Bel Canto(87)

Having kept such close quarters for so long, everybody knew what everybody else liked. Ishmael, for example, followed the Vice President like a dog. Looking for Ishmael? Find the Vice President and chances were the boy would be tangled up in his feet. Beatriz would always be in front of the television unless compelled by a direct order to be elsewhere. Gilbert was mad for the bathtub, especially the one in the master bathroom that roared into a raging boil when you flipped a switch (wasn’t that a surprise the first time it happened!). Cesar liked the tree, a sturdy oak that leaned into the wall, a tree with low, strong branches for easy climbing, high, wide branches for comfortable sitting. The other soldiers thought he was especially stupid or brave because sometimes he climbed up high enough that he was actually over the wall, where any military personnel could have popped him off like a squirrel. Sometimes the Generals asked him to look out over the city and report back, and off he would go into the tree. So there was no great puzzle as to where Carmen should look. She went out into the yard, a place that seemed completely different to her after last night. She took the long way around so that she could pass by the spot where the wall pocketed out into a private cove and look, the grass was still flattened, pressed down in the shape of her back. She felt every drop of her blood race to her head and she put her fingers to the wall, dizzy. Dear God, what if somebody noticed? Should she stop now, take the time to try and set it right? Could grass be fluffed up again? Would it stay that way? But then Carmen realized that she planned to pound down that same spot of grass again tonight, that she wanted to press down every blade of grass in the garden with her hips, her shoulders, the bare soles of her feet. If there had been a way she would have taken Gen then and there, wrapped her legs around him and climbed him like a tree. Who would ever think that such man would want to be with her? She was so distracted by the certainty of love that for a moment she forgot why she had come outside in the first place or who she was looking for. Then, in the distance, she saw a boot dangling like a large, ugly fruit from the high leaves and the world came rushing back to her. Carmen went to the oak tree, grabbed a branch above her head, and climbed.

There was Cesar, shaking, crying. Anyone else who climbed this tree he would have thrown out on his head. He would have kicked him hard under the chin and sent him flying. But the head that pulled itself up to him was Carmen’s and Carmen he liked. He thought she understood him because of how she clearly loved Roxane Coss. She was the luckiest of them all, getting to take up her breakfast, getting to sleep outside her door. (Because Carmen was completely discreet he knew nothing about the rest of it: that she had slept in Roxane’s bed, brushed her hair, that Carmen had smuggled Roxane’s lover to her in the middle of the night and held her confidence. Had he known all of that he might have imploded with jealousy.) And while no one should see him cry like he was still a child, it would be less than terrible if the person who saw him was Carmen. Before he fell in love with Roxane Coss, back before they ever came to the city, he thought constantly about how much he would have liked to kiss Carmen, kissed her and more, but he gave up on the idea after a sharp smack from General Hector. Such business was completely forbidden between soldiers.

“You sing so beautifully,” she said.

Cesar turned his face away from her. A small branch scraped lightly against his cheek. “I’m a fool,” he said into the leaves.

Carmen swung onto a branch across from him and clamped her legs around it. “Not a fool! You had to do it. You didn’t have any choice.” She could see the battered-down portion of grass from where she was now. It was different from this vantage point, larger and almost perfectly round, as if they had spun each other in great circles, which seemed possible. She could smell the grass in her hair. Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

But Cesar would not look back at her. From where she was she could have seen over the wall if she had just stretched up a little bit. She did not.

“Roxane Coss sent me out to get you,” Carmen said. It was close enough to the truth. “She wants to talk to you about your singing. She thinks you’re very good.” She could say this because she knew he was very good and of course Roxane would tell him so. She did not understand anywhere near enough English to have deciphered what had been said in the living room, but she was developing a knack of figuring things out without having to know all the actual words.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, too. The translator was there.”

“She said, stop. She said, enough. I understood what she said.” A bird swooped once past the tree, hoping to land, and then shot on.

“She wanted to talk to you. What does she know to say? You have to ask Gen for help. He’s the only way to understand anything.”

Cesar sniffed, blotted his eyes with his cuff. In the perfect world it would not be Carmen in this tree. It would be Roxane Coss herself who had followed him up there. She would be touching his cheek, speaking to him in perfect Spanish. They would sing together. The word for that was duet. They would travel all over the world.

“Well, you’re not a squirrel,” Carmen said. “You aren’t going to stay up here forever. You’ll have to come down for guard duty and when you do she’ll tell you herself with the translator. She’ll tell you how good you are and then you will feel like an idiot for sulking up here. Everyone wants to celebrate with you. You’ll miss out on everything.”