Ann Patchett (30 page)
Authors: Bel Canto
Carmen
nodded,
she
made a sound, something like, “ah,” not quite a word.
Gen sighed. It was better now but only
slightly. “Do you want to learn?”
Carmen nodded again, her eyes fixed on a drawer
handle. She tried to see Saint Rose of
tried to find her voice through prayer. She thought of Roxane Coss, whose very
hands had braided her hair. Shouldn’t that give her strength?
“I don’t know that I’m much of a teacher. I’m
trying to teach Mr. Hosokawa Spanish. He writes down words in a notebook and
memorizes them. Maybe we could try the same for you.”
After a minute of silence, Carmen offered up
that same sound, a little “ah” that gave no real information other than that
she had heard him. She was an idiot.
A fool.
Gen looked around. Ishmael was watching them
but he didn’t seem to care.
“The eggplant is perfect!” Ruben said. “Thibault,
did you see this eggplant? Every cube is exactly the same size.”
“I forgot to take out the seeds,” Ishmael said.
“The seeds don’t matter,” Ruben said. “The
seeds are as good for you as anything else.”
“Gen, are you going to sauté?” Thibault said.
“One minute,” Gen said, and held up his hand. He
whispered to Carmen, “Have you changed your mind? Do you want me to help you?”
And then it seemed the saint gave Carmen a
sharp blow between her shoulder blades and the word that was so tightly lodged
in her throat disengaged like a tough piece of gristle caught in the windpipe. “Yes,”
she said, gasping. “Yes.”
“So we’ll practice?”
“Every day.”
Carmen picked up the words,
knife
and
garlic
, and she put
them in her pocket along with
girl
. “I learned my
letters. I haven’t practiced in a while. I used to make them every day and then
we started training for this.”
Gen could see her up in the mountains, where it
was always cold at night, sitting by the fire, her face flushed from heat and
concentration, one piece of dark hair falling from behind her ear the way it
was now. She has a cheap tablet, a stubby pencil. In his mind he stands next to
her, praises the straight lines of her
T
and
H,
the delicate sweep of her
Q
.
Outside he can hear the last call of the birds as they careen towards their
nests before dusk. He had thought once that she was a boy and it terrified him,
this feeling. “We’ll go over the letters,” he said. “We’ll start there.”
“Am I the only one who has to work?” Beatriz
called loudly.
“When?”
Carmen only mouthed the word.
“Tonight,” Gen said. What he wanted then was
something he could barely believe. He wanted to fold her in his arms. He wanted
to kiss the parting of her hair. He wanted to touch her lips with the tips of
his fingers. He wanted to whisper things to her in Japanese. Maybe, if there
was time, he could teach her Japanese as well.
“Tonight in the china closet,” Carmen said. “Teach
me tonight.”
t
he
priest was right about the weather,
even though the break came later than he had predicted. By the middle of
November, the
garúa
had ended. It did not drift away.
It did not lessen. It simply stopped, so that one day everything had the
saturated quality of a book dropped into a bathtub and the next day the air was
bright and crisp and extremely blue. It reminded Mr. Hosokawa of cherry blossom
season in
October on
in the early morning before she began her singing. He pointed out a pair of
yellow birds to her, bright as chrysanthemums, sitting on the branch of some
previously unseen tree. They pecked for a while at the spongy bark and then
flew off, first one and then the other, up and over the wall. One by one all
the hostages and all their keepers went up to the windows around the house,
stared and blinked and stared again. So many people put their hands and noses
on the glass that Vice President Iglesias had to come out with a rag and a
bottle of ammonia and wipe down each pane. “Look at the garden,” he said to no
one in particular. “The weeds are as tall as the flowers.” One would have
thought that with so much rain and so little light the forward march of growth
would have been suspended, when in fact everything had thrived. The weeds
alongside the domesticated bedding plants sniffed at the distant jungle in the
air and stretched their roots down and stretched their leaves up in an attempt
to turn the vice-presidential garden back into a wild thing. They drank up
every bit of the rain. They could have survived another year of wet weather. Left
long enough to
their own
devices, they would overtake
the house and pull down the garden wall. After all, this yard had once been a
part of the continuum, the dense and twisted interstate of vines that spread
right to the sandy edges of the ocean. The only thing that prevented them from
taking over the house was the gardener, who pulled up whatever he deemed
unworthy, burned it, and then clipped back the rest. But the gardener was now
on an indefinite vacation.
The sun had been up and shining no more than an
hour and in that time several of the plants had grown half a centimeter.
“I’ll have to do something about the yard.” Ruben
sighed, not that he knew where he would find the time with all that needed to
be done in the house. Not that they were likely to let him outside in the first
place. Not that they were likely to give him the things he needed: hedge
shears, trowels, pruning knives. Everything in the garden shed was a murder
weapon.
As Father Arguedas opened the windows in the
living room, he thanked God for the light and the sweet quality of the air. Though
he was in the house, across the garden, and behind the wall, he could hear more
clearly the rustling on the street without the rain to muffle the sound. There
were no more messages shouted over the wall, but still he could imagine a large
crowd of men and guns. The priest suspected that either they had no plan of
action anymore or that they had a plan so complex that it no longer exactly
included them. While General Benjamin continued to cut out every mention of
their circumstances from the newspaper, they had caught a snippet of talk on
the television that a tunnel was being dug, that the police were planning on
digging their way up into the house, and so the crisis would end much the way
it had started, with strangers crashing into the room and redirecting the
course of their lives, but no one believed this. It was too far-fetched, too
much like a spy movie to be real. Father Arguedas stared at his feet, his cheap
black lace-up shoes settled on such expensive carpet, and he wondered what went
on deep beneath the ground. He prayed for their safe delivery, for the safe
delivery of each and every one of them, but he did not pray to be rescued
through a tunnel. He did not pray to be rescued at all. He only prayed for
God’s will, His love and protection. He tried to clear his heart of selfish
thoughts while at the same time being grateful for all that God had granted
him. Take the mass, as only one example. In his former life (for that was how
he thought of it now) he was only allowed to celebrate the mass with his
parishioners when everyone else was on holiday or sick and then it was the six
A.M.
mass
they gave to him or a mass on Tuesday. Mainly his responsibilities within the
church were the same as the ones he had held before he was a priest: he
distributed the host he had not blessed on the far left-hand aisle of the
church or he lit the candles or he snuffed them out. Here, after much
discussion, the Generals agreed to allow Messner to bring in the implements of
communion, and last Sunday in the dining room, Father Arguedas celebrated the
mass with all of his friends. People who were not Catholic attended and people
who did not understand what he was saying got down on their knees. Everyone was
more likely to pray when there was something specific they wanted. The young
terrorists closed their eyes and bent their chins deeply to their chests, while
the Generals stayed in the back of the room. It could have been something else
entirely.
So many of the terrorist organizations nowadays
wanted to abolish all religion, especially Catholicism.
Had they been
taken over by
Dirección Auténtica
they would never have been allowed to pray. LDA would have dragged one hostage
up to the roof every day for the press to see, and then shot him in the head in
an attempt to speed negotiations. Father Arguedas considered such things while
he lay on the living-room carpet late at night. They were fortunate, really.
There was no other way to look at it. Wasn’t there still freedom in the deepest
sense if there was the freedom to pray? At his mass, Roxane Coss sang “Ave
Maria,” an event of such startling beauty that (and he did not wish to sound
competitive) it simply could not be topped at any church, anywhere, including
pure, so light, that it opened up the ceiling and carried their petitions
directly to God. It swept over them like the feathery dusting of wings, so that
even the Catholics who no longer practiced their faith, and the non-Catholics
who came along because there was nothing else to do, and all those who had no
idea what he was saying, and the stone-cold atheists who wouldn’t have cared
anyway, because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling
comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith. The priest stared
at the slightly yellowed stucco wall that protected them from whatever was
waiting to happen outside. It must have been ten feet high and was covered in
some sections with ivy. It was a beautiful wall, not unlike what might have
surrounded the
not immediately obvious but now he saw how one could consider such a wall a
blessing.
Roxane sang Rossini that morning, in keeping
with the weather. One song, “Bella crudele,” she sang seven times. Clearly, she
was trying to perfect something, to find something lodged at the very center of
the score that she felt she had not reached. She and Kato communicated in their
own way. She pointed at a line of notes. He played it. She tapped her fingers
in light rhythm against the top of the piano. He played it again. She sang the
line unaccompanied. He played it without her. She sang while he played. They
circled each other, each one oblivious to feelings, each caring only for the
music. She closed her eyes while he moved through the
opening,
she nodded her head slightly in approval. He made such easy work of the score.
There was no showy bravado in the movements of his arms. He kept things small
and light, perfect for her voice. It was one thing when he played for himself,
but when he was the accompanist he played like a man who was trying not to wake
the neighbors.
Roxane stood so straight that one could easily
forget how short she was. She rested her hand on the piano,
then
she crossed her palms over her heart. She sang. She had taken to following the
example of the Japanese and had given up wearing her shoes. Mr. Hosokawa had
kept the tradition of his host and had worn his shoes for the first week of
their captivity, but as time went on he felt that he could no longer bear it. Wearing
shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing
shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.
When his
shoes came off, then so came Gen’s, and Kato’s, and Mr. Yamamoto’s, Mr. Aoi’s,
Mr. Ogawa’s, and Roxane’s.
She padded around in a pair of athletic socks
borrowed from the Vice President, whose feet were not much larger than her own.
She sang now in those socks. When she got the song exactly right she took it
straight through to the end without a flutter of hesitation. It was impossible
to say that her singing had improved, but there was something in her
interpretation of the lines that had shifted almost imperceptibly. She sang as
if she was saving the life of every person in the room. A breeze made the
sheers at the window shiver for a moment but everything else was still. There
was not a sound from the street. There was not a sound from the two yellow
birds.
On the morning that the rains ended, Gen waited
until the last note had been sung and then went to stand beside Carmen. It was
a particularly good time to talk without being noticed as everyone wandered
around in a state of stunned confusion after Roxane let go of her final note. If
anyone had thought to simply walk out the door, they might not have been
stopped, but no one was thinking about leaving. When Mr. Hosokawa went to get
her water, Roxane stood up to follow him and then looped her arm through his
arm.
“She’s in love with him,” Carmen whispered to
Gen. He misunderstood her for the smallest instant, heard only the word
love
. Then he stopped and made himself recall the entire
sentence. He could do that. It was as if he had a tape recorder in his head.
