Ann Patchett (13 page)
Authors: Bel Canto
Father Arguedas anointed the accompanist’s
hands, saying, “May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.”
Roxane picked up some of his fine blond hair
and held it over her fingers. It looked anemic. It looked like it belonged to a
person who wasn’t long for this world. The truth was
,
she had hated the accompanist a little. For months they had worked together
amicably. He knew his music. He played with passion but never tried to
overshadow her. He was quiet and reserved and she liked that about him. She did
not try to draw him out. She never thought about him enough to wonder if she
should. Then it was decided that he would come with her on this trip. No sooner
had the wheels of the plane lifted up from the tarmac than the accompanist
grabbed her hand and told her about the impossible burden of love he had been
living with. Didn’t she know? All those days of being next to her, of hearing
her sing. He leaned into her seat and tried to press his ear against her chest
but she pushed him away. It was like that every minute of the eighteen-hour
flight. It was like that in the limousine to the hotel. He pleaded and wept
like a child. He cataloged every outfit she had worn to every rehearsal. Outside
the car window an impenetrable wall of leaves and vines sped past. Where was
she going? He crept one finger over to touch her skirt and she knocked it away
with the back of her hand.
Roxane bowed her head and closed her eyes,
pressed her hands together with the strands of his hair caught in between. “A
prayer can just be something nice,” Sister Joan had said. Sister Joan was her
favorite, young and nearly pretty. She kept chocolate in her desk. “It isn’t
always the things you want. It can be the things you appreciate.” Sister Joan
would often ask Roxane to sing for the children before assembly, “Oh Mary We
Crown Thee with Flowers Today,” even in the dead of a
“He always wanted to hear about
what it was like to grow up near an opera house. He said, now that he was in
never leave. He said he couldn’t bear those cold northern winters now.”
Father Arguedas looked up at her, desperate to
know what she was saying. Was it confession, prayer?
“Maybe it was something he ate,” she said. “There
could be a food he was allergic to. Maybe he was sick before we got here.”
Certainly, he was not the man she had known.
They were all three quiet for a while, the
accompanist with his eyes closed, the opera singer and the priest both staring
down at those closed eyes. Then something occurred to Roxane Coss and without
hesitation she reached into his pockets and pulled out his wallet and
handkerchief and a roll of mints. She flipped through the wallet and put it
down. His passport was there:
She slipped her hands deep into his pants pockets, at which point Father
Arguedas stopped his prayers to watch her. There she found a hypodermic needle,
used and capped, and a small glass vile with a rubber top, empty but for a drop
or two circling the bottom.
Insulin.
All out of insulin.
They would be back at the hotel by
midnight, they had been promised. There was no reason to bring more than one
shot along. She scrambled to her feet, the necessary proof in her upturned
palms. Father Arguedas raised his head as she rushed to the Generals. “Diabetic!”
she cried, a word that had to be more or less the same in any language. Those
medical terms came off Latin roots, the single tree they should all understand.
She turned her head towards the men’s wall, where they were all watching, like
this was any other night at the opera and tonight’s performance was the tragic
death of the accompanist,
Il Pianoforte Triste
.
“Diabetic,” she said to Gen.
Gen, who had wanted to give the priest his
chance, came forward now and explained what the Generals must, without benefit
of translation, have understood: the man was in a diabetic coma, which meant
that somewhere out there was the medicine needed to save him if he was still
alive. They went over to see, General Benjamin dropping his cigarette into the
marble fireplace which was big enough to hold three good-sized children. In
fact, the Vice President’s own three children had crowded in there together
after it had been emptied of ashes and scrubbed down, and pretended to be
cooked by witches. Father Arguedas had finished the formal prayer and now
simply knelt beside the accompanist, his hands wrapped together, his head
bowed,
praying
silently that the man would find solace
and joy in God’s eternal love now that he was dead.
When the priest opened his eyes he saw that he
and the accompanist were no longer alone. Father Arguedas smiled gently at the
assembled crowd. “Who can separate us from the love of Christ?” he said by way
of explanation.
When Roxane Coss sank to the floor it was a
lovely sight, the pale green chiffon of her dress billowing out like a canopy
of new spring leaves caught in a sweep of April wind. She took in her hands the
hand that his mother had been so careful with, the hand she had watched play
Schumann lieder hour after hour without tiring. The hand was cold already, and
the colors of his face, which hadn’t seemed right for hours, were quickly
becoming very wrong, yellow around the eyes, a pale lavender creeping up near
his lips. His tie was gone, as were the studs from his shirtfront, but he still
wore his black tails and white waistcoat. He was still dressed for performance.
Never for a minute had she thought he was a bad man. And he had been a
brilliant pianist. It was just that he shouldn’t have waited until they were
sealed up in that plane to tell her how he felt about her, and now that he was
dead she wouldn’t even hold that against him.
All the men had left their wall and come to the
other side of the room, where they stood, more or less shoulder to shoulder
with the band of terrorists. Every one of them had resented the accompanist,
thought he was too lucky for being able to play the piano so well, thought he
was too forward, the way he had shielded her from the rest of them. But when he
was dead they felt the loss of him. He had died for her after all. Even from
across the room in languages they may not have understood, they could follow
the story clearly. He had never told her he was a diabetic. He had chosen to
stay with her rather than ask for the insulin that could save his life.
The poor accompanist, their friend.
He was one of them.
“Now a man is dead!” General Benjamin said,
throwing up his hands. His own illness flared at the thought of it and the pain
was like hot needles sewing together the nerve endings of his face.
“It isn’t as if men haven’t died,” General
Alfredo answered coolly. He had nearly died himself more times than he could
remember: a bullet in his
stomach, that
nearly killed
him! Two fingers shot off not six months after that, then last year a bullet
passing cleanly through the side of his neck.
“We are not here to kill these people. We are
here to take the President and to go.”
“No President,” Alfredo reminded him.
General Hector, trusting no one, reached down
and pressed his own thin fingers against the dead man’s jugular. “Perhaps we
should shoot him, put his body outside. Let them know who they’re dealing
with.”
Father Arguedas, who had been keeping to his
prayers, looked up and stared at the Generals pointedly. The idea of shooting
their new-dead friend made the Spanish-speaking hostages recoil. Those who had
not previously known that Roxane Coss did not speak the language were now sure
of it because she remained in the same position, her head in her hands, her
skirt circled out around her, while the Generals spoke of desecration.
A German named Lothar Falken, who knew just
enough Spanish to get the vaguest idea of what was going on, sidled up to Gen
in the crowd and asked him to translate.
“Tell them it won’t work,” he said. “The wound
won’t bleed. You could shoot him straight through the head now and they’d still
figure out soon enough that he didn’t die of a gunshot wound.” Lothar was the
vice president of Hoechst, a pharmaceutical company, and had been
a biology
major at university many years before. He was
feeling especially bad about the death, as insulin represented the vast
majority of the company’s sales. They were, in fact,
the drug. They had it everywhere back at the office, free samples of every
variety of insulin just waiting to be given away, refrigerators full of
endless, clinking glass vials there for the taking. He had come to the party
because he felt if Nansei was considering an electronics plant in the host
country, he might consider manufacturing there as well. Now he was staring at a
man who died wanting insulin. He couldn’t save the man’s life, but at least he
could spare him the indignity of being killed again.
Gen related the information, trying to choose
words that would make the whole thing sound more gruesome rather than less, as
he, too, did not want to see the poor accompanist shot.
General Hector took out his gun and stared thoughtfully
down the sight. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
Roxane Coss looked up then. “Who’s he going to
shoot?” she asked Gen.
“No one,” Gen assured her.
She wiped her fingers in a straight line
beneath her eyes. “Well, he isn’t going to clean his gun. Are they going to
start killing us now?” Her voice was tired, practical, as if to say she had a
schedule and she needed to know where things stood.
“You might as well tell her the truth,” the
Vice President whispered to Gen in Spanish. “If anyone can stop this I would
think it would be her.”
It should not be Gen’s responsibility, deciding
what was best for her, what to tell and what not to tell. He did not know her.
He did not know how she would take such a thing. But then she grabbed his ankle
in the same way a standing person might have grabbed a wrist in an argument. He
looked down at this famous hand touching his pant’s leg and felt confused.
“English!” she said.
“They’re considering shooting him,” Gen
confessed.
“He’s dead,” she said, in case they had missed
the point. “How do you say dead in Spanish?
Dead.
”
“Difunto,”
Gen said.
“Difunto!”
Her voice was sliding up into the
higher registers now. She stood up. At some point she had made the mistake of
taking off her shoes, and in a room full of men this small woman seemed
especially small. Even the Vice President had several inches on her. But when
she put her shoulders back and raised her head it was as if she was willing
herself to grow, as if from years of appearing far away on a stage she had
learned how to project not just her voice but her entire person, and the rage
that was in her lifted her up until she seemed to tower over them. “You
understand this,” she said to the Generals. “Any bullet that goes into that man
goes through me first.” She was feeling very bad about the accompanist. She had
demanded that the flight attendant find her another seat but the flight was
full. She had been quite cruel to him on the plane in an attempt to make him be
quiet.
She pointed a finger at Gen, who reluctantly
told them what she had said.
The men who circled them like a gallery
approved of this. Such love! He had died for her, she would die for him!
“You’ve kept one woman, one American, and the
one person that anyone in the world has ever heard of before, and if you kill
me, and make no mistake, you will have to—are you getting all this?” she said
to the translator. “The very wrath of God will come down on you and your
people.”
Even though Gen translated, a clear and simple
word-for-word translation, every person in the room understood what she was
saying without him, in the same way they would have understood her singing
Puccini in Italian.
“Take him out of here. Drag him to the front
steps if you have to, but you let the people out there send him home in one
piece.” A light perspiration had come up on Roxane Coss’s forehead, making her
glow like Joan of Arc before the fire. When she was completely finished she
took a breath, fully reinflating her massive lungs, and then sat down again. Her
back was to the Generals and she bent forward to lean her head against the
chest of her accompanist. Resting on this still chest, she drew herself back
into composure. She was surprised to find his body comforting and she wondered
if it was just that she could like him now that he was dead. Once she felt she
was herself again she kissed him to reinforce her point. His lips were slack
and cool above the hard resistance of his teeth.
From somewhere in the middle of the crowd, Mr.
Hosokawa stepped forward, reached into his pocket, and extended to her his
handkerchief, clean and pressed. It was odd, he thought, to have been so
reduced, to have so little to offer, and yet she took it as if his handkerchief
were the thing she had most been hoping for and pressed it beneath her eyes.
