Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

“If I could live on the eleventh floor I think I’d take an interest again,” Bianca said.

“Quite frankly it’s better when you don’t,” Isabel said, abruptly and unsettlingly lucid, and in the silence that followed she stood up and put her arms around Bianca.

For a moment two of my three sisters-in-law stood there in the courtyard with the guard at the gate on Christmas afternoon and buried their faces in each other’s shoulders and stroked each other’s hair. Only their silence suggested their tears. They were little sisters crying.

Elena rubbed at a drop of champagne on her magenta crepe de chine pajamas.

Antonio drummed his nails on the table.

“It might be better if you left,” Victor said to Antonio.

“Maybe I’ll go get your norteamericana to sit on my face,” Antonio said to Victor.

Victor smoked his cigar and looked at me. “Feliz Navidad,” he said after a while.

Here is what Charlotte Douglas was said by Elena to have done with the twenty-four white roses Victor sent her on Christmas Eve: left them untouched in their box and laid the box in the hallway for the night maid.

“IT’S DEPRESSING TO BE SICK IN A HOTEL.”

“I don’t mind it.” She said it as a child might, and she said nothing more.

“At Christmas.”

“I didn’t mind.”

I tried again. “You’re at the mercy of the maids.”

“They’re very nice here.”

I watched Charlotte Douglas unwrap a cracker and fold the cellophane into a neat packet. She had insisted that we meet not at my house but at the Capilla del Mar, that I be her guest.

“Actually I’m never depressed.” The act of saying this seemed to convince her that it was so, and she picked up the wine list in a show of resolute conviviality. “Actually I don’t believe in being depressed. It’s hard to keep wine in this climate, isn’t it? Wine and crackers?”

Through two courses of that difficult dinner she never mentioned Victor.

She guided every topic to its most general application.

She talked as if she had no specific history of her own.

No Leonard.

No Warren.

As dessert was served she mentioned Marin for the first time: she said that she preferred the Capilla del Mar to the Jockey Club because the colored lights strung outside the Capilla del Mar reminded her of the Tivoli Gardens, where she had once flown with Marin for the weekend. Her face came alive with pleasure as she described this adult’s dream of a weekend a child might like, described the puppet shows, the watermills, the picnics with the child. They had made dinners of salami and petits fours. They had scarcely slept. They had wandered beneath the colored lights until Marin’s heels blistered, and then they had taken off their shoes and wandered barefoot.

“And when we got back to the hotel we ordered cocoa from room service.” Charlotte Douglas leaned across the table. “And I let Marin place the order and tip the waiter and I taught her how to wash out her underwear at night.”

I asked if her husband had gone to Copenhagen on business, but she said no. Her husband had not gone to Copenhagen at all. She had just woken up one morning in the house on California Street and decided to fly Marin to Copenhagen. “To see Tivoli. I mean before she was too old to like it.”

Her eyes were fixed on the colored lights strung over our table on the porch at the Capilla del Mar. The lights at the Capilla del Mar were not Christmas lights but souvenirs of the season I married Edgar in São Paulo, the season a deranged Haitian dentist convinced the Minister of Health to string the entire city of Boca Grande with a web of colored lights as a specific against 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.

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.

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.