Authors: Bel Canto
Ann Patchett (20 page)
Then Tetsuya Kato, a vice president at Nansei
whom Gen had known for years, smiled and walked to the Steinway without a word.
He was a slightly built man in his early fifties with graying hair who, in
Gen’s memory, rarely spoke. He had a reputation for being very good with
numbers. The sleeves to his tuxedo shirt were rolled up above his elbows and
his jacket was long gone but he sat down on the bench with great formality. The
ones in the living room watched him as he lifted the cover of the keyboard and
ran his hands once lightly over the keys, soothing them. Some of the others were
still talking about the
piano,
you could hear the
Russians’ voices coming from the dining room. Then, without making a request
for anyone’s attention, Tetsuya Kato began to play. He started with Chopin’s
Nocturne opus
coming to this country, the one he played silently against the edge of the
dining-room table when no one was watching. At home he looked at his sheet
music and turned the pages. Now he was certain he had known the music all
along. He could see the notes in front of him and he followed them with
unerring fidelity. In his heart he had never felt closer to Chopin, whom he
loved like a father. How strange his fingers felt after two weeks of not
playing, as if the skin he wore now was entirely new. He could hear the softest
click of his fingernails, two weeks too long, as he touched the keys. The
felt-covered hammers tapped the strings gently at first, and the music, even
for those who had never heard the piece before, was like a memory. From all
over the house, terrorist and hostage alike turned and listened and felt a
great easing in their chests. There was a delicacy about Tetsuya Kato’s hands,
as if they were simply resting in one place on the keyboard and then in
another. Then suddenly his right hand spun out notes like water, a sound so
light and high that there was a temptation to look beneath the lid for bells. Kato
closed his eyes so that he could imagine he was home, playing his own piano. His
wife was asleep. His children, two unmarried sons still living with them, were
asleep. For them the notes of Kato’s playing had become like air, what they
depended on and had long since stopped noticing. Playing on this grand piano
now Kato could imagine them sleeping and he put that into the nocturne, his
sons’ steady breathing, his wife clutching her pillow with one hand. All of the
tenderness he felt for them went into the keys. He touched them as if he meant
not to wake them. It was the love and loneliness that each of them felt, that
no one had brought himself to speak of. Had the accompanist played so well? It
would have been impossible to remember, his talent was to be invisible, to lift
the soprano up, but now the people in the living room of the vice-presidential mansion
listened to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so
well.
Most of the men there did not know him. Most of
them had no distinct memory of having noticed him up to this point, so that in
a way it felt that he had come in from the outside world to play for them. None
of the men who did know him knew that he played, that he continued his lessons
and practiced for an hour every morning before boarding the train for work. It
had been important to Kato to have another life, a secret life. Now the secrecy
of it did not strike him as important at all.
They were all at the piano, Roxane Coss and Mr.
Hosokawa and Gen and Simon Thibault and the priest and the Vice President and
Oscar Mendoza and little Ishmael and Beatriz and Carmen, who left her gun in
the kitchen and came and stood with the rest. All of the Russians were there,
and the Germans who had spoken of a revolt, and the Italians, who were weeping,
and the two Greeks who were older than the rest of them. The boys were there,
Paco and Ranato and Humberto and Bernardo and all the rest, the great and
menacing hulk of boy flesh that seemed to soften with every note. Even the
Generals came. Every last one of them came, until there were fifty-eight people
in the room, and when he finished Tetsuya Kato bowed his head while they
applauded. Had there not been a need for a pianist there was little chance that
Kato would have sat down that afternoon to play, though he had watched the
piano the way the other men watched the door. He would not have chosen to draw
attention to himself, and without his playing the story might have missed him
altogether. But there was a need, a specific request, and so he stepped
forward.
“Fine, fine,” General Benjamin said, feeling
good to think the accompanist that had been lost was now replaced.
“Very well done,” Mr. Hosokawa said, so proud
that it was a Nansei man stepping up for the job. Twenty years he had known
Kato. He knew his wife and the names of his children. How was it possible he
did not know about the piano?
For a moment the room was very quiet and then
Carmen, who had so recently become a girl to them, said something in a language
that not even Gen was sure of.
“Encore,” the priest said to her.
“Encore,” Carmen said.
Kato bowed his head to Carmen, who smiled. Who
could have ever mistaken her for one of those boys? Even beneath her cap she
was wholly lovely. She knew that people were looking at her and she closed her
eyes, unable to go back to the kitchen the way she wanted to, unable to leave
the nesting curve of the piano’s side. When he played she could feel the
vibrations of the strings as she leaned one hip against the wood. No one had
ever bowed his head to her before. No one had listened to her request.
Certainly, no one had ever played a piece of music for her before.
Kato played another and then another until
everyone in the room forgot that they badly wanted to be someplace else. When
he was finally finished and could not meet the request of another encore because
his hands were trembling with exhaustion, Roxane Coss shook his hand and bowed
her head, which established a pact that in the future she would sing and he
would play.
g
en
was a busy man. He was needed by
Mr. Hosokawa, who wanted another ten words and their pronunciations to add to
his book. He was needed by the other hostages, who wanted to know how to say,
“Are you finished with that newspaper?” in Greek or German or French, then he
was needed to read the newspaper to them if they did not read in Spanish. He
was needed by Messner every day to translate the negotiations. Mostly, he was
needed by the Generals, who had conveniently mistaken him as Mr. Hosokawa’s
secretary instead of his translator. They appropriated his services. They liked
the idea of having a secretary, and soon they were waking Gen up in the middle
of the night, telling him to sit with a pencil and pad while they dictated
their latest list of demands for the government. What they wanted seemed to Gen
to be unformed. If their plan had been to kidnap the President in order to
overthrow the government, they hadn’t bothered to think any further than that. Now
they talked in generalities about money for the poor. They dredged up the names
of every person they had ever known who was in jail, which seemed to Gen to be
an inexhaustible list. Late at night, in deliriums of power and generosity,
they demanded that everyone be set free. They moved beyond the political
prisoners. They remembered the car thieves they had known from boyhood, the petty
robbers, men who stole chickens, a handful of drug traffickers who were not
entirely bad sorts once you knew them. “Don’t forget him,” Alfredo said, and
gave Gen an irritating poke on the shoulder. “You have no idea how that man has
suffered.” They admired Gen’s neat penmanship, and when they found a typewriter
in the bedroom of the Vice President’s older daughter, they were impressed with
Gen’s ability to type. Sometimes, in the middle of transcription, Hector would
say, “In English!” and then Alfredo, “In Portuguese!” How amazing it was to
watch over his shoulder while he typed on in different languages! It was like
having an incredibly fascinating toy. Sometimes, when it was very late, Gen
would type up everything in Swedish without benefit of umlauts in an attempt to
amuse himself, but he did not feel amused anymore. As far as Gen could tell,
there were only two hostages who were not fabulously wealthy and powerful:
himself
and the priest, and they were the only two who were
made to work. Of course, the Vice President worked, but not because anyone had
asked him to. He seemed to think that the comfort of his guests was still his
responsibility. He was always serving sandwiches and picking up cups. He washed
the dishes and swept and twice a day he mopped up the floors in the lavatories.
With a dishtowel knotted around his waist, he took on the qualities of a
charming hotel concierge. He would ask
,
would you like
some tea? He would ask
,
would it be too much of an
imposition to vacuum beneath the chair in which you were sitting? Everyone was
very fond of Ruben. Everyone had completely forgotten that he was the Vice
President of the country.
Ruben Iglesias delivered a message to Gen while
he waited for the Generals to make up their minds as to what they wanted to say
next: he was needed at the piano. Roxane Coss and Kato had a great deal to
discuss. Could they spare Gen at this particular moment? They were all in favor
of keeping the soprano happy and possibly hearing her sing again, and so they
consented to let Gen go. Gen felt like he was a schoolboy called out of class. He
remembered his neat box of pencils, the clean pad of paper,
the
luck of having a desk next to the window simply because of where his name fell
in the alphabet. He was a good student, and yet he remembered at every moment
how desperately he wished to leave the room. Ruben Iglesias took his arm. “I
suppose the problems of the world will have to wait,” he whispered, and then he
laughed in a way that no one could hear him at all.
Mr. Hosokawa stayed at the piano with Kato and
Roxane. It was a pleasure to hear so much talk of opera translated into
Japanese, to hear Roxane Coss’s conversation in Japanese. It was different to
listen to what she said to him and what she said when she was speaking to
someone else, speaking to someone about music. There was a regular education to
be had from eavesdropping. So much of what was learned was accidentally
overheard, just half a sentence caught when walking through the door. Since
they had been taken hostage, Mr. Hosokawa had felt the frustration of the deaf.
Even as he diligently studied his Spanish, it was only occasionally that he
heard a word he recognized. All his life he had wanted more time to listen, and
when finally there was time there was nothing to listen to, only the patter of
voices he could not understand, the occasional screeching of the police beyond
the wall. The Vice President had a stereo system but he seemed only to have a
taste for local music. All of his CDs were of bands playing high-pitched pipes
and crude drums. The music gave Mr. Hosokawa a headache. The Generals, however,
found it inspiring and would not grant requests for new CDs.
But now Mr. Hosokawa pulled his chair up to the
piano and listened. Everyone stayed in the living room, hostages and terrorists
alike, in hopes that Kato might be persuaded to play again or, better still,
that Roxane Coss might sing. Carmen seemed especially intent on watching
Roxane. She considered herself to be Roxane’s bodyguard, her personal
responsibility. She stood in the corner and stared at their party with
unwavering concentration. Beatriz chewed on the end of her braid for a while,
making talk with the boys her own age. When no music seemed to be immediately
forthcoming, she and a few of her cohorts snuck off to watch television.
Only Mr. Hosokawa and Gen were invited to sit
with the two principal players. “I like to sing scales first thing in the
morning,” Roxane said.
“After breakfast.
I’ll work on
some songs, Bellini, Tosti,
Schubert
. If you can play
the Chopin, you can play those.” Roxane ran her fingers over the keys, placing
her hands for the opening of Schubert’s “Die Forelle.”
“If we can get the music,” Kato said.
“If we can get dinner brought in we can get
sheet music. I’ll have my manager put a box together and send it down. Someone
can fly it down. Tell me what you want.” Roxane looked around for a piece of
paper and Mr. Hosokawa was able to produce his notebook and pen from the inside
pocket of his jacket. He opened it to a blank page towards the back and handed
it to her.
“Ah, Mr. Hosokawa,” Roxane said. “Imprisonment
would be something else altogether without you.”
“Surely you’ve been given nicer gifts than a
pad of paper and a pen,” Mr. Hosokawa said.
“The quality of the gift depends on the
sincerity of the giver. It also helps if the gift is something the receiver
actually wants. So far you’ve given me your handkerchief, your notebook, and
your pen. All three things I wanted.”
“The little I have here is yours,” he said with
a sincerity that didn’t match her lightness. “You could have my shoes.
My watch.”
“You have to save something for the future so
you can surprise me.” Roxane tore off a sheet of paper and handed the notebook
back. “Keep up with your studies. If we stay here long enough we’ll be able to
cut Gen out of the loop.”
Gen translated and then added, “I’ll put myself
out of business.”
