Ann Patchett (19 page)

Ruben nodded. Roxane Coss had given up her
evening gown days ago and was now wearing a pair of tan slacks that belonged to
his wife as well as his wife’s favorite cardigan, a navy sweater of extremely
fine baby alpaca he had bought for her on their second anniversary. He had
requested a guard accompany him upstairs. He went to the closet himself and
brought the sweater down to the soprano. “Are you cold?” he had asked, and then
draped the cardigan gently around her shoulders. Was it a betrayal, so quickly
giving up the sweater his wife loved? The clothing conflated the two women for
him in a way that was extraordinarily pleasing, his beautiful guest wearing the
clothes of his wife whom he so dearly missed, the traces of his wife’s perfume
still lingering inside the ribbing of the sweater so that he could smell both
women there when he passed the one. If this wasn’t enough to ask, Roxane was
wearing a pair of familiar slippers that belonged to the governess, Esmeralda,
because his wife’s shoes had been too small. How delightful it had been to put
his head inside Esmeralda’s tiny, meticulous closet!

“Are you going to tell her you love her?” the
contractor asked. “It is your home. I would certainly defer to your right to go
first.”

Ruben considered his guest’s thoughtful
invitation. “It’s a possibility.” He was trying not to stare at Roxane. He was
failing. He imagined taking her hand, suggesting he could show her the stars
from the wide stone veranda that wrapped around the back of the house, that is,
he would have if they had been allowed to go outside. He was the Vice
President, after all, that might impress her. At least she was not a tall
woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus. He was grateful for that. “It might not
be appropriate, given my position here.”

“What’s appropriate?” Oscar said. His voice was
light and unconcerned. “They’re bound to kill us in the end.
Either
the ones inside or the ones outside.
The shooting will start. There will
be some terrible mistake, you can bank on it. The ones outside can’t let it
look like we were not mistreated. It will be important to them we wind up dead.
Think of the people, the masses. You can’t have them getting the wrong idea. You’re
the government man. You know more about these things than I do.”

“It does happen.”

“Then what’s the point of not telling her? I,
for one, want to know that in my last days I made some effort. I’m going to
speak to the young Japanese man, the translator. When the time is right, when I
know what I want to say. You can’t approach a woman like that too quickly.”

Ruben liked the contractor. Although they had
never met before, the very fact that they both lived in the same city made them
feel like neighbors and then old friends and then brothers. “What do you know
about women like that?”

Oscar chuckled and put his hand down on his
brother’s shoulder. “Little Vice President,” he said. “There are so many things
that I know.” It was big talk but in this place big talk seemed appropriate. While
he had lost every freedom he was most accustomed to, a new, smaller set of
freedoms began to raise a dim light within him: the liberty to think
obsessively, the right to remember in detail. Away from his wife and five
daughters he was not contradicted or corrected, and without those burdens he
found himself able to dream without constant revision. He had lived his life as
a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was
a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and
always lost. He knew that one by one each of his daughters would be lost,
either honorably in the ceremony of marriage or, realistically, in a car
pointed out towards the ocean well after dark. In his day, Oscar himself had
made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting
them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the
hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if you got
them right at the nape of their neck they went easily limp. Then he would
whisper his suggestions, all the things they might do together, the wonderful
dark explorations for which he was to be their guide. His voice traveled like a
drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten
everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and
offered themselves up to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan.

Oscar shuddered at the thought. As he was ready
to play the part of the boy again he could see the lines of boys forming around
his house, boys ready to assuage the awful grief of his daughters now that
their father was held hostage.
Pilar, how awful this must
be for you. Isabelle, you mustn’t stay shut away. Teresa, your father wouldn’t
want such suffering. Look at this, I brought you some flowers
(
or a bird
,
a skein of yarn, a colored
pencil
. IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE). Would his wife have the sense to lock
the door? She would never have sense enough to believe that the boys meant them
any harm. She believed their lies now just as she had believed him then, when
she was a girl and he had come to call while her father lay dying from cancer.

What was he thinking of, chasing after an opera
singer? Who were those two girls anyway, Beatriz and Carmen? What were they
doing here? Where were their fathers?
Probably gunned down in
some countryside revolution.
What could such girls do to keep the boys
away without fathers to protect them? Everywhere in this house there were boys,
those awful, surly boys with their greasy hair and bitten fingernails, hoping
to touch a breast.

“You look bad,” the Vice President said. “All
this talk of love isn’t agreeing with you.”

“When will we get out of here?” Oscar said. He
sat down on the sofa and dropped his head onto his knees as if dizzy.

“Get out of here? You’re the one who said we
would be shot.”

“I’ve changed my mind. No one is going to kill
me. I may kill someone, but no one is going to kill me.”

Ruben sat down beside him and leaned his good
cheek against his friend’s broad shoulder. “I won’t complain about your
inconsistencies. I like this talk better anyhow. Let’s assume we’ll live.” He
sat up again. “Here, wait here. I’m going to the kitchen to get you some ice. You
won’t believe how much better ice can make you feel.”

“Do you play the piano?” Roxane Coss said to
Gen
.

He hadn’t seen her coming. His back was to the
room while he watched the
garúa
from the bay window.
He was learning to relax as he watched it, to not strain his eyes. He was
beginning to think he could see things. Mr. Hosokawa looked at Gen expectantly,
clearly anxious to know what she was saying, and for a minute Gen was confused
as to whether he should answer her or translate first as the question was
directed to him. He translated and then told her no, he was sorry to say he did
not.

“I thought you might,” she said. “You seem to
know how to do so many things.” She looked towards his companion. “What about
Mr. Hosokawa?”

Mr. Hosokawa shook his head sadly. Until their
capture, he had thought of his life in terms of achievement and success. Now it
struck him as a long list of failures: he didn’t speak English or Italian or
Spanish. He didn’t play the piano. He had never even tried to play the piano. He
and Gen didn’t have a single lesson between them.

Roxane Coss looked across the room as if she
were
looking for her accompanist, but he was already half a
world away, his grave now covered by an early Swedish frost. “I keep telling
myself that this is going to be over soon, that I’m just taking a vacation from
work.” She looked up at Gen. “Not that I think this is a vacation.”

“Of course.”

“We’ve been in this miserable place nearly two
weeks. I’ve never gone a week without singing unless I was sick. I’m going to
have to start practicing soon.” She leaned in towards the two of them and they
bent towards her reflexively. “I really don’t want to sing here. I don’t want
to give them the satisfaction. Do you think it would be worth it to wait another
couple of days? Do you think they’ll let us go by then?” She glanced over the
room again to see if there was a particularly elegant pair of hands folded
across a lap.

“Surely someone here must play,” Gen said, not
wanting to address the other issue.

“The piano is very good. I can play a little
but not to accompany myself. I somehow doubt they’d go out and kidnap a new
accompanist for me.” Then she spoke directly to Mr. Hosokawa. “I don’t know
what to do with myself when I’m not singing. I don’t have any talent for
vacations.”

“I feel very much the same way,” he said, his
voice growing fainter with each word, “when I am not able to listen to opera.”

For this Roxane smiled.
Such
a dignified man.
In the others she could see a look of fear, the
occasional brush of panic. Not that there was anything wrong with panic given
their circumstances, she had cried herself to sleep most nights. But it never
seemed to touch Mr. Hosokawa, or he managed not to show it. And when she stood
near him she somehow did not feel the panic herself, though she couldn’t
explain it. Near him, it felt like she was stepping out of a harsh light and
into someplace quiet and dark, like she was wrapping herself up in the heavy
velvet of the stage curtains where no one could see her. “You should help me
find an accompanist,” she told him, “and both of our problems will be solved.”

All of her makeup was gone now. For the first
few days she bothered to go to the lavatory and put on lipstick from the tube
she carried in her evening bag. Then her hair went back in
a
tight
elastic and she was wearing someone else’s clothes that did not
exactly fit. Mr. Hosokawa thought that every day she was lovelier. He had
wanted so many times to ask her to sing but he never would have since singing
for him was the thing that had brought her all the trouble in the first place. He
wasn’t able to ask her for a hand of cards or for her thoughts on the
garúa
. He did not seek her out at all and so Gen did not
either. In fact both of them had noticed that (with the exception of the
priest, whom she could not understand) all the men in their desire to speak to
her had decided to leave her alone as if it was some sort of respect, so alone
she sat, hour after hour. Sometimes she cried and other times she thumbed
through books or took naps on the sofa. It was a pleasure to watch her sleep.
Roxane was the only hostage to have the privilege of a bedroom and her own
guard, who slept outside her door, though whether that was to keep her in or to
keep other people out no one was entirely sure. Now that they knew the guard
was Carmen, they wondered if she was only trying to keep herself safe by
staying near such an important person.

“Perhaps the Vice President plays,” Mr.
Hosokawa suggested. “He has a fine piano.”

Gen went off to find the Vice President, who
was asleep in a chair, his good cheek pressed to his shoulder, his bad cheek
turned up, red and blue and still full of Esmeralda’s stitches. The skin was
growing up around them. They needed to come out.
“Sir?”
Gen whispered.

“Hmm?”
Ruben said, his
eyes closed.

“Do you play the piano?”

“Piano?”

“The one in the living room.
Do you know how to play it, sir?”

“They brought it in for the party,” Ruben said,
trying not to let
himself
wake up completely. He had
been dreaming of Esmeralda standing over the sink, peeling a potato. “There was
one that was here before but they took it away because it wasn’t good enough. It
was good, of course, my daughter takes lessons on it, just not good enough for
them,” he said, his voice full of sleep. “That piano isn’t mine. Neither piano
is mine, really.”

“But do you know how to play it?”

“The piano?”
Ruben finally looked at him and
then straightened up his neck.

“Yes.”

“No,” he said, and smiled. “Isn’t that a
shame?”

Gen agreed that it was. “You should take those
stitches out, I think.”

Ruben touched his face. “Do you think they’re
ready?”

“I’d say so.”

Ruben smiled as if he had accomplished
something by growing his skin back together again. He went off to find Ishmael
to ask him to bring the manicure kit from the bathroom upstairs. Hopefully, the
cuticle scissors had not been confiscated as a weapon.

Gen went off on his own to try and find a new
accompanist. It wasn’t a matter of much linguistic finesse, as piano was more
or less piano in many languages. Surely Roxane Coss could have gotten the point
across herself with a small amount of gesturing, but she stayed with Mr.
Hosokawa and together they stared at the nothingness the window offered up to
them.

“Do you play?” Gen asked, beginning with the Russians,
who were smoking in the dining room. They squinted at him through the blue haze
and then shook their heads. “My God,” said Victor Fyodorov, covering his heart
with his hands. “What I would not give to know! Tell the Red Cross to send in a
teacher and I will learn for her.” The other two Russians laughed and threw
down their cards.
“Piano?”
Gen asked the next group.
He made his way through the house asking all of the guests, skipping over their
captors on the assumption that piano lessons were
an impossibility
in the jungle. Gen imagined lizards on the foot pedals, humidity warping the
keyboard, persistent vines winding their way up the heavy wooden legs. One
Spaniard, Manuel Flores; one Frenchman, Étienne Boyer; and one Argentinian,
Alejandro Rivas, said they could play a little but didn’t read music. Andreas
Epictetus said he had played quite well in his youth but hadn’t touched a piano
in years. “Every day my mother made me practice,” he said. “The day I moved
away from home I piled up all the music in the back of the house and I lit it,
right there with her watching. I haven’t laid a finger to a piano since.” The
rest of them said no, they didn’t play. People began recounting stories of a
couple of lessons or the lessons of their children. Their voices fell over one
another and from every corner of the room there came the word,
piano
,
piano
,
piano
. It seemed to Gen (and he included himself in this
assessment) that never had a more uncultured group of men been taken hostage. What
had they been doing all these years that no one had bothered with such an
important instrument? They all wished they could play, if not before then,
certainly now.
To be able to play for Roxane Coss.