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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.

10
    T HE 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.

11
    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.
    A California drivers’ license, recently expired, and credit cards from American Express, Gulf Oil, the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue.
    $26 American and an equivalent amount in local currency.
    An unsealed envelope addressed only to a post-office box in Buffalo, New York. An unfinished letter describing the resemblance of the Capilla del Mar to the Tivoli Gardens.
    Two lipsticks, one broken pencil, a folded envelope containing four sulfathalidine and two salt tablets, a vial containing a scent predominantly gardenia, a fortune-cookie tape printed “A surprise is in store for someone you love,” and a frayed clipping of one day’s horoscope from Prensa Latina .
    This is a list of the items said to be in Charlotte Douglas’s possession (and later returned to the manager of the Hotel del Caribe) at the time of her death in the Estadio Nacional. The square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring was neither listed nor returned. I took the gold