Authors: Bel Canto
In the end, counting the translator (he added
his own name), it was decided that thirty-nine hostages would be kept. The
final number was forty, because Father Arguedas again refused to leave. With
fifteen soldiers and three generals, it gave them very nearly the
two-hostages-for-every-one-captor ratio that they had decided upon as being
reasonable. Considering that the original plan was for eighteen terrorists to
take one president, the recalculation felt to be as much as they could
reasonably handle. What they wanted, what would have been best, would be to
tease out the release of the extras, to keep them all for another week and then
let them dribble out, a few here and there in exchange for demands that were
met. But the terrorists were tired. The hostages had needs and complaints. They
took on the weight of a roomful of restless children all needing to be shushed
and petted and entertained. They wanted them gone.
The Vice President could not help himself. He
was picking up glasses and putting them on a large silver tray he knew the maid
kept in the sideboard in the dining room. When he went to the kitchen he was
followed but not stopped and he took a minute to rest his cheek against the
freezer door. He came back with a dark green plastic garbage bag and began to
pick up the wrappers from the sandwiches. There were no crusts of bread left in
the papers, only small pools of orange oil. They had all been hungry. He picked
up the soda cans from the tables and rugs, even though the tables and rugs did
not technically belong to him. He had been happy in this house. It had always
been such a bright place when he came home, his children laughing, running down
the hallways with their friends, the pretty Indian maids who waxed the floors
down on their hands and knees despite the presence of an electric polisher in
the broom closet, the smell of his wife’s perfume as she sat at the dressing
table brushing her hair. It was his home. He had to make some attempt to put it
back towards the familiar so as to keep things bearable.
“Are you comfortable?” he would say to his
guests as he swept some tender crumbs into the palm of his hand. “Are you
holding up all right?” He wanted to nose their shoes under the sofa. He wanted
to drag the blue silk chair down to the other end of the room where it
belonged, but decorum prohibited that.
He made another trip to the kitchen for a wet
cloth, hoping to blot up something that looked like grape juice out of the
tight knots of the Savonnière rug. At the far end of the room he saw the opera
singer sitting with the Japanese man whose birthday was yesterday.
Funny, but with the pain in his head now he could think of neither
of their names.
They were leaning towards one another and from time to
time she would laugh and then he would nod happily. Was it her husband who had
just died? The Japanese man would hum something and she would listen and nod
and then, in a very quiet voice, she would sing it back to him. What a sweet
sound. Over the constant ruckus of the messages being boomed in through the
window it was hard to make out what it was she was singing. He could only hear
the notes, the clear resonance of her voice, like when he was a boy and would
run down the hill past the convent, how he could hear just a moment of the
nuns’ singing, and how it was better that way, to fly past it rather than to
stop and wait and listen. Running, the music flew into him, became the wind
that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement. Hearing
her sing now, softly, as he sponged at the carpet, was like that. It was like
hearing one bird
answer
another when you can only hear
the reply and not the plaintive, original call.
When Messner was called again he came quickly. Ruben
Iglesias, Vice President, houseboy, was sent to the door to let him in. Poor
Messner looked more exhausted, more sunburned as the day went on. How long were
these days? Had it been today that the accompanist had died? Had it only been
last night that their clothes were fresh and they ate the little chops and
listened to the aria of Dvořák? Or was Dvořák something they drank in small
glasses after dinner? Had it been so recently that the room was still full of
women and the sweet chiffon of their gowns, their jewelry and jeweled hair
combs and tiny satin evening bags fashioned to look like peonies? Had it been
just yesterday that the house was cleaned, the windowpanes and windowsills, the
sheer curtains and heavy drapes washed and rehung, everything in immaculate
order because the President and the famous Mr. Hosokawa, who might want to
build a factory in their country, were coming to dinner? It was then that it
struck the Vice President for the first time: why had Masuda asked him to have
the party at his house?
If this birthday was so important,
why not the presidential palace?
Why, if not because he knew all along
that he had no intention of coming?
“I think you’re getting an infection,” Messner
said, and touched the tips of his pale fingers to Ruben’s burning forehead. He
flipped open his cellular phone and made a request for antibiotics in a
combination of English and Spanish. “I don’t know what kind,” he said.
“Whatever they give to people with smashed-up faces.”
He put
his hand over the bottom of the phone and said to Ruben, “Any—” He turned to
Gen. “What is the word
allergies
?”
“Alergia.”
Ruben nodded his tender head.
“Peanuts.”
“What is he calling about?” General Benjamin
said to
Gen
.
Gen told him it was for medication for the Vice
President.
“No medication. I haven’t given authorization
for any medication,” General Alfredo said. What did this Vice President know
about infection? The bullet in his
stomach, now that
was an infection to talk about.
“Certainly not insulin,” Messner
said, flipping shut his phone.
Alfredo appeared not to hear him. He was
shuffling his papers. “Here are the lists. This is who we are keeping. This is
who we are letting go.” He put the yellow tablet pages on the table in front of
Messner. “These are our demands. They’ve been updated. There will be no more
releases until the demands are completely and fully met. We have been, as you
say, very reasonable. Now is the time for the government to be reasonable.”
“I’ll tell them that,” Messner said, picking up
the papers and folding them into his pocket.
“We’ve been very conscientious in matters of
health,” Alfredo said.
Gen, suddenly tired, held up his hand for a
moment to stop the dialogue, trying to remember the word for
concienzudo
in English. It came to him.
“Anyone needing medical attention will be
released.”
“Including him?” Messner tipped his head toward
the Vice President, who, lost inside the intricate world of his own fever, paid
no attention to what was being said.
“Him we keep,” General Alfredo said shortly. “We
didn’t get the President. We have to have something.”
* * *
There was another
list,
aside from The Demands (money, prisoners released, a plane, transportation to
the plane, etc. . . .) This was the list that slowed things down, the list of
Small and Immediate Needs. The details were not interesting, certain things had
to come in before the excess of hostages could go out: pillows (58), blankets
(58), toothbrushes (58), fruit (mangoes, bananas), cigarettes (20 cartons
filtered, 20 cartons unfiltered), bags of candy (all types, excluding
licorice), bars of chocolate, sticks of butter, newspapers, a heating pad, the
list went on and on. Inside, they imagined the people on the outside being
dispatched on a great scavenger hunt, trying to come up with what was needed in
the middle of the night. People would be banging on glass doors, waking up
shopkeepers who would be forced to flick on the bright overhead lights. No one
wanted to wait until morning and risk the possibility of someone changing his
mind.
When all the remaining guests were herded
together into the dining room to hear the hostage list and release list, there
was a great sense of excitement. It was a cakewalk, a game of musical chairs in
which people were randomly rewarded or punished and they were each one glad to
take their chance at the wheel, even those like Mr. Hosokawa and Simon
Thibault, who must have known they didn’t have a chance of going home, stood
with the rest of the men, their hearts beating wildly. The men all thought that
Roxane Coss was sure to be let go now, the idea of keeping one woman would
become cumbersome and embarrassing. They would miss her, they were missing her
already, but everyone wanted to see her go.
They called through the names and told them to
go to either the left or the right, and while they didn’t say which side was to
be released, it was clear enough. One could almost tell from the cut of the
tuxedo
who
would be staying. A great wall of darkness
came from those who could now reasonably assume their fate and it pulled them
away from the lucky hilarity of the others. On one side, men deemed less
important were going back to their wives, would sleep in the familiar sheets of
their own beds,
would
be greeted by children and dogs,
the wet and reckless affection of their unconditional love. But thirty-nine men
and one woman on the other side were just beginning to understand that they
were digging in, that this was the house where they lived now, that they had
been kidnapped.
f
ather
Arguedas explained to Gen, who
explained to Mr. Hosokawa, that what they were looking at in the hours they
spent staring out the window was called
garúa
, which
was more than mist and less than drizzle and hung woolly and gray over the city
in which they were now compelled to stay. Not that they could see the city,
they could not see anything. They could have been in
could have been looking at a field of blue-tipped grass or a gridlock of
traffic. They couldn’t see. No defining hints of culture or local color. They
could have been anyplace where the weather was capable of staying bad for
indeterminate amounts of time. From time to time, instructions came blasting
over the wall, but even that seemed to be diminishing, as if the voices
couldn’t always permeate the fog. The
garúa
maintained a dull, irregular presence from April through November and Father
Arguedas said to take heart since October was very nearly over and then the sun
would return. The young priest smiled at them. He was almost handsome until he
smiled, but his smile was too big and his teeth turned and crossed at awkward
angles, making his appearance suddenly loopy. Despite the circumstances of
their internment, Father Arguedas remained sanguine and found cause to smile
often. He did not seem to be a hostage, but someone hired to make the hostages
feel better. It was a job he carried out with great earnestness. He opened his
arms and put one hand on Mr. Hosokawa’s shoulder and the other on Gen’s,
then
he dipped his head down slightly and closed his eyes. It
might have been to pray but if it was he did not force the others to join him. “Take
heart,” he said again before pressing on in his rounds.
“A good boy,” Mr. Hosokawa said, and Gen nodded
and both returned to looking out the window. The priest need not have been
concerned with how they felt about the weather. They had no issue with the
weather. The
garúa
made sense, while atmospheric
clarity would not. When one looked out the window now it was impossible to see
as far as the wall which cut off the garden from the street. It was difficult
to make out the shapes of the trees, to tell a tree from a shrub. It made the
daylight seem like dusk in much the same way the floodlights that had been set
up on the other side of the wall almost made night into day, the kind of false,
electric day of an evening baseball game. In short, when one looked out the
window during the
garúa
all one really saw was the
garúa
itself, not day or night or season or place. The day
no longer progressed in its normal, linear fashion but instead every hour
circled back to its beginning, every moment was lived over and over again. Time,
in the manner in which they had all understood it, was over.
So to rejoin the story a week after Mr.
Hosokawa’s birthday party ended seems as good a place as any. That first week
was only details anyway, the tedium of learning a new life. Things were very
strict in the beginning. Guns were pointed, commands were given and obeyed,
people slept in rows on the living-room carpet and asked for permission in the
most personal of matters. And then, very slowly, the details began to fall
away. People stood
on their own
. They brushed their
teeth without asking, had a conversation that was not interrupted. Eventually
they went to the kitchen and made a sandwich when they were hungry, using the
backs of spoons to spread the butter onto bread because all of the knives had
been confiscated. The Generals had a peculiar fondness for Joachim Messner
(even if they did not demonstrate this fondness to him) and insisted that not
only was he in charge of negotiations but that he must be the one to bring all
supplies to the house, to lug every box alone through the gate and up the endless
walkway. So it was Messner, his vacation long since over, who brought their
bread and butter to the door.