Ann Patchett (36 page)

“Shh,” General Benjamin said, and held his
finger to his lips. He pointed to the board. “It’s starting now.”

Messner leaned against the wall, suddenly
exhausted. Ishmael removed the tip of his finger from his pawn.

“Let me walk you out,” Roxane said to Messner.

“What?” General Benjamin said.

“She said she’ll take Mr. Messner to the door,”
Gen said.

General Benjamin did not care to go along. He
was interested in seeing if the boy could actually play.

“Tell me what they’re going to do,” Roxane said
as they walked down the hall. Gen had come along and so the three of them spoke
in English.

“I have no idea.”

“You have some idea,” Roxane said.

He looked at her. Every time he saw her he was
surprised all over again by how small she was. At night, in his memory, she was
towering, powerful. But standing beside her, she was small enough to slip
beneath a coat if he had been wearing one, small enough to sweep out of the
house quietly beneath one arm. He had the perfect trench coat at home in
Geneva
, it had been his
father’s and his father had been a bigger man. Messner wore it anyway out of a
combined sense of love and practicality and it billowed behind him as he
walked. “I am a farrier, a delivery service. I bring in the papers, take out
the papers,
make
sure there is plenty of butter for
the rolls. They don’t tell me anything.”

Roxane put her arm through his, not in a
flirtatious way, but in the manner of a heroine in a nineteenth-century English
novel going for a walk with a gentleman. Messner could feel the warmth of her
hand through his shirtsleeve. He did not want to leave her inside. “Tell me,”
she whispered. “I’m losing track of time. Some days I think this is where I
live, where I’m always going to live.
If I knew that for sure
then I could feel settled.
Do you understand that? If it’s going to be a
very long time, I want to know.”

To see her every day, to stand out on the
sidewalk in the mornings with the thronging crowd to hear her sing, wasn’t that
a remarkable thing? “I imagine,” Messner said quietly, “that it’s going to be a
very long time.”

As they walked, Gen trailed behind them like a
well-trained butler, both discreet and present if he was needed in any way. He
listened. Messner said it.
A very long
time.
He thought of Carmen, of all the languages there were for a
smart girl to learn. They might need a very long time.

When Ruben saw the three of them coming he
moved briskly up the hallway before any of the soldiers could cut him off. “Messner!”
he said. “It’s a miracle! I wait for you and then you manage to slip right by
me. How is our government? Have they replaced me yet?”

“Impossible,” Messner said. Roxane stepped
away, stepped back towards Gen, and Messner felt the air cooling all around
him.

“We need soap,” the Vice President said. “All
sorts of
soap,
bar soap, dishwashing soap, laundry
soap.”

Messner was distracted His conversation with
Roxane should have lasted longer. They didn’t need Gen. Messner often dreamed
in English. There was never a moment to be alone. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Ruben’s face darkened. “I’m not asking for
anything so complicated.”

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” he said, his voice
growing soft. Why all this sudden tenderness? Messner wanted to go back to
Switzerland
,
where the postman who never recognized him when they passed in the hallway
always put mail into the correct slot. He wanted to be unneeded, unknown. “Your
face has finally healed up.”

The Vice President, sensing the ridiculousness
of his anger, the burden on his friend, touched his own cheek. “I never thought
it would happen. It’s one hell of a scar, don’t you think?”

“It will make you a hero of the people,”
Messner said.

“I’ll say I got it from you,” Ruben said,
looking up into Messner’s pale eyes. “
A knife fight
in
a bar.”

Messner went to the door and held out his arms
and Beatriz and Jesus, the two guards on the door, worked him over until he
felt embarrassed by the persistence of Beatriz’s hands. It was one thing, the
way they shook him down when he came in. He could not understand why the whole
process needed to be repeated upon his exit. What was he smuggling out?

“They think you might be taking the soap,” the
Vice President said, as if he was reading his friend’s mind. “They wonder where
it has all gone to when they haven’t been using any of it themselves.”

“Get back to the sofa,” Jesus said, and laid
two directional fingers on the top of his gun. The Vice President was ready for
a nap anyway and went his way without further instruction. Messner went out the
door without saying good-bye.

*  *  *

All the time Roxane was thinking. She thought
about Messner and how it seemed to her he would have rather been a hostage
himself instead of bearing the burden of being the only person in the world who
was free to come and go. She thought about Schubert lieder, Puccini’s arias,
the performances she’d missed in
Argentina
and the performances she had missed by now in
New York
that had taken forever to negotiate
and had been so important to her, though she had not admitted it at the time. She
thought of what she would sing tomorrow in the living room, more Rossini? Mostly,
she thought about Mr. Hosokawa, and how she had grown so dependent on him. If
he hadn’t been there she thought she would have completely lost her mind in the
first week, but of course if he hadn’t been there she never would have come to
this country, she never would have even been asked. Her life would have gone on
like a train on schedule:
Argentina
,
New York
, a visit to
Chicago
,
then back to
Italy
.
Now she was completely stopped. She thought of Katsumi Hosokawa sitting by the
window, listening while she sang, and she wondered how it was possible to love
someone you couldn’t even speak to. She believed now there was a reason why all
of this had happened: his birthday and her invitation to be, in a sense, his
birthday present, why they had been stuck here all this time. How else would
they have met? How else would there have been any way to get to know someone
you couldn’t speak to, someone who lived on the other side of the world, unless
you were given an enormous amount of empty time to simply sit and wait
together? She would have to take care of
Carmen, that
was the first thing.

“You know Carmen,” Roxane said to Gen. They
were on their way back to see how the chess game was progressing but she
stopped him in the middle of the hall when they were far from any door.

“Carmen?”

“I know you know who she is, but you know her a
little, too, don’t know? I’ve seen the two of you speaking.”

“Of course.”
Gen felt a flush rising up in his
chest and he willed it not to go any farther, as if one could will such a
thing.

But Roxane wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes
seemed slightly out of focus, like she was tired. It was only noon but she was
often tired after she sang in the morning. The guards would let her go upstairs
alone to go back to sleep. If Carmen wasn’t on watch sometimes she would find
her and take her wrist and Carmen would follow her. It was so much easier to
sleep when she was there. Carmen was probably twenty years younger than she
was, but there was something about her, something that settled Roxane down. “She’s
a sweet girl. She brings me breakfast in the morning. Sometimes I open the door
to my room at night and she’s sleeping in the hall,” she said. “Not all the
time.”

Not all the time. Not when she was with him.

Roxane looked back at him and smiled a little. “Poor
Gen, you’re always in the middle of everything. Anyone who has a secret has to
take it through you.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty I miss.”

“I need you to do me a favor, just like
everybody else. I need you to do something.” Because if Messner was right, if
it was still going to be a very long time that they were held hostage, then she
deserved to have this. And if, at the end of that long time, they were killed
anyway, because that was always the talk, that the military would shoot them to
pin it on the terrorists, or that the terrorists would kill them in a moment of
desperation (though she found this harder to believe), then she deserved it all
the more. And if the third scenario were true, that they would be released
quickly and unharmed, that they all would go back to their regular lives and
put this behind them, then she would deserve it most of all, because certainly
then she would not see Katsumi Hosokawa again. “Find Carmen tonight and tell
her to sleep somewhere else. Tell her she shouldn’t come up with breakfast in
the morning. You’d do that for me?”

Gen nodded.

But that wasn’t asking for quite enough. That
wasn’t asking for everything because she had no way of telling Mr. Hosokawa he
should come to her tonight. She wanted to ask him to come to her room but there
was only one way of doing that, to ask Gen to go to him and say it in Japanese,
and what did she mean to say, exactly? That she meant for him to stay the
night? And Gen would have to ask Carmen to find a way to get Mr. Hosokawa
upstairs, and what if they were found out, what would happen to Mr. Hosokawa
then, and Carmen? It used to be if you met someone and you wanted to see them,
maybe you went out to dinner, had a drink. She leaned back against the wall.
Two boys with guns walked by but they never teased or poked when Roxane was
there. Once they had passed, she took a deep breath and told Gen everything she
wanted. He did not tell her this was all insanity. He listened to her as if she
wasn’t asking for anything unusual at all, nodding while she spoke. Maybe a
translator was not unlike a doctor, a lawyer, a priest even. They must have
some code of ethics that prevented them from gossiping. And even if she wasn’t
positive then of his loyalty to her, she knew he would do everything possible
to protect Mr. Hosokawa.

Ruben Iglesias went into what he still thought
of as the guest room, but was now the Generals’ office, in order to empty the
wastebaskets. He was going from room to room with a large green trash bag,
taking not only what had been thrown away in the cans but what was on the floor
as well: pop bottles, banana peels, the bits of the newspaper which had been
edited out. Ruben surreptitiously deposited those into his pockets to read late
at night with a flashlight. Mr. Hosokawa and Ishmael were playing chess and he
stood in the door for a minute to watch. He was very proud of Ishmael, who was
so much brighter than the other boys. Ruben had bought that set to teach the
game to his son, Marco, but he still felt the boy was too young to learn. General
Benjamin was sitting on the couch and after a while he looked up at Ruben. The
sight of his eye, so badly infected, took Ruben’s breath away.

“That Ishmael, he’s a fast learner,” General
Benjamin said. “Nobody taught him the game, you know. He just picked it up from
watching.” The boy’s accomplishment had put him in a good mood. It reminded him
of when he used to be a schoolteacher.

“Come into the hall for a moment,” Ruben said
to him quietly. “I must speak to you about something.”

“Then speak to me here.”

Ruben cast his eyes towards the boy, indicating
that this was a private matter between men. Benjamin sighed and pushed himself
off the couch. “Everyone has a problem,” he said.

Outside the doorway, Ruben put down his bag of
trash. He did not like to speak to the Generals. His first encounter with them
had set a precedent which he followed, but no decent man could pretend not to
notice such a thing.

“What is it you need?” Benjamin
said,
his voice heavy.

“What you need,” Ruben said. He reached into
his pocket and took out a bottle of pills with his name on them.
“Antibiotics.
Look, they gave me more than I would ever
need. They stopped the infection in my face.”

“Good for you,” General Benjamin said.

“And you. There are plenty here. Take them. You
be will surprised by the difference they make.”

“You are a doctor?”

“You don’t need to be a doctor to see an
infection. I’m telling you.”

Benjamin smiled at him. “How do I know you
don’t mean to poison me, little Vice President?”

“Yes, yes.” Ruben sighed. “I mean to poison
you. I mean for us to die together.” He opened the bottle and shook one of the
pills into his mouth and after making sure to show Benjamin how it sat there on
his tongue, he swallowed it. Then he handed the bottle over to the General. “I
will not ask you what you mean to do with them, but there, they are yours.”

After that, Benjamin returned to the chess game
and Ruben picked up the trash and headed on to the next room in the hall.

It was Saturday, but since all the days were
essentially the same, the only two people who gave this any thought at all were
Father Arguedas, who heard confession on Saturday and planned for his Sunday
mass, and Beatriz, who found the weekends to be an unbearable wasteland because
the program she liked,
The Story of Maria,
was only
on Monday through Friday.