Authors: Bel Canto
“And you suggest?” Simon Thibault said. Thibault
wore his wife’s huge blue scarf tied around his neck and hanging down his back,
and the presence of this scarf made people less likely to listen to his opinion
on serious matters.
Pietro Genovese walked by and asked Gen to
translate the conversation to him as well. He knew enough French but no German.
“It isn’t as if the guns are hidden from us,”
von Schuller said, lowering his voice even though no one seemed able to pick up
the German. They waited for Gen.
“And so we shoot our way out. Just like
television,” Pietro Genovese said. “Is that grapefruit juice?” He looked bored
by the conversation even though he had just walked into it. He built airports.
As a country’s industry enlarges, so must its airports.
Gen held up his hand. “One moment, please.” He
was still translating the German into Japanese.
“We would need a dozen translators and
arbitration from the UN before we could decide to overthrow the one teenager
with a knife,” Jacques Maitessier said, as much to himself as anyone, and he
knew what he was talking about, having once been the French ambassador to the
United Nations.
“I’m not saying that everyone would have to
agree,” von Schuller said.
“You’ll give it a try on your own?” Thibault
said.
“Gentlemen, your patience, please.” Gen was
trying to translate it all into Japanese. That was his first responsibility. He
didn’t work for the general convenience of the people, although everyone
managed to forget that. He worked for Mr. Hosokawa.
Conversations in more than two languages felt
awkward and unreliable, like speaking with a mouthful of cotton and Novocain. No
one could hold on to their thoughts long enough and wait their turns. These
were not men who were accustomed to waiting or speaking precisely. They
preferred to expound, to rant when necessary. Pietro Genovese went off to see
if there was more juice in the kitchen. Simon Thibault smoothed down his scarf
with the flat of his palm and asked Jacques Maitessier if he would be
interested in a hand of cards. “My wife would kill me if I was involved in an overthrow,”
Thibault said in French.
The three Germans spoke rapidly among
themselves and Gen made no attempt to listen.
“I never get tired of the weather,” Mr.
Hosokawa said to Gen as they walked back to the window. They stood side by side
for a while, clearing all those other languages from their heads.
“Do you ever think of rising up?” Gen asked. He
could see their reflections. They were standing very close to the glass. Two
Japanese men, both wearing glasses, one was taller and twenty-five years
younger, but in this room where people had so little in common Gen could see
for the first time how they looked very much the same.
Mr. Hosokawa kept his eyes on their reflection,
or maybe he was watching the
garúa
. “Something will
rise up eventually,” he said. “And then there will be nothing we can do to stop
it.” His voice turned heavy at the thought.
The soldiers spent most of their days exploring
the house, eating the pistachio nuts they found in the pantry, sniffing the
lavender hand lotion in the bathroom. The house offered up no end of
curiosities: closets the size of some houses they had seen, bedrooms where no
one slept, cupboards that held nothing but rolls of colored paper and ribbon. A
favorite room was the Vice President’s study, which was at the end of a long
hallway. Behind the heavy draperies, the windows stopped short at two
upholstered bench seats, the kind of place where a person could tuck up his
legs and look out into the garden for hours. The study had two leather sofas
and two leather chairs and all of the books were covered in leather. Even the
desk set, the cup that held the pencils and the edges of the blotter were
leather. The room had the comforting and familiar smell of cows standing in the
hot sun.
There was a television in this room. A few of
them had seen a television before, a wooden box with a curved piece of glass
that threw back your reflection in peculiar ways. They were always, always
broken. That was the nature of televisions. There was talk, big stories about
what a television once had done, but no one believed it because no one had seen
it. The boy called Cesar put his face close to the screen, pulled back his lips
by hooking a finger into either side of his mouth, and enjoyed the picture. The
others were watching. He rolled back his eyes and shook his tongue. Then he
took his fingers out of his mouth, crossed his hands over his chest, and began
to mimic a song he remembered Roxane Coss singing that first night they were
waiting in the air-conditioning vents. He wasn’t quite getting the words, but
he was close to their sounds and right on their pitch. He wasn’t mocking,
exactly, he was singing and then he was singing very well. When he couldn’t
remember what came next, he stopped abruptly and bowed at the waist. He turned
and went back to making faces in the television.
It was Simon Thibault who turned the television
on. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He had come into the room because he heard
the singing. He thought that someone was playing some odd and beautiful old
record and it made him curious. Then he saw the boy doing the show, a
moderately funny boy, and thought he would get a kick out of the picture coming
up suddenly where his face had been. Simon picked up the remote control from
where it sat balanced on the arm of a comfortable-looking leather chair and
pushed the power button.
They screamed. They howled like dogs. They
cried out the names of their compatriots, “Gilbert! Francisco!
Jesus!” in a voice that would indicate fire, murder, the coming of
police.
That brought the great metal snap of safeties being removed from
guns and the rushing in of the other soldiers and the three Generals who threw
Simon Thibault against the wall and cut his lip.
“Nothing foolish,” Edith had said, her lips
lightly touching his ear. But what was included in foolishness? Turning on a
television?
One of the
boys
who
rushed in, a big boy named Gilbert, put the round muzzle of his rifle into
Thibault’s throat, pressing the blue silk scarf into the soft skin above his
trachea. He pinned him there like a butterfly tacked down on a corkboard.
“Television,” Thibault said with great
difficulty.
Sure enough, in the crowded study the attention
had turned away from Simon Thibault. Just as quickly as he had been a threat, a
star, they turned their guns away from him, let him slump down the wall in a
shuddering crumple of fear. They were all looking at the television now. An
attractive woman with dark hair was holding up articles of soiled clothing to
the camera with both hands, shaking her head in mild disgust before shoving
them into the washing machine. Her lipstick was bright red and the walls behind
her a vivid yellow. “This is a real challenge,” she said in Spanish. Gilbert
crouched down on his toes to watch.
Simon Thibault coughed and rubbed his throat.
Certainly, the Generals had seen television
before, though not in the years since they had gone back to the jungle. They
were in the room now. This was a very nice television, color with a
twenty-eight-inch screen. The remote control had fallen on the floor and now
General Alfredo picked it up and began pushing the buttons to take them through
the channels: soccer game; a man in a coat and tie sitting at a desk reading; a
girl in silver pants singing; a dozen puppies in a basket. There was a fresh
burst of excitement, a collective
ah
, at every new
picture.
Simon Thibault left the room without being
noticed. Cesar’s singing did not even cross his mind.
Most days the hostages longed for this whole
thing to be over. They longed for their countries, their wives,
their
privacy. Other days, honestly, they just wanted to be
away from all these children, from their sullenness and sleepiness, from their
chasing games and appetites. How old could they have been? When asked, they
either lied and
said twenty-five or they shrugged as if they
hadn’t the slightest idea what the question meant. Mr. Hosokawa knew he was a
poor judge of children. In
he often saw young people who looked to be no more than ten behind the wheels
of cars. His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical
impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in
images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had
dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not
old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were
old enough to be members of a terrorist organization. He tried to picture them,
their plastic daisy barrettes and short white socks, picking at the door frame
with the sharp tip of a knife.
Mr. Hosokawa could not imagine his daughters
anyplace but curled in their mother’s bed, crying for his return while they
watched the news. And yet to everyone’s genuine surprise, two of the junior
soldiers turned out to be girls. One was revealed quite simply: somewhere
around the twelfth day she pulled off her cap to scratch her head and down came
a braid. She did not bother to twist it back into place when the scratching was
done. She did not seem to think that her being a girl was any secret at all. Her
name was Beatriz. She was perfectly happy to tell anyone who asked. She was not
blessed with a pretty face or a delicate manner and had passed very well as a
boy. She held her gun as ready to shoot as any of the boys and her eyes stayed
dull even after it was no longer a necessity. And yet, for all her
extraordinary averageness, the hostages watched her as if she were something
impossible and rare,
a luna
moth lighting in a
snowfield. How could there be a girl among them? How had they all failed to
notice? The other girl was not so hard to figure out. Logic held that if there
was one girl then there could just as easily be more than one, and everyone
looked immediately towards the silent boy who never answered questions and had
seemed in every way unnatural from the start, much too beautiful, too nervous. His
hairline dipped onto his forehead and made his face a perfect heart. His mouth
was round and soft. His eyes stayed half closed as if the heavy lashes seemed
too great a burden to lift. He smelled different from the other boys, a sweet,
warm smell, and his neck was long and smooth. He was the one who seemed so
particularly in love with Roxane Coss and slept on the hallway floor outside
her room at night, using his body to prevent any drafts from coming under the
door. Gen looked at him, the one who had made him feel so uneasy, and the
anxiousness he had held inside his chest rolled off of him in a long, low wave.
“Beatriz,” Simon Thibault said, “that boy over
there. Is he your sister?”
Beatriz snorted and shook her head. “Carmen?
My sister?
You must be crazy.”
At the sound of her name, Carmen looked up from
across the room.
Beatriz speaking her name.
There was
no such thing as a secret in this world. Carmen threw down the magazine she had
been looking at. (It was Italian, with an abundance of glossy pictures of movie
stars and royalty. The text undoubtedly contained important information about
their most personal lives that she was unable to read. It had been found in the
drawer of the nightstand beside the bed where the Vice President’s wife slept.)
Carmen took her revolver into the kitchen and shut the door and no one followed
her, a visibly angry teenaged girl with a gun. There was nowhere to go and
everyone assumed that eventually she would come out on her own. They wanted to
look at her again, to see her without her cap on, to have the time to
contemplate her as a girl, but they were willing to wait. If this was the drama
of the afternoon, one of the terrorists taking herself hostage for a few hours,
then the suspense was better than single-mindedly watching the drizzle.
“I should have known she was a girl,” Ruben
said to Oscar Mendoza, the contractor who lived only a few miles away.
Oscar shrugged. “I have five daughters at home.
I never saw a girl in this room.” He stopped to reconsider his point and then
leaned in toward the Vice President. “I just saw one girl in this room, you
know?
One woman.
There can only be one woman in this
room.” He tilted his head meaningfully towards the far side of the room where
Roxane Coss sat.
Ruben nodded. “Of course,” he said.
“Of course.”
“I am thinking there will never be a better
opportunity than this to tell her I love her.” Oscar rubbed his hand over his
chin. “I don’t necessarily mean right now. It doesn’t have to be today,
although it could be today. These days are so long that by supper the time
could be exactly right. You never know until it comes to you, you know?
Until you are exactly in that place.”
He was a big man, well
over six feet and broad through the shoulders. He had stayed strong because
even though he was a contractor he was not above pitching in and carrying
boards or putting up Sheetrock. In this way he remained a fine example to the
men who worked for him. Oscar Mendoza had to bend forward so as to speak softly
into the Vice President’s ear. “But I will do it while we are here. You mark my
words.”