Bel Canto(88)

Cesar slid his hand over the rough bark. Carmen had never talked like this before. When they were in training together she was almost too shy to speak at all, that was one of the things that had made her so appealing. He had never heard her string two full sentences together. “How do you know all of this?”

“I told you, the translator.”

“And how do you know he tells you the truth?”

Carmen looked at him like he was crazy, but she didn’t say a word. She reached down for the branch beneath her, held on, let her feet fall, and then opened her hands to drop to the ground. She was an expert at jumping. She kept her knees soft and sprang straight up after her feet hit the grass. She did not lose her balance at all. She walked away from Cesar without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Let him rot up there. On her way back into the house she passed one of the windows that looked into the great living room. How strange it was to see it all from that side. She stopped for a while and stood beside a bush that had been so neatly shaped when they first arrived and now was almost as tall as she was. She could see Gen near the piano, talking to Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa. Kato was there. She could see Gen, his straight back and tender mouth, his hands which had helped her out of her clothes and then folded her neatly back inside them again. She wished she could tap on the glass and wave to him, but it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected, as if you were a stranger seeing them for the first time. She could see his beauty as someone who took nothing for granted. Look at that beautiful man, that brilliant man, he loves me. She said a prayer to Saint Rose of Lima. Safety for Gen. Happiness and a long life. Watch over him and guide him. She looked through the window. He was speaking to Roxane now, Roxane who had been so good to her, and so Carmen included her in the prayer. Then she bowed her head for a minute and quickly crossed herself, thus hurrying the prayer on its way.

“I shouldn’t have told him to stop,” Roxane said. Gen translated it into Japanese.

“There is no place for the boy to go,” Mr. Hosokawa said. “He will have to come back. You mustn’t worry about that.” In Japan, he was often made uneasy by this modern age of affection, young men and women holding hands in public, kissing good-bye on subway trains. There was nothing about these gestures he had understood. He had believed that what a man felt in his heart was a private matter and so should remain with him, but he had never had so much in his heart before. There wasn’t enough room for this much love and it left an aching sensation in his chest. Heartache! Who would have thought it was true? Now all he wanted was to take her hand or curve his arm around her shoulder.

Roxane Coss leaned towards him, dipped her head down to his shoulder just for a second, just long enough for her cheek to touch his shirt.

“Ah,” said Mr. Hosokawa softly. “You are everything in the world to me.”

Gen looked at him. Was that meant to be translated, the tenderness his employer whispered? Mr. Hosokawa took one of Roxane’s hands. He held it up to his chest, touched it to his shirt in the place above his heart. He nodded. Was he nodding to Gen? Was he telling Gen to go ahead? Or was he nodding to her? Gen felt a terrible discomfort. He wanted to turn away. It was a private matter. He knew what that meant now.

“Everything in the world,” Mr. Hosokawa said again, but this time he looked at Gen.

And so Gen told her. He tried to make his voice soft. “Respectfully,” he said to Roxane, “Mr. Hosokawa would like you to know that you are everything in the world to him.” He remembered saying something very similar to her from the Russian.

It was to her credit that Roxane never looked at Gen. She kept her eyes exactly on Mr. Hosokawa’s eyes and took the words from him.

Carmen came back. She was flustered and everyone thought it had to do with Cesar, when she had almost forgotten about Cesar. She wanted to go to Gen but she went first to General Benjamin. “Cesar is up in the tree,” she said. She started to say more but then she remembered herself. It was always wiser to wait.

“What is he doing there?” the General asked her. He couldn’t help but notice how pretty this girl was becoming. Had she been this pretty before, he never would have let her sign up. He should tell her to keep her hair under her cap. He should let her go just as soon as they were home.

“Sulking.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He feels embarrassed.”

Maybe it was wrong to let a pretty girl go after him. One of the boys should have gone and simply shaken the tree until Cesar fell out. General Benjamin sighed. He had been impressed with Cesar’s singing. He wondered if the talent would make the boy high-strung, the way the soprano was high-strung. If that was the case he would be forced to dismiss Cesar as well, and then he would have lost two soldiers. Even as he was thinking this he remembered where he was, and the thought of ever getting home, of ever having a choice so simple as to let someone go or to keep them, seemed impossible. Why was he even wasting his time with this? Cesar in a tree? What did it matter? “Leave him up there.” General Benjamin looked over Carmen’s head to the far side of the room, which was his way of saying that the conversation was over.

“May I tell Miss Coss?”

He looked back down at her and blinked. She was obedient, well mannered. It was a shame that things hadn’t turned out better. Certainly there would be a role for pretty girls in a revolution. There was no sense being hard on her. “I think she would want to know.”