Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

Like the shimmer of the oil slick on the boulevards after rain in Progreso.

Let me try a less holistic approach to the model.

We had the cholera epidemic in April that year.

The cholera epidemic in which Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping.

I gave inoculations with Charlotte, but only for a few hours the first morning, because I had no patience with the fact that almost no one in Boca Grande would cross the street to be inoculated. They were all fatalistas about cholera. Cholera was an opportunity for God to prove His love.

“Then let Him prove it,” I said to Charlotte at the end of the first morning.

“We have to make it attractive,” Charlotte said. “Obviously.”

And she did.

She set out to make each inoculation seem to the inoculee not a hedge against the hereafter but an occasion of mild profit in the here and now. She left the clinic for an hour and she bought chocolates wrapped in pink tinfoil from the Caribe kitchen and she made a deal for whisky miniatures with an unemployed Braniff steward who had access to the airport catering trucks and, until the remaining vaccine was appropriated by a colonel named Rafael Higuera, she dispensed these favors with every 1.5 cc. shot of Lederle Cholera Strains Ogawa-Inaba.

“Why didn’t she just lie down and open her legs for them,” Antonio said to Gerardo in my living room. It was the evening of the day the vaccine had been appropriated and Antonio had already expressed his conviction that Higuera had performed a public service by preventing Charlotte from further contaminating the populace with her American vaccine. I have never known why Antonio was so particularly enraged by everything Charlotte did. I suppose she was a norteamericana , she was a woman, she was an unpredictable element. I suppose she was a version of me at whom he could vent his rage. “Ask the great lady why she didn’t just do that. Higuera didn’t go far enough. ”

“How far should he have gone,” Gerardo said, and smiled slightly at me.

“She’d throw her apron on my feet once,” Antonio said. “Just once.”

“What would you do,” Gerardo said.

“Drop her,” Antonio said.

“Drop her,” Gerardo said.

“Between the eyes.”

“Seems extreme,” Gerardo said.

“How can you be entertained by this?” I said to Gerardo.

“How can you not be?” Gerardo said to me.

During the week after the appropriation of the vaccine Charlotte spoke not at all to me, spoke only in a glazed and distracted way to Gerardo, and was known to have placed two telephone calls to Leonard Douglas, neither of them completed. At the end of the week she gave me her revised version of the appropriation of the vaccine, the version in which the army was lending its resources to the inoculation program, the version in which she had simply misunderstood Higuera, the version in which he had never offered to sell her the vaccine but had simply expressed concern as to whether she herself had been inoculated; once she had arrived at this version Charlotte never mentioned cholera again, although people continued dying from it for several weeks.

After the cholera epidemic she appeared for a while that May and June to retreat into unspecified gastrointestinal infection less often, and she perfected that frenetic public energy which made many people, particularly Elena, suspect her of a reliance on major amphetamines. Even after she had moved most of her things into the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, even after she had with her own hands whitewashed all the walls and filled the empty rooms with flowers and begun to have what she called her “evenings” there, she kept her room at the Caribe, and she would go there every day for breakfast and to spend most of the day.

She began her “writing” during these days she spent alone at the Caribe.

She remembered her “film festival,” and she drew up endless lists of names: actors, directors, agents, former agents who were then studio executives, former studio executives who were then independent producers, and what I once heard her call “other movers and shakers.” She had met many of these people with Leonard and she was certain that they would be delighted to lend their names and films, once she put it to them.

Which she intended to do as soon as she completed the lists.

She got the idea for her “boutique,” and she planned her projected inventory: needlepoint canvases of her own design and Porthault linens, the market for which in Boca Grande would have seemed to be limited to Elena, Bianca, Isabel, and me. She had enlisted Gerardo’s help in finding a storefront to rent and she was certain that the boutique would pick up the character of the entire neighborhood, once she got it in shape for the opening.

Which she intended to do as soon as Bebe Chicago got his Dominicans out of the storefront.

“Imagine cymbidiums,” she said on the afternoon she showed me her storefront. “Masses of them. In hemp baskets. The illusion of the tropics. That’s the effect to strive for.”

As a matter of fact the illusion of the tropics seemed to me an odd effect to strive for in a city rotting on the equator, but the actual condition of the storefront was such that I could only nod. The room was cramped and grimy and the single window was blacked out. Outside the afternoon sun was blazing but inside there was only the light from two bare bulbs. In the room, besides Charlotte and me, there were several sleeping bags, a hot plate, an open and unflushed toilet, a cheap dinette chair in which Bebe Chicago sat talking on the telephone, and a table at which a man whom Charlotte had introduced as “Mr. Sanchez” seemed to be translating a United States Army arms manual into Spanish.

Charlotte appeared oblivious.

“Lighten, brighten, open it up. The perfect creamy white on the walls, maybe the palest robin’s-egg on the ceiling. And lattice. Lots of lattice. Mr. Sanchez is doing the lattice for me.” Charlotte smiled fondly at the man at the table. He did not smile back. “Aren’t you.”

“Mr. Sanchez” stared at Charlotte as if she were a moth he had never before observed and turned to Bebe Chicago. “Are we interested in the AR–16?” he said in Spanish.

“AR–15 only.” Bebe Chicago hung up the telephone and smiled at me. “Gerardo’s mama naturally speaks Spanish, mon chéri. ”

“Think of a lath-house crossed with a Givenchy perfume box,” Charlotte said.

“Can I offer Gerardo’s mama a café-filtre ,” Bebe Chicago said. He stood up with a magician’s flourish and placed the dinette chair in front of me. “Can I offer Gerardo’s mama this superb example of post-industrial craftsmanship.”

I remained standing.

“Possibly gardenias,” Charlotte said. “No. Cymbidiums.”

Bebe Chicago smiled and sat in the chair himself.

“Then can I tell Gerardo’s mama how much I admire her shoes,” he said. “Can I at least tell her that.”

“You can tell her what that Bren gun is doing behind the toilet,” I said.

“That’s not a Bren at all,” Bebe Chicago said after only the slightest beat, his voice still silky. “That’s a Kalashnikov. Russian. Out of Syria. The Chinese make one too, but it’s inferior to the Russian. The Russian is the best. A really super weapon.”

“Don’t talk about guns,” Charlotte said, and her voice was low and abrupt, and after that day she seemed to lose interest in her boutique.

During this period Charlotte also had her “research.”

She had her “paperwork.”

In other words she would sit alone in her room at the Caribe and she would try to read books and she would try to write letters. She tried to read a book about illiteracy in Latin America, but in lieu of finishing it she wrote a letter to Prensa Latina offering her services as author of a daily “literacy lesson.” She tried to read Alberto Masferrer’s El Minimum Vital but she still had difficulty reading Spanish, and she had read a hundred pages of El Minimum Vital before she learned from Gerardo that it was about the progressive tax. She borrowed from Ardis Bradley a volume that was obviously a CIA-sponsored “handbook” on Boca Grande, and she discovered in the introduction to this handbook an invitation to address her suggestions “for factual or interpretive or other changes” to a post-office box in Washington.