Authors: Bel Canto
Ann Patchett (10 page)
It was a beautiful house, a beautiful rug on
which his guests crowded together. Who would have thought that he would one day
live in such a house with two freezers and a machine that made only ice? It had
been a spectacular piece of luck. His father lifted baggage onto flatbed carts,
first for the trains and then for the airlines. His mother raised eight
children, sold vegetables,
took
in needlework. How
many times had that story been told?
Ruben Iglesias working
his way up.
The first in his family to finish high school! Worked as a
janitor to put
himself
through college.
Worked as a janitor and a judge’s clerk to put himself through law
school.
After that there was a successful career in the law, the correct
steps on the unstable ladder of politics. It made him as attractive a running
mate as his height. Never in the story did they mention how he had married
well, the daughter of a senior partner he had made pregnant during a festive
Christmas party, how the ambitions of his wife and her parents pushed him
forward. That was a decidedly less interesting story.
A man on the floor near the tapestry
wing-backed chair asked him a question in a language Ruben believed was German.
The Vice President told him he did not know.
Gen the translator was lying very close to Mr.
Hosokawa. He whispered something in Mr. Hosokawa’s ear and the older man closed
his eyes and nodded his head almost imperceptibly. Ruben had forgotten all
about Mr. Hosokawa. Happy birthday, sir, he thought to himself. I don’t suppose
there will be any factories built this year. Not too far from them
was
Roxane Coss and her accompanist. She looked, if this was
possible, even better than she had the night before. Her hair was loose and her
skin glowed as if she had been waiting for this opportunity to rest. “How are
you?” she mouthed in English, and touched her hand to her own cheek to indicate
her concern for his injury. Perhaps it was the fact that he had had nothing to
eat, maybe it was exhaustion or blood loss or the onset of an infection, but at
that moment he was quite sure he would faint. The way she touched her face, did
it because she could not stand and put her hand to his own cheek, the image of
her standing and touching his cheek, he sank down to the floor, balancing on
his toes, putting his hands down in front of him, and dropped his head forward
until the feeling passed. Slowly he raised his eyes to hers, which now looked
panicked. “I’m well,” he whispered. At that moment he noticed her accompanist,
who frankly did not look well at all. It seemed that if Roxane Coss was able to
extend such compassion to him she should take a look at the man lying next to
her. His paleness had a decidedly gray cast, and while his eyes were open and
his chest moved in a shallow way, there was
a stillness
about him that the vice president thought was not good at all. “Him?” he said
softly, and pointed.
She looked at the body beside her as if she was
noticing it for the first time. “He says he has the flu. I think he’s very
nervous.”
Speaking in the very smallest of whispers, the
sound of her voice was thrilling, even if he wasn’t exactly sure what she was
saying.
“Translator!”
General Alfredo called out.
Ruben had meant to stand and extend his hand to
Gen, but Gen, younger, made it to his feet more quickly and reached down to
help the Vice President. He took Ruben’s arm, as if the Vice President had been
struck suddenly blind, and led him forward through the room. How quickly one
could form attachments under circumstances like these, what bold conclusions a
man could come to: Roxane Coss was the woman he had always loved; Gen Watanabe
was his son; his house was no longer his own; his life as he knew it, his
political life, was dead. Ruben Iglesias wondered if all hostages, all over the
world, felt more or less the same way.
“Gen,” Messner said, and shook his hand
somberly, as if offering condolences. “The Vice President should have
medicine.” He said this in French for Gen to translate.
“Too much time is spent discussing the needs of
a foolish man,” General Benjamin said.
“Ice?”
Ruben offered himself, as suddenly
his mind was filled with the pleasures of ice, of the snow on the tops of the
young girls wearing handkerchiefs of diaphanous gauze around their doll-like
waists. He was burning alive now and the silver blades of their skates shot up
arches of blue-white chips. He wanted to be buried in ice.
“Ishmael,” the General said impatiently to one
of the boys.
“Into the kitchen.
Get him a towel and
ice.”
Ishmael, one of the young boys holding up the
wall, a small one with the worst shoes of all, looked pleased. Maybe he was
proud of having been chosen for the task, maybe he wanted to help the Vice
President, maybe he wanted a shot at the kitchen, where surely trays of
leftover crackers and melted canapés were waiting. “No one gives my people ice
when they need ice,” General Alfredo said bitterly.
“Certainly,” Messner said, half listening to
Gen’s translation. “Have you reached some kind of compromise here?”
“We’ll let you have the women,” General Alfredo
said. “We have no interest in harming women. The workers can go, the priests,
anyone who is sick. After that we’ll review the list of who we have. There may
be a few more to go after that. In return we’ll want supplies.” He produced a
piece of paper, neatly folded, from his front pocket and clamped it between the
three remaining fingers of his left hand. “These are the things we’ll need. The
second page is to be read to the press.
Our demands.”
Alfredo had been so certain their plan would turn out better than this. It had
been his cousin, after all, who had once worked on the air-conditioning system
of this house and had managed to steal a copy of the blueprints.
Messner took the papers and scanned them for a
minute and then asked Gen to read them. Gen was surprised to find his hands
trembling. He could never remember an instance when what he was translating had
actually affected him. “On behalf of the people,
has taken hostage—”
Messner raised his hand for Gen to stop. “
The General nodded.
“Not
Messner kept his voice down.
“You said we were
reasonable
men,” General Alfredo said, his voice swelling with the insult. “What do you
think? Do you think
Dirección Auténtica
would be letting the women go? I know LDA. In LDA, the ones who are not useful
are shot. Who have we shot? We are trying to do something for the people, can
you understand that?” He took a step towards Messner, who knew how it was
intended, but Gen moved quietly between them.
“We are trying to do something for the people,”
Gen said, keeping his tone deliberate and slow. The second part of the
sentence, “Can you understand that?” was irrelevant and so he left it off.
Messner apologized for his mistake.
An honest mistake.
They were not LDA. He had to concentrate
to keep the corners of his mouth from bending up. “How long before the first
group can be released?”
General Alfredo could not speak to him. He
ground down on his teeth. Even General Hector, who had the least to say, spat
on the Savonnière carpet. Ishmael returned with two dishtowels full of ice cubes,
a sign of the great abundance the kitchen held. General Benjamin batted one of
the sacks from his hand, sending the clear diamond ice tripping and bouncing
across the carpet. Anyone close enough scooped up the extra cubes and slipped
them into their mouths. Ishmael, frightened now, quickly gave the remaining bag
to the Vice President with a slight bow of the head. Ruben returned the nod,
thinking it best not to draw any more attention to
himself
than was absolutely necessary, as clearly it would take little to provoke
another gun butt to the side of the head. He touched the ice to his face and
winced with the pain and the deep, deep pleasure of the cold.
General Benjamin cleared his throat and pulled
himself together. “We’ll divide them up now,” he said. First he spoke to his
troops. “Look alert.
On your guard.”
The boys against
the wall straightened out their legs and lifted their guns to their chests. “Everyone
on your feet,” he said.
“I beg for your attention,” Gen said in
Japanese. “It is now time to stand.” If the terrorists minded speaking, they
made an exception for Gen. He repeated the sentence again in as many languages
as he could think of. He said it in languages he knew he need not include,
Serbo-Croatian and Cantonese, just because there was comfort in speaking and no
one tried to stop him. “Stand up,” is not a message that needed translation in
the first place. People are sheep about certain things. When some begin to
stand, the rest will follow.
They were stiff and awkward. Some people tried
to work their way back into their shoes and others just forgot them. Some
people stomped lightly on one foot, trying to wrestle it from sleep. They were
nervous. As much as they had been thinking that all they wanted was to stand,
now that they were on their feet they felt insecure. It seemed so much more
likely that transitions would be bad rather than good, that standing increased
the likelihood of being shot.
“The women will stand to the far right of the
room and the men to the far left.”
Gen churned the sentence through the different
languages with no clear idea of which countries were represented or who was in
need of a translator. His voice was full of the soothing monotony of the
overhead announcements heard in train stations and airports.
But the men and women did not part quickly. Instead
they clung to one another, arms around necks. Couples who had not held each
other this way for years, who had perhaps never held each other this way in
public, embraced deeply. It was a party that had simply gone on too long. The
music had stopped and the dancing had stopped and still the couples stood, each
enveloped in the other, waiting. The only awkward pairing was between Roxane
Coss and the accompanist. She looked so small in his arms she seemed almost a
child. She didn’t appear to want to be held by him, but on closer inspection
she was actually shoring him up. He draped himself on her, and the grimace on
her face was that of a woman unequal to the weight that had been given her. Mr.
Hosokawa, recognizing her distress (because he had been watching, having no one
to embrace himself, his own wife safely home in Tokyo), took the accompanist in
his arms, wrapping the much larger man across his shoulders like a coat in
warmer weather. Mr. Hosokawa staggered a bit himself, but it was nothing
compared with the relief that flooded her face.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Thank you,” he repeated.
“You’ll look after him?” At this point the
accompanist raised his head and took some of his weight onto his own feet.
“Thank you,” Mr. Hosokawa repeated tenderly.
Other men, single men, mostly waiters, all of
whom wished that they had been the one to peel this dying gringo from her
shoulders, moved forward to help Mr. Hosokawa, and together they shuffled to
the left side of the room with the sour-smelling man, his blond head swinging
as if his neck had been snapped. Mr. Hosokawa turned to look at her, so
heartsick to think she would be alone. He might have thought that she was
watching him, but really she was looking at her accompanist, who was slumped in
Mr. Hosokawa’s arms. Once he was away from her it was much easier to see how
ill he looked.
Now, in the face of so many passionate
good-byes, it struck Mr. Hosokawa that he had never even considered bringing
his wife to this country. He did not tell her that she had been invited. He
told her he was attending a business meeting, not a birthday party to be held
in his honor. Their unspoken agreement was that Mrs. Hosokawa always stayed
home with their daughters. They did not travel together. Now he could see how
smart this decision was. He had kept his wife from discomfort and possibly
harm. He had protected her. But still, he couldn’t help but wonder what it
would have been like for the two of them to stand together now. Would they have
felt so much sadness when they were told to step away from one another?
For what seemed like a long time but could not
have been a whole minute, Edith and Simon Thibault said nothing to each other. Then
she kissed him and he said, “I like to think of you outside.” He could have
said anything, it made no difference. He was thinking of those first twenty
years they were married, years when he had loved her without any kind of real
understanding. This would be his punishment now, for all his time wasted. Dear
Edith. She took off the light silk wrapper she was wearing. He had forgotten to
ask for it. It was a wonderful blue, the blue used on the dinner plates of
kings and the underbreasts of the birds in this very godforsaken jungle. She
crumpled it up into a surprisingly small ball and pressed it into the waiting
cup of his hands.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said, and
because it was the last thing she asked of him, he swore he would not.