Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

“You’re aware Gerardo’s still seeing the norteamericana ,” Victor said one morning in March.

I knew that he was disturbed because he had come to see me in my laboratory. Victor does not like to see me in my laboratory. His forehead sweats, his pupils contract. I have observed taboo systems in enough cultures to know precisely how Victor feels about me in my laboratory: Victor distrusts the scientific method, and my familiarity with it gives me a certain power over him.

In my laboratory I am therefore particularly taboo.

To Victor.

For some years I used this taboo to my advantage but I am no longer so sure that Victor was not right.

“I believe they’re ‘dating,’ Victor.” I did not look up from what I was doing. “I see her too. What about it.”

“I’m not talking about you seeing her.”

“I took her to Millonario. She killed a chicken. With her bare hands.”

“I’m not talking about you seeing her and I’m not talking about any chickens seeing her. I’m talking about Gerardo seeing her. Observed at all hours. Entering and leaving. I don’t like it.”

“Why don’t you have him deported,” I said.

Victor took another tack.

“You’re very sophisticated these days.”

I said nothing.

“Very tolerant.”

I said nothing.

“I suppose with your vast sophistication and tolerance you don’t mind the fact that your son also spends time with the faggot. The West Indian faggot. Whatever his circus name is, I’m not familiar with it.”

I transferred a piece of tissue from one solution to another.

Victor meant Bebe Chicago.

Victor was as familiar with Bebe Chicago’s name as I was, probably more familiar, since Victor received a detailed report on Bebe Chicago every morning at nine o’clock.

With his coffee.

“I sometimes wonder if your son has leanings. That way.”

“No need to worry about the norteamericana , then.”

Victor drummed his fingers on a flask and watched me for a long time without speaking.

“The West Indian is financing the guerrilleros ,” he said suddenly. “I happen to know that.”

“I know you ‘happen to know that,’ Victor. You told me a year ago. When Gerardo and Elena were such a burden to you.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you that this West Indian is financing the guerrilleros? ”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you either. If it did you’d arrest him.”

“I don’t arrest him because I don’t want to embarrass your son.”

I said nothing.

Victor would have arrested me if he thought he could carry it off.

“All right then,” Victor said. “You tell me why I don’t arrest him.”

“You don’t arrest him because you want to know who’s financing him . That’s why you don’t arrest him.”

Victor sat in silence drumming his fingers on the flask.

It was the usual unsolved equation of the harmonic tremor in Boca Grande.

If Bebe Chicago was running the guerrilleros then X must be running Bebe Chicago.

Who was X.

This time.

There you had it. The guerrilleros would stage their “expropriations” and leave their communiqués about the “People’s Revolution” and everyone would know who was financing the guerrilleros but for a while no one would know for whose benefit the guerrilleros were being financed. In the end the guerrilleros would all be shot and the true players would be revealed.

Mirabile dictu .

People we knew.

I remembered Luis using the guerrilleros against Anastasio Mendana-Lopez and I also remember Victor using the guerrilleros , against Luis.

I only think that.

I never knew that. Empirically.

In this case of course it would turn out to be Antonio who was using the guerrilleros , against Victor, but no one understood this in March.

Except Gerardo.

Gerardo understood it in March.

Maybe Carmen Arrellano understood it in March too.

Charlotte never did understand it.

I don’t know that either. Empirically.

“I suppose you do know who’s running the West Indian?” Victor said after a while. He was still drumming his fingers on the flask, a barrage of little taps, a tattoo. “I suppose in your infinite wisdom you know who’s running the West Indian and one day you might deign to tell me?”

“How would I know who’s running the West Indian, Victor? I’m not the Minister of Defense. You might want to watch that flask you’re banging around, it’s cancer virus.” It was not cancer virus but I liked to reinforce the taboo. “Live.”

Victor stood up abruptly.

“Disgusting,” he said finally. “Filthy. Crude. The thought of it makes me retch.”

“Are you talking about the cancer virus or the guerrilleros? ”

“I am talking,” he whispered, his voice strangled, “about the kind of woman who would kill a chicken with her bare hands.”

It occurred to me that morning that Charlotte Douglas was acquiring certain properties of taboo.

Which might have stood her in good stead.

Had Victor been in charge at the Estadio Nacional instead of waiting it out with El Presidente at Bariloche.

WHEN MARIN BOGART ASKED ME WITHOUT MUCH INTEREST what her mother had “done” in Boca Grande there was very little I could think to say.

Very little that Marin Bogart would have understood.

A lost child in a dirty room in Buffalo.

A child who claimed no interest in the past.

Or the future.

Or the present.

As far as I could see.

“She did some work in a clinic,” I said.

“Charity,” Marin Bogart said.

The indictment lay between us for a while.

“Cholera actually,” I said.

Marin Bogart shrugged.

Cholera was something Marin Bogart had been protected against, along with diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, and undue dental decay.

Cholera was one more word Marin Bogart did not understand.

“And after that she worked in a birth control clinic.”

“Classic,” Marin Bogart said. “Absolutely classic.”

“How exactly is it ‘classic.’ ”

“Birth control is the most flagrant example of how the ruling class practices genocide.”

“Maybe not the most flagrant,” I said.

A lost daughter in a dirty room in Buffalo with dishes in the sink and an M–3 on the bed.

A daughter who never had much use for words but had finally learned to string them together so that they sounded almost like sentences.

A daughter who chose to believe that her mother had died on the wrong side of a “people’s revolution.”

“There was no ‘right side,’ ” I said. “There was no issue. There were only—”

“That is a typically—”

“ There were only personalities. ”

“ —A typically bourgeois view of the revolutionary process. ”

She had Charlotte’s eyes.

Maybe there is no motive role in this narrative.

Maybe it is just something that happened.

Then why is it in my mind when nothing else is.

WHAT HAD CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS “DONE” IN BOCA GRANDE.

I have no idea whether Marin Bogart was asking me that day what her mother had “done” with her life in Boca Grande or what her mother had “done” to get killed in Boca Grande.

In either case the answer is obscure.

The question of Charlotte Douglas has never been “settled” for me.

Never “decided.”

I know how to make models of life itself, DNA, RNA, helices double and single and squared, but I try to make a model of Charlotte Douglas’s “character” and I see only a shimmer.