said. “You like it more than anybody I ever knew. I know a girl in Birmingham likes it almost as much as you. We’ll go do it with her. I want to see you with Julia.”
“I didn’t like that before.”
“Did we do that before?”
“With Howard’s girl. I didn’t like it.”
“You liked it all right.”
We could have been doing this all our lives.
We should be doing this all our lives.
We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.
Talk about it and you lose it.
She was a woman almost forty whose fillings hurt when the highway vibrated. She was a woman almost forty waiting for the night she would call to get the Demerol. When Warren woke at sundown he took her to see a bike movie in a drive-in and drank a fifth of bourbon in the car and drove under the big pink arc lights with the rented car flat-out all the way to Birmingham. When the peonies swelled and broke behind her eyelids in the Ochsner Clinic they blazed like the big pink arc lights all the way to Birmingham. She could take care of somebody or somebody could take care of her and it was the same thing in the end.
Mérida.
Antigua.
Guadeloupe.
How could I leave you.
The same way you left everybody.
He wants you to walk away from here the same way you walked away from everything else in your life.
Tell her I said it’s all the same.
El Aeropuerto del Presidente General Luis Strasser-Mendana, deceased.
Tell her that for me.
FIVE
1
OIL WELLS ABOUT TO COME IN HAVE A SOUND THE ATTENTIVE ear can detect.
As do earthquakes.
Volcanoes about to erupt transmit for days or weeks before their convulsion a signal called “the harmonic tremor.”
Similarly I know for months before the fact when there is about to be a “transition” in Boca Grande. There is the occasional tank on the Avenida Centrale. Sentries with carbines appear on the roof of the presidential palace. For reasons I have never understood the postal rates begin to fluctuate mysteriously. There is a mounting mania for construction, for getting one’s cut while the government lasts: dummy corporations multiply, phantom payrolls metastasize. No one has an office but everyone has a mail drop. A game is underway, the “winner” being the player who lands his marker in the Ministry of Defense, and the play has certain ritual moves: whoever wants the Ministry that year must first get the guerrilleros into the game The guerrilleros seem always to believe that they are playing on their own, but they are actually a diversion, a disruptive element placed on the board only to be “quelled” by “stronger leadership.” Guns and money begin to reach the guerrilleros via the usual channels. Mimeographed communiqués begin to appear, and twenty people are detained for questioning. A few are reported as prison suicides and a few more reported in exile but months later, again mysteriously, the same twenty are detained for questioning.
A mounting giddiness about the proximity of the guerrilleros sets the social tone of the city: many tea dances are planned, many adulterous liaisons initiated.
Many citizens adopt eccentric schedules to comply with the terms of their kidnapping insurance.
El Presidente, whoever is playing El Presidente at the moment, falls ill, and is urged to convalesce at Bariloche, in Argentina.
Gerardo arrives, and stays for the action.
These events in Boca Grande are inflexibly reported on the outside as signs of a popular uprising, but they are not. “NEW LEASE ON DEMOCRACY IN BOCA GRANDE” is one headline I recall from the New York Times. I believe Victor was the lessor of democracy in question.
I told Charlotte all along that I was hearing the harmonic tremor but Charlotte paid no attention.
Charlotte appeared to have used up all her attention.
2
I THINK NOW THAT IN THE BEGINNING SHE STAYED ON in Boca Grande precisely because it seemed not to demand attentiveness. I recall having made, in the early days of my marriage to Edgar, somewhat the same mistake about Boca Grande, as well as about Edgar himself, but I revised my impressions to coincide with reality. Charlotte did the reverse. The city must have seemed to her at once familiar and distant, potentially “colorful” but in no way unmanageable, a place not unlike the matchbox model village that she and Dickie had once laid out along an irrigation ditch on the Hollister ranch: a place she could revise to suit herself as she had not been able to revise the other points on her recent itinerary. Here in Boca Grande there was the matchbox hotel in which one stayed, there was the matchbox hotel in which one did not stay. There was the “best” restaurant, there was the “second-best” restaurant, there were the districts in which nurses pushed baby carriages on Sunday afternoons and the districts in which nurses did not push baby carriages on Sunday afternoons.
There was no intimidating social life but only the Jockey Club, a place where a norteamericana in a good linen dress might well have expected to pass unnoticed.
There was no intimidating history but only the Museo de la República, a place where a norteamericana with a six-hundred-dollar handbag might well have expected to spend an undemanding hour studying cracked spinets and bronzed Winged Victories and other Strasser-Mendana family artifacts.