Authors: Bel Canto
“What about our demands? Have you spoken to
them in a similar way? Have you spoken to them as friends?”
“They will give up nothing,” Messner said. “There
is no chance, no matter how long you wait. You have to trust me on this.”
“Then we will kill the hostages.”
“No, you won’t,” Messner said, rubbing his eyes
with his fingers. “I said it the first time we met, you are reasonable men. Even
if you did kill them it wouldn’t change the outcome. The government would be
even less inclined to bargain with you then.”
From down the long hallway in the living room
they could hear Roxane sing a phrase and then Cesar repeat the phrase. They
went over it again and again and the repetition was beautiful.
Benjamin listened to the music for a while and
then, as if he had heard a note that didn’t agree with him, he struck the table
they used for chess with his fist. Not that it
mattered,
the game was in the other room. “Why is it our responsibility to make every
concession? Are we expected to give up just because we have such a long history
of giving things up? I am trying to free the men I know from prison. I am not
trying to join them. It is not my intention to put my soldiers down in those
caves. I would sooner see them dead and buried.”
You might see them dead, Messner thought, but
you won’t have the chance to see them buried. He sighed. There was no such
place as
Truly, time had stopped. He had always been here and he would always be here. “I’m
afraid those are your two choices,” he said.
“The meeting is over.” General Benjamin stood
up. You could chart the course of this story on his skin, which was burning
now. The shingles flared with every word he spoke and every word he listened
to.
“It cannot be over. We have to keep talking
until we reach some
agreement, that
is imperative. I
am begging you to think about this.”
“Messner, what else do I do all day?” the
General said, and then he left the room.
Messner and Gen sat alone in the guest bedroom
suite, where hostages were not allowed to sit without guards. They listened to
the small French enamel clock strike the hour of noon. “I don’t think I can
stand this anymore,” Messner said after several minutes had passed.
Stand what? Gen knew that everything was
getting better and not just for him. People were happier. Look, they were
outside right now. He could see them from the windows, running. “It is a
standoff,” Gen said.
“Maybe a permanent one.
If they
keep us here forever, we’ll manage.”
“Are you insane?” Messner said. “You were the
brightest one here once, and now you’re as crazy as the rest of them. What do
you
think,
that they’ll just keep the wall up and
pretend this is a zoo, bring in your food, charge money for tickets? ‘See
defenseless hostages and vicious terrorists live together in peaceful
coexistence.’ It doesn’t just go on. Someone puts a stop to it and there needs
to be a decision as to who will be in charge of the stopping.”
“Do you think the military has plans?”
Messner stared at him. “Just because you’re in
here doesn’t mean the rest of the world just shut down.”
“So they will arrest them?”
“At best.”
“The Generals?”
“All of them.”
But all of them could not possibly include
Carmen. It could not include Beatriz or Ishmael or Cesar. When Gen scanned the
list he couldn’t think of one he would be willing to give up, even the bullies
and the fools. He would marry Carmen. He would have Father Arguedas marry them
and it would be legal and binding, so that when they came for them he could say
she was his wife. But that would only save one, albeit the most important one. For
the others he had no ideas. How had he come to want to save all of them? The
people who followed him around with loaded guns. How had he fallen in love with
so many people? “What do we do?” Gen said.
“You can try to talk them into giving up,”
Messner said. “But honestly, I’m not even sure what good it would do them.”
All his life, Gen had worked to learn, the deep
rolling
R
in Italian, the clutter of vowels in
Danish. As a child in
he sat in the kitchen on a high stool, repeating his mother’s American accent
while she chopped vegetables for dinner. She had gone to school in
as well as English. His father’s father worked in
father spoke Chinese and had studied Russian in college. In his childhood, it
seemed that language changed on the hour and no one was better at keeping up
than Gen. He and his sisters played with words instead of toys. He studied and
read,
printed nouns onto index cards, listened to language
tapes on the subway. He did not stop. Even if he was a natural polyglot, he
never relied solely on talent. He learned. Gen was born to learn.
But these last months had turned him around and
now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as
there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at
forgetting as he had ever worked to learn. He managed to forget that Carmen was
a soldier in the terrorist organization that had kidnapped him. That was not an
easy task. Every day he forced himself to practice until he was able to look at
Carmen and only see the woman he loved. He forgot about the future and past. He
forgot about his country, his work, and what would become of him when all of
this was over. He forgot that the way he lived now would ever be over. And Gen
wasn’t the only one. Carmen forgot, too. She did not remember her direct orders
to form no emotional bonds to the hostages. When she found it was a struggle to
let such important knowledge slip from her memory, the other soldiers helped
her forget. Ishmael forgot because he wanted to be the other son of Ruben
Iglesias and an employee of Oscar Mendoza. He could picture himself sharing a
bedroom with Ruben’s son, Marco, and being a helpful older brother to the boy. Cesar
forgot because Roxane Coss had said he could come with her to
imagine
himself
on a stage with her, a rain of tender
blossoms pouring down on their feet. The Generals helped them to forget by
turning a blind eye to all the affection and slackness that surrounded them,
and they could do that because there was so much they were forgetting
themselves. They had to forget that they had been the ones to recruit these
young people from their families by promising them work and opportunity and a
cause to fight for. They had to forget that the President of the country had
neglected to attend the party from which they had so elaborately planned to
kidnap him and so they changed their plans and took everyone else hostage. Mostly,
they had to forget that they had not come up with a way to leave. They had to
think that one might present itself if they waited long enough. Why should they
think about the future? No one else seemed to remember it. Father Arguedas
refused to think about it. Everyone came to Sunday mass. He performed the
sacraments: communion, confession, even last rites. He had put the souls in
this house in order and that was the only thing that mattered, so why should he
think about the future? The future never even occurred to Roxane Coss. She had
become so proficient at forgetting that she never considered the wife of her
lover anymore. She was not concerned that he ran a corporation in
they did not speak the same language. Even the ones who had no real reason to
forget had done so. They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of
them. Lothar Falken thought only of running around the house. Victor Fyodorov
thought of nothing but playing cards with his friends and gossiping about their
love for Roxane Coss. Tetsuya Kato thought of his responsibilities as an
accompanist and forgot about the rest. It was too much work to remember things
you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and them
let go. Except for Messner, whose job it was to remember.
And
Simon Thibault, who even in his sleep thought of nothing but his wife.
So even though Gen understood that there was
something real and dangerous waiting for them, he began to forget it almost as
soon as Messner left the house that afternoon. He busied himself typing up
fresh lists of demands for the Generals and when it got later he helped serve
dinner. He went to sleep that night and woke up at two
A.M.
to
meet Carmen in the china closet and he told her, but not with the urgency he
had felt in the afternoon. It was the sense of urgency he had managed to
forget.
“What Messner was saying worried me,” Gen said.
Carmen was sitting in his lap, both of her legs to the left of him, both of her
arms around his neck.
Worried me.
Shouldn’t he have said something stronger than that?
And Carmen, who should have listened, who
should have asked him questions for her own safety and the safety of the other
soldiers, her friends, only kissed him, because the important thing was to
forget. It was their business, their job. That kiss was like a lake, deep and
clear and they swam into it, forgetting. “We’ll have to wait and see,” Carmen
said.
Should they do something, try to escape? There
must be a way by now, everyone was lax. Hardly anyone was watching anymore. Gen
asked her, his hands up under her shirt, feeling her shoulder blades flex
beneath his fingertips.
“We could think about escaping,” she said. But
the military would catch her and torture her, that’s what the Generals told
them in training, and under the pains of torture she would tell them something.
She could not remember what it was that she shouldn’t tell but that would be
the thing that would get everyone else killed. There were only two places in
the world to go: inside and outside, and the question was where
were you
safer? Inside this house, in this china closet, she
had never felt so safe in all her life. Clearly, Saint Rose of
protected here. She was rewarded for her prayers with abundance. It was always
better to stay with your saint. She kissed Gen’s throat. All girls dreamed of
being in love like this.
“So we’ll talk about it?” Gen said, but now her
shirt was off and it stretched out like a carpet for them to lie on. They
closed the angle between their bodies and the floor.
“Let’s talk about it,” she said, sweetly
shutting her eyes.
As soon as Roxane Coss fell in love, she fell
in love again. The two experiences were completely different and yet coming as
they did, one right on top of the other, she could not help but link them
together in her mind. Katsumi Hosokawa came to her room in the middle of the
night and for the longest time he just stood there inside her bedroom door and
held her. It was as if he had returned from something no one is meant to
survive, a plane crash, a ship lost at sea, and he could imagine nothing more
than this: her in his arms. There was nothing they could say to one another but
Roxane was far beyond thinking that speaking the same language was the only way
to communicate with people. Besides, what was there to say, really? He knew
her. She leaned against him, her arms around his neck,
his
hands flat against her back. Sometimes she nodded or he rocked her back and
forth. From the way he was breathing she thought he might be crying and she
understood that, too. She cried herself, she cried for the relief that came in
being with him in that dark room, the relief that came from loving someone and
from being loved. They would have stood there all
night,
he would have left without ever asking for anything else if she hadn’t reached
behind her at some point and taken one of his hands, led him there to her bed. There
were so many ways to talk. He kissed her as she was leaning back, the curtains
closed, the room completely dark.
In the morning she woke up for a minute,
stretched, rolled over, and went back to sleep. She didn’t know how long she
slept, but then she heard singing and for the second time she was struck by the
thought that she wasn’t alone. It wasn’t that she was in love with Cesar, but
she was in love with his singing.
It was like this: every night Mr. Hosokawa came
back to her bedroom and every morning Cesar waited to practice. If there was
something else to want she forgot what it might be.
“Breathe,” she said. “Like this.” Roxane filled
up her lungs, took in more air and then some more, and then held it. It didn’t
matter that he didn’t understand the words she used. She stepped behind him and
put her hand flat on his diaphragm. What she was saying was clear. She pushed
all of the breath from his body and then filled him up again. She sang a line
of Tosti, moving her hand back and forth like a metronome, and he sang it back
to her. He was not a conservatory student who thought that to please was to be
careful. He did not have a lifetime of mediocre instruction to overcome. He was
not afraid. He was a boy, full of a boy’s bravado, and when the line came back
it was loud and passionate. He sang every line, every scale, as if the singing
would save his life. He was settling into his own voice now and it was a voice
that amazed her. It would have lived and died in a jungle, this voice, if she
hadn’t come along to rescue it.