Ann Patchett (22 page)

“Call Manuel,” he said, coming back to the
living room. Ruben went to the kitchen and brought back the telephone directory
and Messner gave the priest his cellular phone and showed him how to dial out.

On the third ring there was an answer.
“Alo!”

“Manuel?” the priest said.
“Manuel,
hello?”
He felt his voice choke with emotion. Someone outside the house!
It was like seeing a ghost from his former life, a silvery shadow walking down
the aisle towards the altar. Manuel. He had not been in captivity two full
weeks but upon hearing that voice the priest felt as if he were dead to the
world.

“Who is this?” The voice was suspicious.

“It is your friend, Father Arguedas.” The
priest’s eyes filled with tears and he held up his hand to excuse himself from
the crowd and stepped into the corner, into the lustrous folds of the
draperies.

There was a long silence on the other end. “Is
this a joke?”

“Manuel, no, I’m calling.”

“Father?”

“I am in—” he said, but then faltered. “I have
been detained.”

“We know all about that. Father, are you well?
Do they treat you all right? They let you make phone calls there?”

“I am well. I am fine. The call, no, it is a
special circumstance.”

“We say the mass for you every day.” Now it was
his friend’s voice that was breaking. “I only came home for lunch. I have only
just walked in the door. If you had called five minutes before I wouldn’t have
been here. Are you safe? We hear terrible things.”

“They say the mass for me?” Father Arguedas
wrapped his hand around the heavy draperies and rested his cheek against the
soft cloth. To the best of his knowledge, he had been remembered in the mass
along with twenty-three others on the Sunday before he took his holy orders,
and that was all. To think of those people, the people he prayed for, praying
for him.
To think that God heard his name from so many
voices.
“They must pray for all of us here, the hostages and captors
alike.”

“We do,” Manuel said. “But the mass is offered
in your name.”

“I can’t believe this,” he whispered.

“Does he have the music?” Roxane asked and then
Gen asked the priest.

Father Arguedas remembered himself. “Manuel.” He
coughed to try and clear the emotion from his voice. “I’m calling to ask you
for a favor.”

“Anything, my friend.
Do they want money?”

The priest smiled to think with all these
wealthy men around it would be put to him to ask a music teacher for money.
“Nothing like that.
I need sheet music. There is a singer
here—”

“Roxane Coss.”

“You know everything,” he said, taking comfort
in his friend’s concern. “She needs music to practice with.”

“I heard her accompanist was dead.
Murdered by the terrorists.
I heard they cut off his hands.”

Father Arguedas was shocked. What else did
people say about them now that they were gone? “It was nothing like that. He
died all on his own. The man was a diabetic.” Should he defend the people who
kept them? Surely, they should not be falsely accused of cutting the hands off
a pianist. “It isn’t so bad here. I don’t mind it, really. We’ve found another
accompanist. Someone who is here who plays very well, I think,” he said,
dropping his voice to a whisper.
“Perhaps even better than
the first one.
She wants things in a wide range, opera scores, Bellini
songs, Chopin for the accompanist. I have a list.”

“There is nothing she needs that I don’t have,”
Manuel said confidently.

The priest could hear his friend rummaging for
paper, a pen. “I told her that.”

“You spoke of me to Roxane Coss?”

“Of course.
That’s why I’m calling.”

“She’s heard my name?”

“She wants to sing from your music,” the priest
said.

“Even when you are locked away you manage to do
good work.” Manuel sighed. “What an honor for me. I will bring them now. I will
skip lunch completely.”

The two men conferred about the list and then
Father Arguedas double-checked it with Gen. When everything was settled, the
priest asked his friend to hold the line. He hesitated and then he held out the
phone to Roxane. “Ask her to say something,” he said to
Gen
.

“What?”

“Anything.
It doesn’t matter. Ask her to say
the names of the operas. Would she do that?”

Gen made the request and Roxane Coss took the
small phone from the priest’s hand and held it to her ear. “Hello?” she said.

“Hello?” Manuel parroted in English.

She looked at the priest and she smiled. She
looked right at him while she said the names into the phone.
“
La Bohème
,”
she said.
“Così fan tutti.”

“Dear God,” Manuel whispered.

“
La Gioconda
, I Capuleti e i
Montecchi, Madama Butterfly.”

It was as if a white light filled up the
priest’s chest, a hot sort of brightness that made his eyes water and his heart
beat like a desperate man pounding on the church door at night. Had he been
able to lift up his hands to touch her he could not be sure he could have
stopped
himself.
But it didn’t matter. He was
paralyzed by her voice, the music of speaking, the rhythmic loops of the names
that passed through her lips, into the phone, and then into Manuel’s ear some
two miles away. The priest knew then for sure that he would survive this. That
there would come a day when he would sit at Manuel’s kitchen table in his small
apartment cluttered with music and they would shamelessly recount the pleasure
of this exact moment. He would have to live if only to have that cup of coffee
with his friend. And while they would remember, try to place in order the names
that she spoke, Father Arguedas would know that he had been the more fortunate
of the two because it was he whom she had looked at when she spoke.

“Give me the phone,” Simon Thibault said to
Messner when they were done.

“He said one call.”

“I couldn’t care less what he said. Give me the
goddamn phone.”

“Simon.”

“They’re watching
television
.
Give me the phone.” The terrorists had removed all the cords from the phones.

Messner sighed and handed him the phone. “One
minute.”

“I swear it,” Simon said. He was already
dialing the number. The phone rang five times and then the answering machine
picked up the line. It was his own voice, saying first in Spanish and then
again in French that they were out, saying they would return the call. Why
hadn’t Edith recorded the message? What had he been thinking of? He put his
hand over his eyes and began to cry. The sound of his own voice was almost
unbearable to him. When it stopped there was a long, dull tone.
“Je t’adore,”
he said.
“Je t’aime, Je
t’adore.”

*  *  *

Everyone was scattering now, wandering off to
their chairs to nap or play a hand of solitaire. After Roxane walked away and
Kato returned to the letter he had been writing to his sons (he had so much to
tell them now!) Gen noticed that Carmen was still in her place on the other
side of the room and that she wasn’t watching the singer or the accompanist
anymore. She was watching him. He felt that same tightness he felt when she had
looked at him before. That face, which had seemed pretty to a disadvantage when
it was assigned to a boy, did not blink or move or even appear to breathe. Carmen
did not wear her cap. Her eyes were large and dark and frozen onto Gen, as if
by looking away she would be admitting that she had been looking in the first
place.

Gen, in his genius for languages, was often at
a loss for what to say when left with only his own words. If Mr. Hosokawa had
still been sitting there he might have said to Gen, Go and see what that girl
wants, and Gen would go and ask her without hesitation. It had occurred to him
in his life that he had the soul of a machine and was only capable of motion
when someone else turned the key. He was very good at working and he was very
good at being by himself. Sitting alone in his apartment with books and tapes,
he would pick up languages the way other men picked up women, with smooth talk
and then later, passion. He would scatter books on the floor and pick them up
at random. He read Czeslaw Milosz in Polish, Flaubert in French, Chekhov in
Russian, Nabokov in English, Mann in German,
then
he
switched them around: Milosz in French, Flaubert in Russian, Mann in English. It
was like a game, a showy parlor trick he performed only for himself, in which
the constant switching kept his mind sharp, but it was hardly the same thing as
being able to approach a person who was looking at you intently from across a
room. Perhaps the Generals were right about him after all.

Carmen wore a wide leather belt around her
narrow waist and into the right side she had stuck a pistol. Her green fatigues
were not dirty the way the fatigues of her compatriots were and the tear in the
knee of her pants had been neatly sewn together with the same needle and thread
Esmeralda had used to stitch together the Vice President’s face. Esmeralda had
left the spool with the needle sticking out of it on the side table when she
had finished her work and Carmen had surreptitiously dropped them into her
pocket the first chance she got. She had been hoping to speak to the translator
since she realized what it was he did, but couldn’t figure out a way to speak
to him without letting him know she was a girl. Then Beatriz took care of that
and now there was no secret, no reason to wait, except for the fact that she
seemed to be stuck against the wall. He had seen her. He was looking at her
now, and that seemed to be as far as things were able to progress. She could
not walk away and she was equally unable to walk towards him. Life could very
well be lived out in that spot. She tried to remember her aggressiveness, all
the things the Generals had taught her in training, but it was one thing to
take what you must for the good of the people and quite another to ask for
something for yourself. She knew nothing at all about asking.

“Dear Gen,” Messner said, clapping a hand down
on his shoulder. “I’ve never seen you sitting alone. You must feel at times
that everyone has something to say and no one knows how to say it.”

“At times,” Gen said absently. He felt if he
were to blow in her direction she would be lifted up in the current of air and
would simply bob away like a feather.

“We are the handmaidens of circumstance, you
and
I
.” Messner spoke to Gen in French, the language
he spoke at home in
Switzerland
.
“What would be the male equivalent to handmaiden?”

“Esclave,”
Gen said.

“Yes, slave, of course, but it doesn’t sound as
nice. I think I’ll stay with handmaidens. I don’t mind that.” Messner sat down
next to Gen on the piano bench and let his eyes follow the course of Gen’s
stare. “My God,” he said quietly. “Isn’t that a girl there?”

Gen told him it was.

“Where did she come from? There were no girls.
Don’t tell me they’ve found a way to get more of their troops inside.”

“She was always here,” Gen said.
“Two of them.
We just didn’t notice. That’s Carmen. Beatriz,
the other one, is in watching television.”

“We didn’t notice her?”

“Apparently not,” Gen said, feeling quite sure
he had noticed.

“I was just in the den.”

“Then you overlooked Beatriz again.”

“Beatriz. And this one is Carmen. Well,”
Messner said, standing up. “Then there’s something wrong with the whole lot of
us. Be my translator. I want to speak to her.”

“Your Spanish is fine.”

“My Spanish is halting and my verbs are
improperly conjugated. Get up. Look at her, Gen. She’s staring right at you.” It
was true. So fearful had Carmen become when she saw that Messner meant to come
towards her that she had lost her ability to even blink. She was now staring in
much the same way a figure stares from a portrait. She prayed to Saint Rose of
Lima
to grant her that
rarest of gifts: to become invisible. “Either she’s been commanded to watch you
on the penalty of her death or she has something to say.”

Gen got up. He was a translator. He would go
and translate Messner’s conversation. Still, he felt a peculiar fluttering in
his chest, a sensation that was not entirely dissimilar to an itch but was
located just beneath his ribs.

“Such a remarkable thing and no one even
mentioned it,” Messner said.

“We were all thinking about the new
accompanist,” Gen said, his knees feeling looser with every step.
Femur, patella, tibia.
“We had already forgotten about the
girls.”