A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

I will be her witness.

That would translate sere su testigo, and will not appear in your travelers' phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler.

Here is what happened: she left one man, she left a second man, she traveled again with the first; she let him die alone. She lost one child to "history" and another to "complications" (I offer in each instance the evaluation of others), she imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande, a tourist. Una turista. So she said. In fact she came here less a tourist than a sojourner but she did not make that distinction.

"I think I have never known anyone who lead quite so unexamined a life," the narrator of Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer, Grace Strasser-Mendana says about Charlotte Douglass, who was "immaculate of history, innocent of politics." The two women met in the Central American nation of Boca Grande, where Grace is the widow of a tinpot dictator--and in control of the copra mines which are the country's only major resource--and Charlotte was a turista, fled to Boca Grande to--to, well, what, exactly? The book is an attempt to find out, and Grace--an anthropologist as well as a copper baron--writes it in order to make sense of Charlotte, whom history and politics both seem to have caught in the end.

The events that lead Charlotte to Boca Grande, as detailed by Grace, are remarkably convoluted. They begin with the discovery that Marin, Charlotte's daughter, has committed an act of international terrorism and disappeared. In the aftermath of Marin's crime, Marin's father, a primo asshole named Warren who may be dying of cancer, turns up to wrench Charlotte away from her current husband, an aloof bureaucrat named Leonard. Charlotte and Warren drift through the United States for a time, alienating every country club buddy Warren ever made, before Charlotte flees to Central America on her own, eventually settling in Boca Grande.

What draws Charlotte to Boca Grande seems not to be a connection of logic--there's no indication, for example, that the terrorists Marin is tied up with are related to the local guerilleros--but of spirit. Charlotte, with her tremendously selective attention, is unable or unwilling to see the way history manifests in her own life, and Boca Grande is a place where history never happens. The beautiful new capital planned in the jungle is never built, the streets planned on the map never materializes, and every year or two a new round of guerilla warfare shuffles control of the country between one or another of Grace's in-laws, all perfectly spoiled banana republicans.

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 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 ("Oldsmobile," 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.

But things tend not to happen right up until the point that they do, and Charlotte, just as she's mugged by history in the case of Marin, is mugged by history in Boca Grande, where the latest revolucion turns out to be a bit more permanent, or at least a bit more violent, than the last. Grace's obsession with understanding Charlotte, who refuses to understand anything, becomes quite explicitly a quest to understand herself, one that yields entirely unsatisfactory results. For me, too, something about the lives of Charlotte and Grace eludes understanding; it's never clear why, for instance, the distraught Charlotte absconds with Warren, or why she leaves him in the end. The war in Boca Grande has no recognizable cause; its aims are false even though the "hardware" is real and the intrigue as complicated as that of a Graham Greene novel. 

"Maybe it is just something that happened," Grace says, speaking about the portion of Charlotte's life she describes, but she might be talking about her own life as well, and history and politics in general. When Grace, finally put face to face with Marin after Charlotte's death, says, "I didn't understand your mother," Marin replies, "Try a class analysis." That's part of it, of course--both Charlotte and Grace are inoculated from history by their money--but it's so insufficient to explaining Charlotte's life it makes Marin, blinkered by the narrowness of her ideological perspective, doubly tragic. Maybe A Book of Common Prayer is a book about the way history and politics intrude even on those of us who don't think about them. Or maybe it's just something that happened.