Bel Canto(81)
Gen took her hands, which were so small. How did he ever think she was only a beautiful boy? “I need to ask you something.” Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame, he thought again, and he kissed her.
She kissed him for the kiss, touched his hair, whose gloss and weight she found to be an endless source of fascination. “I didn’t want to get up right away. I thought I should wait awhile before I followed you.”
He kissed her. There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again. “Roxane Coss came to speak to me today. She said she wants you to sleep somewhere else tonight, to not bring her breakfast in the morning.”
Carmen pushed away from him, keeping one hand on his chest. Roxane Coss didn’t want her to bring breakfast? “Did I do something wrong?”
“Oh, no,” Gen said. “She thinks very highly of you. She told me so.” He tucked her into the crook of his arm and she breathed into his shoulder. This was what it felt like, to be a man with a woman. This was the thing Gen had missed in all the translation of language. “You were right, what you thought about, her feelings for Mr. Hosokawa. She wants to be with him tonight.”
Carmen raised her head. “How will he get upstairs?”
“Roxane wants you to help him.”
Gen lived one life and in that life he was always a prisoner and his friends were the other prisoners, and even though he loved Carmen and got along politely with some of the terrorists, he never got confused and thought he wanted to join LFDMS. But for Carmen it was different. She had clearly two lives. She did her push-ups in the morning and stood for inspection. She carried her rifle on guard. She kept a boning knife in her boot and she knew how to use it. She obeyed orders. She was, as it had been explained to her, part of the force that would bring about change. But she was also the girl who went to the china closet at night, who was learning to read in Spanish and could already say several things in English. Good morning. I am very well, thank you. Where is the restaurant? Some mornings, Roxane Coss let her climb into the impossibly soft sheets on her big bed, let her close her eyes for a few minutes and pretend she belonged there. She would pretend she was one of the prisoners, that she lived in a world with so many privileges that there was nothing to fight for. But no matter how the two sides got along, they were always two sides, and when she went from one to the other it was a matter of crossing over something. Either she told Gen she couldn’t get Mr. Hosokawa upstairs, in which case she disappointed Gen and Mr. Hosokawa and Miss Coss, who had all been so kind to her, or she told him she could, in which case she broke every oath she had sworn to her party and put herself at risk of a punishment she would not imagine. If Gen had understood any of this he never would have asked her. For him it was merely about helping out, being a friend. It was as if he only wanted to borrow a book. Carmen closed her eyes and pretended to be tired. She prayed to Saint Rose of Lima. “Saint Rose, give me guidance. Saint Rose, give me clarity.” She pressed her eyes closed and pleaded for the intercession of the only saint she knew personally, but a saint is very little help when it comes to smuggling a married man into an opera singer’s bedroom. On this matter, Carmen was on her own.
“Sure,” Carmen whispered, her eyes still closed, her ear pressed to the steady thump of Gen’s heart. Gen’s hand came up and smoothed her hair, over and over again, the way her mother had done when Carmen was a child and had a fever.
In the vice-presidential mansion, none of the guests, not even Ruben Iglesias himself, knew the house as well as the members of LFDMS. Part of their daily work was the memorization of windows and which ones were wide enough to jump through. They calculated the falls, estimated the damage in terms of their own bones. They each knew the length of the hallways, rooms from which one could make a clear shot to the outside, the fastest exits to the roof, to the garden. So naturally, Carmen knew there was a back stairwell in the hallway off the kitchen that led to the servants’ quarters, and that in the very room that Esmeralda had once slept there was a door that went to the nursery, and the nursery had a door onto the main hallway of the second floor, and that hallway led to the bedroom where Roxane Coss slept. Of course, other people slept on the second floor as well. Generals Benjamin and Hector had rooms on the second floor. (General Alfredo, the worst sleeper, found a little rest in the guest suite on the first floor.) Many of the boys slept on the second floor and not always in the same place, which is why Carmen chose to sleep in the hallway outside of Roxane Coss’s room, just in case one of those boys woke up in the middle of the night, restless. Carmen herself had used this route to the china closet every night, her stocking feet silent on the polished wood floor. She knew the location of every creaky board, every potentially light sleeper. She knew how to flatten herself into the shadows when someone came around the corner headed for the bathroom. She could skate those floors as quiet as a blade drawing over ice. Carmen was trained, an expert at remaining silent. Still, she could sense the depth of Mr. Hosokawa’s ability to be quiet. Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand. Gen was to bring Mr. Hosokawa to the back hallway at two A.M. and she would take him to Roxane Coss’s room. Two hours later she would come to the door to lead him back. They would say nothing to each other, but that part was easy enough. Even if in this case they were allies, there was nothing they knew to say.