A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion

typhoid. The red and blue strings mostly shorted out in the first rain, leaving the city in the evening bathed in a necrotic yellow. So it was the night Edgar and I first arrived in Boca Grande from São Paulo. Edgar took me directly to Millonario and left me there until the epidemic waned. When I next saw the city many people had died and the rest seemed immune and the only lights left were at the Capilla del Mar.

      I mentioned this to Charlotte.

      “That’s very interesting,” Charlotte said politely, her eyes still on the lights. She had been smoking a cigarette as I talked and there was no ashtray and now, instead of just tossing the cigarette over the porch railing, she flicked off the lighted head with her fingernail, stripped the paper with the same fingernail and crumbled the tobacco neatly into the loam of a potted plant. I had seen men do this often and I had seen women do it in the field but I had never before seen a woman in a beige silk St. Laurent dress do it in a restaurant which passed for fashionable, and the casual dispatch with which Charlotte Douglas did it seemed at distinct odds with her rather demented account of the trip to Copenhagen. “By the way,” she said then. “Marin and I are inseparable.”

      Some weeks later Charlotte again mentioned the weekend she had taken Marin to see Tivoli before she was too old to like it. She said that because Marin had run a fever all weekend, a reaction to her smallpox vaccination, they had never left the Hôtel Angleterre. She had obtained a doctor who was very understanding and nice. The manager at the Angleterre had been very understanding and nice and had sent Marin a marzipan carousel to make up for not seeing Tivoli. In any case it had rained all weekend.

      One of two things was true: either Charlotte had gone with Marin to the Tivoli Gardens or Charlotte had wanted to go with Marin to the Tivoli Gardens.

      Type of Visa TURISTA. Occupation MADRE.

      10

      THE NEXT TIME I SAW CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS SHE GRABBED up a chicken on the run and snapped the vertebrae in its neck. I had taken her to the annual picnic for the children of the workers in the Millonario groves and the men were killing chickens with machetes but Charlotte’s kill was clean. There was no blood. She killed this chicken as efficiently and reflexively as she had field-stripped the cigarette at the Capilla del Mar.

      “All the children have red shoes,” she said to me and Elena as she handed the dead chicken to the man who had been trying to catch it. She had only smiled vaguely at the man’s attempt to congratulate her. She seemed entirely unaware that for a guest of the dueña to kill a chicken with her hands was at Millonario an event worth remark. Even Elena had forgotten her sulky pique at being in Millonario and was staring at Charlotte, speechless.

      “Red cardboard patent-leather shoes,” Charlotte said. “All of them. Why do the children wear red shoes?”

      “That chicken,” Elena said.

      “I mean you see them all over the tropics. Those red shoes.”

      “How exactly did you kill that chicken?” Elena said.

      “Not the right way at all, actually.” Charlotte’s expression did not change. “Actually they’re better if you bleed them live. Marin wanted a pair of red shoes once. When she was six. She cried, I wouldn’t buy them.”

      Charlotte looked away and lifted the hair off her neck.

      “I did have a baby who had red shoes,” she said after a while. She stood up then and rinsed her hands in a ditch and when she straightened up she dried her hands on her skirt and gazed for a long time at the men still killing chickens with machetes. “You ought to tell them, chickens are better if you bleed them live. There was no reason not to buy Marin those shoes.”

      Nationality NORTEAMERICANA.

      11

      A GOLD CIGARETTE LIGHTER ENGRAVED “D.N.C. ATLANTIC CITY ’64.”

      A letter of introduction from the Wells-Fargo Bank in San Francisco to the Banco de la República, collapsed two regimes back.

      A California drivers’ license, recently expired, and credit cards from American Express, Gulf Oil, the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue.

      $26 American and an equivalent amount in local currency.

      An unsealed envelope addressed only to a post-office box in Buffalo, New York. An unfinished letter describing the resemblance of the Capilla del Mar to the Tivoli Gardens.

      Two lipsticks, one broken pencil, a folded envelope containing four sulfathalidine and two salt tablets, a vial containing a scent predominantly gardenia, a fortune-cookie tape printed “A surprise is in store for someone you love,” and a frayed clipping of one day’s horoscope from Prensa Latina.

      This is a list of the items said to be in Charlotte Douglas’s possession (and later returned to the manager of the Hotel del Caribe) at the time of her death in the Estadio Nacional. The square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring was neither listed nor returned. I took the gold cigarette lighter to Marin in Buffalo but Marin said she had no interest in the past. I do.

TWO

      1

      THE WIND IS UP TONIGHT.

      Palm fronds clatter.

      Shutters bang against the sills but I cannot close the windows because the house smells of cancer. Gerardo is somewhere over the sea, due home on the midnight Air France. When I think of the sea here tonight I imagine the water abruptly receding, then swelling back in the tidal surge, la marejada, drowning the sea wall, silencing the dogs, softening my burning skin and rinsing my brittle hair and floating the Liberian tanker in the harbor across the submerged boulevards of Progreso primero.

      Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep

      Where the winds are all asleep.

      Wishful thinking.

      La marejada will not come tonight, nor will I die tonight.

      All that will happen tonight is that the generator will fail as usual and I will sit in the dark reciting Matthew Arnold as usual and when Gerardo arrives from the airport I will pretend to be asleep.

      Again as usual.

      Since Charlotte’s death Gerardo and I have had to learn how to make conversation by day and avoid it in the dark, how to pretend together that my indifference to his presence derives from my being asleep, or in pain, or hallucinating. I am not in such pain that I hallucinate but other people prefer to think that I am. When I speak above a whisper Gerardo and Elena and Victor and Antonio avert their eyes. Even Isabel and Bianca avert their eyes. Even the dim Mendana cousin they brought in from Millonario to nurse me averts her eyes, and crosses herself every time I vomit or ask for a rum-and-quinine or suggest that she is repeating herself. This particularly tedious Mendana was trained as a Sister of Mercy, left the order in 1944 but continues to wear her full habit around Millonario and at family deathbeds, and fancies herself the dispatch-rider between the rest of us and heaven. When I interrupt her accounts of local miracles on the third telling she consoles herself by dismissing me as “de afuera,” an outsider. I am de afuera. I have been de afuera all my life. I was de afuera even at the Brown Palace Hotel. It is a little more than a year now since Charlotte Douglas’s death and almost two years since her arrival in Boca Grande.

      Charlotte Douglas’s death.

      Charlotte Douglas’s murder.

      Neither word works.

      Charlotte Douglas’s previous engagement.

      Some of what I know about Marin Bogart’s disappearance I know from Charlotte. Some of it I know from Leonard Douglas. Some of it I know from having once seen Warren Bogart and some of it I know from having once seen Marin but most of what I know, the most reliable part of what I know, derives from my training in human behavior.

      I do not mean my training under Kroeber at California, nor with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo.

      I