Bel Canto(48)

“Beatriz. And this one is Carmen. Well,” Messner said, standing up. “Then there’s something wrong with the whole lot of us. Be my translator. I want to speak to her.”

“Your Spanish is fine.”

“My Spanish is halting and my verbs are improperly conjugated. Get up. Look at her, Gen. She’s staring right at you.” It was true. So fearful had Carmen become when she saw that Messner meant to come towards her that she had lost her ability to even blink. She was now staring in much the same way a figure stares from a portrait. She prayed to Saint Rose of Lima to grant her that rarest of gifts: to become invisible. “Either she’s been commanded to watch you on the penalty of her death or she has something to say.”

Gen got up. He was a translator. He would go and translate Messner’s conversation. Still, he felt a peculiar fluttering in his chest, a sensation that was not entirely dissimilar to an itch but was located just beneath his ribs.

“Such a remarkable thing and no one even mentioned it,” Messner said.

“We were all thinking about the new accompanist,” Gen said, his knees feeling looser with every step. Femur, patella, tibia. “We had already forgotten about the girls.”

“I suppose it’s terribly sexist of me assuming that all of the terrorists were male. It’s a modern world, after all. One should suppose a girl can grow up to be a terrorist just as easily as a boy.”

“I can’t imagine it,” Gen said.

When they were three feet away, Carmen found the strength to put her right hand on her gun, which immediately stopped them from coming any closer.

“Do you mean to shoot us?” Messner said in French, a simple sentence he couldn’t say in Spanish because he didn’t know the word for shoot, a word he imagined he should make a point to learn. Gen translated and his voice sounded uncertain. Carmen, wide-eyed, her forehead damp, said nothing.

“Are we certain she speaks Spanish? Are we certain she speaks?” Messner said to Gen.

Gen asked her if she spoke Spanish.

“Poquito,” she whispered.

“Don’t shoot,” Messner said with good nature, and pointed to the gun.

Carmen pulled her hand away and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t,” she said.

“How old are you?”

She said that she was seventeen and they assumed she was telling the truth.

“What is your first language?” Messner asked her.

Gen asked her what she spoke at home.

“Quechua,” she said. “We all speak Quechua but we know Spanish.” And then, in her first attempt to address what she wanted, she said, “I should know Spanish better.” The words came out in a dull croak.

“Your Spanish is good,” Gen said.

The expression on her face changed with this compliment. No one could stretch the truth so much as to call it a smile, but her eyebrows lifted and her face tilted up towards them a centimeter or so as if it was drawn towards sunlight. “I am trying to learn better.”

“How did a girl like you get tied up with a bunch like this?” Messner said. Gen found the question overly direct but certainly Messner knew enough Spanish to catch him if he were to ask her another question entirely.

“I work to free the people,” she said.

Messner scratched the back of his neck. “It’s always ‘Free the People.’ I never know exactly which people they mean or what it is they want to free them from. I certainly recognize the problems but there is such a vagueness to ‘Free the People.’ It’s easier to negotiate with bank robbers, really. They only want the money. They want to take the money and free themselves and the people be damned. There’s something much more straightforward about that, don’t you think?”

“Are you asking me or her?”

Messner looked at Carmen and apologized in Spanish. “That is rude of me,” he said to Gen. “My Spanish is very poor,” Messner said to Carmen, “but I’m trying to improve as well.”

“Sí,” she said. She should not be talking to them like this. The Generals could come in. Anyone could see her. She was too much out in the open.

“Are you being treated well? Are you in good health?”

“Sí,” she said again, although she wasn’t sure why he was asking.

“She’s really a very lovely girl,” he said to Gen in French. “She has a remarkable face. It’s almost a perfect heart. Don’t tell her that, though. She looks like the kind that could die of embarrassment.” Then he turned to Carmen. “If there’s anything you need, you let one of us know.”

“Sí,” she said, just barely able to make a sound come out with the shape of the word.

“You don’t see many shy terrorists,” Messner said in French. They all stood there as if it was a painful moment at a long, dull cocktail party.

“You like the music,” Gen said.

“Very beautiful,” she whispered.

“It was Chopin.”

“Kato played Chopin?” Messner said. “The nocturnes? I’m sorry I missed that.”

“Chopin played,” Carmen said.

“No,” Gen said. “The man who played was Se?or Kato. The music he played was written by Se?or Chopin.”