Ann Patchett (41 page)

Cesar stopped his singing dead but sadly left
his mouth open, shaped to the last word he had sung. And when she did not say,
“Begin again!” his lips betrayed the slightest tremor.

Roxane Coss was touching his arm. She was
speaking so fast and he didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. He
stared at her blankly and he could see that she was frustrated, panicked even. The
more panicked she became the louder and faster her senseless words came out and
when he still didn’t respond she called out, “Gen!”

But the whole room was watching them and it was
too awful. Cesar felt the trembling everywhere now, and even though she was
standing right beside him, touching him, he turned away and ran out of the
room. They all stood there in
embarrassed
silence, as
if the boy had run out suddenly naked. It was Kato who thought to put his hands
together and the Italians, Gianni Davansate and Pietro Genovese, who called
out,
“Bravo!”
And then everyone in the room was
clapping and calling for the boy, but he was gone, out the back door and up
into a tree where he often kept watch of the goings-on of the world. He could
hear them, the dull buzz from inside, but who’s to say they weren’t mocking him
terribly? Maybe she was in there now doing her own imitation: pretending to be
him pretending to be her.

“Gen!”
Roxane took Gen’s hand. “Go after
him. Tell someone to go after him.”

And when Gen turned around, there stood Carmen.
Always there was Carmen, her bright dark eyes turned up to him, ready to help
him like a person whose life you’ve saved. He didn’t even have to say it. That
was how they understood each other. She turned and then she was gone.

Having kept such close quarters for so long,
everybody knew what everybody else liked. Ishmael, for example, followed the
Vice President like a dog. Looking for Ishmael? Find the Vice President and
chances were the boy would be tangled up in his feet. Beatriz would always be
in front of the television unless compelled by a direct order to be elsewhere. Gilbert
was mad for the bathtub, especially the one in the master bathroom that roared
into a raging boil when you flipped a switch (wasn’t that a surprise the first
time it happened!). Cesar liked the tree, a sturdy oak that leaned into the
wall, a tree with low, strong branches for easy climbing, high, wide branches
for comfortable sitting. The other soldiers thought he was especially stupid or
brave because sometimes he climbed up high enough that he was actually over the
wall, where any military personnel could have popped him off like a squirrel. Sometimes
the Generals asked him to look out over the city and report back, and off he
would go into the tree. So there was no great puzzle as to where Carmen should
look. She went out into the yard, a place that seemed completely different to
her after last night. She took the long way around so that she could pass by
the spot where the wall pocketed out into a private cove and look, the grass
was still flattened, pressed down in the shape of her back. She felt every drop
of her blood race to her head and she put her fingers to the wall, dizzy. Dear
God, what if somebody noticed? Should she stop now, take the time to try and
set it right? Could grass be fluffed up again? Would it stay that way? But then
Carmen realized that she planned to pound down that same spot of grass again
tonight, that she wanted to press down every blade of grass in the garden with
her hips, her shoulders, the bare soles of her feet. If there had been a way
she would have taken Gen then and there, wrapped her legs around him and climbed
him like a tree. Who would ever think that such man would want to be with her? She
was so distracted by the certainty of love that for a moment she forgot why she
had come outside in the first place or who she was looking for. Then, in the
distance, she saw a boot dangling like a large, ugly fruit from the high leaves
and the world came rushing back to her. Carmen went to the oak tree, grabbed a
branch above her head, and climbed.

There was Cesar, shaking, crying. Anyone else
who climbed this tree he would have thrown out on his head. He would have
kicked him hard under the chin and sent him flying. But the head that pulled
itself up to him was Carmen’s and Carmen he liked. He thought she understood
him because of how she clearly loved Roxane Coss. She was the luckiest of them
all, getting to take up her breakfast, getting to sleep outside her door. (Because
Carmen was completely discreet he knew nothing about the rest of it: that she
had slept in Roxane’s bed, brushed her hair, that Carmen had smuggled Roxane’s
lover to her in the middle of the night and held her confidence. Had he known
all of that he might have imploded with jealousy.) And while no one should see
him cry like he was still a child, it would be less than terrible if the person
who saw him was Carmen. Before he fell in love with Roxane Coss, back before
they ever came to the city, he thought constantly about how much he would have
liked to kiss Carmen, kissed her and more, but he gave up on the idea after a
sharp smack from General Hector. Such business was completely forbidden between
soldiers.

“You sing so beautifully,” she said.

Cesar turned his face away from her. A small
branch scraped lightly against his cheek. “I’m a fool,” he said into the
leaves.

Carmen swung onto a branch across from him and
clamped her legs around it. “Not a fool! You had to do it. You didn’t have any
choice.” She could see the battered-down portion of grass from where she was
now. It was different from this vantage point, larger and almost perfectly
round, as if they had spun each other in great circles, which seemed possible. She
could smell the grass in her hair. Love was action. It came to you. It was not
a choice.

But Cesar would not look back at her. From
where she was she could have seen over the wall if she had just stretched up a
little bit. She did not.

“Roxane Coss sent me out to get you,” Carmen
said. It was close enough to the truth. “She wants to talk to you about your
singing. She thinks you’re very good.” She could say this because she knew he
was very good and of course Roxane would tell him so. She did not understand
anywhere near enough English to have deciphered what had been said in the
living room, but she was developing a knack of figuring things out without
having to know all the actual words.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, too. The translator was there.”

“She said,
stop
. She
said,
enough
. I understood what she said.” A bird
swooped once past the tree, hoping to land, and then shot on.

“She wanted to talk to you. What does she know
to say? You have to ask Gen for help. He’s the only way to understand
anything.”

Cesar sniffed, blotted his eyes with his cuff. In
the perfect world it would not be Carmen in this tree. It would be Roxane Coss
herself who had followed him up there. She would be touching his cheek,
speaking to him in perfect Spanish. They would sing together. The word for that
was
duet
. They would travel all over the world.

“Well, you’re not a squirrel,” Carmen said. “You
aren’t going to stay up here forever. You’ll have to come down for guard duty
and when you do she’ll tell you herself with the translator. She’ll tell you
how good you are and then you will feel like an idiot for sulking up here. Everyone
wants to celebrate with you. You’ll miss out on everything.”

Cesar slid his hand over the rough bark. Carmen
had never talked like this before. When they were in training together she was
almost too shy to speak at all, that was one of the things that had made her so
appealing. He had never heard her string two full sentences together. “How do
you know all of this?”

“I told you, the translator.”

“And how do you know he tells you the truth?”

Carmen looked at him like he was crazy, but she
didn’t say a word. She reached down for the branch beneath her, held on, let
her feet fall, and then opened her hands to drop to the ground. She was an
expert at jumping. She kept her knees soft and sprang straight up after her
feet hit the grass. She did not lose her balance at all. She walked away from
Cesar without
so
much as a glance over her shoulder. Let
him rot up there. On her way back into the house she passed one of the windows
that looked into the great living room. How strange it was to see it all from
that side. She stopped for a while and stood beside a bush that had been so
neatly shaped when they first arrived and now was almost as tall as she was. She
could see Gen near the piano, talking to Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa. Kato was
there. She could see Gen, his straight back and tender mouth, his hands which
had helped her out of her clothes and then folded her neatly back inside them
again. She wished she could tap on the glass and wave to him, but it was a
miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected, as if you
were a stranger seeing them for the first time. She could see his beauty as
someone who took nothing for granted. Look at that beautiful man, that
brilliant man, he loves me. She said a prayer to Saint Rose of
Lima
.
Safety for Gen.
Happiness and a long life.
Watch over him and guide him. She looked
through the window. He was speaking to Roxane now, Roxane who had been so good
to her, and so Carmen included her in the prayer. Then she bowed her head for a
minute and quickly crossed herself, thus hurrying the prayer on its way.

“I shouldn’t have told him to stop,” Roxane
said. Gen translated it into Japanese.

“There is no place for the boy to go,” Mr.
Hosokawa said. “He will have to come back. You mustn’t worry about that.” In
Japan
, he was
often made uneasy by this modern age of affection, young men and women holding
hands in public, kissing good-bye on subway trains. There was nothing about
these gestures he had understood. He had believed that what a man felt in his
heart was a private matter and so should remain with him, but he had never had
so much in his heart before. There wasn’t enough room for this much love and it
left an aching sensation in his chest. Heartache! Who would have thought it was
true? Now all he wanted was to take her hand or curve his arm around her shoulder.

Roxane Coss leaned towards him, dipped her head
down to his shoulder just for a second, just long enough for her cheek to touch
his shirt.

“Ah,” said Mr. Hosokawa softly. “You are
everything in the world to me.”

Gen looked at him. Was that meant to be
translated, the tenderness his employer whispered? Mr. Hosokawa took one of
Roxane’s hands. He held it up to his chest, touched it to his shirt in the
place above his heart. He nodded. Was he nodding to Gen? Was he telling Gen to
go ahead? Or was he nodding to her? Gen felt a terrible discomfort. He wanted
to turn away. It was a private matter. He knew what that meant now.

“Everything in the world,” Mr. Hosokawa said
again, but this time he looked at Gen.

And so Gen told her. He tried to make his voice
soft. “Respectfully,” he said to Roxane, “Mr. Hosokawa would like you to know
that you are everything in the world to him.” He remembered saying something
very similar to her from the Russian.

It was to her credit that Roxane never looked
at Gen. She kept her eyes exactly on Mr. Hosokawa’s eyes and took the words
from him.

Carmen came back. She was flustered and
everyone thought it had to do with Cesar, when she had almost forgotten about
Cesar. She wanted to go to Gen but she went first to General Benjamin. “Cesar
is up in the tree,” she said. She started to say more but then she remembered
herself. It was always wiser to wait.

“What is he doing there?” the General asked
her. He couldn’t help but notice how pretty this girl was becoming. Had she
been this pretty before, he never would have let her sign
up.
He should tell her to keep her hair under her cap. He should let her go just as
soon as they were home.

“Sulking.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He feels embarrassed.”

Maybe it was wrong to let a pretty girl go after
him. One of the boys should have gone and simply shaken the tree until Cesar
fell out. General Benjamin sighed. He had been impressed with Cesar’s singing. He
wondered if the talent would make the boy high-strung, the way the soprano was
high-strung. If that was the case he would be forced to dismiss Cesar as well,
and then he would have lost two soldiers. Even as he was thinking this he
remembered where he
was,
and the thought of ever
getting home, of ever having a choice so simple as to let someone go or to keep
them, seemed impossible. Why was he even wasting his time with this?
Cesar in a tree?
What did it matter? “Leave him up there.”
General Benjamin looked over Carmen’s head to the far side of the room, which
was his way of saying that the conversation was over.

“May I tell Miss Coss?”

He looked back down at her and blinked. She was
obedient, well mannered. It was a shame that things hadn’t turned out better. Certainly
there would be a role for pretty girls in a revolution. There was no sense
being hard on her. “I think she would want to know.”