Bel Canto(76)

“Let me walk you out,” Roxane said to Messner.

“What?” General Benjamin said.

“She said she’ll take Mr. Messner to the door,” Gen said.

General Benjamin did not care to go along. He was interested in seeing if the boy could actually play.

“Tell me what they’re going to do,” Roxane said as they walked down the hall. Gen had come along and so the three of them spoke in English.

“I have no idea.”

“You have some idea,” Roxane said.

He looked at her. Every time he saw her he was surprised all over again by how small she was. At night, in his memory, she was towering, powerful. But standing beside her, she was small enough to slip beneath a coat if he had been wearing one, small enough to sweep out of the house quietly beneath one arm. He had the perfect trench coat at home in Geneva, it had been his father’s and his father had been a bigger man. Messner wore it anyway out of a combined sense of love and practicality and it billowed behind him as he walked. “I am a farrier, a delivery service. I bring in the papers, take out the papers, make sure there is plenty of butter for the rolls. They don’t tell me anything.”

Roxane put her arm through his, not in a flirtatious way, but in the manner of a heroine in a nineteenth-century English novel going for a walk with a gentleman. Messner could feel the warmth of her hand through his shirtsleeve. He did not want to leave her inside. “Tell me,” she whispered. “I’m losing track of time. Some days I think this is where I live, where I’m always going to live. If I knew that for sure then I could feel settled. Do you understand that? If it’s going to be a very long time, I want to know.”

To see her every day, to stand out on the sidewalk in the mornings with the thronging crowd to hear her sing, wasn’t that a remarkable thing? “I imagine,” Messner said quietly, “that it’s going to be a very long time.”

As they walked, Gen trailed behind them like a well-trained butler, both discreet and present if he was needed in any way. He listened. Messner said it. A very long time. He thought of Carmen, of all the languages there were for a smart girl to learn. They might need a very long time.

When Ruben saw the three of them coming he moved briskly up the hallway before any of the soldiers could cut him off. “Messner!” he said. “It’s a miracle! I wait for you and then you manage to slip right by me. How is our government? Have they replaced me yet?”

“Impossible,” Messner said. Roxane stepped away, stepped back towards Gen, and Messner felt the air cooling all around him.

“We need soap,” the Vice President said. “All sorts of soap, bar soap, dishwashing soap, laundry soap.”

Messner was distracted His conversation with Roxane should have lasted longer. They didn’t need Gen. Messner often dreamed in English. There was never a moment to be alone. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Ruben’s face darkened. “I’m not asking for anything so complicated.”

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” he said, his voice growing soft. Why all this sudden tenderness? Messner wanted to go back to Switzerland, where the postman who never recognized him when they passed in the hallway always put mail into the correct slot. He wanted to be unneeded, unknown. “Your face has finally healed up.”

The Vice President, sensing the ridiculousness of his anger, the burden on his friend, touched his own cheek. “I never thought it would happen. It’s one hell of a scar, don’t you think?”

“It will make you a hero of the people,” Messner said.

“I’ll say I got it from you,” Ruben said, looking up into Messner’s pale eyes. “A knife fight in a bar.”

Messner went to the door and held out his arms and Beatriz and Jesus, the two guards on the door, worked him over until he felt embarrassed by the persistence of Beatriz’s hands. It was one thing, the way they shook him down when he came in. He could not understand why the whole process needed to be repeated upon his exit. What was he smuggling out?

“They think you might be taking the soap,” the Vice President said, as if he was reading his friend’s mind. “They wonder where it has all gone to when they haven’t been using any of it themselves.”

“Get back to the sofa,” Jesus said, and laid two directional fingers on the top of his gun. The Vice President was ready for a nap anyway and went his way without further instruction. Messner went out the door without saying good-bye.

*

All the time Roxane was thinking. She thought about Messner and how it seemed to her he would have rather been a hostage himself instead of bearing the burden of being the only person in the world who was free to come and go. She thought about Schubert lieder, Puccini’s arias, the performances she’d missed in Argentina and the performances she had missed by now in New York that had taken forever to negotiate and had been so important to her, though she had not admitted it at the time. She thought of what she would sing tomorrow in the living room, more Rossini? Mostly, she thought about Mr. Hosokawa, and how she had grown so dependent on him. If he hadn’t been there she thought she would have completely lost her mind in the first week, but of course if he hadn’t been there she never would have come to this country, she never would have even been asked. Her life would have gone on like a train on schedule: Argentina, New York, a visit to Chicago, then back to Italy. Now she was completely stopped. She thought of Katsumi Hosokawa sitting by the window, listening while she sang, and she wondered how it was possible to love someone you couldn’t even speak to. She believed now there was a reason why all of this had happened: his birthday and her invitation to be, in a sense, his birthday present, why they had been stuck here all this time. How else would they have met? How else would there have been any way to get to know someone you couldn’t speak to, someone who lived on the other side of the world, unless you were given an enormous amount of empty time to simply sit and wait together? She would have to take care of Carmen, that was the first thing.