As a matter of fact the illusion of the tropics seemed to me an odd effect to strive for in a city rotting on the equator, but the actual condition of the storefront was such that I could only nod. The room was cramped and grimy and the single window was blacked out. Outside the afternoon sun was blazing but inside there was only the light from two bare bulbs. In the room, besides Charlotte and me, there were several sleeping bags, a hot plate, an open and unflushed toilet, a cheap dinette chair in which Bebe Chicago sat talking on the telephone, and a table at which a man whom Charlotte had introduced as “Mr. Sanchez” seemed to be translating a United States Army arms manual into Spanish.
Charlotte appeared oblivious.
“Lighten, brighten, open it up. The perfect creamy white on the walls, maybe the palest robin’s-egg on the ceiling. And lattice. Lots of lattice. Mr. Sanchez is doing the lattice for me.” Charlotte smiled fondly at the man at the table. He did not smile back. “Aren’t you.”
“Mr. Sanchez” stared at Charlotte as if she were a moth he had never before observed and turned to Bebe Chicago. “Are we interested in the AR–16?” he said in Spanish.
“AR–15 only.” Bebe Chicago hung up the telephone and smiled at me. “Gerardo’s mama naturally speaks Spanish, mon chéri.”
“Think of a lath-house crossed with a Givenchy perfume box,” Charlotte said.
“Can I offer Gerardo’s mama a café-filtre,” Bebe Chicago said. He stood up with a magician’s flourish and placed the dinette chair in front of me. “Can I offer Gerardo’s mama this superb example of post-industrial craftsmanship.”
I remained standing.
“Possibly gardenias,” Charlotte said. “No. Cymbidiums.”
Bebe Chicago smiled and sat in the chair himself.
“Then can I tell Gerardo’s mama how much I admire her shoes,” he said. “Can I at least tell her that.”
“You can tell her what that Bren gun is doing behind the toilet,” I said.
“That’s not a Bren at all,” Bebe Chicago said after only the slightest beat, his voice still silky. “That’s a Kalashnikov. Russian. Out of Syria. The Chinese make one too, but it’s inferior to the Russian. The Russian is the best. A really super weapon.”
“Don’t talk about guns,” Charlotte said, and her voice was low and abrupt, and after that day she seemed to lose interest in her boutique.
During this period Charlotte also had her “research.”
She had her “paperwork.”
In other words she would sit alone in her room at the Caribe and she would try to read books and she would try to write letters. She tried to read a book about illiteracy in Latin America, but in lieu of finishing it she wrote a letter to Prensa Latina offering her services as author of a daily “literacy lesson.” She tried to read Alberto Masferrer’s El Minimum Vital but she still had difficulty reading Spanish, and she had read a hundred pages of El Minimum Vital before she learned from Gerardo that it was about the progressive tax. She borrowed from Ardis Bradley a volume that was obviously a CIA-sponsored “handbook” on Boca Grande, and she discovered in the introduction to this handbook an invitation to address her suggestions “for factual or interpretive or other changes” to a post-office box in Washington.
To this post-office box in Washington Charlotte addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on the subject of Boca Grande.
She never received an answer but first Kasindorf and then Riley and finally Tuck Bradley received word that she was in the country.
In case they had missed her.
Nor did Charlotte receive answers from most of the other officials and agencies and writers and editors to whom she addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on a wide range of subjects.
I believe mainly “other” changes.
The only bad time of these days Charlotte spent at the Caribe was about four o’clock.
At about four o’clock the shine of plausibility would seem to go off her projects.
At about four o’clock she would find herself sitting in the room at the Caribe remembering something.
She would sometimes call me up at four o’clock and tell me what she was remembering.
For example.
Those crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room of the house on California Street.
Those crossed spots were too bright, or too exposed, she could not determine which.
Those spots had always been too bright, too exposed.
She should perhaps have them recessed in the ceiling.
What did I think.
At a certain point during each of these calls the possession would seem to fade from her voice, and by the time she hung up she would sound almost at peace. She would go downstairs then and sit by the pool and she would watch the peacocks hiding from the heat under the jacaranda trees and she would watch the blocks of ice being dragged across the concrete into the Caribe kitchen. She would imagine the various bacteria waiting in each block of ice. She counted bacteria instead of sheep. After a while a great lassitude would come over her and she would want to sleep, and sometimes she did sleep, there by the Caribe pool in the late afternoons, but at night in the apartment on the Avenida del Mar she did not sleep at all.
8
WE COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THIS ALL OUR LIVES.
We should do this all our lives.
Tell her I said it’s all the same.
Tell her that for me.
Tell Charlotte she was wrong.
I never told Charlotte what Warren Bogart said.
I think she heard him say it every night.
She would get up some nights when Gerardo was asleep and she would pick up the half-filled glasses with which the strangers who came to her “evenings” had littered the empty rooms of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar and she would walk by herself to a theater downtown which showed dolorous Mexican movies all night, tales of betrayal and stolen babies and other sexual punishments. Other nights she would not leave the apartment but would only stand in the living room by the window and listen to the radio. Radio Boca Grande was allowed to broadcast only during restricted hours by that time but she could usually get Radio Jamaica and sometimes even Radio British Honduras and the Voice of the Caribbean from the Central American Mission in San José, Costa Rica. She thought she had New Orleans or Miami one night, dance music from some hotel or another in New Orleans or Miami, but it turned out to be only a pick-up from the Caribe. She recognized the accordionist.
Some nights when she could not even get Radio Jamaica she called San Francisco.
She did not call the number of the house on California Street in San Francisco.
She did not call the number of anyone she knew in San Francisco.
She called a number in San Francisco which gave, over and over again in a voice so monotonous as to seem to come from beyond the grave, the taped “road condition” report of the California Highway Patrol.
Interstate 80 Donner Pass was open.
U.S. 50 Echo Summit was closed.
State Route 88 Carson Pass was open.
State Route 89 Lassen Loop was closed, State Route 108 Sonora was closed, State Route 120 Tioga Pass was closed.
These calls were routed through Quito and Miami and took quite a long time to place.
By the end of May every road regularly reported upon by the California Highway Patrol was open.