Authors: Bel Canto
Too often in these moments of listening he had
felt his soul fill with a kind of rapture, a feeling he could not name but was
disquieted by—longing?
Love?
Early in his seminary
training he had set his mind to giving up opera as other young men had set
their minds to giving up women. He thought there must be
a
darkness
in such passion, especially for a priest. Lacking any real or
interesting sins to confess, he offered up the imagined sin of opera one Wednesday
afternoon as his greatest sacrifice to Christ.
“Verdi or Wagner?” said the voice from the
other side of the screen.
“Both,” Father Arguedas said, but when he
recovered himself from the surprise of the question he changed his answer. “Verdi.”
“You are young,” the voice replied. “Come back
and tell me again in twenty years, if God allows that I am here.”
The young priest strained to recognize the
voice. Certainly he knew all the priests at the San Pedro Church. “Is it not a
sin?”
“Art is not sin. It’s not always good. But it
is not a sin.” The voice paused for a minute and Father Arguedas slipped a
finger into the black band of his collar, trying to move some of the thick warm
air into his shirt. “Then again, some of the libretti . . . well, try to concentrate
on the music. The music is the truth of opera.”
Father Arguedas took his small, perfunctory
penance and said each prayer three times as an offering of joy. He did not have
to give up his love. In fact, after that he changed his mind completely and
decided that such beauty would have to be one with God. The music gave praise,
he was sure of that, and if the words too often focused on the sins of man,
well, did Jesus himself not explore this subject exactly? When he suffered from
any feelings of questionable discomfort, he simply rectified the situation by
not reading the libretti. He had studied Latin in seminary, but he refused to
make the connection to Italian. Tchaikovsky was especially good in these cases,
as Russian escaped him completely. Sadly, there were times when the lust came
through the music rather than the words. Having no understanding of French did
not keep a priest safe from
Carmen
.
Carmen
gave him dreams. In most instances, though, he was
able to pretend that every man and woman in every opera sang with so much grace
and splendor because they sang about the love for God in their hearts.
Once freed by his confessor, Father Arguedas
did not try to hide his love for music. No one seemed to care about his
interests one way or the other so long as it did not take away from the duties
of his life. Perhaps it was not a particularly modern country or a modern
religion, but it was a modern age. People in the parish had a fondness for this
young priest, the tireless vigor with which he polished the pews, the way he
knelt in front of the candles for an hour every morning before first mass
began. Among the people who noticed his good works was a woman named Ana Loya,
the favorite cousin of the wife of the Vice President. She, too, had an
interest in music and was generous in loaning Father Arguedas recordings. When
she heard a rumor that Roxane Coss was coming to sing at a party, Ana
telephoned her cousin to ask if a certain young priest could attend. He
wouldn’t have to be invited to
dinner,
of course, he
could wait in the kitchen during the dinner. He could wait in the kitchen while
Roxane Coss sang, for all it mattered, but if he could be in the house, even in
the garden, she would be very grateful. Father Arguedas had once confided in
Ana after a particularly mediocre rehearsal of the church choir that he had
never heard opera sung live. The great love of his life, after God, lived only
in dark vinyl. Ana had once lost a son, more than twenty years before. The boy
was three when he drowned in an irrigation ditch. There were many other
children and she loved them well and did not speak of the one who was lost. In
fact, the only time she ever thought of that child now was when she saw Father
Arguedas. She repeated her question to her cousin by telephone: “Could Father
Arguedas come to hear the soprano?”
* * *
It was different in ways he never could have
imagined, as if the voice were something that could be seen. Certainly it could
be felt, even where he stood in the very back of the room. It trembled inside
the folds of his cassock, brushed against the skin of his cheeks. Never had he
thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God
that God’s own voice poured from her.
How far she must have
gone inside herself to call up that voice.
It was as if the voice came
from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her
will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards
of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting,
warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God
in heaven. It was a miracle and he wept for the gift of bearing witness.
Even now, after more than a dozen hours spent
on the floor of the marble entryway, the cold having permeated into his bone
marrow, the voice of Roxane Coss was making large, swooping circles through his
head. If he had not been told to lie down, he might have been forced to ask if
he might be allowed to. He needed all this time to rest, and better that it was
on a marble floor. The floor kept him mindful of God. Had he been stretched out
on a soft rug he might have forgotten himself altogether. He was glad to have
spent the night in the sea of bullhorns and sirens because it kept him awake
and thinking, glad (and for this he asked forgiveness) to have missed the
morning’s mass and communion because then he could stay there longer. The
longer he stayed where he was, the longer the moment continued, as if her voice
were still echoing against these papered walls. She was still there, after all,
lying someplace where he could not see her but not so terribly far away. He
said a prayer that she had had a comfortable
night, that
someone would have thought to offer her one of the couches.
In addition to his concern for Roxane Coss,
Father Arguedas was worried about the young bandits. Many of them were propped
upright against the walls, their feet apart, leaning on their rifles like
walking sticks. Then their heads would drop back and they would fall asleep for
ten seconds before their knees buckled and they slumped into their guns. Father
Arguedas had often gone with the police to collect the bodies of suicides and
often they looked like they must have begun in exactly such a position, their
toes pressed down on the trigger.
“Son,” he whispered to one of the boys who
was
guarding the people in the entry hall, mostly waiters
and cooks laid on the hard floor, people of the lowest ranking. Being young
himself, he often felt uncomfortable calling a parishioner “son,” but this
child, he felt, was his own. He looked like his cousins. He looked like every
boy who ran from the church as soon as they had taken communion, the host still
white and round on their tongues. “Come here.”
The boy squinted towards the ceiling as if he
was hearing the voice in his sleep. He pretended not to notice the priest.
“Son,” Father Arguedas said again. “Come here.”
Now the boy looked down and
a
puzzlement
crossed his face. How did one not answer a priest? How was it
possible not to go if called? “Father?” he whispered.
“Come here,” the priest mouthed, and patted his
hand on the floor, nothing more than a little fluttering movement of his
fingers beside him. It was not crowded on the marble floor. Unlike the carpeted
living room, there was plenty of space to stretch here, and when one had been
leaning against a rifle all night, an open expanse of marble floor would seem
as inviting as a feather bed.
The boy looked nervously around the corner to
the place where the Generals were in conference. “I’m not allowed,” he mouthed.
He was an Indian, this boy. He spoke the language from the north that Father
Arguedas’s grandmother spoke to his mother and aunts.
“I say you are allowed,” he said, not with
authority, but with compassion.
The boy considered this for a moment and then
turned his head up as if he was studying the intricate crown molding that
ringed the ceiling. His eyes filled up with tears and he had to blink madly to
hold them back. He had been awake for such a long time and his fingertips
trembled around the cool barrel of his gun. He could no longer exactly tell
where his fingers stopped and the green-blue metal began.
Father Arguedas sighed and let it go for now. He
would ask the boy again later just to let him know there was a place to rest
and forgiveness for any sin.
The crowd on the floor pulsed with needs. Some
had to go to the bathroom again. There were murmurings about medications.
People wanted to stand up, to be fed,
to
have a drink
of water to wash the taste from their mouths. Their restlessness emboldened
them, but there was this as well: nearly eighteen hours had passed and still no
one was dead. The hostages had begun to believe that they might not be killed. If
what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything
else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.
Victor Fyodorov, a Muscovite, finally gave in
to himself and lit up a cigarette, even though all lighters and matches were to
have been surrendered. He blew his smoke straight up to the ceiling. He was
forty-seven years old and had been smoking regularly since he was twelve, even
in hard times, even when decisions had to be made between cigarettes and food.
The General Benjamin snapped his fingers and
one of the minions rushed forward to take Fyodorov’s cigarette away, but
Fyodorov only inhaled. He was a big man, even lying down, even with no weapon
save the cigarette itself. He looked like the one who would win the fight. “Just
try,” he said to the soldier in Russian.
The boy, having no idea what had been said, was
unsure of how to proceed. He tried to steady his hand when he withdrew his gun
and pointed it at Fyodorov’s middle in a halfhearted way.
“This is it!” Yegor Ledbed, another Russian and
a friend to Fyodorov, said. “You will shoot us for smoking!”
What a dream it was, that cigarette. How much
more delightful it was to smoke when one had not smoked in a day. Then one
could notice the flavor, the blue tint of the smoke. One could relax into the
pleasant light-headedness one remembered from boyhood. It was almost enough to
make a man quit, so that he could know the pleasures of starting again. Fyodorov
was almost down to the point of burning his fingers. What a pity. He sat up,
startling the gunman with his girth, and crushed the cigarette against the sole
of his shoe.
To the great pleasure of the Vice President,
Fyodorov put the butt in the pocket of his tuxedo and the boy stuffed the gun
awkwardly back into the waistband of his pants and slunk away.
“I will not take this another minute!” a woman
shouted, but when they looked around no one could be sure who had spoken.
Two hours after Joachim Messner had left,
General Benjamin summoned the Vice President up from the floor and had
him
open the door and wave Messner back in.
Was it possible that Messner had spent all this
time waiting just outside the door? His delicate cheeks looked even more
scorched than before.
“Everything all right?”
Messner said to the Vice President
in Spanish, as if he had spent the last two hours standing in the sun working
on his language skills.
“Very little changes,” the Vice President said
in English, in an attempt to be thoughtful. He still had some vestiges of
feeling like the host.
“Your face, it isn’t bad. She did a very good
job with the”—he struggled for the word—“sew,” he said finally.
The Vice President lifted his fingers to his
cheek but Messner held his hand down. “Don’t touch it.” He looked around the
room. “The Japanese man, is he still here?”
“Where would he go?” Ruben asked.
Messner glanced around at the bodies at his
feet, all of them warm and taking even breaths. Really, he had seen worse.
“I’m going to call for the translator,” the
Vice President told the Generals, who looked away from them as if they had not
noticed that Messner had arrived. Then finally one of them glanced up and gave
some sort of brief, sideways gesture with his eyebrows that Ruben Iglesias took
to mean, fine, go ahead.
He did not call for Gen, but walked the long
way around the room to get to him. It was both an opportunity to stretch his
legs and to take inventory of his guests. Most people gave something between a
wince and a smile upon seeing him. The side of his face really was swelling
horribly without ice. The stitches already strained against the burden of
keeping his face together. Ice. It wasn’t like he was looking for penicillin.
There was plenty of ice in the house. There were two freezers, one side by side
with the refrigerator in the kitchen and one in the basement just for storage. There
was also a machine in the kitchen that stood separately and did nothing but
pour forth ice all day into a plastic cabinet. And yet he knew he was not a
favorite with these Generals, and to request so much as a cube might mean the
closing of his other eye. How lovely it would be just to stand with his cheek
resting lightly against the cool white metal of the freezer door. He didn’t
even need the
ice, that
would be enough. “Monsignor,”
he said, stepping around Monsignor Rolland on the floor. “I am so sorry. Are
you comfortable? Yes? Good, good.”