Bel Canto(53)
“Step back,” Roxane said, and shooed them away with her hands. “I’m going to want that air.”
The first thing she sang that morning was the aria from Rusalka, which she remembered was the one Mr. Hosokawa had requested that she sing for his birthday, before she knew him, before she knew anything. How she loved that story, the spirit of the water who longs to be a woman who can hold her lover in real arms instead of cool waves. She sang this aria at nearly every performance she gave, though she had never infused it with the compassion and understanding that she gave to it this morning. Mr. Hosokawa heard the difference in her voice, and it brought tears to his eyes.
“She sings Czech like she was born to it,” he whispered to Gen.
Gen nodded. He would never refute the beauty of her singing, the warm and liquid quality of her voice that so well matched the watery Rusalka, but there was no point in telling Mr. Hosokawa that this woman did not know a word of Czechoslovakian. She sang the passion of every syllable, but none of the syllables actually managed to form themselves into recognizable words of the language. It was quite obvious that she had memorized the work phonetically, that she sang her love for Dvo?ák and her love for the translated story, but that the Czech language itself was a stranger which passed her by without a moment’s recognition. Not that this was any sort of crime, of course. Who would even know except for him? There were no Czechs among them.
Roxane Coss sang rigorously for three hours in the morning and sometimes sang again in the late afternoon before dinner if her voice felt strong, and for those hours no one gave a single thought to their death. They thought about her singing and about the song, the sweet radiance of her upper register. Soon enough the days were divided into three states: the anticipation of her singing, the pleasure of her singing, and the reflection on her singing.
If the power had shifted away from them, the Generals didn’t seem to mind. The utter hopelessness of their mission seemed less overbearing to them now and many nights they slept almost in peace. General Benjamin continued to mark off the days on the dining-room wall. They had more time to concentrate on negotiations. Among themselves they spoke as if the singing had been part of their plan. It calmed the hostages. It focused the soldiers. It also had the remarkable effect of quelling the racket that came from the other side of the wall. They could only assume that with the windows open the people on the streets could hear her because the constant screech of bullhorned messages would stop as soon as she opened her mouth to sing, and after a few days the bullhorn did not come back at all. They imagined the street outside. It was packed with people, not one of them eating chips or coughing, all of them straining to listen to the voice they had heard only on records and in their dreams. It was a daily concert the Generals had arranged, or so they had come to believe. A gift to the people, a diversion to the military. They had kidnapped her for a reason, after all.
“We will make her sing more,” General Hector said in the downstairs guest suite that they had taken over as their private offices. He stretched across the canopied bed, his boots nesting on top of the embroidered ivory comforter. Benjamin and Alfredo sat in matching chairs covered in enormous pink peonies. “There is no reason she couldn’t sing a few more hours a day. And we will rearrange her times to keep them off their guard.”
“We will tell her what to sing as well,” Alfredo said. “She should sing in Spanish. All this Italian, it is not what we stand for. Besides, for all we know she could be singing out messages.”
But General Benjamin, despite his occasional participation in the delusions at hand, knew that whatever they got from Roxane Coss was something to be grateful for. “I don’t think we should ask.”
“We won’t be asking,” Hector said, reaching back to plump the pillows beneath his head. “We will be telling.” His voice was even and cold.
General Benjamin waited a moment. She was singing now and he let the sound of her voice wash over him while he sought a way to explain. Isn’t it obvious? he wanted to say to his friends. Can’t you hear that? “Music, I believe, is different. That’s what I understand. We have set this up exactly right, but if we were to push . . .” Benjamin shrugged. He raised a hand to touch his face and then thought better of it. “We could wind up with nothing.”
“If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day.”
“Try it first with a bird,” General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. “Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn’t know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.”
When Roxanne was finished singing, Mr. Hosokawa went to get her glass of water himself, cool with no ice, the way she liked it. Ruben Iglesias had recently mopped the kitchen floor and rubbed it down with a hard wax by hand so that the whole room shimmered like light on the flat surface of a lake. Could Mr. Hosokawa say, picking up the pot of water he had boiled and cooled this morning for this very purpose, that this was the happiest time in his life? Surely that could not be the case. He was being held against his will in a country he did not know and every day he found himself looking down the barrel of some child’s gun. He was living on a diet of tough meat sandwiches and soda pop, sleeping in a room with more than fifty men, and although there were irregular privileges at the washing machine, he was thinking of asking the Vice President if he could kindly extend to him a second pair of underwear from his own bureau. Then why this sudden sense of lightness, this great affection for everyone? He looked out the large window over the sink, stared into the mist of bad weather. There had not been poverty in his childhood but there was a great deal of struggle: his mother’s death when he was ten; his father holding on, broken, until he joined her the year Katsumi Hosokawa was nineteen; his two sisters disappearing into the distant lives of their marriages. No, that family had not been a greater happiness. The early years he had spent building Nansei were like a hurricane in his memory, a huge, overbearing wind into which every loose thing was sucked. He slept with his head on his desk most nights, he missed holidays, birthdays, entire seasons of the year. From his endless work had come a great industry, great personal gain, but happiness? It was a word he would have puzzled over, unable to understand its importance even while its meaning was evident.