*
Everyone was scattering now, wandering off to their chairs to nap or play a hand of solitaire. After Roxane walked away and Kato returned to the letter he had been writing to his sons （he had so much to tell them now!） Gen noticed that Carmen was still in her place on the other side of the room and that she wasn’t watching the singer or the accompanist anymore. She was watching him. He felt that same tightness he felt when she had looked at him before. That face, which had seemed pretty to a disadvantage when it was assigned to a boy, did not blink or move or even appear to breathe. Carmen did not wear her cap. Her eyes were large and dark and frozen onto Gen, as if by looking away she would be admitting that she had been looking in the first place.
Gen, in his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words. If Mr. Hosokawa had still been sitting there he might have said to Gen, Go and see what that girl wants, and Gen would go and ask her without hesitation. It had occurred to him in his life that he had the soul of a machine and was only capable of motion when someone else turned the key. He was very good at working and he was very good at being by himself. Sitting alone in his apartment with books and tapes, he would pick up languages the way other men picked up women, with smooth talk and then later, passion. He would scatter books on the floor and pick them up at random. He read Czeslaw Milosz in Polish, Flaubert in French, Chekhov in Russian, Nabokov in English, Mann in German, then he switched them around: Milosz in French, Flaubert in Russian, Mann in English. It was like a game, a showy parlor trick he performed only for himself, in which the constant switching kept his mind sharp, but it was hardly the same thing as being able to approach a person who was looking at you intently from across a room. Perhaps the Generals were right about him after all.
Carmen wore a wide leather belt around her narrow waist and into the right side she had stuck a pistol. Her green fatigues were not dirty the way the fatigues of her compatriots were and the tear in the knee of her pants had been neatly sewn together with the same needle and thread Esmeralda had used to stitch together the Vice President’s face. Esmeralda had left the spool with the needle sticking out of it on the side table when she had finished her work and Carmen had surreptitiously dropped them into her pocket the first chance she got. She had been hoping to speak to the translator since she realized what it was he did, but couldn’t figure out a way to speak to him without letting him know she was a girl. Then Beatriz took care of that and now there was no secret, no reason to wait, except for the fact that she seemed to be stuck against the wall. He had seen her. He was looking at her now, and that seemed to be as far as things were able to progress. She could not walk away and she was equally unable to walk towards him. Life could very well be lived out in that spot. She tried to remember her aggressiveness, all the things the Generals had taught her in training, but it was one thing to take what you must for the good of the people and quite another to ask for something for yourself. She knew nothing at all about asking.
“Dear Gen,” Messner said, clapping a hand down on his shoulder. “I’ve never seen you sitting alone. You must feel at times that everyone has something to say and no one knows how to say it.”
“At times,” Gen said absently. He felt if he were to blow in her direction she would be lifted up in the current of air and would simply bob away like a feather.
“We are the handmaidens of circumstance, you and I.” Messner spoke to Gen in French, the language he spoke at home in Switzerland. “What would be the male equivalent to handmaiden?”
“Esclave,” Gen said.
“Yes, slave, of course, but it doesn’t sound as nice. I think I’ll stay with handmaidens. I don’t mind that.” Messner sat down next to Gen on the piano bench and let his eyes follow the course of Gen’s stare. “My God,” he said quietly. “Isn’t that a girl there?”
Gen told him it was.
“Where did she come from? There were no girls. Don’t tell me they’ve found a way to get more of their troops inside.”
“She was always here,” Gen said. “Two of them. We just didn’t notice. That’s Carmen. Beatriz, the other one, is in watching television.”
“We didn’t notice her?”
“Apparently not,” Gen said, feeling quite sure he had noticed.
“I was just in the den.”
“Then you overlooked Beatriz again.”
“Beatriz. And this one is Carmen. Well,” Messner said, standing up. “Then there’s something wrong with the whole lot of us. Be my translator. I want to speak to her.”
“Your Spanish is fine.”
“My Spanish is halting and my verbs are improperly conjugated. Get up. Look at her, Gen. She’s staring right at you.” It was true. So fearful had Carmen become when she saw that Messner meant to come towards her that she had lost her ability to even blink. She was now staring in much the same way a figure stares from a portrait. She prayed to Saint Rose of Lima to grant her that rarest of gifts: to become invisible. “Either she’s been commanded to watch you on the penalty of her death or she has something to say.”
Gen got up. He was a translator. He would go and translate Messner’s conversation. Still, he felt a peculiar fluttering in his chest, a sensation that was not entirely dissimilar to an itch but was located just beneath his ribs.
“Such a remarkable thing and no one even mentioned it,” Messner said.
“We were all thinking about the new accompanist,” Gen said, his knees feeling looser with every step. Femur, patella, tibia. “We had already forgotten about the girls.”
“I suppose it’s terribly sexist of me assuming that all of the terrorists were male. It’s a modern world, after all. One should suppose a girl can grow up to be a terrorist just as easily as a boy.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Gen said.
When they were three feet away, Carmen found the strength to put her right hand on her gun, which immediately stopped them from coming any closer.
“Do you mean to shoot us?” Messner said in French, a simple sentence he couldn’t say in Spanish because he didn’t know the word for shoot, a word he imagined he should make a point to learn. Gen translated and his voice sounded uncertain. Carmen, wide-eyed, her forehead damp, said nothing.
“Are we certain she speaks Spanish? Are we certain she speaks?” Messner said to Gen.
Gen asked her if she spoke Spanish.
“Poquito,” she whispered.
“Don’t shoot,” Messner said with good nature, and pointed to the gun.
Carmen pulled her hand away and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t,” she said.
“How old are you?”
She said that she was seventeen and they assumed she was telling the truth.
“What is your first language?” Messner asked her.
Gen asked her what she spoke at home.
“Quechua,” she said. “We all speak Quechua but we know Spanish.” And then, in her first attempt to address what she wanted, she said, “I should know Spanish better.” The words came out in a dull croak.
“Your Spanish is good,” Gen said.