The expression on her face changed with this compliment. No one could stretch the truth so much as to call it a smile, but her eyebrows lifted and her face tilted up towards them a centimeter or so as if it was drawn towards sunlight. “I am trying to learn better.”
“How did a girl like you get tied up with a bunch like this?” Messner said. Gen found the question overly direct but certainly Messner knew enough Spanish to catch him if he were to ask her another question entirely.
“I work to free the people,” she said.
Messner scratched the back of his neck. “It’s always ‘Free the People.’ I never know exactly which people they mean or what it is they want to free them from. I certainly recognize the problems but there is such a vagueness to ‘Free the People.’ It’s easier to negotiate with bank robbers, really. They only want the money. They want to take the money and free themselves and the people be damned. There’s something much more straightforward about that, don’t you think?”
“Are you asking me or her?”
Messner looked at Carmen and apologized in Spanish. “That is rude of me,” he said to Gen. “My Spanish is very poor,” Messner said to Carmen, “but I’m trying to improve as well.”
“Sí,” she said. She should not be talking to them like this. The Generals could come in. Anyone could see her. She was too much out in the open.
“Are you being treated well? Are you in good health?”
“Sí,” she said again, although she wasn’t sure why he was asking.
“She’s really a very lovely girl,” he said to Gen in French. “She has a remarkable face. It’s almost a perfect heart. Don’t tell her that, though. She looks like the kind that could die of embarrassment.” Then he turned to Carmen. “If there’s anything you need, you let one of us know.”
“Sí,” she said, just barely able to make a sound come out with the shape of the word.
“You don’t see many shy terrorists,” Messner said in French. They all stood there as if it was a painful moment at a long, dull cocktail party.
“You like the music,” Gen said.
“Very beautiful,” she whispered.
“It was Chopin.”
“Kato played Chopin?” Messner said. “The nocturnes? I’m sorry I missed that.”
“Chopin played,” Carmen said.
“No,” Gen said. “The man who played was Se?or Kato. The music he played was written by Se?or Chopin.”
“Very beautiful,” she said again, and suddenly her eyes welled up with tears and she parted her lips slightly not to speak but to breathe.
“What is the matter?” Messner said. He was going to touch her shoulder and then thought better of it. The big boy named Gilbert called to her from the other side of the room and hearing her name it was as if her power of movement was restored. She quickly rubbed her eyes and stepped around the two men without so much as nodding. They turned and watched her dart off across the wide expanse of the living room and then disappear down the hall with the boy.
“Perhaps the music was getting to her,” Messner said.
Gen stood watching the empty place where she had been. “It would be hard on a girl,” he said. “All of this.”
And while Messner started to say it was hard on them all he knew what Gen meant and frankly, he agreed.
Whenever Messner left there was a lingering sadness in the house that could last for hours. It was very quiet inside and no one listened to the tedious messages the police continued to broadcast from the other side of the wall. Hopeless, Surrender, Will Not Negotiate. It droned on until the words simply broke down into a dull buzz, the angry sound of hornets scouring the nest. They imagined what prisoners felt like when the visiting hour was over and there was nothing left to do but sit in their cell and wonder if it was dark yet outside. They were still deep in their afternoon bout of depression, still thinking about all the elderly relatives they never went to visit, when Messner knocked again. Simon Thibault lifted his face from the blue scarf that hung around his neck and General Benjamin motioned for the Vice President to answer the door. Ruben took a moment to untie the dishtowel from his waist. The people with the guns motioned for him to hurry. It was Messner, they knew it. Only Messner came to the door.
“What a lovely surprise,” the Vice President said.
Messner was standing on the front steps, struggling to hold a heavy box in his arms.
The Generals had thought that this knock out of schedule indicated a breakthrough, a chance to put this thing to rest. They were that hopeless, that hopeful. When they saw it was only another delivery they felt a crush of disappointment. They wanted none of it. “This isn’t his time,” General Alfredo said to Gen. “He knows what times he is allowed to come.” General Alfredo had fallen asleep in his chair. He had suffered from terrible insomnia ever since their arrival at the Vice President’s estate and anyone who woke him from the little sleep he managed would live to regret it. He always dreamed of bullets zipping past his ears. When he woke up his shirt was drenched, his heart was racing, and he was always more exhausted than he had been before he slept.
“It seemed to me to be a special circumstance,” Messner said. “The music has arrived.”
“We are an army,” Alfredo said sharply. “Not a conservatory. Come at your time tomorrow and we will discuss the issue of allowing music.”
Roxane Coss asked Gen if it was her music, and when he told her yes she was on her feet. The priest approached the door as well. “These are from Manuel?”
“He’s just on the other side of the wall,” Messner said. “He sent this all for you.”
Father Arguedas pressed his folded hands to his lips. Ever-powerful and merciful God, we do well always and everywhere to give You thanks and praise.
“Both of you, sit down,” General Alfredo said.
“I’ll put this inside the door,” Messner said, and started to bend down. It was surprising how much music could weigh.
“No,” Alfredo said. He had a headache. He was sick to death of giving in on things. There needed to be some order to this business, some respect for authority. Wasn’t he the man with the gun? Didn’t that count for something? If he said the box would not come inside then the box would not come inside. General Benjamin whispered something in Alfredo’s ear but Alfredo simply repeated his point. “No.”
Roxane pulled on Gen’s arm. “Isn’t that mine? Tell them that.”
Gen asked if the box belonged to Miss Coss.
“Nothing belongs to Se?orita Coss! She is a prisoner like the rest of you. This is not her home. There is no special mail service that applies only to her. She does not receive packages.” The tone of Alfredo’s voice made all the junior terrorists stand up straight and look menacing, for many of them all this took was to put their hands on their guns.
Messner sighed and shifted the weight in his arms. “Then I will come back tomorrow.” He spoke in English now, he spoke to Roxane and let Gen translate for the Generals.
He had not left, he had barely started to turn away from the house when Roxane Coss closed her eyes and opened her mouth. In retrospect, it was a risky thing to do, both from the perspective of General Alfredo, who might have seen it as an act of insurrection, and from the care of the instrument of the voice itself. She had not sung in two weeks, nor did she go through a single scale to warm up. Roxane Coss, wearing Mrs. Iglesias’s slacks and a white dress shirt belonging to the Vice President, stood in the middle of the vast living room and began to sing “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. There should have been an orchestra behind her but no one noticed its absence. No one would have said her voice sounded better with an orchestra, or that it was better when the room was immaculately clean and lit by candles. They did not notice the absence of flowers or champagne, in fact, they knew now that flowers and champagne were unnecessary embellishments. Had she really not been singing all along? The sound was no more beautiful when her voice was limber and warm. Their eyes clouded over with tears for so many reasons it would be impossible to list them all. They cried for the beauty of the music, certainly, but also for the failure of their plans. They were thinking of the last time they had heard her sing and longed for the women who had been beside them then. All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear. When she was finished, the people around her stood in stunned and shivering silence. Messner leaned into the wall as if struck. He had not been invited to the party. Unlike the others, he had never heard her sing before.