Bel Canto(41)



“Perhaps the Vice President plays,” Mr. Hosokawa suggested. “He has a fine piano.”

Gen went off to find the Vice President, who was asleep in a chair, his good cheek pressed to his shoulder, his bad cheek turned up, red and blue and still full of Esmeralda’s stitches. The skin was growing up around them. They needed to come out. “Sir?” Gen whispered.

“Hmm?”Ruben said, his eyes closed.

“Do you play the piano?”

“Piano?”

“The one in the living room. Do you know how to play it, sir?”

“They brought it in for the party,” Ruben said, trying not to let himself wake up completely. He had been dreaming of Esmeralda standing over the sink, peeling a potato. “There was one that was here before but they took it away because it wasn’t good enough. It was good, of course, my daughter takes lessons on it, just not good enough for them,” he said, his voice full of sleep. “That piano isn’t mine. Neither piano is mine, really.”

“But do you know how to play it?”

“The piano?” Ruben finally looked at him and then straightened up his neck.

“Yes.”

“No,” he said, and smiled. “Isn’t that a shame?”

Gen agreed that it was. “You should take those stitches out, I think.”

Ruben touched his face. “Do you think they’re ready?”

“I’d say so.”

Ruben smiled as if he had accomplished something by growing his skin back together again. He went off to find Ishmael to ask him to bring the manicure kit from the bathroom upstairs. Hopefully, the cuticle scissors had not been confiscated as a weapon.

Gen went off on his own to try and find a new accompanist. It wasn’t a matter of much linguistic finesse, as piano was more or less piano in many languages. Surely Roxane Coss could have gotten the point across herself with a small amount of gesturing, but she stayed with Mr. Hosokawa and together they stared at the nothingness the window offered up to them.

“Do you play?” Gen asked, beginning with the Russians, who were smoking in the dining room. They squinted at him through the blue haze and then shook their heads. “My God,” said Victor Fyodorov, covering his heart with his hands. “What I would not give to know! Tell the Red Cross to send in a teacher and I will learn for her.” The other two Russians laughed and threw down their cards. “Piano?” Gen asked the next group. He made his way through the house asking all of the guests, skipping over their captors on the assumption that piano lessons were an impossibility in the jungle. Gen imagined lizards on the foot pedals, humidity warping the keyboard, persistent vines winding their way up the heavy wooden legs. One Spaniard, Manuel Flores; one Frenchman, ?tienne Boyer; and one Argentinian, Alejandro Rivas, said they could play a little but didn’t read music. Andreas Epictetus said he had played quite well in his youth but hadn’t touched a piano in years. “Every day my mother made me practice,” he said. “The day I moved away from home I piled up all the music in the back of the house and I lit it, right there with her watching. I haven’t laid a finger to a piano since.” The rest of them said no, they didn’t play. People began recounting stories of a couple of lessons or the lessons of their children. Their voices fell over one another and from every corner of the room there came the word, piano, piano, piano. It seemed to Gen (and he included himself in this assessment) that never had a more uncultured group of men been taken hostage. What had they been doing all these years that no one had bothered with such an important instrument? They all wished they could play, if not before then, certainly now. To be able to play for Roxane Coss.

Then Tetsuya Kato, a vice president at Nansei whom Gen had known for years, smiled and walked to the Steinway without a word. He was a slightly built man in his early fifties with graying hair who, in Gen’s memory, rarely spoke. He had a reputation for being very good with numbers. The sleeves to his tuxedo shirt were rolled up above his elbows and his jacket was long gone but he sat down on the bench with great formality. The ones in the living room watched him as he lifted the cover of the keyboard and ran his hands once lightly over the keys, soothing them. Some of the others were still talking about the piano, you could hear the Russians’ voices coming from the dining room. Then, without making a request for anyone’s attention, Tetsuya Kato began to play. He started with Chopin’s Nocturne opus 9 in E Flat major no 2. It was the piece he had most often heard in his head since coming to this country, the one he played silently against the edge of the dining-room table when no one was watching. At home he looked at his sheet music and turned the pages. Now he was certain he had known the music all along. He could see the notes in front of him and he followed them with unerring fidelity. In his heart he had never felt closer to Chopin, whom he loved like a father. How strange his fingers felt after two weeks of not playing, as if the skin he wore now was entirely new. He could hear the softest click of his fingernails, two weeks too long, as he touched the keys. The felt-covered hammers tapped the strings gently at first, and the music, even for those who had never heard the piece before, was like a memory. From all over the house, terrorist and hostage alike turned and listened and felt a great easing in their chests. There was a delicacy about Tetsuya Kato’s hands, as if they were simply resting in one place on the keyboard and then in another. Then suddenly his right hand spun out notes like water, a sound so light and high that there was a temptation to look beneath the lid for bells. Kato closed his eyes so that he could imagine he was home, playing his own piano. His wife was asleep. His children, two unmarried sons still living with them, were asleep. For them the notes of Kato’s playing had become like air, what they depended on and had long since stopped noticing. Playing on this grand piano now Kato could imagine them sleeping and he put that into the nocturne, his sons’ steady breathing, his wife clutching her pillow with one hand. All of the tenderness he felt for them went into the keys. He touched them as if he meant not to wake them. It was the love and loneliness that each of them felt, that no one had brought himself to speak of. Had the accompanist played so well? It would have been impossible to remember, his talent was to be invisible, to lift the soprano up, but now the people in the living room of the vice-presidential mansion listened to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well.

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