Authors: Bel Canto
Carmen was in the living room, but so
was
General Hector and a half-dozen of the bigger boys. Four
of them played cards and the rest of them watched. They had stuck their knives
into the table they played on, something that drove the Vice President to the
brink of insanity. The table was from the early 1800s, hand-carved by Spanish
artisans who never envisioned that knives would bristle from the wood’s smooth
top like so many porcupine quills. Gen walked past them slowly. He could not
even attempt to catch Carmen’s eye. All he could do was hope that she saw him
and would think to follow. Gen stopped and spoke to Simon Thibault, who was
stretched across a nearby sofa reading
One Hundred Years of
Solitude
in Spanish.
“This will take me forever,” Thibault said to
Gen in French.
“Maybe a hundred years.
At least I know
I have the time.”
“Who knew that being kidnapped was so much like
attending university?” Gen said.
Thibault laughed and turned a page. Had she
heard them talking? Did she see him walking away? He went on to the kitchen,
which was mercifully empty, slipped inside the china closet, and waited. Whenever
he had come to the china closet, Carmen was already there, waiting for him. He
had never been in there alone and the sight of all those plates stacked up
above his head filled his heart with love for Carmen.
Plates
on which two people could eat a year’s worth of dinners and never have to wash
a dish.
There was never a minute alone, a minute when someone wasn’t
asking him to say something. Always his head was cluttered with other people’s
overly expressed sentiments, and now it was quiet and he could imagine Carmen
sitting next to him, her long, slender legs folded up in front of her while she
conjugated verbs. She had asked him for favors and now he would ask her for her
help. Together they would help Mr. Hosokawa and Miss Coss. Normally he would
say that the private life of one’s employer was in no manner his business, but
no one pretended anymore that this was a normal life. He could not think of
Mrs. Hosokawa or Nansei or
Those things had receded so far behind them that it was almost impossible to
believe they had ever existed. What he believed in was this china closet,
saucers and soup bowls, towering stacks of bread-and-butter plates. He believed
in this night. It struck him that he had looked for Carmen first, that he had
not gone back to speak to Mr. Hosokawa, who was most likely still playing chess
with Ishmael. He could not be two places at once and finally he felt himself
settling, felt the kitchen floor hard and cold beneath his buttocks, felt the
slightest ache in his back. He was here, only here, in this country he did not
know, waiting on the girl he taught and loved, waiting to help Mr. Hosokawa,
whom he loved as well. There was Gen, who had gone from nothing to loving two
people.
He didn’t know how much time was passing
without his watch. He couldn’t even guess anymore. Five minutes felt so much
like an hour.
L’amour
est
un
oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser, et c’est bien en vain qu’on
l’appelle, s’il lui convient de refuser.
He only said the words to
himself, humming lightly. He wished that he could sing them but Gen couldn’t
sing.
And then Carmen came, flushed as if she had
been running when in fact she had walked to the kitchen as slowly as such a
walk was possible to make. She closed the door behind her and sank down on the
floor. “I thought this was what you meant,” she whispered, pressing in close
beside him as if it were cold. “I thought you would be waiting for me.”
Gen took her hands, which were so small. How
did he ever think she was only a beautiful boy? “I need to ask you something.”
Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame,
he thought
again, and he kissed her.
She kissed him for the kiss, touched his hair,
whose gloss and weight she found to be an endless source of fascination. “I
didn’t want to get up right away. I thought I should wait awhile before I
followed you.”
He kissed her. There was such an incredible
logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a
wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every
second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we
sank and never found the strength to rise up again. “Roxane Coss came to speak
to me today. She said she wants you to sleep somewhere else tonight, to not
bring her breakfast in the morning.”
Carmen pushed away from him, keeping one hand
on his chest. Roxane Coss didn’t want her to bring breakfast? “Did I do
something wrong?”
“Oh, no,” Gen said. “She thinks very highly of
you. She told me so.” He tucked her into the crook of his arm and she breathed
into his shoulder. This was what it felt like, to be a man with a woman. This
was the thing Gen had missed in all the translation of language. “You were
right, what you thought about,
her
feelings for Mr.
Hosokawa. She wants to be with him tonight.”
Carmen raised her head. “How will he get
upstairs?”
“Roxane wants you to help him.”
Gen lived one life and in that life he was
always a prisoner and his friends were the other prisoners, and even though he
loved Carmen and got along politely with some of the terrorists, he never got
confused and thought he wanted to join LFDMS. But for Carmen it was different.
She had clearly two lives. She did her push-ups in the morning and stood for
inspection. She carried her rifle on guard. She kept a boning knife in her boot
and she knew how to use it. She obeyed orders. She was, as it had been
explained to her, part of the force that would bring about change. But she was
also the girl who went to the china closet at night, who was learning to read
in Spanish and could already say several things in English.
Good morning. I am very well, thank you. Where is the restaurant?
Some mornings, Roxane Coss let her climb into the impossibly soft sheets on her
big bed, let her close her eyes for a few minutes and pretend she belonged
there. She would pretend she was one of the
prisoners, that
she lived in a world with so many privileges that there was nothing to fight
for. But no matter how the two sides got along, they were always two sides, and
when she went from one to the other it was a matter of crossing over something.
Either she told Gen she couldn’t get Mr. Hosokawa upstairs, in which case she
disappointed Gen and Mr. Hosokawa and Miss Coss, who had all been so kind to
her, or she told him she could, in which case she broke every oath she had
sworn to her party and put herself at risk of a punishment she would not
imagine. If Gen had understood any of this he never would have asked her. For
him it was merely about helping out, being a friend. It was as if he only
wanted to borrow a book. Carmen closed her eyes and pretended to be tired. She
prayed to Saint Rose of
“Saint Rose, give me guidance. Saint Rose, give me clarity.” She pressed her
eyes closed and pleaded for the intercession of the only saint she knew
personally, but a saint is very little help when it comes to smuggling a
married man into an opera singer’s bedroom. On this matter, Carmen was
on her own
.
“Sure,” Carmen whispered, her eyes still
closed, her ear pressed to the steady thump of Gen’s heart. Gen’s hand came up
and smoothed her hair, over and over again, the way her mother had done when
Carmen was a child and had a fever.
In the vice-presidential mansion, none of the
guests, not even Ruben Iglesias himself, knew the house as well as the members
of LFDMS. Part of their daily work was the memorization of windows and which
ones were wide enough to jump through. They calculated the falls, estimated the
damage in terms of their own bones. They each knew the length of the hallways,
rooms from which one could make a clear shot to the outside, the fastest exits
to the roof, to the garden. So naturally, Carmen knew there was a back
stairwell in the hallway off the kitchen that led to the servants’ quarters,
and that in the very room that Esmeralda had once slept there was a door that
went to the nursery, and the nursery had a door onto the main hallway of the
second floor, and that hallway led to the bedroom where Roxane Coss slept. Of
course, other people slept on the second floor as well. Generals Benjamin and
Hector had rooms on the second floor. (General Alfredo, the worst sleeper,
found a little rest in the guest suite on the first floor.) Many of the boys
slept on the second floor and not always in the same place, which is why Carmen
chose to sleep in the hallway outside of Roxane Coss’s room, just in case one
of those boys woke up in the middle of the night, restless. Carmen herself had
used this route to the china closet every night, her stocking feet silent on
the polished wood floor. She knew the location of every creaky board, every
potentially light sleeper. She knew how to flatten
herself
into the shadows when someone came around the corner headed for the bathroom. She
could skate those floors as quiet as a blade drawing over ice. Carmen was
trained, an expert at remaining silent. Still, she could sense the depth of Mr.
Hosokawa’s ability to be quiet. Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love
with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without
stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.
Gen was to bring Mr. Hosokawa to the back hallway at two
A.M.
and
she would take him to Roxane Coss’s room. Two hours later she would come to the
door to lead him back. They would say nothing to each other, but that part was
easy enough. Even if in this case they were allies, there was nothing they knew
to say.
Once the plans were made, Carmen left Gen to
watch television with the other soldiers. There she saw a repeat broadcast of
The Story of Maria
. Maria had gone to the city to search
for her lover, whom she had sent away. She wandered the crowded streets with
her little suitcase in her hand and on every corner strangers lurked in the
shadows, conspiring to ruin her. Everyone in the Vice President’s study wept.
Carmen played checkers when the program was over and she helped with supply
lists and volunteered to cover afternoon watch if anyone was feeling tired. She
would be exemplary in her helpfulness and willing participation. She did not
want to see Gen or Mr. Hosokawa or Roxane Coss for fear she would blush and
give herself
away,
for fear that she would become
angry at them for asking so much of her.
How much does a house know? There could not
have been gossip and yet there was a slight tension in the air, the vaguest
electricity that made men lift their heads and look and find nothing. The
salted fish and rice that came for dinner did not go down well and one after
the other they put their shares on the table half eaten and walked away. Kato
picked out Cole Porter on the piano and the evening fell into a low, blue
light. Maybe it was the fine weather, the irritation of once again not being
able to walk outside. A half-dozen men stood near an open window and tried to
breathe the night air as darkness settled in, taking away the view of the overgrown
garden one twisted flower at a time. From the other side of the wall they could
hear the faint race of engines, cars that were possibly blocks away from their
street, and for a moment the men at the window remembered that there was a
world out there, and then just as quickly they let the thought go.
Roxane Coss had gone to bed early. Like Carmen,
she didn’t want to be there once she had made her decision. Mr. Hosokawa sat
next to Gen on the love seat nearest the piano. “Tell me again,” he said.
“She wants to see you tonight.”
“That’s what she said?”
“Carmen will take you to her room.”
Mr. Hosokawa looked at his hands. They were old
hands.
His father’s hands.
His nails were long. “It’s
very awkward that Carmen should know this.
That you should
know.”
“There was no other way.”
“What if it is dangerous for the girl?”
“Carmen knows what she’s doing.” Gen said.
Dangerous?
She went down the stairs every night to come to
the china closet. He wouldn’t ask her to do something that wasn’t safe.
Mr. Hosokawa nodded slowly. He had the distinct
sensation that the living room was tilting, that the living room had become a
boat in a gently tilting sea. He had stopped thinking of what he wanted most so
many years ago, even when he was a child perhaps. He disciplined himself to
only want the things that were possible to have: an enormous industry, a
productive family, an understanding of music. And now, a few months after his
fifty-third birthday, in a country he had never really seen, he felt desire in
the deepest part of himself, the kind of wanting that can only come when the
thing you want is very close to you. When he was a child he dreamed of love,
not only to witness it, the way he saw love in the opera, but to feel it
himself. But that, he decided, was madness. That was wanting too much. Tonight
he wished for little things, the chance to take a hot bath, a reasonable suit
of clothing, a gift to bring, at the very least some flowers, but then the room
tilted slightly in the other direction and he opened up his hands and all of
that fell away from him and he wanted nothing. He had been asked to come to her
room at two
A.M.
and there was nothing more in the world to
want, ever.