Bel Canto(78)

“And you. There are plenty here. Take them. You be will surprised by the difference they make.”

“You are a doctor?”

“You don’t need to be a doctor to see an infection. I’m telling you.”

Benjamin smiled at him. “How do I know you don’t mean to poison me, little Vice President?”

“Yes, yes.” Ruben sighed. “I mean to poison you. I mean for us to die together.” He opened the bottle and shook one of the pills into his mouth and after making sure to show Benjamin how it sat there on his tongue, he swallowed it. Then he handed the bottle over to the General. “I will not ask you what you mean to do with them, but there, they are yours.”

After that, Benjamin returned to the chess game and Ruben picked up the trash and headed on to the next room in the hall.

It was Saturday, but since all the days were essentially the same, the only two people who gave this any thought at all were Father Arguedas, who heard confession on Saturday and planned for his Sunday mass, and Beatriz, who found the weekends to be an unbearable wasteland because the program she liked, The Story of Maria, was only on Monday through Friday.

“It is a healthy thing to wait,” General Alfredo told her, because he enjoyed the show himself. “It gives you a sense of anticipation.”

“I don’t want to wait,” she said, and suddenly thought that she might cry with frustration, the dull white stretch of the afternoon pushing out endlessly in every direction. She had already cleaned her gun and passed inspection and she didn’t have to stand guard until night. She could have taken a nap or looked at one of the magazines she had seen and not understood a hundred times before, but the thought of it all seemed unbearable. She wanted out of this place. She wanted to walk down the streets in the city like any other girl and have men tap their horns as they drove by her. She wanted to do something. “I’m going to see the priest,” she said to Alfredo. She quickly turned her face away. To cry was strictly forbidden. She thought of it as the worst thing she could do.

Father Arguedas adopted a “translator optional” policy in regard to confession. If people chose to confess in a language other than Spanish, then he would be happy to sit and listen and assume their sins were filtered through him and washed away by God exactly as they would have been if he had understood what they were saying. If people would rather be understood in a more traditional way, then they were welcome to bring Gen along if it worked out with his schedule. Gen was perfect for the job, as he seemed to have a remarkable ability not to listen to the words coming out of his own mouth. But that didn’t matter because today Oscar Mendoza was confessing in the language they both grew up speaking. They sat face-to-face on two dining-room chairs pulled over to the corner. People respected the arrangement and avoided the dining room when they saw the priest was sitting down with someone there. At first, Father Arguedas had brought up the idea of trying to rig up some sort of proper confessional in the coat closet but the Generals would not allow it. All of the hostages must be out in the open where they could be clearly seen at all times.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been three weeks since my last confession. At home I go every week, I promise you that, but there isn’t a great deal of opportunity to sin in our present circumstances,” Oscar Mendoza said. “No drinking, no gambling, only three women. Even to try and sin with yourself is nearly impossible. There is so little privacy.”

“There are rewards to the way we live.”

Mendoza nodded, though he could hardly see it as such. “I am having dreams, though. Can certain types of dreams constitute a sin, Father?”

The priest shrugged. He enjoyed confession, the chance to talk to people, possibly to relieve them of their burden. He could count on one hand the number of times he had been allowed to hear confession before the kidnapping, but since then there had been instances when there had been several people waiting to speak to him. Perhaps he would have chosen slightly more sin, if only because it would have kept the people with him longer. “Dreams are a matter of the subconscious. That’s unclear territory. Still, I think it would be best if you told me. Then maybe I can help you.”

Beatriz leaned her head into the doorway, her heavy braid swung down against the light. “Are you finished yet?”

“Not yet,” the priest said.

“Soon?”

“Go and play for a while. I can see you next.”

Play. Did he think she was a child? She looked at Gen’s big watch on her wrist. It was seventeen minutes after one o’clock. She understood the watch perfectly now, though it dogged her a little. She couldn’t go for more than three minutes without checking the time no matter how hard she tried to ignore it. Beatriz lay down on a small red Oriental carpet just outside the door where Father couldn’t see her but she could comfortably hear confession. She slipped the end of her braid into her mouth. Oscar Mendoza had a voice as big as his shoulders and it carried easily, even when he whispered.

“It is more or less the same dream every night.” Oscar Mendoza stopped, not entirely sure he wanted to say anything too horrible to such a young priest. “Dreams of terrible violence.”

“Against our captors?” the priest said quietly.

Out in the hall, Beatriz lifted up her head.

“Oh no, nothing like that. I wish they would leave us alone but I don’t wish them any particular violence, at least not usually. No, the dreams that I have are about my daughters. I come home from this place. I escape or am freed, it’s different in different dreams, and when I get to my house it is full of boys. It’s like some sort of boys’ academy. Boys of every size, light-skinned, dark-skinned, some fat, some lanky. They’re everywhere. They are eating out of my refrigerator and smoking cigarettes on my porch. They are in my bathroom, using my razor. When I pass them they glance up, give me a dull look, like they couldn’t really be bothered, and then they go back to whatever it was they were doing. But that’s not the terrible part. These boys, what they are mostly doing, they are . . . they are, having knowledge of my daughters. They are lined up outside their bedrooms, even the rooms of my two little girls. It is a terrible thing, Father. From some of the doors I hear laughing and from others I hear sobbing and I start to kill the boys, one by one, I go down the hall and I break them apart like matches. They don’t even step away from me. Each one looks so surprised just before I reach up to snap his neck in my hands.” Oscar’s hands were shaking and he knotted them together and pressed them between his knees.