Ann Patchett (23 page)

“I suppose it’s terribly sexist of me assuming
that all of the terrorists were male. It’s a modern world, after all. One
should suppose a girl can grow up to be a terrorist just as easily as a boy.”

“I can’t imagine it,” Gen said.

When they were three feet away, Carmen found
the strength to put her right hand on her gun, which immediately stopped them
from coming any closer.

“Do you mean to shoot us?” Messner said in
French, a simple sentence he couldn’t say in Spanish because he didn’t know the
word for
shoot,
a word he imagined he should make a
point to learn. Gen translated and his voice sounded uncertain. Carmen,
wide-eyed, her forehead damp, said nothing.

“Are we certain she speaks Spanish? Are we
certain she speaks?” Messner said to
Gen
.

Gen asked her if she spoke Spanish.

“Poquito,”
she whispered.

“Don’t shoot,” Messner said with good nature,
and pointed to the gun.

Carmen pulled her hand away and crossed her
arms over her chest. “I don’t,” she said.

“How old are you?”

She said that she was seventeen and they
assumed she was telling the truth.

“What is your first language?” Messner asked
her.

Gen asked her what she spoke at home.

“Quechua,” she said. “We all speak Quechua but
we know Spanish.” And then, in her first attempt to address what she wanted,
she said, “I should know Spanish better.” The words came out in a dull croak.

“Your Spanish is good,” Gen said.

The expression on her face changed with this
compliment. No one could stretch the truth so much as to call it a smile, but
her eyebrows lifted and her face tilted up towards them a centimeter or so as
if it was drawn towards sunlight. “I am trying to learn better.”

“How did a girl like you get tied up with a
bunch like this?” Messner said. Gen found the question overly direct but
certainly Messner knew enough Spanish to catch him if he were to ask her
another question entirely.

“I work to free the people,” she said.

Messner scratched the back of his neck. “It’s
always ‘Free the People.’ I never know exactly which people they mean or what
it is they want to free them from. I certainly recognize the problems but there
is such a vagueness to ‘Free the People.’ It’s easier to negotiate with bank
robbers, really. They only want the money. They want to take the money and free
themselves
and the people be damned. There’s something
much more straightforward about that, don’t you think?”

“Are you asking me or her?”

Messner looked at Carmen and apologized in
Spanish. “That is rude of me,” he said to Gen. “My Spanish is very poor,”
Messner said to Carmen, “but I’m trying to improve as well.”

“Sí,”
she said. She should not be talking to them
like this. The Generals could come in. Anyone could see her. She was too much
out in the open.

“Are you being treated well? Are you in good
health?”

“Sí,”
she said again, although she wasn’t sure why
he was asking.

“She’s really a very lovely girl,” he said to
Gen in French. “She has a remarkable face. It’s almost a perfect heart. Don’t
tell her that, though. She looks like the kind that could die of
embarrassment.” Then he turned to Carmen. “If there’s anything you need, you
let one of us know.”

“Sí,”
she said, just barely able to make a sound
come out with the shape of the word.

“You don’t see many shy terrorists,” Messner
said in French. They all stood there as if it was a painful moment at a long,
dull cocktail party.

“You like the music,” Gen said.

“Very beautiful,” she whispered.

“It was Chopin.”

“Kato played Chopin?” Messner said.
“The nocturnes?
I’m sorry I missed that.”

“Chopin played,” Carmen said.

“No,” Gen said. “The man who played was Señor
Kato. The music he played was written by Señor Chopin.”

“Very beautiful,” she said again, and suddenly
her eyes welled up with tears and she parted her lips slightly not to speak but
to breathe.

“What is the matter?” Messner said. He was
going to touch her shoulder and then thought better of it. The big boy named
Gilbert called to her from the other side of the room and hearing her name it
was as if her power of movement was restored. She quickly rubbed her eyes and
stepped around the two men without so much as nodding. They turned and watched
her dart off across the wide expanse of the living room and then disappear down
the hall with the boy.

“Perhaps the music was getting to her,” Messner
said.

Gen stood watching the empty place where she
had been. “It would be hard on a girl,” he said. “All of this.”

And while Messner started to say it was hard on
them all he knew what Gen meant and frankly, he agreed.

Whenever Messner left there was a lingering
sadness in the house that could last for hours. It was very quiet inside and no
one listened to the tedious messages the police continued to broadcast from the
other side of the wall.
Hopeless, Surrender, Will Not
Negotiate.
It droned on until the words simply broke down into a dull
buzz, the angry sound of hornets scouring the nest. They imagined what
prisoners felt like when the visiting hour was over and there was nothing left
to do but sit in their cell and wonder if it was dark yet outside. They were
still deep in their afternoon bout of depression, still thinking about all the
elderly relatives they never went to visit, when Messner knocked again. Simon
Thibault lifted his face from the blue scarf that hung around his neck and
General Benjamin motioned for the Vice President to answer the door. Ruben took
a moment to untie the dishtowel from his waist. The people with the guns
motioned for him to hurry. It was Messner, they knew it. Only Messner came to
the door.

“What a lovely surprise,” the Vice President
said.

Messner was standing on the front steps,
struggling to hold a heavy box in his arms.

The Generals had thought that this knock out of
schedule indicated a breakthrough, a chance to put this thing to rest. They
were that hopeless, that hopeful. When they saw it was only another delivery
they felt a crush of disappointment. They wanted none of it. “This isn’t his
time,” General Alfredo said to Gen. “He knows what times he is allowed to
come.” General Alfredo had fallen asleep in his chair. He had suffered from
terrible insomnia ever since their arrival at the Vice President’s estate and
anyone who woke him from the little sleep he managed would live to regret it. He
always dreamed of bullets zipping past his ears. When he woke up his shirt was
drenched, his heart was racing, and he was always more exhausted than he had
been before he slept.

“It seemed to me to be a special circumstance,”
Messner said. “The music has arrived.”

“We are an army,” Alfredo said sharply. “Not a
conservatory. Come at your time tomorrow and we will discuss the issue of
allowing music.”

Roxane Coss asked Gen if it was her music, and
when he told her yes she was on her feet. The priest approached the door as
well. “These are from Manuel?”

“He’s just on the other side of the wall,”
Messner said. “He sent this all for you.”

Father Arguedas pressed his folded hands to his
lips.
Ever-powerful and merciful God, we do well always and
everywhere to give
You
thanks and praise.

“Both of
you,
sit
down,” General Alfredo said.

“I’ll put this inside the door,” Messner said,
and started to bend down. It was surprising how much music could weigh.

“No,” Alfredo said. He had a headache. He was
sick to death of giving in on things. There needed to be some order to this
business, some respect for authority. Wasn’t he the man with the gun? Didn’t
that count for something? If he said the box would not come inside then the box
would not come inside. General Benjamin whispered something in Alfredo’s ear
but Alfredo simply repeated his point. “No.”

Roxane pulled on Gen’s arm. “Isn’t that mine?
Tell them that.”

Gen asked if the box belonged to Miss Coss.

“Nothing
belongs
to
Señorita Coss! She is a prisoner like the rest of you. This is not her home.
There is no special mail service that applies only to her. She does not receive
packages.” The tone of Alfredo’s voice made all the junior terrorists stand up
straight and look menacing, for many of them all this took was to put their
hands on their guns.

Messner sighed and shifted the weight in his
arms. “Then I will come back tomorrow.” He spoke in English now, he spoke to
Roxane and let Gen translate for the Generals.

He had not left, he had barely started to turn
away from the house when Roxane Coss closed her eyes and opened her mouth. In
retrospect, it was a risky thing to do, both from the perspective of General
Alfredo, who might have seen it as an act of insurrection, and from the care of
the instrument of the voice itself. She had not sung in two weeks, nor did she
go through a single scale to warm up. Roxane Coss, wearing Mrs. Iglesias’s
slacks and a white dress shirt belonging to the Vice President, stood in the
middle of the vast living room and began to sing “O Mio Babbino Caro” from
Puccini’s
Gianni Schicchi
. There should have been an
orchestra behind her but no one noticed its absence. No one would have said her
voice sounded better with an orchestra, or that it was better when the room was
immaculately clean and lit by candles. They did not notice the absence of
flowers or champagne, in fact, they knew now that flowers and champagne were
unnecessary embellishments. Had she really not been singing all along? The
sound was no more beautiful when her voice was limber and warm. Their eyes
clouded over with tears for so many reasons it would be impossible to list them
all. They cried for the beauty of the music, certainly, but also for the
failure of their plans. They were thinking of the last time they had heard her
sing and longed for the women who had been beside them then. All of the love
and the longing a body can contain
was
spun into not
more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest
notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had
lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear. When
she was finished, the people around her stood in stunned and shivering silence.
Messner leaned into the wall as if struck. He had not been invited to the
party. Unlike the others, he had never heard her sing before.

Roxane took a deep breath and rolled her
shoulders. “Tell him,” she said to Gen, “that’s it. Either he gives me that box
right now or you will not hear another note out of me or that piano for the duration
of this failed social experiment.”

“Really?”
Gen asked.

“I don’t bluff,” the soprano said.

So Gen related the message and all eyes turned
to General Alfredo. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to push down
the headache but it didn’t work. The music had confused him to the point of
senselessness. He could not hold on to his convictions. Now he was thinking of
his sister who had died of scarlet fever when he was just a boy. These hostages
were like terrible children, always wanting more for
themselves
.
They knew nothing of what it meant to suffer. He would have been glad to walk
out of the house at that moment and take whatever fate was waiting for him on
the other side of the wall, a lifetime in prison or a bullet in the head. With
so little sleep he was in no condition to make decisions. Every possible
conclusion seemed like madness. Alfredo turned and left the room, walking down
the long hallway towards the Vice President’s study. After a time the faint
voices of television news could be heard and General Benjamin told Messner to
get inside and sharply instructed his soldiers to check thoroughly the contents
of the box for anything that was not music. He tried to make it sound as if it
was his decision, that he was the one in charge, but even he could see this was
no longer true.

The soldiers took the box from Messner and
emptied it out on the floor. There were loose scores and bound books, hundreds
of pages covered in the alphabet of song. They sifted through them and
separated them, shaking out handfuls as if there might be money caught between
the pages.

“Amazing,” Messner said. “I watched the police
tear through them outside and now we have to go through it all again.

Kato went and knelt down beside the boys. Once
they had checked a piece of paper, Kato took it from them. He carefully
separated Rossini from Verdi, put Chopin with Chopin. Sometimes he would stop
and read a page as if it were a letter from home, his head swaying with the
timed beat. When he found something of particular interest he would take it to
Roxane and hand it to her, bowing from the waist. He did not ask for Gen to
translate. Everything she needed to know was there.