Bel Canto(92)

A face looked down between the leaves.

“Tell him he sings beautifully,” she said to Gen. “Tell him I want to be his teacher.”

“She’s fooling me,” Cesar called down.

“Why do you think we’re all outside?” Gen said. “Does this look like fooling to you? She wanted to come outside and talk to you, and the Generals decided that everyone could come along. Doesn’t that seem important enough to you?”

It was true. Cesar could see everything from where he sat. All three of the Generals and every one of the soldiers except Gilbert and Jesus were outside. They must have been left behind to guard the house. Every one of the hostages was walking around the yard like he was drunk or blind, touching and sniffing, weaving and then suddenly sitting down. They were in love with the place. They wouldn’t leave if you tore the wall down. If you poked them in the back with your gun and told them to get going they would still run to you. “So you’re outside,” Cesar said.

“He isn’t planning on staying in that tree, is he?” Roxane asked.

It was remarkable even to Cesar that he had not been called down for duty. He would have gone. He could only imagine that in the excitement of deciding to let everyone outside he had been forgotten. He had been forgotten by everyone but Roxane Coss.

“She doesn’t think I’m a fool?”

“He wants to know if you think he’s a fool,” Gen said.

She sighed at the self-indulgence of children. “Staying up in the tree seems foolish, but the singing, not at all.”

“Foolish for the tree and not the singing,” Gen reported. “Come down and talk to her.”

“I’m not sure,” Cesar said. But he was sure. He had already pictured the two of them singing together, their voices rising, their hands clasped.

“What are you going to do, live in the tree?” Gen called. His neck was aching from dropping his head back.

“How do you sound so much like Carmen?” Cesar said. He reached down and took hold of the branch beneath him. He had been up there a long time. One of his legs was stiff and the other was completely asleep. When his feet hit the ground they did nothing to support him and he fell into a pile at their feet, striking his head against the trunk of the tree that had held him.

Roxane Coss dropped to her knees and put her hands on either side of the boy’s head. She could feel the blood jumping in his temples. “My God, I didn’t mean for him to throw himself out of the tree.”

Mr. Hosokawa caught a flash of a smile cross Cesar’s face. It was released and then just as quickly suppressed, though the boy never opened his eyes. “Tell her he’s fine,” Mr. Hosokawa said to Gen. “And tell the boy he can get up now.”

Gen helped Cesar into a sitting position, leaned him like a floppy doll against the tree. Though Cesar’s head was splitting he didn’t mind opening his eyes. Roxane Coss was crouching down so close to him it was as if he could see inside her. Look at the blue of her eyes! They were so much deeper, more complicated than he could have imagined from a distance. She still had on a bathrobe and white pajamas and not twelve centimeters from his nose her pajamas formed a V where he could see the place her breasts came together. Who was this old Japanese man who was always with her? He looked too much like the President. In fact, Cesar suspected that maybe he was the President, regardless of any lies he might have told, right in front of them the whole time.

“Pay attention,” she said, and then the translator said it in Spanish. She sang five notes. She wanted him to listen and repeat, to follow the notes. He could see right inside her mouth, a damp, pink cave. It was the most intimate thing of all.

He opened his mouth and croaked a little, then he touched his head with his fingertips.

“That’s all right,” she said. “You can sing later. Did you sing at home, before you came here?”

Certainly he sang the way people will sing, not thinking about it when he was doing something else. He could mimic the people they heard sometimes when the radio worked, but that wasn’t about singing so much as it was about making people laugh.

“Does he want to learn? Would he be willing to practice very hard to see if he has a real voice?”

“To practice with her?” Cesar asked Gen. “Just the two of us?”

“I imagine there would be other people there.”

Cesar touched Gen’s sleeve. “Tell her I’m shy. Tell her I’d work much better if we could be alone.”

“Once you learn English you can tell her that yourself,” Gen said.

“What does he want?” Mr. Hosokawa said. He was standing over them, trying to keep the sun out of Roxane’s eyes.

“Impossible things,” Gen said. Then he said to the boy in Spanish, “Yes or no, do you want her to teach you to sing?”

“Of course I do,” Cesar said.

“We’ll start this afternoon,” Roxane said. “We’ll start with scales.” She picked up Cesar’s hand and patted it. He turned pale again and closed his eyes.

“Let him rest,” Mr. Hosokawa said. “The boy wants to sleep.”

Lothar Falken put his hands flat against the wall and stretched his hamstrings, pressing one heel down and then the other. He touched his toes and rocked his hips from side to side and when he felt his legs were warm and limber he began to run barefoot through the grass. The soldiers bristled at first, leaned forward, aimed their rifles halfheartedly in his general direction, but he kept running. It was a large yard in terms of the size of lawns in cities, but it was still small in terms of a track, and a few minutes after Lothar had gone outside the sight of any one person, he had looped back around again, his head up, his arms pumping by his chest. He was a slender man with long, graceful legs, and while it might have gone unnoticed while he was lying on the couch, here in the sun, running rings around the vice-presidential mansion, it was easy to see that the manufacturer of German pharmaceuticals had once been an athlete. With every lap he felt his body again, the relation of muscle to bone, the oxygen stirring his blood. He kicked his feet high behind him, every step going deep into the thick grass. After a while Manuel Flores of Spain began to run alongside him, keeping pace at first and then falling back. Simon Thibault began to run and proved himself to be almost Falken’s match. Victor Fyodorov handed his cigarette to his friend Yegor and joined in for two rounds. Such a beautiful day, to run seemed only fitting. He collapsed exactly where he had started, his heart beating at the cage of his ribs with a manic fury.