Ann Patchett (42 page)

Carmen, happy, grateful, bowed to
him.

He said to her sharply, “Salute!”

Carmen saluted him, her face as serious as any
soldier’s, and then skated away.

“Cesar’s in the tree,” Carmen said. She stood
between Mr. Hosokawa and Mr. Kato. She stood across from Gen, where she would
not be tempted to hold on to his sleeve in front of everyone. She loved the
sound of his voice, translating.

“Won’t he come in?” Roxane said. Her blue eyes
were shadowed in purple. Never had Carmen seen her look so tired, except at the
very beginning.

“Oh, he’ll come in. He’s just embarrassed. He
thinks he made a fool of himself. He thinks you think he’s an idiot for trying
to sing.” She looked at Roxane, her friend. “I told him you didn’t think that
at all.”

Gen translated her words into English and
Japanese. Both the men and Roxane Coss were nodding. Carmen’s words translated
into Japanese. They had such a beautiful sound.

“Would you ask the General if I could go
outside?” Roxane said to Carmen. “Do you think it would be possible?”

Carmen listened. She was included. It was
thought that she would be the best person to make the request. Her opinion was
sought out. It was more than she could believe, of all the people in the room
with all their money and education and talent, they thought that she was the
one. She wanted to say to Roxane Coss in her most polite voice, No, they will
never let you outside, but I am very pleased that you asked me. Not that she
had any idea how to say that in English. The Generals were ignoring her
conversation, the Generals Hector and Alfredo had left the room altogether,
none of the boys cared, but Beatriz was listening. Carmen could see her out of
the corner of one eye. She wanted to trust Beatriz. She had trusted her. And
anyway, she wasn’t doing anything wrong now. “Tell her I would be glad to ask
for her,” she said to Gen.
She
was aware of her
posture and she tried to hold her back straight like Roxane Coss. She tried to
train her shoulders to go back though the effect was mostly lost inside the
dark green shirt that hung over her like a piece of tarp.

They thanked her in English and Japanese and
then in Spanish. Gen was proud of her, she could tell. Gen, if circumstances allowed,
would have put his hand on her shoulder and told her so in front of his
friends.

There was no way Roxane Coss would be allowed
to go outside to speak to Cesar in the tree. Keeping the hostages inside was a
top priority. Certainly, no one knew that better than Carmen, who had broken
this important rule just last night. But it wasn’t her place to refuse the
request. No one had asked Carmen for an answer, they had only asked her to
approach the General with the question. In truth, she would have rather not
done it. What was the point in asking for something that you knew would be
denied? Carmen wondered if she could ask the General something else, say, if he
wanted a fresh cup of coffee, then everyone would see her asking without being
able to hear her. She could come back with the news that they had been turned
down. But she didn’t want to lie to Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa, people who
valued her opinion and treated her as a friend, and certainly she couldn’t lie
to Gen. She would have to ask because she said she would. It would have been
better if she could have waited an hour or two. The generals did not like being
approached when they had so recently been bothered. But there wasn’t an hour or
two to wait. Cesar would be long out of the tree by then. Carmen had sat in
that tree herself and she knew it to be both lovely and uncomfortable. The
amount of time anyone could sulk while sitting in a tree was limited, and the
point was that Roxane Coss wanted the opportunity to coax him down. There was
no sense trying to explain the General’s inner workings to her dearest
hostages, any more than she would bother to try and explain Roxane Coss’s
motives to General Benjamin, who certainly would not have cared. All she could
do was
ask
. Carmen smiled and left her group, crossed
back over the room where General Benjamin was sitting in a wing-backed chair
near the empty fireplace. He was reading papers. She couldn’t tell what the
papers were, although she saw that they were written in Spanish. She could read
a little now but not
so
well as that. His eyebrows
were pointed down towards the bridge of his nose and his eyes were squinting. His
shingles ran across the side of his face and into his eye like a slash of
molten lava but they no longer appeared to be so infected. He lifted a finger
and touched them once gently,
then
he winced and went
back to his reading. Truly, Carmen knew better than to disturb him.

“Sir?” she whispered.

They had been speaking not five minutes before
but now he looked at her as if he was confused. His eyes were red and watery,
especially his left eye, which was rimmed in blisters no bigger than pinheads.

Carmen waited for him to speak to her but he
said nothing. It was up to her to start the conversation. “Forgive me for
bothering you again, General, but Roxane Coss asked me to ask you . . .” She
paused, thinking surely he would cut her off, tell her to go away, but he
didn’t. He did nothing. Had he turned away and gone back to reading his papers,
she would have understood that. She would have known how to act if he shouted
at her, but General Benjamin only stared. She took in her breath, straightened
up her shoulders, and started again. “Roxane Coss would like to go outside to
speak to Cesar.
Cesar in the tree?
She wants to tell
him he did well.” Again she waited but nothing happened. “I think the
translator would have to go, too, if Cesar was to understand what she was
saying. We could send some guards out with them. I could get my gun.” She
stopped and waited patiently for him to deny the request. She had never
considered any other possibility, but he didn’t say anything, and for a minute
he closed his eyes so as not to look at her anymore. She glanced down at the
papers he was holding and felt a chill pass through her thin chest. She was
suddenly afraid that the General had received bad news, that there was
something in those papers that would ruin her happiness.

“General Benjamin,” she said, leaning over so
that only he could hear her. “Sir, are things all right?” Her hair fell loose
from behind one ear and it brushed against his shoulder. It smelled like
lemons. Roxane had washed Carmen’s hair in some of the lemon shampoo Messner
had had flown in for her all the way from
Italy
.

The smell of lemons.
He is a boy in the city, a quarter
lemon clenched between his teeth as he runs to school, the bright lemon yellow
of the peel showing between his open lips, the impossible tartness, the utter
clarity of taste that he was addicted to. His brother, Luis, is with him,
running along beside him, a little boy. He is younger than Benjamin and so he
is Benjamin’s responsibility. He, too, has a lemon in his mouth and they look
at one another and begin to laugh so hard they have to raise their hands to
their mouths to catch the now empty rinds. The smell of lemons snaps him back.
Carmen wanted something else. He was still in the living room. Why was it only
now that he understood that things would end badly? It didn’t seem strange that
he knew it, but that he hadn’t known it from the very start, that he hadn’t turned
his troops around and run them straight back into the air vents the second it
was established that President Masuda was not at the party. That mistake was
almost impossible to comprehend now. It was all the fault of hope. Hope was a
murderer.

“She wants to go outside?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Cesar is still out there?”

“I believe so, sir.”

General Benjamin nodded his head. “The weather
is good now.” He looked out the window for a long time to make sure that what
he was saying to her was true. “Take them all outside. Tell Hector and Alfredo.
Put some soldiers along the wall.” He looked at Carmen. If he had known
anything he would have paid more attention to her. “We need some air in here,
don’t you think? Get some sun on them.”

“Everyone, sir?
Do you mean Miss Coss and the
translator?”

“I mean all of them.” He swept a hand across
the room. “Get them out of here.”

That was how it happened that on the very day
after Carmen had taken Gen
outside,
the rest of the
party was allowed to go as well. She did not want to be the one to tell the
Generals Hector and Alfredo, but she did so as a direct order. She stood at the
door of the study still stunned by the news.
Outside.
The Generals were watching soccer. They sat on the edge of the sofa, their
hands gripping their knees, yelling at the television set. There was an
abandoned card game half played on the table in front of them, two automatic
pistols sticking out from between the cushions. When she was able to get their
attention, she did not tell them that she had asked that anyone be allowed to
go outside, or that Roxane Coss wished to speak to Cesar in the tree, she only
said that General Benjamin had made a decision and she was instructed to inform
them of that decision. She used as few words as was possible.

“Outside!”
General Alfredo said.
“Insanity!
How are we supposed to control them outside?” He
gesticulated with the hand that was short two fingers, a sight that always
filled Carmen with pity.

“What is there to control?” General Hector
said, stretching his arms above his head.
“As if they would
go anywhere now.”

It was a surprise. Hector was usually against
every idea. If he had disagreed strongly they could have probably made General
Benjamin change his mind, but the sun was pouring through every window and
there was a staleness that had grown up around them. Why not open the doors?
Why not today if every day was exactly the same? They went into the living room
and the three Generals called the troops together and told them to get their
guns and load them. Even after so many months of
lying
on couches the boys, along with Beatriz and Carmen, could still move quickly. They
didn’t know why they were loading their guns, they didn’t ask. They obeyed
their orders, and in doing so their eyes took on
a certain
coldness. General Benjamin could not help but think,
If
I told them to kill everyone now, they would still do it. They would do what I
told them to. The idea of taking everyone outside was a good one. It would put
the soldiers to work. It would remind the hostages of both his authority and
his benevolence. It was time to get out of the house.

Roxane Coss had Mr. Hosokawa’s arm to lean on,
but Gen was left alone to watch his lover running across the room with the
soldiers, her rifle held high against her chest.

“I do not understand this,” Mr. Hosokawa
whispered. He could feel Roxane trembling beside him and he pressed her hand
between his own. It was as if a switch had been thrown and the people they knew
were suddenly people they had never seen before.

“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Roxane
whispered to Gen. “What’s happened?”

Of course he could understand what they were
saying. They were shouting it, after all.
Load your
weapons. Prepare formations.
But there was no sense in telling Roxane
that. The other hostages were standing with them now. They pushed together like
sheep in an open field of hard rain. Thirty-nine men and one woman, the sudden
nervousness rising off of them like steam.

Then General Benjamin stepped forward and said,
“Traductor!”

Mr. Hosokawa touched the translator’s arm as he
stepped forward. Gen wished he was a brave man. Even though Carmen wasn’t with
them now, he wished she could see him as brave.

“I have decided that everyone should go
outside,” General Benjamin said. “Tell the people they are to go outside now.”

But Gen didn’t translate. That was no longer
his profession. Instead he asked, “For what purpose?” If there was to be an
execution he would not be the one to lead these sheep out to be lined up
against the wall. It wasn’t enough to translate what was
said,
you had to know the truth.

“What purpose?” General Benjamin said. He
stepped towards Gen, so close that Gen could see red lines half the thickness
of sewing threads webbing across his face. “I was told Roxane Coss requested to
go outside.”

“And you’re letting everyone out?”

“You object to this?” General Benjamin was
about to change his mind. What had he ever shown these people but decency and
now they stared him down like a murderer? “You think I will take you outside
and shoot the lot of you?”

“The guns—” Gen had made a mistake. He could
see that.

“Protection,” the General said, his teeth
clamped together.

Gen turned away from him and faced the people
he thought of as his people. He watched their faces soften at the sound of his
voice. “We are going outside,” Gen said in English, in Japanese, in Russian,
Italian,
French
. “We are going outside,” he said in
Spanish and Danish. Only four words but in every language he was able to convey
that they would not be shot, this was not a trick. The group laughed and sighed
and shook away from one another. The priest crossed himself quickly in
gratitude for an answered prayer. Ishmael went and opened the door and hostages
filed out into the light.