According to Victor.
Who duly heard these calls and believed them coded.
“Quite frankly I don’t think the California Highway Patrol is hooked up with the guerrilleros,” I said to Victor.
“Then give me one reason for these calls.”
“She’s lonely, Victor.” In fact “lonely” was never a word I would have used to characterize Charlotte Douglas but conversation with Victor requires broad strokes. “She’s ‘a woman alone.’ As I believe you used to call her.”
“She is no longer a woman alone. May I point out. On the occasion of all but one of these calls your son has been spending the night in this apartment. Where Bebe Chicago has been a frequent visitor.”
“If I were you I’d listen to Bebe Chicago’s calls and forget Charlotte’s.”
“Bebe Chicago’s calls. Spare me any more of Bebe Chicago’s calls.” Victor mimicked a whispery falsetto. “ ‘Ricardo? It’s me. C’est moi, chéri. Bebe.’ ”
“Actually you aren’t good at voices, Victor. What is it you want to know?”
“What I want to know, Grace, is what your son is doing while she makes these calls.”
“Sleeping.”
“ ‘Sleeping’?”
“ ‘Sleeping.’ Yes.”
Victor looked at me awhile, and then at his nails. “Sleeping,” he said finally. “What kind of man would be sleeping.”
I was tired of Victor that spring.
I was also tired of whatever game Gerardo was playing with Bebe Chicago and the guerrilleros and the strangers he invited to Charlotte’s “evenings” on the Avenida del Mar.
Charlotte’s “evenings.”
I would go sometimes.
There were always these strangers there, third-rate people Gerardo was using in his game, the object of which seemed to be to place his marker in Victor’s office in as few moves as possible. His marker that year happened to be Antonio, but who it was mattered not at all to Gerardo. Gerardo plays only for the action. Part of the action in this case was the artful manipulation of what passed for the intelligentsia in Boca Grande, the point being to create an illusion of support for the guerrilleros, and it was the members of this “intelligentsia” who littered the apartment on the Avenida del Mar with half-filled glasses two or three nights a week. Of course Bebe Chicago was usually there, and a few “poets” who had published verses in anthologies with titles like Fresh Wind in the Caribbean, and the usual complement of translators and teachers and film critics who supported themselves stringing for newspapers and playing at politics. I recall one who read out loud at Charlotte’s dinner table a paper he was writing called “The Singular Position of Intellectuals with Respect to the Crisis of the Underdeveloped World” and then read it again, over Charlotte’s telephone, to a friend in Tenerife. I recall another who made marionettes to perform the plays of Arnold Wesker in schoolyards.
I have no idea what Charlotte thought of these people.
She told me she found them “terribly stimulating to listen to,” but I never saw her “listen to” any one of them.
She had in the dining room of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar a large round table around which these people sat and talked about what they always called “the truly existential situation of the Central American,” and Charlotte would sit at this table in her gray chiffon dress, but she seemed not to be there at all. She only stared at the kerosene lamp in the center of the table and watched moths batter themselves against the glass chimney. As the moths fell stunned to the table she would brush them toward her with a napkin, like someone dreaming. At the end of such an evening there would be moths drifted beneath her chair and moth wings caught in her gray chiffon skirt and no trace in her mind of what had been said. So dimly did Charlotte appear to perceive the nature of her evenings that she would sometimes invite Victor, and Victor would sit stiffly and finger his pistol and say that he did not quite comprehend why the situation of the Central American was so truly existential.
“What’s to be done about it in any case,” I recall Victor saying one night. “What does it mean.”
Whenever I saw Victor at one of Charlotte’s “evenings” I found myself rather liking him.
At least he was serious.
Unlike Gerardo.
“Don’t worry about what it means,” Gerardo said that night.
“ ‘What does it mean,’ ” Bebe Chicago said. “A knotty question.”
“I find it touching,” the most offensive of the poets said. His name was Raúl Lara and he was working on a sequence of Mother-and-Child sonnets to present to the people of Cuba and all that evening he had been studying a mango, spitting on it, polishing it, holding it in different lights.
Raúl Lara held the mango now in front of Victor’s eyes.
“A Strasser-Mendana. A man of action. Trapped in the quicksand of time and he asks us what does it mean. Give him Fanon. Give him Debray. Give him this fat mango.”
Raúl Lara dropped the mango in Victor’s lap.
With considerable dignity Victor stood up and placed the mango on the table in front of Charlotte.
The table fell silent.
Charlotte seemed to force herself to look away from the moths and at the mango. “Did someone need a fruit knife,” she said finally.
“You weren’t listening,” Victor said gently.
“She never listens,” Gerardo said.
“Why don’t you listen,” Victor said to Charlotte.
Charlotte smiled vaguely.
“Maybe she doesn’t listen because she’s afraid of what she’ll hear,” Raúl Lara said. “New ideas. Very threatening.”
Charlotte looked directly at Raúl Lara for the first time that evening. She seemed tired. She seemed older. “I’ve heard some new ideas,” she said after a while. “In my time.”
Other than that Charlotte seemed to make no judgments at all on the people who came to the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, no judgments on them and no distinctions among them.
Among us.
I was there too.
We were voices. We were voices no different from the voices in Mexican movies. We were voices no different from the voices on Radio Jamaica or on the California Highway Patrol road reports. We were voices to fill the hours until it was time to go to the Caribe for breakfast.
Sometimes I forget that I was there too.
Charlotte’s breakfasts at the Caribe.
Charlotte went to the Caribe for breakfast every morning for a while.
She went to the Caribe for breakfast because she worried about three children who every morning would crawl under the Caribe fence and leap screaming into the deep end of the pool. They did not seem to know how to swim. They would flounder and gasp to the side and leap in again. There was no lifeguard and the water was green with algae and Charlotte could never see the children beneath the surface of the water but every morning she would take her breakfast to the pool and try to insure that the children did not drown. She tried to distinguish their particular shrieks. She counted their heads compulsively. Because she believed that in the instant of a blink one of the heads would slip beneath the surface and stay there unseen she tried not to blink.
“There are no children registered at the hotel,” the manager of the Caribe said when she mentioned the children in the pool. “So they aren’t supposed to be there.”
“But they are there.”
“They aren’t supposed to be there,” the manager said, enunciating each word very carefully, “because there are no children registered at the hotel.”
On the morning she could only see two of the three children for thirty straight seconds she screamed, and jumped into the pool with her clothes on. She choked and the murky water blinded her and when she came up all three children were standing on the edge of the pool fighting over her handbag. She watched them run away with the bag and she went upstairs and she stood for a long while in the lukewarm trickle from the shower and she thought about the pale wash of green Marin got in her hair every summer from the chlorine in pools.