Bel Canto(63)

“Still,” Gen said. He wanted to be firm on this point but he felt it slipping away from him. Sometimes he suspected he was the weakest person in captivity.

“I hear you gave her your wristwatch.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everybody knows. She flashes it around every chance she gets. Would she shoot the man who gave her his watch?”

“Well, that’s what we don’t know.”

Thibault dried his hands and looped a careless arm around Gen’s neck. “I would never let them shoot you, no more than I’d let them shoot my own brother. I’ll tell you what, Gen, when this is over, you’ll come and visit us in Paris. The second this is over I’m resigning my post and Edith and I are moving back to Paris. When you feel like traveling again, you will bring Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane. You can marry one of my daughters if you want to, then you would be my son rather than my brother.” He leaned forward and whispered in Gen’s ear, “This will all seem very funny to us then.”

Gen inhaled Thibault’s breath. He tried to take in some of the courage, some of the carelessness. He tried to believe that one day they would all be in Paris in the Thibaults’ apartment, but he couldn’t picture it. Thibault kissed Gen beside his left eye and then let him go. He went off in search of a roasting pan.

“Speaking in French,” Ruben said to Gen. “That’s very impolite.”

“How is French impolite?”

“Because everyone here speaks Spanish. I can’t remember the last time I was in a room where everyone spoke the same language and then you go off speaking some language I failed in high school.” And it was true, when they spoke in Spanish no one in the kitchen waited for anything to be explained, no one was forced to stare vacantly while the others tore through unintelligible sentences. No one wondered suspiciously if what was being said was in fact something horrible about them. Of the six people in the room, Spanish was a first language only for Ruben. Gen spoke Japanese, Thibault French, and the three with the knives had first learned Quechua in their village and then a hybrid of Spanish and Quechua together from which they could comb out the Spanish with varying degrees of success.

“You could take the day off,” Ishmael said to the translator, a tough rubber spiral of eggplant skin dangling from his knife. “You don’t have to stay.”

At that Carmen, who had been keeping her eyes on the garlic she was chopping, looked up. The nerve, which she had found so briefly the night before, had been missing all day and all she had managed to do was avoid Gen, but that didn’t mean she wanted him to go. She had to believe she had been sent to the kitchen for a reason. She prayed to Saint Rose that the shyness which came down on her like a blinding fog would be lifted as suddenly as it landed.

Gen had no intention of leaving. “I can do more than translate,” he said. “I can wash vegetables. I can stir something if something needed stirring.”

Thibault came back lugging a huge metal roaster in each hand. He heaved them one at a time up onto the stovetop, where each pan covered three burners. “Did I hear leaving? Is Gen even thinking about leaving?”

“I was thinking about staying.”

“No one is leaving! Dinner for fifty-eight, is that what they expect? I will not lose one pair of hands, even if the hands belong to the very valuable translator. Do they think we’re going to do this every night, every meal? Do they think I’m a caterer? Has she chopped the onions yet? May I inquire as to the state of the onions or will you threaten to shoot me?”

Beatriz wagged her knife at Thibault. Her face was wet and red from crying. “I would have shot you if I had to but I didn’t, so you should be grateful. And I chopped your stupid onions. Are you finished with me now?”

“Does dinner look finished to you?” Thibault said, pouring oil into the pans and turning on the bright blue flames of gas. “Go wash the chickens. Gen, bring me the onions. Sauté these onions.”

“Why does he get to cook the onions?” Beatriz said. “They’re my onions. And I won’t wash the chickens because that does not involve a knife. I was only sent in here to work the knives.”

“I will kill her,” Thibault said in weary French.

Gen took the bowl of onions and hugged it to his chest. It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it. They could stand there for hours, six squares of tile apart from each other and never say anything or one of them, either one, could step forward and begin to speak. Gen was hoping it would be Carmen, but then Gen was hoping they would all be released and neither seemed likely to happen. Gen gave the onions to Thibault, who dumped them into the two pans where they spat and hissed like Beatriz herself. Rallying the very small amount of bravery he still possessed, Gen went to the drawer by the telephone, which hung naked on the wall without its cord. He found a small pad of paper and a pen. He wrote the words cuchillo, ajo, chica each on its own piece of paper and took them to Carmen while Thibault argued with Beatriz over who was to stir the onions. He tried to keep in mind all the languages he had spoken, all the cities he had been to, all the important words of other men that had come through his mouth. What he asked of himself was small and still he could feel his hands shaking. “Knife,” he said, and put the first piece down. “Garlic.” He set that one on top of the garlic. “Girl.” The last piece he handed to Carmen and after she looked at it for a minute she put it in her pocket.