Ann Patchett (45 page)

Recently life had improved for all the
hostages, not just those who were in love. Once the front door had been opened,
it opened regularly. Every day they went outside and stood in the hot sun. Lothar
Falken encouraged other men to take up running. He led them through a series of
exercises every day and then they went in a pack around and around the house. The
soldiers played soccer with a ball they had found in the basement and some days
there was an actual game, the terrorists against the hostages, though the
terrorists were so much younger and trained into better shape that they almost
always won.

When Messner came now he often found
everyone in the yard.
The priest got up from his digging and waved.

“How is the world?” Father Arguedas said to
him.

“Impatient,” Messner said. His Spanish kept
improving, but still he asked for Gen.

Father Arguedas pointed to the sprawled-out
figure beneath a tree.
“Sleeping.
It is a terrible
thing the way they work him so hard.
And you.
They
work you too hard as well. If you don’t mind my saying, you look tired.”

It was true that recently Messner had lost the
sangfroid that everyone had found so reassuring in the beginning. He had aged
ten years in the four and a half months they had been living here, and while
everyone else seemed to mind it less and less, Messner clearly minded it more. “All
this sunlight is no good for me,” Messner said. “All Swiss citizens were meant
to live in the shade.”

“It’s very warm,” the priest said. “But the
plants do wonderfully, rain, sun,
drought
, there’s no
holding them back.”

“I won’t keep you from your work.” Messner
patted the priest on the shoulder, remembering how they had tried several times
to let him go and how the priest would have none of it. He wondered if, in the
end, Father Arguedas would be sorry to have stayed.
Probably
not.
Regret didn’t seem to be in his nature the way it was in Messner’s.

Paco and Ranato ran up from the side lawn,
which they now called the playing field, and made an extremely halfhearted
effort to frisk him that consisted of nothing more than a few brisk slaps near
his pockets. Then they ran back to join the game, which had been stopped for
this purpose.

“Gen,” Messner said, and tapped the sleeping
body on the shoulder with the toe of his shoe. “For God’s sake, get up.”

Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily
drugged. His mouth was open and slack and his arms flung straight out to the
side. A small, rippling snore came up from his throat.

“Hey, translator.”
He leaned over and picked up one of
Gen’s eyelids between his thumb and forefinger. Gen shook him off and opened
his eyes slowly.

“You speak Spanish,” Gen said thickly. “You
have from the beginning. Now leave me alone.” He rolled over on his side and
pulled his knees up to his chest.

“I don’t speak Spanish. I don’t speak anything.
Get up.” Messner thought he felt a shaking in the earth. Surely Gen must feel
it, lying with his cheek pressed down to the grass. Was it his imagination that
the earth might actually cave in beneath them? How much did these engineers
know? Who’s to say that the ground wouldn’t swallow them up, opera diva and
common criminal in the same fatal
bite.
Messner got
down on his knees. He pressed his palms to the grass and when he had decided
that he was only experiencing a temporary madness, he shook Gen again. “Listen
to me,” he said in French. “We have to talk them into surrendering.
Today.
This can’t go on. Do you understand me?”

Gen rolled onto his back, stretched like a cat,
and then folded his arms beneath his head. “And then we’ll talk the trees into
growing blue feathers. Haven’t you paid attention at all, Messner? They aren’t
going to be talked into anything.
Especially not by the likes
of us.”

The likes of us.
Messner wondered if Gen was
implying that he had not done his job well enough. Four and a half months
living in a hotel room half the world away from
Geneva
when all he had come here for in the
first place was a holiday. Both parties were intractable and what the party
inside this wall didn’t understand was that the government was always
intractable, no matter what the country, what the circumstances. The government
did not give in, and when they said they were giving in they were lying, every
time, you could count on it. As Messner saw it, it was his job not to hammer
out a compromise but merely to steer them clear of a tragedy. There wasn’t much
time left for this work. Despite the rhythmic thud of the runners and the boys
playing soccer, he could definitely feel something happening in the ground.

The sign of the Red Cross, like the very sign
of
Switzerland
,
stood for peaceful neutrality. Messner had stopped wearing his armband a long
time ago but he didn’t believe in it any less. Members of the Red Cross brought
food and medicine, sometimes they would ferry papers for arbitration, but they
were not moles. They did not spy. Joachim Messner would have no more told the
terrorists what the military had planned than he would tell the military what
was happening on the other side of the wall.

“Get up,” he said again.

Sluggishly, Gen sat up and raised an arm to
Messner to be pulled to his feet. Was this a picnic? Had they been drinking so
early? No one seemed to be suffering in the least. In fact they all looked
pink-cheeked and energetic. “The Generals are probably still over at the
playing field,” Gen said. “They might be in the game.”

“You have to help me,” Messner said.

Gen pushed his hair back into some semblance of
order with his fingers and then, finally awake, threw his arm across his
friend’s shoulder. “When have I not helped you?”

The Generals were not playing ball but they
were sitting at the edge of the field in three wrought-iron chairs pulled over
from the patio. General Alfredo was shouting instructions at the players,
General Hector was watching with intent silence, and General Benjamin had his
face tilted up to make an even plane for the sun. All three had their feet
buried in the high grass.

Gilbert kicked a beautiful shot and Gen waited
until the play was over to announce their guest. “Sir,” he said, meaning
whoever looked up. “Messner is here.”

“Another day,” General Hector said. The second
arm of his glasses had broken off that morning and now he held them up to his
face like a pince-nez.

“I need to speak to you,” Messner said. If his
voice had taken on some new urgency none of them heard it over the whooping and
shouting of the boys in the game.

“Permission to speak,” General Hector said. General
Alfredo hadn’t taken his eyes off the game and General Benjamin hadn’t opened
his eyes at all.

“I need to speak to you inside. We need to talk
about negotiations.”

Then General Alfredo turned his head in
Messner’s direction. “They are ready to negotiate?”

“Your negotiations.”

General Hector waved his hand at Messner as if
he had never been so bored in all his life. “You’re taking up our time.” He
turned his attention back to the game and called out, “Francisco!
The ball!”

“Listen to me with seriousness,” Messner said
quietly in French.
“One time.
I have done a great deal
for you. I have brought in your food, your cigarettes. I have carried your
messages. I am asking that you sit down with me now and talk.” Even in the
bright sun Messner’s face was drained of color. Gen looked at him and then he
translated the message, trying to keep Messner’s tone of voice. The two of them
stood there but the Generals did not look up again. Usually this was Messner’s
sign to go but he stood there with his arms folded across his chest and waited.

“Enough?” Gen whispered in English, but Messner
didn’t look at him. They waited for more than half an hour.

Finally, General Benjamin opened his eyes. “All
right,” he said, his voice as tired as Messner’s. “We’ll go to my office.”

Cesar, who had been so fearless when he sang
from
Tosca
in front of the full house, really did
prefer to practice in the afternoons when everyone else was outside, especially
since practicing so often meant scales, which he found degrading. And he and
Roxane Coss were never alone, there was no such thing as alone. Kato was there
to play the piano and Mr. Hosokawa was there because he was always there. Today,
Ishmael, who was regularly humiliated in soccer, had set up the chess set on a
low table near the piano and played with Mr. Hosokawa. He and Cesar both had
guns because if they both chose to stay in the house then they were the default
house guards. If Cesar complained about other people staying to listen and if
there was someone there to translate from Spanish to English and back into
Spanish again (and several people could do this), Roxane Coss would tell him
that singing was intended to be heard by other people and he might as well get
used to it. He wanted to learn songs, arias, entire operas, but mostly she made
him sing scales and nonsense lines. She made him roar and pucker his lips and
hold his breath until he had to sit down quickly and put his head between his
knees. He would have invited everyone in if she had let him sing a song with
the piano, but that, she said, was something to be earned.

“There’s a boy who sings now?” Messner asked.
“Is that Cesar?” He stopped in the living room to listen and General Benjamin
and Gen stopped with him. Cesar’s jacket was too short in the sleeves and his
wrists hung out like broomsticks with hands loosely attached.

General Benjamin was clearly proud of the boy. “He’s
been singing for weeks now. You’ve simply come at the wrong time. Cesar is
always singing. Señorita Coss says he has the potential to be truly great, as
she is great.”

“Remember your breath,” Roxane said, and
inhaled deeply to show Cesar what she meant.

Cesar stumbled over a note, suddenly nervous to
see the General there.

“Ask her how he’s doing,” Benjamin said to
Gen
.

Roxane put her hand on Kato’s shoulder and he
lifted his fingers from the keys as if she had touched an off switch. Cesar
sang three more notes and then stopped when he realized the music was gone. “We’ve
only been at this a very short time, but I think he has enormous potential.”

“Have him sing his song for Messner,” General
Benjamin said. “Messner is in need of a song today.”

Roxane Coss agreed. “Listen to this,” she said.
“We’ve been working on this.”

She sang a few words under her breath so that
Cesar knew what he was to sing. He could not read or write in Spanish and
certainly he didn’t understand Italian, but his ability to memorize and repeat
a sound, to repeat it with such pathos the listener could only imagine he
understood what he was saying completely, was uncanny. Once she had prompted
Cesar, Kato began to play the opening of Bellini’s “Malinconia, Ninfa Gentile,”
the first, short song from
Sei Ariette
. Gen
recognized the music. He had heard it floating through the windows in the
afternoons. The boy closed his eyes and then looked towards the ceiling,
Oh, Melancholy, you graceful nymph, I devote my life to you
.
When he forgot a line, Roxane Coss sang it in a surprising tenor voice:
I asked the Gods for hills and springs; they listened to me at
last
. Then Cesar repeated the line. It was not unlike watching a calf
rise up for the first time on spindly legs, at the same time awkward and
beautiful. With every step he learned the business of walking, with every note
he sang with more assurance. It was a very short song, finished almost as soon
as it was started. General Benjamin clapped and Messner whistled.

“Don’t praise him too much,” Roxane said. “He’ll
be ruined.”

Cesar, his face flushed from pride or lack of
breath, bowed his head to them.

“Well, you can’t tell it from looking at him,”
General Benjamin said as he walked down the back hallway to his office with
Messner and Gen. It was true. The only thing more crooked than Cesar’s teeth
was Cesar’s nose. “It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have
done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

“I know I will never sing,” Messner said.

“I know that much as well.” General Benjamin
flipped the light on in the room and the three men sat down.

“I want to tell you that soon now they will not
let me come here anymore,” Messner said.

Gen was startled.
Life
without Messner?

“You are losing your job,” the General said.

“The government feels that they’ve put enough
effort into negotiations.”

“I have seen no effort at all. They have made
us no reasonable offers.”

“I am telling you this as someone who likes
you,” Messner said. “I will not pretend that we are friends, but I want what is
best for everyone here. Give this up. Do it today. Walk outside where everyone
can see you and surrender.” Messner knew this was not convincing and still he
had no idea how to make it so. In his confusion he wandered back and forth
between the languages he knew: German, which he had spoken as a boy at home;
French, which he had spoken in school; English, which he had spoken for the
four years he lived in Canada when he was a young man; and Spanish, which he
knew better every day. Gen tried his best to keep up with the patchwork, but
with every sentence he had to stop and think. It was Messner’s inability to
stay with one country that frightened Gen more than what he was saying. There
was no time to concentrate on what he was saying.