Bel Canto(34)

“Including him?” Messner tipped his head toward the Vice President, who, lost inside the intricate world of his own fever, paid no attention to what was being said.

“Him we keep,” General Alfredo said shortly. “We didn’t get the President. We have to have something.”

*

There was another list, aside from The Demands (money, prisoners released, a plane, transportation to the plane, etc. . . .) This was the list that slowed things down, the list of Small and Immediate Needs. The details were not interesting, certain things had to come in before the excess of hostages could go out: pillows (58), blankets (58), toothbrushes (58), fruit (mangoes, bananas), cigarettes (20 cartons filtered, 20 cartons unfiltered), bags of candy (all types, excluding licorice), bars of chocolate, sticks of butter, newspapers, a heating pad, the list went on and on. Inside, they imagined the people on the outside being dispatched on a great scavenger hunt, trying to come up with what was needed in the middle of the night. People would be banging on glass doors, waking up shopkeepers who would be forced to flick on the bright overhead lights. No one wanted to wait until morning and risk the possibility of someone changing his mind.

When all the remaining guests were herded together into the dining room to hear the hostage list and release list, there was a great sense of excitement. It was a cakewalk, a game of musical chairs in which people were randomly rewarded or punished and they were each one glad to take their chance at the wheel, even those like Mr. Hosokawa and Simon Thibault, who must have known they didn’t have a chance of going home, stood with the rest of the men, their hearts beating wildly. The men all thought that Roxane Coss was sure to be let go now, the idea of keeping one woman would become cumbersome and embarrassing. They would miss her, they were missing her already, but everyone wanted to see her go.

They called through the names and told them to go to either the left or the right, and while they didn’t say which side was to be released, it was clear enough. One could almost tell from the cut of the tuxedo who would be staying. A great wall of darkness came from those who could now reasonably assume their fate and it pulled them away from the lucky hilarity of the others. On one side, men deemed less important were going back to their wives, would sleep in the familiar sheets of their own beds, would be greeted by children and dogs, the wet and reckless affection of their unconditional love. But thirty-nine men and one woman on the other side were just beginning to understand that they were digging in, that this was the house where they lived now, that they had been kidnapped.





four

father Arguedas explained to Gen, who explained to Mr. Hosokawa, that what they were looking at in the hours they spent staring out the window was called garúa, which was more than mist and less than drizzle and hung woolly and gray over the city in which they were now compelled to stay. Not that they could see the city, they could not see anything. They could have been in London or Paris or New York or Tokyo. They could have been looking at a field of blue-tipped grass or a gridlock of traffic. They couldn’t see. No defining hints of culture or local color. They could have been anyplace where the weather was capable of staying bad for indeterminate amounts of time. From time to time, instructions came blasting over the wall, but even that seemed to be diminishing, as if the voices couldn’t always permeate the fog. The garúa maintained a dull, irregular presence from April through November and Father Arguedas said to take heart since October was very nearly over and then the sun would return. The young priest smiled at them. He was almost handsome until he smiled, but his smile was too big and his teeth turned and crossed at awkward angles, making his appearance suddenly loopy. Despite the circumstances of their internment, Father Arguedas remained sanguine and found cause to smile often. He did not seem to be a hostage, but someone hired to make the hostages feel better. It was a job he carried out with great earnestness. He opened his arms and put one hand on Mr. Hosokawa’s shoulder and the other on Gen’s, then he dipped his head down slightly and closed his eyes. It might have been to pray but if it was he did not force the others to join him. “Take heart,” he said again before pressing on in his rounds.

“A good boy,” Mr. Hosokawa said, and Gen nodded and both returned to looking out the window. The priest need not have been concerned with how they felt about the weather. They had no issue with the weather. The garúa made sense, while atmospheric clarity would not. When one looked out the window now it was impossible to see as far as the wall which cut off the garden from the street. It was difficult to make out the shapes of the trees, to tell a tree from a shrub. It made the daylight seem like dusk in much the same way the floodlights that had been set up on the other side of the wall almost made night into day, the kind of false, electric day of an evening baseball game. In short, when one looked out the window during the garúa all one really saw was the garúa itself, not day or night or season or place. The day no longer progressed in its normal, linear fashion but instead every hour circled back to its beginning, every moment was lived over and over again. Time, in the manner in which they had all understood it, was over.

So to rejoin the story a week after Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday party ended seems as good a place as any. That first week was only details anyway, the tedium of learning a new life. Things were very strict in the beginning. Guns were pointed, commands were given and obeyed, people slept in rows on the living-room carpet and asked for permission in the most personal of matters. And then, very slowly, the details began to fall away. People stood on their own. They brushed their teeth without asking, had a conversation that was not interrupted. Eventually they went to the kitchen and made a sandwich when they were hungry, using the backs of spoons to spread the butter onto bread because all of the knives had been confiscated. The Generals had a peculiar fondness for Joachim Messner (even if they did not demonstrate this fondness to him) and insisted that not only was he in charge of negotiations but that he must be the one to bring all supplies to the house, to lug every box alone through the gate and up the endless walkway. So it was Messner, his vacation long since over, who brought their bread and butter to the door.