Bel Canto(64)

Carmen nodded, she made a sound, something like, “ah,” not quite a word.

Gen sighed. It was better now but only slightly. “Do you want to learn?”

Carmen nodded again, her eyes fixed on a drawer handle. She tried to see Saint Rose of Lima on that handle, a tiny blue-cloaked woman balancing on the curved silver bar. She tried to find her voice through prayer. She thought of Roxane Coss, whose very hands had braided her hair. Shouldn’t that give her strength?

“I don’t know that I’m much of a teacher. I’m trying to teach Mr. Hosokawa Spanish. He writes down words in a notebook and memorizes them. Maybe we could try the same for you.”

After a minute of silence, Carmen offered up that same sound, a little “ah” that gave no real information other than that she had heard him. She was an idiot. A fool.

Gen looked around. Ishmael was watching them but he didn’t seem to care.

“The eggplant is perfect!” Ruben said. “Thibault, did you see this eggplant? Every cube is exactly the same size.”

“I forgot to take out the seeds,” Ishmael said.

“The seeds don’t matter,” Ruben said. “The seeds are as good for you as anything else.”

“Gen, are you going to sauté?” Thibault said.

“One minute,” Gen said, and held up his hand. He whispered to Carmen, “Have you changed your mind? Do you want me to help you?”

And then it seemed the saint gave Carmen a sharp blow between her shoulder blades and the word that was so tightly lodged in her throat disengaged like a tough piece of gristle caught in the windpipe. “Yes,” she said, gasping. “Yes.”

“So we’ll practice?”

“Every day.” Carmen picked up the words, knife and garlic, and she put them in her pocket along with girl. “I learned my letters. I haven’t practiced in a while. I used to make them every day and then we started training for this.”

Gen could see her up in the mountains, where it was always cold at night, sitting by the fire, her face flushed from heat and concentration, one piece of dark hair falling from behind her ear the way it was now. She has a cheap tablet, a stubby pencil. In his mind he stands next to her, praises the straight lines of her T and H, the delicate sweep of her Q. Outside he can hear the last call of the birds as they careen towards their nests before dusk. He had thought once that she was a boy and it terrified him, this feeling. “We’ll go over the letters,” he said. “We’ll start there.”

“Am I the only one who has to work?” Beatriz called loudly.

“When?” Carmen only mouthed the word.

“Tonight,” Gen said. What he wanted then was something he could barely believe. He wanted to fold her in his arms. He wanted to kiss the parting of her hair. He wanted to touch her lips with the tips of his fingers. He wanted to whisper things to her in Japanese. Maybe, if there was time, he could teach her Japanese as well.

“Tonight in the china closet,” Carmen said. “Teach me tonight.”





seven

the priest was right about the weather, even though the break came later than he had predicted. By the middle of November, the garúa had ended. It did not drift away. It did not lessen. It simply stopped, so that one day everything had the saturated quality of a book dropped into a bathtub and the next day the air was bright and crisp and extremely blue. It reminded Mr. Hosokawa of cherry blossom season in Kyoto and it reminded Roxane Coss of October on Lake Michigan. They stood together in the early morning before she began her singing. He pointed out a pair of yellow birds to her, bright as chrysanthemums, sitting on the branch of some previously unseen tree. They pecked for a while at the spongy bark and then flew off, first one and then the other, up and over the wall. One by one all the hostages and all their keepers went up to the windows around the house, stared and blinked and stared again. So many people put their hands and noses on the glass that Vice President Iglesias had to come out with a rag and a bottle of ammonia and wipe down each pane. “Look at the garden,” he said to no one in particular. “The weeds are as tall as the flowers.” One would have thought that with so much rain and so little light the forward march of growth would have been suspended, when in fact everything had thrived. The weeds alongside the domesticated bedding plants sniffed at the distant jungle in the air and stretched their roots down and stretched their leaves up in an attempt to turn the vice-presidential garden back into a wild thing. They drank up every bit of the rain. They could have survived another year of wet weather. Left long enough to their own devices, they would overtake the house and pull down the garden wall. After all, this yard had once been a part of the continuum, the dense and twisted interstate of vines that spread right to the sandy edges of the ocean. The only thing that prevented them from taking over the house was the gardener, who pulled up whatever he deemed unworthy, burned it, and then clipped back the rest. But the gardener was now on an indefinite vacation.

The sun had been up and shining no more than an hour and in that time several of the plants had grown half a centimeter.

“I’ll have to do something about the yard.” Ruben sighed, not that he knew where he would find the time with all that needed to be done in the house. Not that they were likely to let him outside in the first place. Not that they were likely to give him the things he needed: hedge shears, trowels, pruning knives. Everything in the garden shed was a murder weapon.