5
UNTIL I LOST A FILLING AND HAD OCCASION TO SEE A dentist in Miami I never knew what la norteamericana did during the day. At least one thing she did during the day those first few weeks was this: she went to the airport. She did not go to the airport to catch a plane, nor to meet one. She just went to the airport. She was at the counter of the airport coffee shop the morning I left for Miami, not sitting at the counter but standing behind it, holding a watch in her hand. “I certainly wouldn’t think yet,” she said to the sullen girl whose space she had arrogated, and she tapped the face of the watch with her fingernail. “Nine minutes more. See for yourself.”
The girl stared at Charlotte Douglas a moment and then, without speaking, plunged her index finger into the sugar bowl on the counter. Still gazing at Charlotte she licked the sugar from her finger. In another country she might have gone the extra step, made her point explicit, jammed her grimy finger between la norteamericana’s teeth, but the expression of proletarian resentment in Boca Grande remains largely symbolic. The guerrilleros here would have nothing to say to this girl in the airport. The guerrilleros here spend their time theorizing in the interior, and are covertly encouraged to emerge from time to time as foils to the actual politics of the country. Our notoriously frequent revolutions are made not by the guerrilleros but entirely by people we know. This is a hard point for the outsider of romantic sensibility to grasp.
“Gastrointestinal infection is the leading natural cause of death in this country,” Charlotte said after a while. She said it in English and did not look at the girl. “If you call it natural.”
The girl sucked the last grains of sugar from under her scabbed fingernail and rolled it again in the bowl.
“Which I don’t particularly.”
When the water for Charlotte Douglas’s tea had boiled the requisite twenty minutes she made the tea herself, took it to a table by the window and sat there reading an article on the cultivation of vanilla in Revista Boca Grande. She moved her lips slightly and seemed entirely absorbed in what she read. When the Miami plane was called she continued reading Revista Boca Grande. She never looked up, or out the window. The next afternoon when I came back from Miami Charlotte Douglas was sitting at the same table reading the same copy of Revista Boca Grande. It did not occur to me that day that I would ever have reason to consider Charlotte an outsider of romantic sensibility. In any case I am no longer sure that she was. Possibly this is the question I am trying to answer.
Once I knew Charlotte I realized that although she spoke Spanish she had trouble reading it, and tended to lose the sense of even the simplest newspaper story somewhere in the first paragraph, but it could not have mattered in this case since she had no interest in the cultivation of vanilla.
Or in the reform of the Boca Grande tax structure.
Or in the contradiction inherent in a Central American common market.
All of which topics, and others, Charlotte Douglas read about in the Boca Grande airport, her concentration apparently passionate, her expression miming comprehension, here a nod of approval, there a moue of disagreement; her eyes scanning the Spanish words as if she understood them.
When there was nothing else to read.
When, say, the Miami Herald did not come in and she had already committed to memory the revised schedules of all five airlines chartered to land at Boca Grande.
6
THE STATE DEPARTMENT LIST ON WHICH CHARLOTTE Douglas’s name and passport number appeared stated simply that the United States Embassy should be advised of the entry, the departure, the arrest, the hospitalization, or the participation in civil disorder of anyone listed. Various forms were provided for this purpose, but the immigration officer in charge of the list had mislaid them; as far as he could remember Charlotte Douglas was the only person on the list ever to enter Boca Grande. Victor himself had never before heard of the list, had seen it for the first time when the immigration officer’s report on Charlotte Douglas arrived on his desk at the Ministry of Defense, and he regarded the thin leaflet with the eagle on the top page as a mesmeric challenge to his powers of deduction. The list animated a slow week for Victor. The list was a code Victor could not crack. The list so obsessed Victor that he had even solicited Antonio’s opinion as to whether those listed were politically suspect, criminal, indigent, or very important.
“Scratch indigent,” I suggested.
“The little brother suggested indigent.”
Victor routinely referred to Antonio as “the little brother,” I think in a stab at ironic distance. Antonio was at that time Minister of Public Works, whatever “Public Works” mean in Boca Grande.
“I don’t think indigent,” I said.
“Then what.”
“Show me the list.”
“The list is for official eyes only.”
“You won’t show me the list, how should I know ‘what.’ Ask Bradley.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I’m not the American ambassador, Victor, Bradley is.”
Victor sucked at his teeth and drummed his glossy fingernails on a Steuben paperweight Bradley had given him as a gesture of ambassadorial good will. Victor believed the pale moons of his fingernails to be evidence of noble blood and had a manicurist meet him every day at noon to shape his cuticles and perform other services characterized by Elena as beyond Bianca’s range. Elena’s faith in the sexual virtuosity of working women was touching and childlike. If I did not completely misapprehend Victor the cuticles came first.
“Ask Bradley,” I repeated. “Call the Embassy and ask Bradley.”
“We don’t run this country at Bradley’s convenience.”
Put a Strasser-Mendana behind a desk and you have a tableau vivant of the famous touchiness of command. Antonio once urinated on the foot of an Italian newspaper woman who suggested that Boca Grande was perhaps not ready to join the nuclear club. Victor was displeased with Bradley because the week before Bradley had allowed his wife to leave one of Victor’s official lunches in the courtyard at three-thirty, before the food was served, pleading faintness from the heat. Victor felt insulted by Americans who grew faint before lunch, even Americans who were, as Ardis Bradley was, forty-four years old and seven months pregnant.
“In any case.” Victor studied his nails. “In fact. Bradley is in Caracas.”
In any case in fact Bradley was not in Caracas, I had seen him the night before, but it was a theme of Victor’s that Tuck Bradley neglected Boca Grande for livelier capitals.
“About those four o’clock lunches in the courtyard,” I said.
“I wasn’t aware we were talking about any four o’clock lunches in the courtyard.”
“Just one detail. While I think of it. Pass it on to Bianca. I don’t think the baba au rhum should be out in the sun from twelve-thirty on.”
Victor said that he had not called me into his office for advice on serving baba au rhum.
I asked if he had called me into his office to admire the new 380 Mauser automatic pistol mounted on his desk.
Victor snapped his fingers. The aide at the door sprang to my chair and bowed.
“As another norteamericana you could meet her,” Victor said as I got up. He did not look at me. That he continued this conversation at all confirmed his obsession with the list, because it was past noon. At noon exactly his car always took him to meet his manicurist at the apartment he kept in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. The Residencia was only a block and a half from the Ministry but Victor fancied that his car, a black Mercedes limousine with the license BOCA GRANDE 2 (Victor always allowed El Presidente the BOCA GRANDE 1 plate), was the discreet way to go. “In the most natural way you could meet this woman. You could ask her for a coffee. Or a drink.”