Bel Canto(66)

On the morning that the rains ended, Gen waited until the last note had been sung and then went to stand beside Carmen. It was a particularly good time to talk without being noticed as everyone wandered around in a state of stunned confusion after Roxane let go of her final note. If anyone had thought to simply walk out the door, they might not have been stopped, but no one was thinking about leaving. When Mr. Hosokawa went to get her water, Roxane stood up to follow him and then looped her arm through his arm.

“She’s in love with him,” Carmen whispered to Gen. He misunderstood her for the smallest instant, heard only the word love. Then he stopped and made himself recall the entire sentence. He could do that. It was as if he had a tape recorder in his head.

“Miss Coss? In love with Mr. Hosokawa?”

Carmen nodded, her head making only the smallest gesture, but he had learned to read her. Love?

What he had seen, and done his best to overlook, was that Mr. Hosokawa was in love with Roxane. The notion that the opposite could be possible had never occurred to him and he asked Carmen what she saw.

“Everything,” Carmen whispered. “The way she looks at him, the way she chooses him. She’s always sitting with him and they can’t even talk. He’s so peaceful. She would want to be with him.”

“Did she tell you?”

“Maybe.” Carmen smiled. “She talks to me sometimes in the morning but I don’t know what she says.”

Of course, Gen thought. He watched them walk away, his employer and the soprano. “I would think that everyone must be in love with her. How could she even make a choice?”

“Are you in love with her?” Carmen asked. She met his eyes in a way that would never have been possible a week ago. It was Gen who had to look away.

“No,” he said. “No.” Gen was in love with Carmen. And though he met her every night in the china closet and helped her with her reading and writing, he never revealed as much. They spoke of vowels and consonants. They spoke of diphthongs and possessives. She copied letters into a notebook. As many words as he gave to her, she asked for more. She would have gladly kept him up all night, repeating, practicing, quizzing. He spent his whole life in a confused dream state in which he was never exactly awake or completely asleep. He wondered sometimes if it was love or just a lack of rest that had twisted such a longing in his heart. He stumbled. He drifted off in wing-backed chairs and in the minutes he slept he dreamed of Carmen. Yes, she was shy, and yes, a terrorist from the jungle, but she was as smart as any girl he had met at university. You could tell by the way she picked things up. All she had needed was the smallest amount of instruction. She ate through information like fire licks up hay and asked for more. She took off her gun every night and put it in the glass-front cupboard beside the blue gravy boat. She sat on the floor with her notebook balanced on top of her knees, her pencil sharp. There had been no girls like Carmen at university. There had never been a girl like Carmen. What a sense of humor one would need to believe that the woman you love is not in Tokyo or Paris or New York or Athens. The woman you love is a girl who dresses as a boy and she lives in a village in a jungle, the name of which you are not allowed to know, not that knowing the name would be particularly helpful in trying to find it. The woman you love puts her gun beside a blue gravy boat at night so that you can teach her to read. She came into your life through an air-conditioner vent and how she will leave is the question that keeps you awake in the few free moments you have to sleep.

“Mr. Hosokawa and Miss Coss,” Carmen said. “Out of all the people in the world, they found each other. What are the chances of that?”

“What about Mrs. Hosokawa?” Gen said. He did not know his employer’s wife well, but he saw her often. She was a dignified woman with cool hands and a calming voice. She called him Mr. Watanabe.

“Mrs. Hosokawa lives in Japan,” Carmen said, looking off towards the kitchen, “which is about a million kilometers away from here. Besides, he isn’t going home, and while I’m sorry for Mrs. Hosokawa, I don’t think that means that Mr. Hosokawa should be alone.”

“What do you mean, he isn’t going home?”

Carmen gave Gen a very slight smile. She tilted back her head so that he could see her face beneath the bill of her cap. “This is where we live now.”

“Not forever,” Gen said.

“I think,” Carmen said, mouthing the words without making any sound. She was wondering if she had said too much. She knew that her loyalties absolutely must be to the Generals, but telling things to Gen wasn’t like telling things to anyone else. Gen could keep a secret because everything about them was a secret, the china closet, the reading. She trusted him absolutely. She plucked at the side of his hand with two fingers and then walked away from him. He waited a minute before following her. She walked silently, her movements small and relaxed. No one noticed her as she passed by. She went into the small lavatory off the hall. All of the pretty rose-scented soaps were gone now and the towels were dingy, but the gold swan was still nesting over the sink and when you turned the wing-shaped handles, water still slid from her long throat. Carmen took off her cap and washed her face. She tried to comb out her hair with her fingers. Her face in the mirror was too coarse, too dark. At home some people had called her beautiful but now she had seen beauty and knew it was something she could never possess. Some mornings, only a few, when Carmen came into the room to bring Roxane her breakfast, the singer had still been asleep and Carmen would put down the tray and touch her shoulder. When Roxane’s great, pale eyes blinked open she would smile at Carmen, she would pull the covers back and motion for Carmen to lie down next to her in the warm embroidered sheets. She was careful to dangle her boots over the edge. They would both close their eyes and take an extra five minutes of sleep, Roxane pulling the covers up to Carmen’s neck. How quickly Carmen dreamed of her sisters, her mother! In only a few minutes of sleep they all came to visit her. They all wanted to see her there, nestled in the pillows of such a comfortable bed, beside such an unimaginable woman. Yellow hair, blue eyes, skin like white roses brushed in pink. Who would not be in love with Roxane Coss?