Bel Canto(39)

“I should have known she was a girl,” Ruben said to Oscar Mendoza, the contractor who lived only a few miles away.

Oscar shrugged. “I have five daughters at home. I never saw a girl in this room.” He stopped to reconsider his point and then leaned in toward the Vice President. “I just saw one girl in this room, you know? One woman. There can only be one woman in this room.” He tilted his head meaningfully towards the far side of the room where Roxane Coss sat.

Ruben nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

“I am thinking there will never be a better opportunity than this to tell her I love her.” Oscar rubbed his hand over his chin. “I don’t necessarily mean right now. It doesn’t have to be today, although it could be today. These days are so long that by supper the time could be exactly right. You never know until it comes to you, you know? Until you are exactly in that place.” He was a big man, well over six feet and broad through the shoulders. He had stayed strong because even though he was a contractor he was not above pitching in and carrying boards or putting up Sheetrock. In this way he remained a fine example to the men who worked for him. Oscar Mendoza had to bend forward so as to speak softly into the Vice President’s ear. “But I will do it while we are here. You mark my words.”

Ruben nodded. Roxane Coss had given up her evening gown days ago and was now wearing a pair of tan slacks that belonged to his wife as well as his wife’s favorite cardigan, a navy sweater of extremely fine baby alpaca he had bought for her on their second anniversary. He had requested a guard accompany him upstairs. He went to the closet himself and brought the sweater down to the soprano. “Are you cold?” he had asked, and then draped the cardigan gently around her shoulders. Was it a betrayal, so quickly giving up the sweater his wife loved? The clothing conflated the two women for him in a way that was extraordinarily pleasing, his beautiful guest wearing the clothes of his wife whom he so dearly missed, the traces of his wife’s perfume still lingering inside the ribbing of the sweater so that he could smell both women there when he passed the one. If this wasn’t enough to ask, Roxane was wearing a pair of familiar slippers that belonged to the governess, Esmeralda, because his wife’s shoes had been too small. How delightful it had been to put his head inside Esmeralda’s tiny, meticulous closet!

“Are you going to tell her you love her?” the contractor asked. “It is your home. I would certainly defer to your right to go first.”

Ruben considered his guest’s thoughtful invitation. “It’s a possibility.” He was trying not to stare at Roxane. He was failing. He imagined taking her hand, suggesting he could show her the stars from the wide stone veranda that wrapped around the back of the house, that is, he would have if they had been allowed to go outside. He was the Vice President, after all, that might impress her. At least she was not a tall woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus. He was grateful for that. “It might not be appropriate, given my position here.”

“What’s appropriate?” Oscar said. His voice was light and unconcerned. “They’re bound to kill us in the end. Either the ones inside or the ones outside. The shooting will start. There will be some terrible mistake, you can bank on it. The ones outside can’t let it look like we were not mistreated. It will be important to them we wind up dead. Think of the people, the masses. You can’t have them getting the wrong idea. You’re the government man. You know more about these things than I do.”

“It does happen.”

“Then what’s the point of not telling her? I, for one, want to know that in my last days I made some effort. I’m going to speak to the young Japanese man, the translator. When the time is right, when I know what I want to say. You can’t approach a woman like that too quickly.”

Ruben liked the contractor. Although they had never met before, the very fact that they both lived in the same city made them feel like neighbors and then old friends and then brothers. “What do you know about women like that?”

Oscar chuckled and put his hand down on his brother’s shoulder. “Little Vice President,” he said. “There are so many things that I know.” It was big talk but in this place big talk seemed appropriate. While he had lost every freedom he was most accustomed to, a new, smaller set of freedoms began to raise a dim light within him: the liberty to think obsessively, the right to remember in detail. Away from his wife and five daughters he was not contradicted or corrected, and without those burdens he found himself able to dream without constant revision. He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost. He knew that one by one each of his daughters would be lost, either honorably in the ceremony of marriage or, realistically, in a car pointed out towards the ocean well after dark. In his day, Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if you got them right at the nape of their neck they went easily limp. Then he would whisper his suggestions, all the things they might do together, the wonderful dark explorations for which he was to be their guide. His voice traveled like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves up to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan.