6
WHEN MARIN BOGART ASKED ME WITHOUT MUCH INTEREST what her mother had “done” in Boca Grande there was very little I could think to say.
Very little that Marin Bogart would have understood.
A lost child in a dirty room in Buffalo.
A child who claimed no interest in the past.
Or the future.
Or the present.
As far as I could see.
“She did some work in a clinic,” I said.
“Charity,” Marin Bogart said.
The indictment lay between us for a while.
“Cholera actually,” I said.
Marin Bogart shrugged.
Cholera was something Marin Bogart had been protected against, along with diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, and undue dental decay.
Cholera was one more word Marin Bogart did not understand.
“And after that she worked in a birth control clinic.”
“Classic,” Marin Bogart said. “Absolutely classic.”
“How exactly is it ‘classic.’ ”
“Birth control is the most flagrant example of how the ruling class practices genocide.”
“Maybe not the most flagrant,” I said.
A lost daughter in a dirty room in Buffalo with dishes in the sink and an M–3 on the bed.
A daughter who never had much use for words but had finally learned to string them together so that they sounded almost like sentences.
A daughter who chose to believe that her mother had died on the wrong side of a “people’s revolution.”
“There was no ‘right side,’ ” I said. “There was no issue. There were only—”
“That is a typically—”
“There were only personalities.”
“—A typically bourgeois view of the revolutionary process.”
She had Charlotte’s eyes.
Maybe there is no motive role in this narrative.
Maybe it is just something that happened.
Then why is it in my mind when nothing else is.
7
WHAT HAD CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS “DONE” IN BOCA GRANDE.
I have no idea whether Marin Bogart was asking me that day what her mother had “done” with her life in Boca Grande or what her mother had “done” to get killed in Boca Grande.
In either case the answer is obscure.
The question of Charlotte Douglas has never been “settled” for me.
Never “decided.”
I know how to make models of life itself, DNA, RNA, helices double and single and squared, but I try to make a model of Charlotte Douglas’s “character” and I see only a shimmer.
Like the shimmer of the oil slick on the boulevards after rain in Progreso.
Let me try a less holistic approach to the model.
We had the cholera epidemic in April that year.
The cholera epidemic in which Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping.
I gave inoculations with Charlotte, but only for a few hours the first morning, because I had no patience with the fact that almost no one in Boca Grande would cross the street to be inoculated. They were all fatalistas about cholera. Cholera was an opportunity for God to prove His love.
“Then let Him prove it,” I said to Charlotte at the end of the first morning.
“We have to make it attractive,” Charlotte said. “Obviously.”
And she did.
She set out to make each inoculation seem to the inoculee not a hedge against the hereafter but an occasion of mild profit in the here and now. She left the clinic for an hour and she bought chocolates wrapped in pink tinfoil from the Caribe kitchen and she made a deal for whisky miniatures with an unemployed Braniff steward who had access to the airport catering trucks and, until the remaining vaccine was appropriated by a colonel named Rafael Higuera, she dispensed these favors with every 1.5 cc. shot of Lederle Cholera Strains Ogawa-Inaba.
“Why didn’t she just lie down and open her legs for them,” Antonio said to Gerardo in my living room. It was the evening of the day the vaccine had been appropriated and Antonio had already expressed his conviction that Higuera had performed a public service by preventing Charlotte from further contaminating the populace with her American vaccine. I have never known why Antonio was so particularly enraged by everything Charlotte did. I suppose she was a norteamericana, she was a woman, she was an unpredictable element. I suppose she was a version of me at whom he could vent his rage. “Ask the great lady why she didn’t just do that. Higuera didn’t go far enough.”
“How far should he have gone,” Gerardo said, and smiled slightly at me.
“She’d throw her apron on my feet once,” Antonio said. “Just once.”
“What would you do,” Gerardo said.
“Drop her,” Antonio said.
“Drop her,” Gerardo said.
“Between the eyes.”
“Seems extreme,” Gerardo said.
“How can you be entertained by this?” I said to Gerardo.
“How can you not be?” Gerardo said to me.
During the week after the appropriation of the vaccine Charlotte spoke not at all to me, spoke only in a glazed and distracted way to Gerardo, and was known to have placed two telephone calls to Leonard Douglas, neither of them completed. At the end of the week she gave me her revised version of the appropriation of the vaccine, the version in which the army was lending its resources to the inoculation program, the version in which she had simply misunderstood Higuera, the version in which he had never offered to sell her the vaccine but had simply expressed concern as to whether she herself had been inoculated; once she had arrived at this version Charlotte never mentioned cholera again, although people continued dying from it for several weeks.
After the cholera epidemic she appeared for a while that May and June to retreat into unspecified gastrointestinal infection less often, and she perfected that frenetic public energy which made many people, particularly Elena, suspect her of a reliance on major amphetamines. Even after she had moved most of her things into the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, even after she had with her own hands whitewashed all the walls and filled the empty rooms with flowers and begun to have what she called her “evenings” there, she kept her room at the Caribe, and she would go there every day for breakfast and to spend most of the day.
She began her “writing” during these days she spent alone at the Caribe.
She remembered her “film festival,” and she drew up endless lists of names: actors, directors, agents, former agents who were then studio executives, former studio executives who were then independent producers, and what I once heard her call “other movers and shakers.” She had met many of these people with Leonard and she was certain that they would be delighted to lend their names and films, once she put it to them.
Which she intended to do as soon as she completed the lists.
She got the idea for her “boutique,” and she planned her projected inventory: needlepoint canvases of her own design and Porthault linens, the market for which in Boca Grande would have seemed to be limited to Elena, Bianca, Isabel, and me. She had enlisted Gerardo’s help in finding a storefront to rent and she was certain that the boutique would pick up the character of the entire neighborhood, once she got it in shape for the opening.
Which she intended to do as soon as Bebe Chicago got his Dominicans out of the storefront.
“Imagine cymbidiums,” she said on the afternoon she showed me her storefront. “Masses of them. In hemp baskets. The illusion of the tropics. That’s the effect to strive for.”