Goddamn you all.
She was taken to the Escuela de los Niños Perdidos and detained overnight before she was transferred to the Estadio Nacional for interrogation. The moment and circumstances of her arrest are matters of record but the moment and circumstances of her death remain obscure. I do not even know which side killed her, who held the Estadio Nacional at the moment of death. I know that fire from either an AR–15 or an AR–16 entered her body just below the left shoulder-blade but I also know that all sides had both weapons.
Other than that I know only what Gerardo told me.
That she cried not for God but for Marin.
“She was shot in the back,” I said to Gerardo.
“Maybe she wanted to have it that way,” Gerardo said.
“She wouldn’t have wanted to have it that way.”
“Well,” Gerardo said, “she did.”
That Gerardo knew she cried for Marin suggests that Antonio was in charge of the Estadio Nacional at the moment of death but there are no real points in knowing one way or another.
As Leonard Douglas might say.
As Leonard Douglas did say, when I told him.
I no longer know where the real points are.
I am more like Charlotte than I thought I was.
On the day Antonio finally managed to take over Victor’s office the October Violence ended. On the day after that Victor flew back from Bariloche, I flew back from New Orleans, and Charlotte Douglas’s body was found, where it had been thrown, on the lawn of the American Embassy. Since all Embassy personnel had abandoned the building the point was lost on them.
Although not on me.
And possibly not even on Victor.
Norteamericana cunt.
4
ALL I CAN TELL YOU DIRECTLY ABOUT CHARLOTTE Douglas’s death is that I sent her body to San Francisco. I had the body put in a coffin and I went to the airport with the coffin and I waited there until I could see, for myself, the coffin loaded into the hold of the first Pan American flight to leave Boca Grande after the October Violence. I wanted to lay a flag on the coffin but there were no American flags in Boca Grande that week and in the end I bought a child’s T-shirt in the gift shop at the airport. This T-shirt was printed like an American flag. I dropped this T-shirt on the coffin as it was loaded into the hold of the Boeing. I think this T-shirt did not have the correct number of stars or stripes but it did have the appearance of stars and stripes and it was red and it was white and it was blue. There were no real points in that either.
5
IN SUMMARY.
So you know the story.
Today we are clearing some coastal groves by slash-and-burn and a pall of smoke hangs over Boca Grande. The smoke colors everything. The smoke obscures the light. You will notice my use of the colonial pronoun, the overseer’s “we.” I mean it. I see now that I have no business in this place but I have been here too long to change. I mean “we.” I wish that I could see the light today but I recognize the necessity for clearing groves. I also recognize the equivocal nature of even the most empirical evidence. Some evidence I did not know about until quite recently, when crates of mail uncollected during the October Violence that year were located and distributed. This evidence came to me long after I had talked to Leonard Douglas and been put in touch with Marin Bogart in Buffalo. This evidence came to me long after I had seen Marin Bogart in Buffalo. Here it is. Early on the evening of her arrest, from a box between the Caribe and the Capilla del Mar, Charlotte Douglas mailed me Marin’s address. She also mailed me the big square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring. I wrote to Marin and told her I have the emerald but have received no reply. I did not mention to Marin that the emerald was a memento from the man who financed the Tupamaros.
Marin has no interest in the past.
I still do, but understand it no better.
All I know now is that when I think of Charlotte Douglas walking in the hot night wind toward the lights at the Capilla del Mar I am less and less certain that this story has been one of delusion.
Unless the delusion was mine.
When I am tired I remember what I was taught in Colorado. On Day Minus One in Boca Grande Charlotte remembered to bring me a gardenia for my trip. Her mother taught her that. Marin and I are inseparable. She had a straw hat one Easter, and a flowered lawn dress. Tell Charlotte she was wrong. Tell Marin she was wrong. Tell her that for me. She remembers everything. She remembers she bled. The wind is up and I will die and rather soon and all I know empirically is I am told.
I am told, and so she said.
I heard later.
According to her passport. It was reported.
Apparently.
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including
The Year of Magical Thinking
Her collected nonfiction,
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.