Ann Patchett (48 page)
Authors: Bel Canto
It was early May and the tourist season had not
yet begun in
The old stone streets would soon be packed solid with college students holding
guidebooks, but for now it was completely empty. It felt like their own private
city, which was exactly what the bride wanted, a very quiet wedding in the
birthplace of Giacomo Puccini. A breeze came up and she held down her hat with
her hand.
“I’m happy,” Roxane said, and then she looked
at Gen and said it again. He kissed her.
“The restaurants won’t be open yet,” Edith
said. She scanned the square with one hand shading her eyes. It was like an
ancient, abandoned city, something brought up clean from an archaeological dig.
No part of
have a glass of wine to toast. Roxane and I can wait here. These streets
weren’t meant for heels.”
Thibault felt a small flush of panic, but just
as quickly he got hold of it. The square was too open, too quiet. He had felt
better inside the church. “A drink, absolutely.” He kissed her once near her
eye and then kissed her again on the lips. It was a wedding day, after all, a
wedding day in
“You don’t mind waiting?” Gen asked Roxane.
She smiled at him. “Married women don’t mind waiting.”
Edith Thibault took her hand and admired the
bright new ring. “They mind it terribly, but they would still like a glass of
wine.”
The two women sat down on the edge of a
fountain, Roxane with a bouquet of flowers in her lap, and watched as the men wandered
off down one of the narrow, identical streets. When they turned out of sight
Edith thought she had made a mistake. She and Roxane should have taken off
their shoes and gone along.
Gen and Thibault crossed two piazzas before
either of them said anything and their silence made the clap of their heels
echo up the high walls. “So you’ll live in
“It’s a beautiful city.”
“And your work?”
Because Gen’s
work had been Mr. Hosokawa.
“I mostly translate books now. It leaves my
schedule more flexible. I like to go to rehearsals with Roxane.”
“Yes, of course,” Thibault said absently, and
pushed his hands deep into his pockets as they walked. “I miss hearing her
sing.”
“You should
come
visit.”
A boy on a bright red moped sped past and then two
men with dachshunds came out of a bakery and walked towards them. The city
wasn’t deserted after all. “Will you miss
Gen shook his head. “It’s better for her here,
better for me, too, I’m sure. All opera singers should live in
pointed to the building on the corner. “There’s a bar that’s open.”
Thibault stopped. He would have missed it. He
hadn’t been paying attention. “Good, then we’ve done our job. Let’s go back for
our wives.”
But Gen didn’t turn. He stared at the bar for a
long time as if it were a place he had once lived years before.
Thibault asked him if something was wrong. He
froze up like that from time to time himself.
“I wanted to ask you,” Gen said, but it took
him another minute to find the words. “Carmen and Beatriz are never mentioned
in the papers. Everything I’ve read says there were fifty-nine men and one
woman. Is that the way they reported it in
Thibault said there had been no mention of the
girls.
Gen nodded. “I suppose it makes a better story that
way, fifty-nine and one.” He wore a white rose boutonniere on his wedding suit.
Edith had brought it for him in a cardboard box along with the bouquet of white
roses for Roxane to carry. She had pinned the flower on his lapel herself.
“I’ve called the papers and asked them to publish a correction, but no one is
interested. It’s almost as if they never existed.”
“Nothing you read in the papers is true,”
Thibault said. He was thinking about the first time they had to cook dinner,
all those chickens, and the girls and Ishmael coming in with the knives.
Still Gen wouldn’t look at him. He talked as if
he were telling the story to the bar. “I called Ruben, did I tell you that? I
called to tell him about the wedding. He said that he thought we should wait,
that we would be wrong to rush into anything. He was very kind about
it,
you know how Ruben would be. But we didn’t want to wait.
I love Roxane.”
“No,” Thibault said. “You did the right thing. Getting
married was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Though now he was
wondering about Carmen. Why had he never thought of it before? He could plainly
remember them together, time after time standing at the back of the room,
whispering, the way her face brightened when she turned it to Gen. Thibault did
not wish to see her face again.
“When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to
think well of the world,” Gen said. “This is a world in which someone could
have written such music, a world in which she can still sing that music with so
much compassion. That’s proof of something, isn’t it? I don’t think I would
last a day without that now.”
Even when Thibault closed his eyes and rubbed
them with his thumb and forefinger he could still see Carmen.
Her hair in a braid on the back of her slender neck.
She is
laughing. “She is a beautiful girl,” he said. They had found the bar. He needed
to get back to Edith now. He looped his arm around his friend’s shoulder and
guided him back in the direction of the Piazza San Martino. He felt himself
growing breathless, and he had to concentrate on the muscles in his legs to
keep from running. He was sure that Gen and Roxane had married for love, the
love of each other and the love of all the people they remembered.
When they turned the corner the street opened
into the bright square and there the wives were, still sitting on the edge of
the fountain. They were looking in the direction of the cathedral but then
Edith turned and when she saw him, the joy in her face! They stood up and
walked towards the two men, Edith with her dark hair shining, Roxane still in
her hat. Either one of them could have been the bride. Thibault was sure there
had never been such beautiful women, and the beautiful women came to them and
held out their arms.
My love and gratitude to my editor
Robert Jones.
Friendship and
Love: An Interview with Ann Patchett
From her home in
spoke by phone with
Sean Abbott
, a senior editor
at HarperCollins, on April 6, 2001.
SA:
As I read
Bel Canto
,
I imagined the mise en scène in two ways: I did the usual mental translation of
novel-into-film that I do when I read a realistic novel, but I also read it as
novel-into-opera. Of course, a story in which an opera singer is held hostage
by guerillas need not necessarily be seen as the basis for an opera, but
Bel Canto
is clearly that. Do you agree with this reading?
AP:
I do. I wanted somehow to get all of those
elements that I love about opera into a novel. I wanted to write a book that
would be like an opera in its structure, its grandeur, its musicality, its
melodrama.
SA:
Really — melodrama?
AP:
Writers are really discouraged from being
melodramatic. Certainly as a writing teacher I try to turn my students away
from melodrama. And yet opera is so wonderfully melodramatic. I wanted to write
a book that would be flat-out melodramatic in that operatic way.
SA:
I can’t remember a single melodramatic passage
in
Bel Canto
.
AP:
Well, it is and it isn’t a melodrama. It’s not
melodramatic in a bad soap-opera kind of way, I would hope, but it has all of
the elements of melodrama.
SA:
But everything is
earned
,
which is never the case in a flat-out melodrama, and not often the case in
plenty of operas, for that matter. It takes a long time for the principal
romances to develop in
Bel Canto
, and longer still
before the lovers are in bed together. Everything is totally believable on a
human scale, in terms of the progress of time and relationships.
AP:
Right. But I was thinking about a core concept
of melodrama when writing this book. That it is larger than life. Everything is
sort of worse than you can imagine and better than you can imagine.
SA:
Well, then, let’s talk a bit about the reality
behind this.
Because an obvious source of inspiration for
Bel Canto
was the guerilla seizure of the Japanese embassy
in
years ago.
That also stretched over several months, I believe. [On
December 17th, 1996, fourteen heavily armed members of the Tupac Amaru
Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) seized more than 400 people attending a
diplomatic reception at the residence of the Japanese ambassador in
Peruvian
special forces
launched a raid on the embassy
compound, killing all fourteen of the MRTA insurgents and freeing the remaining
seventy-two hostages.]
AP:
You know, nobody gets that.
SA:
Really?
AP:
Of all the people who’ve read the book, maybe
three people have said that to me. And I find it fascinating because I thought
that the response would be just the opposite: “How dare you co-opt this thing
that happened to these people!”
But nobody has a clue.
SA:
Well, that’s good old American obliviousness
for you, I guess. But to be fair, at one point in the book it’s observed that,
after a few weeks, life has returned to normal in the city where this “hostage
drama” is playing out. And that’s exactly what happened in reality, I think.
Certainly by the time the military went in and killed all the guerillas, the
response up here was, “Oh, right —
that
.”
AP:
Right.
SA:
How much research did you do into this actual
incident?
Did you visit Peru?
AP:
It’s sort of a funny story because it’s one of
those classic pointless novel-research junkets in one sense. I wanted to go to
owed it to the book, but I kept putting it off. The whole idea made me nervous.
I don’t speak Spanish; I knew almost nothing about
person, sort of pushed me into doing it. He said, “You need to go to
go.” The trip got to be a little complicated. Originally, I was going to set
the book not in
sickness and its affect on the characters. So we went up to
SA:
Did you experience altitude sickness?
AP:
Well, that’s just the thing — it goes away
after a few days, so it wasn’t going to work for the book. It wouldn’t have
been interesting, because the book takes place over such a long period of time.
So we got to
over to the Japanese embassy, and he said, “No, we don’t take people over there
on tours. We don’t like to talk about that.” Finally we convinced him to at
least drive us by that same night. We get to this very nice neighborhood, which
could be a very nice neighborhood anywhere, and of course there’s no embassy. The
building had been torn down. There are plans to build a memorial there
eventually, but for now it’s just an empty lot with a wall surrounding it. You
can’t see over the wall and there’s nothing to see anyway. So we pass the wall
and I say thank you very much, and we drive on. Karl says to me, “That’s it? We
came to
of the car. I’m sure I could have written the book without seeing it, but it
was good to be there in some indefinable way.
SA:
It was an empty space that you had to fill in,
repopulate,
bring
back to life.
AP:
Sure.
SA:
And actually being in