Bel Canto(99)

So even though Gen understood that there was something real and dangerous waiting for them, he began to forget it almost as soon as Messner left the house that afternoon. He busied himself typing up fresh lists of demands for the Generals and when it got later he helped serve dinner. He went to sleep that night and woke up at two A.M. to meet Carmen in the china closet and he told her, but not with the urgency he had felt in the afternoon. It was the sense of urgency he had managed to forget.

“What Messner was saying worried me,” Gen said. Carmen was sitting in his lap, both of her legs to the left of him, both of her arms around his neck. Worried me. Shouldn’t he have said something stronger than that?

And Carmen, who should have listened, who should have asked him questions for her own safety and the safety of the other soldiers, her friends, only kissed him, because the important thing was to forget. It was their business, their job. That kiss was like a lake, deep and clear and they swam into it, forgetting. “We’ll have to wait and see,” Carmen said.

Should they do something, try to escape? There must be a way by now, everyone was lax. Hardly anyone was watching anymore. Gen asked her, his hands up under her shirt, feeling her shoulder blades flex beneath his fingertips.

“We could think about escaping,” she said. But the military would catch her and torture her, that’s what the Generals told them in training, and under the pains of torture she would tell them something. She could not remember what it was that she shouldn’t tell but that would be the thing that would get everyone else killed. There were only two places in the world to go: inside and outside, and the question was where were you safer? Inside this house, in this china closet, she had never felt so safe in all her life. Clearly, Saint Rose of Lima lived inside this house. She was protected here. She was rewarded for her prayers with abundance. It was always better to stay with your saint. She kissed Gen’s throat. All girls dreamed of being in love like this.

“So we’ll talk about it?” Gen said, but now her shirt was off and it stretched out like a carpet for them to lie on. They closed the angle between their bodies and the floor.

“Let’s talk about it,” she said, sweetly shutting her eyes.

As soon as Roxane Coss fell in love, she fell in love again. The two experiences were completely different and yet coming as they did, one right on top of the other, she could not help but link them together in her mind. Katsumi Hosokawa came to her room in the middle of the night and for the longest time he just stood there inside her bedroom door and held her. It was as if he had returned from something no one is meant to survive, a plane crash, a ship lost at sea, and he could imagine nothing more than this: her in his arms. There was nothing they could say to one another but Roxane was far beyond thinking that speaking the same language was the only way to communicate with people. Besides, what was there to say, really? He knew her. She leaned against him, her arms around his neck, his hands flat against her back. Sometimes she nodded or he rocked her back and forth. From the way he was breathing she thought he might be crying and she understood that, too. She cried herself, she cried for the relief that came in being with him in that dark room, the relief that came from loving someone and from being loved. They would have stood there all night, he would have left without ever asking for anything else if she hadn’t reached behind her at some point and taken one of his hands, led him there to her bed. There were so many ways to talk. He kissed her as she was leaning back, the curtains closed, the room completely dark.

In the morning she woke up for a minute, stretched, rolled over, and went back to sleep. She didn’t know how long she slept, but then she heard singing and for the second time she was struck by the thought that she wasn’t alone. It wasn’t that she was in love with Cesar, but she was in love with his singing.

It was like this: every night Mr. Hosokawa came back to her bedroom and every morning Cesar waited to practice. If there was something else to want she forgot what it might be.

“Breathe,” she said. “Like this.” Roxane filled up her lungs, took in more air and then some more, and then held it. It didn’t matter that he didn’t understand the words she used. She stepped behind him and put her hand flat on his diaphragm. What she was saying was clear. She pushed all of the breath from his body and then filled him up again. She sang a line of Tosti, moving her hand back and forth like a metronome, and he sang it back to her. He was not a conservatory student who thought that to please was to be careful. He did not have a lifetime of mediocre instruction to overcome. He was not afraid. He was a boy, full of a boy’s bravado, and when the line came back it was loud and passionate. He sang every line, every scale, as if the singing would save his life. He was settling into his own voice now and it was a voice that amazed her. It would have lived and died in a jungle, this voice, if she hadn’t come along to rescue it.

It was a fine time, except for the fact that Messner didn’t linger anymore. He was thinner now. His clothes hung from his shoulders as if they were sitting alone on a wire coat hanger. He only dropped things off and then was in a hurry to get away.

Cesar had his lesson in the morning, and no matter how hard he begged them to go outside, everyone sat down and listened. He was improving so quickly, even the other boys knew that what they were seeing was more interesting than television. He didn’t sound a thing like Roxane anymore. He was finding his own depth. Every morning, he unfolded his voice before them like a rare jeweled fan; the more you listened, the more intricate it became. The crowd assembled in the living room could always count on the fact that he would be even better than he had been the day before. That was what was so astonishing about it. He had yet to show the slightest hint of finding the edges of what he was capable of. He sang with hypnotic passion and then with passionate lust. How impossible it seemed, so much voice pouring out of such an average boy. His arms still hung useless at his sides.