Authors: Bel Canto
Oscar looked at his friend and each man saw
that the other one was serious. “Every man needs a job,” he said. “He will live
with you and work for me. Does that sound fine, Ishmael?”
Ishmael put his gun between his feet and looked
at them. He would live in this house? He would stay on? He would have a job and
earn his own money? He knew he should laugh and tell them to leave him alone. He
should make a joke of it himself: No, he would never be caught dead living in
such a place. That was the only way to manage if you were the person being
teased. Laugh back at them. But he couldn’t. He wanted too much to believe they
were telling him the truth. “Yes.” That was all he could say.
Oscar Mendoza held out his dirty hand to Ruben
Iglesias and they shook. “We’re shaking for you,” Ruben said, his voice
betraying his happiness. “This seals the deal.” He would have another son. The
boy would be legally adopted. The boy would be known after that as Ishmael
Iglesias.
The priest, who had only been watching, now sat
back on his heels, his grimy hands resting on his thighs. He felt something
cold and startling move through his heart. The men should not be talking to
Ishmael this way. They were forgetting the circumstances. The only way things
could work would be for everything to stay exactly as it was, for no one to
speak of the future as if speaking of it could bring it on.
“Father Arguedas here will teach you catechism.
Won’t you, Father? You can come back to the house for the lessons and we’ll all
have lunch together.” Ruben was lost in his story now. He wished he could call
his wife and tell her the news. He would tell Messner and Messner would call
her. Once she met the boy she would fall in love with him.
“Of course I will.” The priest’s voice was
weak, but no one noticed it at all.
m
r
. Hosokawa could find his way in the
dark. Some nights he closed his eyes rather than strain them trying to see. He
knew the schedule and habits of every guard, where they walked and when they
slept. He knew who made their bed on the floor and how to step over them
carefully. He felt the corners of walls with his fingertips, avoided boards
that creaked, could turn a doorknob as silently as a leaf falls. He was so
proficient at moving through the house that he thought that even if he had no
place to go he might be tempted to get up and stretch his legs, go from room to
room just because he could. It even occurred to him that he might be able to
escape now if he wanted to, simply walk down the front path to the gate at
night and set himself free. He did not want to.
Everything he knew he learned from Carmen, who
taught him without benefit of a translator. To teach someone how to be
perfectly quiet you don’t need to speak to them. Everything Mr. Hosokawa needed
desperately to know Carmen taught him over two days. He still carried around
his notebook, added ten new vocabulary words to his list every morning, but he
struggled against the tide of memorization. For silence, though, he had a gift.
He could tell from the approval in Carmen’s eyes, from the light touch of her
fingers on the back of his hand. She taught him how to get from place to place
in the house in plain sight of everyone and yet no one saw them because she was
teaching him to be invisible. It was learning humility, to no longer assume
that anyone would notice who you were or where you were going. It wasn’t until
she began to teach him that Mr. Hosokawa saw Carmen’s genius, because her
genius was to not be seen. How much harder that would be for a beautiful young
girl in a house full of restless men, and yet he found that she drew almost no
attention at all. She had managed to pass as a boy, and, more impressively, had
managed to make
herself
utterly forgettable after she
had been revealed as a beautiful girl. When Carmen walked through the room
without wanting to be seen she hardly moved the air around her. She didn’t
sneak. She did not dart to hide behind the piano and then a chair. She walked
through the middle of the room, asking for nothing, keeping her head level,
making no sound. In fact, she had been teaching him this lesson since the day
they were first in the house together, but it was only now that he could
understand it.
She would have accompanied him upstairs every
night. She told that to Gen. But it was better that he
know
how to go on his own. Nothing made people as clumsy as fear, and she could show
him how not to be afraid.
“She is an extraordinary girl,” Mr. Hosokawa
said to Gen.
“She seems to be,” Gen said.
Mr. Hosokawa gave him a small, avuncular smile
and pretended that there was nothing else to say. That was part of it, too.
The private life.
Mr. Hosokawa had a private life now. He
had always thought of himself as a private man, but now he saw that there was
nothing in his life before that had been private. It didn’t mean that he had no
secrets then and now he did. It was that now there was something that was
strictly between himself and one other
person, that
it
was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to
speak of it to someone else. He wondered now if everyone had a private life. He
wondered if his wife had one. It was possible that all those years he had been
alone, never knowing that a complete world existed and no one spoke of it.
During their entire captivity he had slept
through the night, but now he knew how to sleep and how to wake up in the
pitch-black darkness without the aid of a clock. Often when he woke up Gen was
gone. Then he would stand and walk, so peacefully, so above suspicion, that if
someone were to wake and see him they would have only thought he was going to
get a drink of water. He stepped over his neighbors, his compatriots, and made
his way to the back stairs behind the kitchen. Once he saw a light on beneath a
closet door and thought he heard whispering, but he didn’t stop to see what it
might be. It didn’t concern him, which was part of being invisible. He floated
up the back steps. He had never been so easy inside his own skin. He thought at
once he had never been so alive and so much a ghost. It would have been fine if
he were to climb these steps forever, always the lover going to meet his
beloved. He was happy then, and every step he climbed he was happier. He wished
he could stop time. As much as Mr. Hosokawa was overwhelmed by love, he could
never completely shake what he knew to be the truth: that every night they were
together could be seen as a miracle for a hundred different reasons, not the
least of which was that at some point these days would end, would be ended for
them. He tried not to give himself over to fantasies: he would get a divorce;
he would follow her from city to city, sitting in the front row of every opera
house in the world. Happily, he would have done this, given up everything for
her. But he understood that these were extraordinary times, and if their old
life was ever restored to them, nothing would be the same.
When he opened the door to her room there were
tears in his eyes more often than not, and he was grateful for the darkness. He
didn’t want her to think that anything had gone wrong. She came to him and he
pressed his damp face into the fall of lemon-scented hair. He was in love, and
never had he felt such kindness towards another person. Never had he received
such kindness. Maybe the private life wasn’t forever. Maybe everyone got it for
a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.
In the china closet, Carmen and Gen made a
decision: two full hours of studying before they made love. Carmen was still
every
bit as serious about learning to read and write in
Spanish, look at all the progress she’d made! Haltingly, she could read an
entire paragraph without asking for help. She was completely committed to
learning English. She could fully conjugate ten verbs and knew at least a
hundred nouns and other parts of speech. She held out hopes for Japanese so she
could speak to Gen in his own language when all of this was over and they would
be in bed together at night. Gen was equally firm on their resolve to continue
Carmen’s lessons. It would be pointless to have come so far and then just
abandon everything because they were in love. Wasn’t this exactly what love
was? To want what was best for someone, to help them along as Carmen and Gen
helped each other? No, they would study and practice for two hours, no less
than they had done before. After that, yes, their time was their own and they
could do whatever they wanted. Carmen stole the egg timer from the kitchen.
They settled in to work.
Spanish first.
Carmen had found a satchel of
schoolbooks stuffed in the closet of the Vice President’s daughter, skinny
books with pictures of rolling puppies on the front, a fatter book of paper
with solid lines and dotted lines to practice penmanship. The girl had only used
five pages. She had written the alphabet and her numbers. She had written her
name,
Imelda Iglesias,
over and over again in
sweetly curved letters. Carmen wrote her name beneath that. She wrote out the
words Gen told her:
pescado
,
calcetín
,
sopa
.
Fish, sock, soup.
All
he wanted was to press his lips against the side of her neck. He would not stop
the lesson. She was leaning over her notebook, working so hard to make her
letters as nice as those of the Vice President’s eight-year-old daughter. Two
thick strands of hair fell forward onto the notebook. Carmen ignored them and
folded her lower lip into her mouth to concentrate. He wondered if it was
possible to die from wanting someone so much. In this narrow hall of plates all
he could smell was her, lemons and the dusty, sun-bleached smell of her
uniform, the softer, more complicated smell of Carmen’s skin. Thirty seconds to
kiss her neck, that wasn’t asking so much. He would not even mind if she kept
on writing. He would kiss her that
gently,
her pencil
need never leave the page.
When she looked up his face was very close to
hers and she could no longer remember the word he said and if he was to say it
again she would not know how to spell it or how to bend a single letter out of
a straight line. All she needed was a kiss, a single kiss to clear her head and
then she would be all business again, right back to work. She could not make
herself swallow or blink. She was sure that with one kiss she could study all
night. It would not make her less of a student. She had no mind for letters
anyway, all she could think of was the grass, the grass and trees and dark
night sky, the smell of the jasmine the first time he slid her shirt over her
head and fell to his knees to kiss her stomach, her breasts.
“Pastel,”
Gen
said,
his voice unsteady.
Perhaps she was trained in ways she didn’t
understand, like a police dog, and
cake
was the word
that released her, because as soon as he said it she fell on him, book and
pencil skittering across the floor. She ate off of him, huge, devouring gulps,
pressed her tongue against his tongue, rolled against the lower cupboards where
soup bowls were stacked, one nestled perfectly inside the other.
They did not go back to work that night.
So the next night they agreed: an hour of
studying before giving in. They applied themselves with great seriousness. But
in fact that plan was three minutes less successful than the one they’d had the
night before. They were hopeless, starving, reckless, and everything they did,
they did again.
They experimented with shorter lengths of time
but in every attempt they were unsuccessful until Gen came up with the
following plan: they would make love immediately, the second they had securely
closed the door behind them, and then after that they would study, and it was
this plan that was by far the most successful. Sometimes they fell asleep for a
while,
Carmen curled against Gen’s chest, Gen inside
the crook of Carmen’s arm. Like soldiers shot in battle, they lay where they
fell. Other times they had to make love again, the first time forgotten as soon
as it was finished, but for the most part they managed to get some work done. Before
it was anywhere near getting light they would kiss good night and Carmen would
go back to sleep in the hallway in front of Roxane’s door and Gen would go back
to the floor next to Mr. Hosokawa’s couch. Sometimes they detected the
slightest sound of his movement as he came down the stairs. Sometimes Carmen
passed him in the hall.
Did the others know? Possibly, but they wouldn’t
have said anything. They suspected only Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa, who did
not hesitate to hold hands or exchange a brief kiss during the day. If anyone
suspected Gen and Carmen of anything it was only that perhaps they helped the
first couple in their meetings. Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa, however
improbable to those around them, were members of the same tribe, the tribe of
the hostages. So many people were in love with her that of course, it was only
natural that she should fall in love with one of them. But Gen and Carmen were
another matter. Even if the Generals relied on Gen’s translations and polished
secretarial skills, even if they found him extremely bright and pleasant
enough, they never forgot who he was. And even though the hostages had a soft
spot for Carmen, the way she kept her eyes down, her unwillingness to point her
gun at anyone directly, when there was any call from the Generals, she went and
stood with them.