Bel Canto(36)

He sat down and tapped the tip of his pencil against his pad. Too ambitious. If he took on too many words he would wind up with nothing. Ten words of Spanish a day, ten nouns actually learned and then one verb, fully conjugated, was very likely as much as he could manage if he was to really remember each word and carry them over from one day to the next.

Garúa. Often when Mr. Hosokawa sat at the window he wondered about the people on the other side of the wall, the police and the military who were at this point more likely to use the phone than the bullhorn. Were they constantly damp? Did they sit inside their cars drinking coffee? The Generals sat in the cars, he would guess, while the boys with their guns, the foot soldiers, would stand at attention, the chilled rain running freely down the backs of their necks.

Those soldiers, they would not be unlike the children who patrolled the living room of the vice-presidential estate, though perhaps there was some minimum age requirement in the military. How young were these children exactly? The ones who appeared to be the oldest would then step beneath the bright light of a lamp and it was clear they weren’t older, only bigger. They loped around the room bumping into things, unaccustomed to the size they had so recently acquired. At least those boys had Adam’s apples, a sprinkling of new hairs mixed in with the angry pimples. The ones who were actually the youngest were terrifying in their youth. Their hair had all the weight and gloss of children’s hair. They had the smooth skin and small shoulders of children. They stretched their little hands around the butts of their rifles and tried to keep their faces blank. The hostages stared at the terrorists, and the longer they looked, the younger the terrorists became. Could these be the same men who burst into their party, the same marauding animals? They fell asleep on the floor in limp piles now, their mouths open, their arms twisted. They slept like teenagers. They slept with a kind of single-minded concentration that every adult in the room had forgotten decades before. Some of them liked being soldiers. They continued to carry their guns. They menaced the adults with the occasional shove and hateful glower. Then it seemed that armed children were a much more dangerous breed than armed adults. They were moody, irrational, anxious for confrontation. The others spent their time staring at the details of the house. They bounced on the beds and tried on the clothes in the dressers. They flushed the toilets again and again for the pleasure of watching the water swirl away. At first there had been a rule that they were not to address their prisoners but even that was growing slack for some of them. Sometimes now they spoke to the hostages, especially when the Generals were busy conferring. “Where are you from?” was the favorite question, though the answers rarely registered. Finally, Ruben Iglesias went to his study and brought back a large atlas so they could show them on maps, and when that didn’t seem to make things any clearer he sent a guard to his son’s room to bring down the globe on a stand, a pretty blue-and-green planet that spun easily on its stationary axis.

“Paris,” Simon Thibault said, pointing to his city. “France.”

Lothar Falken showed them Germany and Rasmus Nilson put his finger on Denmark. Akira Yamamoto, who was not interested in playing, turned away, and so Gen showed them Japan. Roxane Coss covered the whole of the United States beneath her palm and then tapped one nail on the dot that represented Chicago. The boys took the globe to the next group of people, who, even if they didn’t understand the question, knew the game. “This is Russia,” they said. “This is Italy.” “This is Argentina.” “This is Greece.”

“Where are you from?” the boy called Ishmael asked the Vice President. He thought of the Vice President as his own hostage because he had been the one to bring the ice from the kitchen when the Vice President was first injured. He still brought Ruben ice, sometimes three and four times a day, without ever being asked. It gave the Vice President relief as his cheek had become infected and persisted in its swelling.

“Here,” the Vice President said, pointing to the floor.

“Show me.” Ishmael held up the globe.

“Here.” Ruben tapped his foot on the carpet. “This is my house. I live in this city. I am from the same country you are from.”

Ishmael looked up at his friend. It had been easier to get the Russians to play. “Show me.”

So Ruben sat down on the floor with the boy and the globe and identified the host country, which in this case was flat and pink. “We live here.” Ishmael was the very smallest of all of them, so much a boy with a boy’s white teeth. Ruben wanted to pull the child into his lap, to keep him.

“You live there.”

“No, not just me,” Ruben said. Where were his own children? Where were they sleeping now? “Both of us.”

Ishmael sighed and pushed himself up from the floor, disappointed in his friend’s thickheadedness. “You don’t know how to play,” he said.

“I don’t know how to play,” Ruben said, looking at the deplorable condition of the boy’s boots. At any minute the right sole would fall off completely. “Now listen to me. Go upstairs to the biggest bedroom you can find and open all the doors until you see a closet full of lady’s dresses. In that closet there are a hundred pairs of shoes and if you look you’ll find some tennis shoes that might fit you. There could even be some boots.”

“I can’t wear lady’s shoes.”

Ruben shook his head. “The tennis shoes and boots are not for ladies. We only keep them there. I know, it makes no sense, but trust me.”