Читать книгу A Book of Common Prayer - Joan Didion - Страница 10

UNTIL I LOST A FILLING AND HAD OCCASION TO SEE A dentist in Miami I never knew what la norteamericana did during the day. At least one thing she did during the day those first few weeks was this: she went to the airport. She did not go to the airport to catch a plane, nor to meet one. She just went to the airport. She was at the counter of the airport coffee shop the morning I left for Miami, not sitting at the counter but standing behind it, holding a watch in her hand. “I certainly wouldn’t think yet,” she said to the sullen girl whose space she had arrogated, and she tapped the face of the watch with her fingernail. “Nine minutes more. See for yourself.”

The girl stared at Charlotte Douglas a moment and then, without speaking, plunged her index finger into the sugar bowl on the counter. Still gazing at Charlotte she licked the sugar from her finger. In another country she might have gone the extra step, made her point explicit, jammed her grimy finger between la norteamericana’s teeth, but the expression of proletarian resentment in Boca Grande remains largely symbolic. The guerrilleros here would have nothing to say to this girl in the airport. The guerrilleros here spend their time theorizing in the interior, and are covertly encouraged to emerge from time to time as foils to the actual politics of the country. Our notoriously frequent revolutions are made not by the guerrilleros but entirely by people we know. This is a hard point for the outsider of romantic sensibility to grasp.

“Gastrointestinal infection is the leading natural cause of death in this country,” Charlotte said after a while. She said it in English and did not look at the girl. “If you call it natural.”

The girl sucked the last grains of sugar from under her scabbed fingernail and rolled it again in the bowl.

“Which I don’t particularly.”

When the water for Charlotte Douglas’s tea had boiled the requisite twenty minutes she made the tea herself, took it to a table by the window and sat there reading an article on the cultivation of vanilla in Revista Boca Grande. She moved her lips slightly and seemed entirely absorbed in what she read. When the Miami plane was called she continued reading Revista Boca Grande. She never looked up, or out the window. The next afternoon when I came back from Miami Charlotte Douglas was sitting at the same table reading the same copy of Revista Boca Grande. It did not occur to me that day that I would ever have reason to consider Charlotte an outsider of romantic sensibility. In any case I am no longer sure that she was. Possibly this is the question I am trying to answer.

Once I knew Charlotte I realized that although she spoke Spanish she had trouble reading it, and tended to lose the sense of even the simplest newspaper story somewhere in the first paragraph, but it could not have mattered in this case since she had no interest in the cultivation of vanilla.

Or in the reform of the Boca Grande tax structure.

Or in the contradiction inherent in a Central American common market.

All of which topics, and others, Charlotte Douglas read about in the Boca Grande airport, her concentration apparently passionate, her expression miming comprehension, here a nod of approval, there a moue of disagreement; her eyes scanning the Spanish words as if she understood them.

When there was nothing else to read.

When, say, the Miami Herald did not come in and she had already committed to memory the revised schedules of all five airlines chartered to land at Boca Grande.