Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

LEONARD HAD NOT WANTED HER TO SEE THE BABY BUT she had.

Leonard had wanted her to leave the baby to die in the Ochsner Clinic but she would not.

There had been words about it.

There had been words between Leonard and Warren about it in the room at the Ochsner Clinic but she could barely remember the words.

There had been words in the room at the Ochsner Clinic and there had also been peonies. She could remember the peonies very clearly and she could remember the words only barely and mainly she remembered that she had not wanted the baby to die without her.

The baby did not die at the Mérida airport but an hour later, in the parking lot of the Coca-Cola bottling plant on the road back into town. The baby had gone into convulsions and projectile vomiting in the taxi and Charlotte had made the driver stop in the parking lot. She walked with the baby on the dark asphalt. She sang to the baby out on the edge of the asphalt where the rushes grew and a few trailers were parked. By the time the baby died the taxi had left but it was only a mile or two to the Centro Médico de Yucatán and Charlotte walked there with the baby in her arms, trusting at last, its vomit spent. The doctor did not speak English but marked the death certificate in English: death by complications .

“Complications of what,” Charlotte said.

“Complications of dying,” the doctor said. “Her name in Christ?”

The Louisiana birth certificate said Douglas, Baby Girl . The Mexican tourist card said Douglas, Infanta . Leonard said it . Charlotte said baby .

“Charlotte,” Charlotte said. “Her name is Charlotte.”

“Carlota,” the doctor said, and made the sign of the Cross before he signed the certificate.

Carlota Douglas was buried in a short coffin which the doctor’s brother-in-law would not close until Charlotte had inspected his work. He was very proud of the work he had done on the baby. He was very grateful to have the job and he wanted Charlotte to be pleased. He had wrapped the baby in a lavender nylon shawl and put a bow in her hair and tiny red shoes on her feet. Charlotte had looked once and then away. She had paid the doctor and his brother-in-law in American ten-dollar bills. Before she left Mérida she called Leonard in San Francisco and told him that the baby was dead.

“I’ll come get you if you want,” Leonard had said.

“Whatever you want,” Charlotte had said.

“You have to say.”

“They put shoes on her feet. Red shoes.”

“It’s over. Forget it. You never should have seen it. You never should have.”

“Warren’s not responsible. For my coming down here. If that’s what you think.”

“No,” Leonard had said. “That’s not what I think.”

“I think I better call you back later,” Charlotte had said, but she had not called Leonard back later.

She had not called Leonard back later and she had not called Warren at all.

In the evening before the plane left for Antigua she had gone back to the cemetery and tried to find the baby’s grave but she could not. It was not a large cemetery but there seemed a large number of small fresh unmarked graves. She left the bougainvillea she had torn from the wall of the hotel on one of them.

FEVERS RELAPSE HERE.

Bacteria proliferate.

Termites eat the presidential palace, rust eats my Oldsmobile.

Twice a year the sun is exactly vertical, and nothing casts a shadow.

The bite of one fly deposits an egg which in its pupal stage causes human flesh to suppurate.

The bite of another deposits a larval worm which three years later surfaces on and roams the human eyeball.

Everything here changes and nothing appears to. There is no perceptible wheeling of the stars in their courses, no seasonal wane in the length of the days or the temperature of air or earth or water, only the amniotic stillness in which transformations are constant. As elsewhere, certain phases in these transformations are called by certain names (“Olds-mobile,” say, and “rust”), but the emotional field of such names tends to weaken as one leaves the temperate zones. At the equator the names are noticeably arbitrary. A banana palm is no more or less “alive” than its rot.

Is it.

I tried to tell Charlotte this but once again Charlotte did not quite see my point.

Charlotte did not take the equatorial view.

Of anything that had happened.

Charlotte did not even remember much of what had happened during the six months between leaving California with Warren and taking the baby to Mérida. She remembered certain days and nights very clearly but she did not remember their sequence. Someone had shuffled her memory. Certain cards were lost. She and Warren had been in the South. She knew that much. They had been in New Orleans a while in January and February, and then again when it was hot and raining and the baby was showing, she remembered that. She remembered arriving at the New Orleans airport. The airport must have been in January because the second time they arrived in New Orleans, the time it was hot and raining and the baby was showing and the girl was with them, they had not flown in but driven in, from Greenville. They had eaten some crab bisque once in Greenville. They had made that crab bisque in Greenville. She had bought the crabs and Warren had shown her how to make the bisque.

“You’re ruining it,” she had said. “You’re putting in too much salt.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Taste it, it’s brine.”

“Taste it yourself,” Warren had said, and pushed the wooden spoon in her face. The soup had gone up her nose and she had choked and he had hit her between the shoulder blades until she stopped. “I never cared for anybody like I cared for you but you never knew your ass about food.”

Everyone else had liked that crab bisque but they had stayed too long in Greenville, they had stayed too long everywhere. After-three-days-guests-like-fish-begin-to-stink. She had heard that all over the South with Warren. After three weeks of hearing it from Howard Hollerith in Greenville she and Warren had moved from Howard Hollerith’s place to a motel in town near the levee but Warren had kept on seeing Howard Hollerith’s wife. And Howard Hollerith’s girl too. The wife and the girl. “I want them to do it together,” Warren said to Charlotte. The girl went to New Orleans with them.

But Greenville was May, June. She knew that Greenville was May or June because Birmingham was July.

The Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was definitely July.

The New Orleans airport had been January.

Warren had been drunk and had twisted her arm behind her back at the Hertz counter.

“I don’t have to be here,” she had said. “I’m going home.”

“Go home,” Warren had said. “I’ll send you home. I’ll ask Porter for the fare, go into debt and send you home. How do you think you’re going home without sending me into debt.”

“The way I came,” Charlotte said, and Warren had hit her.

“It’s all right,” Charlotte kept saying to the Hertz girl, and “No. Don’t call. Please don’t.” The Hertz girl was calling the airport police and Warren was buying a postcard and mailing it to Leonard. The postcard showed a Confederate flag and a mule and the legend PUT YOUR HEART IN DIXIE OR GET YOUR ASS OUT. “It’s all right,” Charlotte said to the airport police. “It’s nothing, it’s personal, it’s all right.”

Delta had lost her bags but it did not seem to matter.

“You forgot your map,” the Hertz girl said.