There were what seemed to Charlotte the “enchanting” children selling contraband Marlboro cigarettes outside the Caribe and there was what seemed to Charlotte the “amusing” accordionist playing “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” in the Caribe lobby on Saturday nights and there were what must have seemed to Charlotte the toy soldiers with their toy carbines on the roof of the matchbox palace. The night Victor met Charlotte at the American Embassy Christmas party and took her for the first time to his apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio, Charlotte pulled back the curtains, gazed down at the palace, and pronounced its roof “ideal” for the fireworks which would officially open the mirage she was already calling the “Boca Grande Festival de Cine, First Annual.” By the time Charlotte left Victor’s apartment that night her festival was not only the First Annual but Internacional.
A few things about Boca Grande Charlotte did not perceive as toy.
She saw the American Embassy as “real” and she left her calling cards there in little lined envelopes embossed “Tiffany et Cie” and she never noticed the workmen who every morning scrubbed obscenities from the white limestone walls.
She saw the proximity of Caracas as “real” and she looked at a map every day to reassure herself on this point and she never knew that the four-lane Carretera del Libertador to Venezuela, marked so clearly on the maps, existed only on the maps, and possibly in the memory of whoever diverted the Alianza funding for the Carretera into the construction of the Residencia Vista del Palacio.
I believe this was Victor but it may have been Antonio.
It was certainly not Luis.
Luis was the Libertador to have been memorialized.
It occurs to me now that it could even have been Edgar but there remain some areas in which I, like Charlotte, prefer my own version.
As a matter of fact Charlotte saw everything about the actual geographical location of Boca Grande as “real,” and crucial to her: in a certain dim way Charlotte believed that she had located herself at the very cervix of the world, the place through which a child lost to history must eventually pass. That Marin would turn up in Boca Grande Charlotte did not literally believe but never really doubted, at least until that day in September when Leonard told her where Marin actually was. Until that day when she learned for certain that Marin was not a victim of circumstance Charlotte believed without ever thinking it that she would be sitting at the Jockey Club one night and the waiter would tell her that a light-haired child who resembled her had come to the kitchen, applied for work as a waitress. Until that day when she learned for certain that Marin was not looking for her Charlotte believed instinctively that she would be buying the Miami Herald at the airport one morning and would hear a voice like her own on the tarmac.
Charlotte and Marin would share a room, order hot chocolate from room service, sit on the bed and catch up.
Charlotte and Marin would buy Marin a dress, get Marin a manicure, cure Marin’s nerves with consommé and naps.
And when Marin was herself again Charlotte and Marin would drive to Caracas on the four-lane Carretera del Libertador, Charlotte and Marin would fly to Bogotá, Charlotte would show her only child the Andes.
Her only child.
Her oldest child.
The only child she ever dressed in flowered lawn for Easter.
One more thing in Boca Grande Charlotte saw as “real”: the airport.
Of course the airport.
Perhaps because Charlotte believed in the airport and in the American Embassy and in the four-lane Carretera del Libertador to Venezuela she did not at first experience the weightless isolation which afflicts most visitors to Boca Grande. Perhaps because in those early days Charlotte had no letters to send or receive she did not notice that mail service was increasingly sporadic, that mailboxes all over the city were left to overflow and there was developing a currency market in stamps. Perhaps because for a while Charlotte had no calls to make or get she did not notice that the telephone lines were down more and more of the time, that calls to Miami were being routed through Quito and the American Embassy was resorting to ham radio to make routine contact with its consulate in Millonario.
She noticed that the lights at the Capilla del Mar resembled those at the Tivoli Gardens.
She did not notice that the pits in the porch railing at the Capilla del Mar resembled those made by carbine fire.
“Actually it doesn’t involve me in the least,” Charlotte told me. “I mean does it.”
When I told Charlotte in March that there would come a day when it might be possible to interpret her presence in certain situations as “political.”
“Actually I’m not ‘political’ in the least,” Charlotte told me. “I mean my mind doesn’t run that way.”
When I told Charlotte in April that there would come a day when she should leave Boca Grande.
Meanwhile Charlotte would wait for Marin in this miniature capital where nothing need be real. Charlotte would remain as she waited an interested observer of everything she saw. Charlotte would remain a tourist, a traveler with good will and good credentials and no memory of how bougainvillea grew on a hotel wall in Mérida or how peonies could swell in a hospital room in New Orleans. Had Gerardo never come home Charlotte might have managed to maintain this fiction, although increasingly I doubt it.
Perhaps Gerardo does not play the motive role in this narrative I thought he did.
Perhaps only Charlotte Douglas and her husbands do.
Perhaps only Charlotte Douglas does, since it was Charlotte who chose to stay.
3
“YOU SMELL AMERICAN,” WAS THE FIRST THING GERARDO ever said to Charlotte Douglas.
“I wonder if that could be because she is,” Elena said.
“I wonder if I do,” Ardis Bradley said.
I cannot now think how I happened to invite Charlotte for drinks that afternoon. It was Gerardo’s second day home and he had asked to see only the family, and Tuck and Ardis Bradley, and Carmen Arrellano, who had been cultivating Antonio since Gerardo’s last visit and on this particular afternoon was sulking in a hammock and ignoring her cousin, who happened to be passing the shrimp. As far as that went the only person Carmen Arrellano had acknowledged all afternoon was Antonio, and she had not exactly spoken to him. She had merely arched her back slightly whenever he passed the hammock where she lay.
But Charlotte.
I was not yet that close to Charlotte.
She had arrived in Boca Grande in November, Victor and I had met her at the Embassy in December, and when Gerardo came home it was late January, early February. I had not yet seen the pictures in Vogue of the last night she spent with her second husband. I had not yet met her first in New Orleans. I was just beginning cobalt, and was quite often tired, and impatient, and generally more absorbed with some gram-negative bacteria I was studying than with this woman I did not understand.
I suppose I might have invited Charlotte only to discomfit Victor.
Victor flatters himself that any woman he touches is rendered unfit for normal social encounter.
In fact I have no idea why I invited Charlotte.
I only remember Charlotte arriving late and the sun just falling and Gerardo watching her as she walked across the lawn with the last light behind her. I remember her dress, a thin batiste dress with pale wildflowers to her ankles. I remember her high-heeled sandals. I remember thinking that she looked at once absurdly frivolous and mildly “tragic,” a word I do not use easily or with any great approval.