At that Carmen, who had been keeping her eyes on the garlic she was chopping, looked up. The nerve, which she had found so briefly the night before, had been missing all day and all she had managed to do was avoid Gen, but that didn’t mean she wanted him to go. She had to believe she had been sent to the kitchen for a reason. She prayed to Saint Rose that the shyness which came down on her like a blinding fog would be lifted as suddenly as it landed.
Gen had no intention of leaving. “I can do more than translate,” he said. “I can wash vegetables. I can stir something if something needed stirring.”
Thibault came back lugging a huge metal roaster in each hand. He heaved them one at a time up onto the stovetop, where each pan covered three burners. “Did I hear leaving? Is Gen even thinking about leaving?”
“I was thinking about staying.”
“No one is leaving! Dinner for fifty-eight, is that what they expect? I will not lose one pair of hands, even if the hands belong to the very valuable translator. Do they think we’re going to do this every night, every meal? Do they think I’m a caterer? Has she chopped the onions yet? May I inquire as to the state of the onions or will you threaten to shoot me?”
Beatriz wagged her knife at Thibault. Her face was wet and red from crying. “I would have shot you if I had to but I didn’t, so you should be grateful. And I chopped your stupid onions. Are you finished with me now?”
“Does dinner look finished to you?” Thibault said, pouring oil into the pans and turning on the bright blue flames of gas. “Go wash the chickens. Gen, bring me the onions. Sauté these onions.”
“Why does he get to cook the onions?” Beatriz said. “They’re my onions. And I won’t wash the chickens because that does not involve a knife. I was only sent in here to work the knives.”
“I will kill her,” Thibault said in weary French.
Gen took the bowl of onions and hugged it to his chest. It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it. They could stand there for hours, six squares of tile apart from each other and never say anything or one of them, either one, could step forward and begin to speak. Gen was hoping it would be Carmen, but then Gen was hoping they would all be released and neither seemed likely to happen. Gen gave the onions to Thibault, who dumped them into the two pans where they spat and hissed like Beatriz herself. Rallying the very small amount of bravery he still possessed, Gen went to the drawer by the telephone, which hung naked on the wall without its cord. He found a small pad of paper and a pen. He wrote the words cuchillo, ajo, chica each on its own piece of paper and took them to Carmen while Thibault argued with Beatriz over who was to stir the onions. He tried to keep in mind all the languages he had spoken, all the cities he had been to, all the important words of other men that had come through his mouth. What he asked of himself was small and still he could feel his hands shaking. “Knife,” he said, and put the first piece down. “Garlic.” He set that one on top of the garlic. “Girl.” The last piece he handed to Carmen and after she looked at it for a minute she put it in her pocket.
Carmen nodded, she made a sound, something like, “ah,” not quite a word.
Gen sighed. It was better now but only slightly. “Do you want to learn?”
Carmen nodded again, her eyes fixed on a drawer handle. She tried to see Saint Rose of Lima on that handle, a tiny blue-cloaked woman balancing on the curved silver bar. She tried to find her voice through prayer. She thought of Roxane Coss, whose very hands had braided her hair. Shouldn’t that give her strength?
“I don’t know that I’m much of a teacher. I’m trying to teach Mr. Hosokawa Spanish. He writes down words in a notebook and memorizes them. Maybe we could try the same for you.”
After a minute of silence, Carmen offered up that same sound, a little “ah” that gave no real information other than that she had heard him. She was an idiot. A fool.
Gen looked around. Ishmael was watching them but he didn’t seem to care.
“The eggplant is perfect!” Ruben said. “Thibault, did you see this eggplant? Every cube is exactly the same size.”
“I forgot to take out the seeds,” Ishmael said.
“The seeds don’t matter,” Ruben said. “The seeds are as good for you as anything else.”
“Gen, are you going to sauté?” Thibault said.
“One minute,” Gen said, and held up his hand. He whispered to Carmen, “Have you changed your mind? Do you want me to help you?”
And then it seemed the saint gave Carmen a sharp blow between her shoulder blades and the word that was so tightly lodged in her throat disengaged like a tough piece of gristle caught in the windpipe. “Yes,” she said, gasping. “Yes.”
“So we’ll practice?”
“Every day.” Carmen picked up the words, knife and garlic, and she put them in her pocket along with girl. “I learned my letters. I haven’t practiced in a while. I used to make them every day and then we started training for this.”
Gen could see her up in the mountains, where it was always cold at night, sitting by the fire, her face flushed from heat and concentration, one piece of dark hair falling from behind her ear the way it was now. She has a cheap tablet, a stubby pencil. In his mind he stands next to her, praises the straight lines of her T and H, the delicate sweep of her Q. Outside he can hear the last call of the birds as they careen towards their nests before dusk. He had thought once that she was a boy and it terrified him, this feeling. “We’ll go over the letters,” he said. “We’ll start there.”
“Am I the only one who has to work?” Beatriz called loudly.
“When?” Carmen only mouthed the word.
“Tonight,” Gen said. What he wanted then was something he could barely believe. He wanted to fold her in his arms. He wanted to kiss the parting of her hair. He wanted to touch her lips with the tips of his fingers. He wanted to whisper things to her in Japanese. Maybe, if there was time, he could teach her Japanese as well.
“Tonight in the china closet,” Carmen said. “Teach me tonight.”
seven
the priest was right about the weather, even though the break came later than he had predicted. By the middle of November, the garúa had ended. It did not drift away. It did not lessen. It simply stopped, so that one day everything had the saturated quality of a book dropped into a bathtub and the next day the air was bright and crisp and extremely blue. It reminded Mr. Hosokawa of cherry blossom season in Kyoto and it reminded Roxane Coss of October on Lake Michigan. They stood together in the early morning before she began her singing. He pointed out a pair of yellow birds to her, bright as chrysanthemums, sitting on the branch of some previously unseen tree. They pecked for a while at the spongy bark and then flew off, first one and then the other, up and over the wall. One by one all the hostages and all their keepers went up to the windows around the house, stared and blinked and stared again. So many people put their hands and noses on the glass that Vice President Iglesias had to come out with a rag and a bottle of ammonia and wipe down each pane. “Look at the garden,” he said to no one in particular. “The weeds are as tall as the flowers.” One would have thought that with so much rain and so little light the forward march of growth would have been suspended, when in fact everything had thrived. The weeds alongside the domesticated bedding plants sniffed at the distant jungle in the air and stretched their roots down and stretched their leaves up in an attempt to turn the vice-presidential garden back into a wild thing. They drank up every bit of the rain. They could have survived another year of wet weather. Left long enough to their own devices, they would overtake the house and pull down the garden wall. After all, this yard had once been a part of the continuum, the dense and twisted interstate of vines that spread right to the sandy edges of the ocean. The only thing that prevented them from taking over the house was the gardener, who pulled up whatever he deemed unworthy, burned it, and then clipped back the rest. But the gardener was now on an indefinite vacation.