Bel Canto(98)

You might see them dead, Messner thought, but you won’t have the chance to see them buried. He sighed. There was no such place as Switzerland. Truly, time had stopped. He had always been here and he would always be here. “I’m afraid those are your two choices,” he said.

“The meeting is over.” General Benjamin stood up. You could chart the course of this story on his skin, which was burning now. The shingles flared with every word he spoke and every word he listened to.

“It cannot be over. We have to keep talking until we reach some agreement, that is imperative. I am begging you to think about this.”

“Messner, what else do I do all day?” the General said, and then he left the room.

Messner and Gen sat alone in the guest bedroom suite, where hostages were not allowed to sit without guards. They listened to the small French enamel clock strike the hour of noon. “I don’t think I can stand this anymore,” Messner said after several minutes had passed.

Stand what? Gen knew that everything was getting better and not just for him. People were happier. Look, they were outside right now. He could see them from the windows, running. “It is a standoff,” Gen said. “Maybe a permanent one. If they keep us here forever, we’ll manage.”

“Are you insane?” Messner said. “You were the brightest one here once, and now you’re as crazy as the rest of them. What do you think, that they’ll just keep the wall up and pretend this is a zoo, bring in your food, charge money for tickets? ‘See defenseless hostages and vicious terrorists live together in peaceful coexistence.’ It doesn’t just go on. Someone puts a stop to it and there needs to be a decision as to who will be in charge of the stopping.”

“Do you think the military has plans?”

Messner stared at him. “Just because you’re in here doesn’t mean the rest of the world just shut down.”

“So they will arrest them?”

“At best.”

“The Generals?”

“All of them.”

But all of them could not possibly include Carmen. It could not include Beatriz or Ishmael or Cesar. When Gen scanned the list he couldn’t think of one he would be willing to give up, even the bullies and the fools. He would marry Carmen. He would have Father Arguedas marry them and it would be legal and binding, so that when they came for them he could say she was his wife. But that would only save one, albeit the most important one. For the others he had no ideas. How had he come to want to save all of them? The people who followed him around with loaded guns. How had he fallen in love with so many people? “What do we do?” Gen said.

“You can try to talk them into giving up,” Messner said. “But honestly, I’m not even sure what good it would do them.”

All his life, Gen had worked to learn, the deep rolling R in Italian, the clutter of vowels in Danish. As a child in Nagano, he sat in the kitchen on a high stool, repeating his mother’s American accent while she chopped vegetables for dinner. She had gone to school in Boston and spoke French as well as English. His father’s father worked in China as a young man and so his father spoke Chinese and had studied Russian in college. In his childhood, it seemed that language changed on the hour and no one was better at keeping up than Gen. He and his sisters played with words instead of toys. He studied and read, printed nouns onto index cards, listened to language tapes on the subway. He did not stop. Even if he was a natural polyglot, he never relied solely on talent. He learned. Gen was born to learn.

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn. He managed to forget that Carmen was a soldier in the terrorist organization that had kidnapped him. That was not an easy task. Every day he forced himself to practice until he was able to look at Carmen and only see the woman he loved. He forgot about the future and past. He forgot about his country, his work, and what would become of him when all of this was over. He forgot that the way he lived now would ever be over. And Gen wasn’t the only one. Carmen forgot, too. She did not remember her direct orders to form no emotional bonds to the hostages. When she found it was a struggle to let such important knowledge slip from her memory, the other soldiers helped her forget. Ishmael forgot because he wanted to be the other son of Ruben Iglesias and an employee of Oscar Mendoza. He could picture himself sharing a bedroom with Ruben’s son, Marco, and being a helpful older brother to the boy. Cesar forgot because Roxane Coss had said he could come with her to Milan and learn to sing. How easy it was to imagine himself on a stage with her, a rain of tender blossoms pouring down on their feet. The Generals helped them to forget by turning a blind eye to all the affection and slackness that surrounded them, and they could do that because there was so much they were forgetting themselves. They had to forget that they had been the ones to recruit these young people from their families by promising them work and opportunity and a cause to fight for. They had to forget that the President of the country had neglected to attend the party from which they had so elaborately planned to kidnap him and so they changed their plans and took everyone else hostage. Mostly, they had to forget that they had not come up with a way to leave. They had to think that one might present itself if they waited long enough. Why should they think about the future? No one else seemed to remember it. Father Arguedas refused to think about it. Everyone came to Sunday mass. He performed the sacraments: communion, confession, even last rites. He had put the souls in this house in order and that was the only thing that mattered, so why should he think about the future? The future never even occurred to Roxane Coss. She had become so proficient at forgetting that she never considered the wife of her lover anymore. She was not concerned that he ran a corporation in Japan, or that they did not speak the same language. Even the ones who had no real reason to forget had done so. They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them. Lothar Falken thought only of running around the house. Victor Fyodorov thought of nothing but playing cards with his friends and gossiping about their love for Roxane Coss. Tetsuya Kato thought of his responsibilities as an accompanist and forgot about the rest. It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and them let go. Except for Messner, whose job it was to remember. And Simon Thibault, who even in his sleep thought of nothing but his wife.