Bel Canto(11)
Cesar, the boy with the gun who waited in the hallway, did not rap on the door to hurry her along as was done with other guests. He leaned against the wall outside and imagined her bending down towards the gold faucet to rinse out her mouth. He pictured her washing her face and hands with the little shell-shaped soaps. He could still hear the songs that she sang in his head and very quietly he hummed the parts that he remembered to pass the time, Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore, non feci mai male ad anima viva! Strange how those sounds stayed so clearly in his mind. She was not quick in the bathroom, but what could you ask of such a woman? She was a masterpiece. Nothing about her could be rushed. When she finally came out her hand was slightly damp and thrilling-cool to the touch. Vissi d’arte, he wanted to say to her, but he didn’t know what it meant. When he returned her to her spot near the piano, the accompanist was gone, and then, in a moment, he was returned as well. He looked considerably worse than the other guests. The accompanist was a troubling moon shade of white and his eyes were rimmed in bloody red. He was held tightly on either side by Gilbert and Francisco, two of the bigger boys. They used both of their hands to drag him forward. At first it appeared that the accompanist had tried to make a run for a window or door and had been overpowered, but when they went to return him to his spot, his knees folded beneath him as if they were two sheets of notebook paper asked to support his entire body weight. He slipped to the floor in a crumpling faint. The terrorists gave Roxane a piece of advice or information in Spanish, but she did not speak Spanish.
She sat up a bit, unsure whether or not she was allowed to sit up, and pulled his legs out straight. He was a large man, not heavy, but tall, and she struggled against the unnatural arrangement of his limbs. At first she had thought he was playing possum. She had heard of hostages pretending to be blind to facilitate their release, but no one could pretend their skin into that color. His head wagged dully from side to side when she shook him. One of the waiters who was near her leaned over and tugged the accompanist’s arms down to his sides from where they had been pinned beneath him.
“What’s happened to you?” she whispered. A set of muddy boots walked past. She stretched out beside the accompanist and took his wrist between her fingers.
Finally, the accompanist stirred and sighed and turned to face her, blinking rapidly as if he were trying to rouse himself from a deep and wonderful sleep. “Nothing will happen to you,” he told Roxane Coss, but even with his bluish lips pressed against the side of her head, his voice was distant, exhausted.
“There will be a request for ransom,” Mr. Hosokawa told Gen. They were both watching Roxane and her accompanist now, thinking at several points that the accompanist was dead, but then he would shift or sigh. “It is Nansei’s policy to pay ransom, any ransom. They’ll pay it for both of us.” He could speak in his smallest voice, a sound too minimal to ever be called a whisper, and still Gen understood him perfectly. “They will pay it for her as well. It would only be fitting. She is here on my account.” And the accompanist, especially if he were sick, he should not be forced to stay. Mr. Hosokawa sighed. Actually, in some sense, everyone in the room was here on his account and he wondered what such a ransom could add up to. “I feel that I have brought this on us.”
“You are not holding a gun,” Gen said. The sound of their own Japanese spoken so softly it could not have been heard twelve centimeters away, comforted them. “It was the President they meant to take last night.”
“I wish they had him,” Mr. Hosokawa said.
On the other side of the room near the bottom edge of a gold brocade sofa, Simon and Edith Thibault held each other’s hand. They didn’t settle in with the rest of the French but kept to themselves. They looked very much a pair, nearly brother and sister, with their dark straight hair and blue eyes. They lay on the floor of the dinner party with so much dignity and ease they looked not like two people forced to the floor at gunpoint, but like two people who had simply grown tired of standing. While everyone else lay rigid and trembling, the Thibaults leaned in, her head on his shoulder, his cheek pressed to the crown of her head. He was thinking less of the terrorists and more of the remarkable fact that his wife’s hair smelled of lilacs.
In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women that often over the course of years he forgot about her. Entire days would pass when she never once crossed his mind. He did not stop to think what she might be doing or wonder if she was happy, at least not Edith by herself, Edith as his wife.
Then, in a wave of government promises made and retracted, they were sent to this country, which, between the two of them was always referred to as ce pays maudit, “this godforsaken country.” Both of them faced the appointment with dread and stoic practicality, but within a matter of days after their arrival a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. He would find her in the house, cutting fresh paper to line the shelves or lying across their bed on her stomach writing letters to their daughters who were attending university in Paris, and he was breathless. Had she always been like this, had he never known? Had he known and then somehow, carelessly, forgotten? In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain. Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.