Bel Canto(80)

“Pray,” the priest said. “Try very hard to understand this.”

Because she liked him, she tried to make herself think about it. With the feel of his hands on her shoulders she closed her eyes and she prayed, and suddenly it seemed very clear to her. Yes, she knew she was not supposed to listen. She knew it like something she could see behind her closed eyes and it made her happy. “I confess having listened.” All she had to do was say it and there it went, floating away from her. It wasn’t her sin anymore.

“And something else?”

Something else. She thought again. She stared hard into the darkness of her closed eyes, the place where she knew the sins stacked up like kindling, dry and ready for a fire. There was something else, lots of something else. She began to see them all. But it was too much and she didn’t know what to call it, how to form so many sins into words. “I shouldn’t have pointed the gun,” she said finally, because there was no way to make sense of all of it. She felt like if she stayed forever she would never be able to confess them all. Not that she meant to stop doing any of those things. She couldn’t stop. It wouldn’t be allowed and she didn’t even want to. She could see her sins now and knew that she would make more and more of them.

“God forgives you,” the priest said.

Beatriz opened her eyes and blinked at the priest. “So it will go away?”

“You’ll have to pray. You’ll have to be sorry.”

“I can do that.” Maybe that was the answer, a sort of cycle of sinning and sorriness. She could come every Saturday, maybe more often than that, and he would keep having God forgive her, and then she would be free to go to heaven.

“I want you to say some prayers now.”





“I don’t know all the words.”

Father Arguedas nodded his head. “We can say them together. I can teach them to you. But, Beatriz, I need you to be kind, to be helpful. That is part of your contrition. I want you to try it just for today.”

Carmen was in the living room, but so was General Hector and a half-dozen of the bigger boys. Four of them played cards and the rest of them watched. They had stuck their knives into the table they played on, something that drove the Vice President to the brink of insanity. The table was from the early 1800s, hand-carved by Spanish artisans who never envisioned that knives would bristle from the wood’s smooth top like so many porcupine quills. Gen walked past them slowly. He could not even attempt to catch Carmen’s eye. All he could do was hope that she saw him and would think to follow. Gen stopped and spoke to Simon Thibault, who was stretched across a nearby sofa reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish.

“This will take me forever,” Thibault said to Gen in French. “Maybe a hundred years. At least I know I have the time.”

“Who knew that being kidnapped was so much like attending university?” Gen said.

Thibault laughed and turned a page. Had she heard them talking? Did she see him walking away? He went on to the kitchen, which was mercifully empty, slipped inside the china closet, and waited. Whenever he had come to the china closet, Carmen was already there, waiting for him. He had never been in there alone and the sight of all those plates stacked up above his head filled his heart with love for Carmen. Plates on which two people could eat a year’s worth of dinners and never have to wash a dish. There was never a minute alone, a minute when someone wasn’t asking him to say something. Always his head was cluttered with other people’s overly expressed sentiments, and now it was quiet and he could imagine Carmen sitting next to him, her long, slender legs folded up in front of her while she conjugated verbs. She had asked him for favors and now he would ask her for her help. Together they would help Mr. Hosokawa and Miss Coss. Normally he would say that the private life of one’s employer was in no manner his business, but no one pretended anymore that this was a normal life. He could not think of Mrs. Hosokawa or Nansei or Japan. Those things had receded so far behind them that it was almost impossible to believe they had ever existed. What he believed in was this china closet, saucers and soup bowls, towering stacks of bread-and-butter plates. He believed in this night. It struck him that he had looked for Carmen first, that he had not gone back to speak to Mr. Hosokawa, who was most likely still playing chess with Ishmael. He could not be two places at once and finally he felt himself settling, felt the kitchen floor hard and cold beneath his buttocks, felt the slightest ache in his back. He was here, only here, in this country he did not know, waiting on the girl he taught and loved, waiting to help Mr. Hosokawa, whom he loved as well. There was Gen, who had gone from nothing to loving two people.

He didn’t know how much time was passing without his watch. He couldn’t even guess anymore. Five minutes felt so much like an hour. L’amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser, et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle, s’il lui convient de refuser. He only said the words to himself, humming lightly. He wished that he could sing them but Gen couldn’t sing.

And then Carmen came, flushed as if she had been running when in fact she had walked to the kitchen as slowly as such a walk was possible to make. She closed the door behind her and sank down on the floor. “I thought this was what you meant,” she whispered, pressing in close beside him as if it were cold. “I thought you would be waiting for me.”