California pools.
Swimming pools for children who knew how to swim.
She tried to stop thinking about swimming pools but could not.
“You don’t seem to have heard of chlorine here,” she said to me.
“We don’t want to emphasize technology at the expense of traditional culture,” I said.
I thought she was in a less literal mood than usual but apparently she was not.
“I see,” she said.
“I wasn’t serious,” I said. “It was a joke. Irony.”
“Is cheap,” she said. Her expression did not change.
After that morning at the pool she stopped spending her days at the Caribe and volunteered as an advisor at the birth control clinic. She seemed to have entirely forgotten Colonel Higuera and the Lederle cholera vaccine, her previous essay into good works. She was a source of some exasperation at the birth control clinic, because she kept advising the women to request diaphragms they would never use instead of intrauterine devices they could not remove, but the job of “advisor” was largely academic anyway since only intrauterine devices were available. In any case Charlotte took her work very seriously and it seemed to lend a purpose to her days.
“Anyone can learn to use a diaphragm,” she announced at my house one evening when I suggested that the diaphragm, however favored it might be in the practices of San Francisco gynecologists, was not generally considered the most practical means of birth control in underdeveloped countries. “I certainly did.”
“You certainly did what?” Gerardo said.
“I certainly learned to use a diaphragm.”
“Of course you did,” Gerardo said. “What’s that got to do with it? Grace wasn’t talking about you.”
“Grace was talking,” Charlotte said, “about the difficulty of using diaphragms. And I said there wasn’t any. Difficulty. Because I had no trouble whatsoever learning how.”
Gerardo looked at me.
I think this was perhaps Gerardo’s first exposure not to the norteamericana in Charlotte but to the westerner in Charlotte, the Hollister ranch child in Charlotte, the strain in Charlotte which insisted that the world was peopled with others exactly like herself.
“What is she saying,” Gerardo said to me.
“Charlotte is an egalitarian,” I said to Gerardo. “So am I. You are not.”
“I am only saying,” Charlotte said patiently, “that if I could learn to use a diaphragm then anyone could.”
“Bullshit,” Gerardo said.
Charlotte looked at Gerardo levelly for quite a long time.
There was a flicker of Warren Bogart on her face.
“Then don’t you talk at me any more about what ‘the people’ can do,” she said finally.
No irony.
However cheap.
I liked Charlotte very much that night but she still tended to take whatever Gerardo said precisely at face value. Gerardo only talked about “the people” that spring as a move in the particular game he was playing. As a matter of fact Charlotte tended to take what anyone said precisely at face value. When she showed me her next attempt at writing about Boca Grande, the next of those “Letters from Central America” which were the only one of her projects to survive the incident at the Caribe pool, the typed manuscript began: “A nation that refuses to emphasize technology at the expense of its traditional culture, Boca Grande is …”
Boca Grande is.
9
“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT,” I SAID TO VICTOR the day Antonio’s Bentley exploded in front of the Caribe, killing the chauffeur. Antonio had not even been using the Bentley. Carmen Arrellano had been using the Bentley, but at the instant of the explosion Carmen Arrellano had been having her legs waxed in the Caribe beauty shop. In short the job had been inept in the extreme, but this was not the aspect I wanted to stress with Victor. “You really shouldn’t have.”
“I didn’t,” Victor said. “I’m appalled you think I did. Appalled. Shocked. Hurt. It’s an obscene accusation.” I said nothing.
“If you think I did it,” Victor said after a while, “then you know why I did it. You’re aware of what Antonio’s trying to do.”
I said nothing.
“I suppose your son told you,” Victor said.
“Actually no.”
“I suppose you prefer Antonio to me,” Victor said.
“Not particularly.”
Victor sat in silence for a while. He had come to visit in the middle of the afternoon. He never used to visit in the middle of the afternoon. Victor did not seem to know what to do with his afternoons that summer.
“Then why aren’t you helping me,” he said finally. “You know what Antonio’s doing, you—”
“I don’t know. I just suppose.”
“—You suppose you know what Antonio’s doing, why don’t you discuss it with me? Why aren’t you with me?”
“Because it doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said.
Victor sat slumped in a chair.
I have liked Victor on some occasions and pitied him on many. Edgar called him stupid. Luis laughed at him. Even Antonio was making a fool of him.
I took his ridiculous manicured hand.
“Because it’s going to happen,” I said. “Just let it happen. With grace.”
“I can’t do that,” Victor said after a while.
I knew he couldn’t do that.
Within the next two weeks three more explosions occurred in locations where Antonio might normally have been, killing six and injuring fourteen, and then there was the usual odd calm.
“ ‘The outlook is not all bright.’ ” Charlotte was reading me the draft of an unfinished Letter from Central America. “ ‘Nor is the outlook all black.’ Paragraph. ‘Nonetheless—’ ”
She broke off.
“That’s where I seem to be blocked.”
“I don’t wonder,” I said.
“What do you mean.”
“ ‘Nevertheless’ what? I mean, Charlotte. If you say ‘the outlook is not all bright’ and then you say ‘nor is the outlook all black,’ then you can’t start the next sentence with ‘nevertheless.’ It can’t possibly mean anything.”
“I didn’t start the next sentence with ‘nevertheless,’ ” Charlotte said. “I started it with ‘nonetheless.’ ”
I said nothing.
“Anyway.” Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. “It’s not just a new sentence. It’s a new paragraph.”
It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.
Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.
If the organism under scrutiny is Charlotte.
“In any case,” Charlotte said after a while. “It’ll all fall together when I’m away.”
“You’re going away, then.”
“Of course I’m going away. I mean I don’t live here, do I.”
“When?”
“I’m not quite sure when.”
“Where?”
“I have to see someone.”
I did not ask who.
“Or rather I want to see someone. My husband.”
I did not ask which one.