It was Simon Thibault who turned the television on. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He had come into the room because he heard the singing. He thought that someone was playing some odd and beautiful old record and it made him curious. Then he saw the boy doing the show, a moderately funny boy, and thought he would get a kick out of the picture coming up suddenly where his face had been. Simon picked up the remote control from where it sat balanced on the arm of a comfortable-looking leather chair and pushed the power button.
They screamed. They howled like dogs. They cried out the names of their compatriots, “Gilbert! Francisco! Jesus!” in a voice that would indicate fire, murder, the coming of police. That brought the great metal snap of safeties being removed from guns and the rushing in of the other soldiers and the three Generals who threw Simon Thibault against the wall and cut his lip.
“Nothing foolish,” Edith had said, her lips lightly touching his ear. But what was included in foolishness? Turning on a television?
One of the boys who rushed in, a big boy named Gilbert, put the round muzzle of his rifle into Thibault’s throat, pressing the blue silk scarf into the soft skin above his trachea. He pinned him there like a butterfly tacked down on a corkboard.
“Television,” Thibault said with great difficulty.
Sure enough, in the crowded study the attention had turned away from Simon Thibault. Just as quickly as he had been a threat, a star, they turned their guns away from him, let him slump down the wall in a shuddering crumple of fear. They were all looking at the television now. An attractive woman with dark hair was holding up articles of soiled clothing to the camera with both hands, shaking her head in mild disgust before shoving them into the washing machine. Her lipstick was bright red and the walls behind her a vivid yellow. “This is a real challenge,” she said in Spanish. Gilbert crouched down on his toes to watch.
Simon Thibault coughed and rubbed his throat.
Certainly, the Generals had seen television before, though not in the years since they had gone back to the jungle. They were in the room now. This was a very nice television, color with a twenty-eight-inch screen. The remote control had fallen on the floor and now General Alfredo picked it up and began pushing the buttons to take them through the channels: soccer game; a man in a coat and tie sitting at a desk reading; a girl in silver pants singing; a dozen puppies in a basket. There was a fresh burst of excitement, a collective ah, at every new picture.
Simon Thibault left the room without being noticed. Cesar’s singing did not even cross his mind.
Most days the hostages longed for this whole thing to be over. They longed for their countries, their wives, their privacy. Other days, honestly, they just wanted to be away from all these children, from their sullenness and sleepiness, from their chasing games and appetites. How old could they have been? When asked, they either lied and said twenty-five or they shrugged as if they hadn’t the slightest idea what the question meant. Mr. Hosokawa knew he was a poor judge of children. In Japan, he often saw young people who looked to be no more than ten behind the wheels of cars. His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization. He tried to picture them, their plastic daisy barrettes and short white socks, picking at the door frame with the sharp tip of a knife.
Mr. Hosokawa could not imagine his daughters anyplace but curled in their mother’s bed, crying for his return while they watched the news. And yet to everyone’s genuine surprise, two of the junior soldiers turned out to be girls. One was revealed quite simply: somewhere around the twelfth day she pulled off her cap to scratch her head and down came a braid. She did not bother to twist it back into place when the scratching was done. She did not seem to think that her being a girl was any secret at all. Her name was Beatriz. She was perfectly happy to tell anyone who asked. She was not blessed with a pretty face or a delicate manner and had passed very well as a boy. She held her gun as ready to shoot as any of the boys and her eyes stayed dull even after it was no longer a necessity. And yet, for all her extraordinary averageness, the hostages watched her as if she were something impossible and rare, a luna moth lighting in a snowfield. How could there be a girl among them? How had they all failed to notice? The other girl was not so hard to figure out. Logic held that if there was one girl then there could just as easily be more than one, and everyone looked immediately towards the silent boy who never answered questions and had seemed in every way unnatural from the start, much too beautiful, too nervous. His hairline dipped onto his forehead and made his face a perfect heart. His mouth was round and soft. His eyes stayed half closed as if the heavy lashes seemed too great a burden to lift. He smelled different from the other boys, a sweet, warm smell, and his neck was long and smooth. He was the one who seemed so particularly in love with Roxane Coss and slept on the hallway floor outside her room at night, using his body to prevent any drafts from coming under the door. Gen looked at him, the one who had made him feel so uneasy, and the anxiousness he had held inside his chest rolled off of him in a long, low wave.
“Beatriz,” Simon Thibault said, “that boy over there. Is he your sister?”
Beatriz snorted and shook her head. “Carmen? My sister? You must be crazy.”
At the sound of her name, Carmen looked up from across the room. Beatriz speaking her name. There was no such thing as a secret in this world. Carmen threw down the magazine she had been looking at. （It was Italian, with an abundance of glossy pictures of movie stars and royalty. The text undoubtedly contained important information about their most personal lives that she was unable to read. It had been found in the drawer of the nightstand beside the bed where the Vice President’s wife slept.） Carmen took her revolver into the kitchen and shut the door and no one followed her, a visibly angry teenaged girl with a gun. There was nowhere to go and everyone assumed that eventually she would come out on her own. They wanted to look at her again, to see her without her cap on, to have the time to contemplate her as a girl, but they were willing to wait. If this was the drama of the afternoon, one of the terrorists taking herself hostage for a few hours, then the suspense was better than single-mindedly watching the drizzle.
“I should have known she was a girl,” Ruben said to Oscar Mendoza, the contractor who lived only a few miles away.
Oscar shrugged. “I have five daughters at home. I never saw a girl in this room.” He stopped to reconsider his point and then leaned in toward the Vice President. “I just saw one girl in this room, you know? One woman. There can only be one woman in this room.” He tilted his head meaningfully towards the far side of the room where Roxane Coss sat.
Ruben nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”
“I am thinking there will never be a better opportunity than this to tell her I love her.” Oscar rubbed his hand over his chin. “I don’t necessarily mean right now. It doesn’t have to be today, although it could be today. These days are so long that by supper the time could be exactly right. You never know until it comes to you, you know? Until you are exactly in that place.” He was a big man, well over six feet and broad through the shoulders. He had stayed strong because even though he was a contractor he was not above pitching in and carrying boards or putting up Sheetrock. In this way he remained a fine example to the men who worked for him. Oscar Mendoza had to bend forward so as to speak softly into the Vice President’s ear. “But I will do it while we are here. You mark my words.”