“I’m sure there’s plenty I miss.”
“I need you to do me a favor, just like everybody else. I need you to do something.” Because if Messner was right, if it was still going to be a very long time that they were held hostage, then she deserved to have this. And if, at the end of that long time, they were killed anyway, because that was always the talk, that the military would shoot them to pin it on the terrorists, or that the terrorists would kill them in a moment of desperation （though she found this harder to believe）， then she deserved it all the more. And if the third scenario were true, that they would be released quickly and unharmed, that they all would go back to their regular lives and put this behind them, then she would deserve it most of all, because certainly then she would not see Katsumi Hosokawa again. “Find Carmen tonight and tell her to sleep somewhere else. Tell her she shouldn’t come up with breakfast in the morning. You’d do that for me?”
Gen nodded.
But that wasn’t asking for quite enough. That wasn’t asking for everything because she had no way of telling Mr. Hosokawa he should come to her tonight. She wanted to ask him to come to her room but there was only one way of doing that, to ask Gen to go to him and say it in Japanese, and what did she mean to say, exactly? That she meant for him to stay the night? And Gen would have to ask Carmen to find a way to get Mr. Hosokawa upstairs, and what if they were found out, what would happen to Mr. Hosokawa then, and Carmen? It used to be if you met someone and you wanted to see them, maybe you went out to dinner, had a drink. She leaned back against the wall. Two boys with guns walked by but they never teased or poked when Roxane was there. Once they had passed, she took a deep breath and told Gen everything she wanted. He did not tell her this was all insanity. He listened to her as if she wasn’t asking for anything unusual at all, nodding while she spoke. Maybe a translator was not unlike a doctor, a lawyer, a priest even. They must have some code of ethics that prevented them from gossiping. And even if she wasn’t positive then of his loyalty to her, she knew he would do everything possible to protect Mr. Hosokawa.
Ruben Iglesias went into what he still thought of as the guest room, but was now the Generals’ office, in order to empty the wastebaskets. He was going from room to room with a large green trash bag, taking not only what had been thrown away in the cans but what was on the floor as well: pop bottles, banana peels, the bits of the newspaper which had been edited out. Ruben surreptitiously deposited those into his pockets to read late at night with a flashlight. Mr. Hosokawa and Ishmael were playing chess and he stood in the door for a minute to watch. He was very proud of Ishmael, who was so much brighter than the other boys. Ruben had bought that set to teach the game to his son, Marco, but he still felt the boy was too young to learn. General Benjamin was sitting on the couch and after a while he looked up at Ruben. The sight of his eye, so badly infected, took Ruben’s breath away.
“That Ishmael, he’s a fast learner,” General Benjamin said. “Nobody taught him the game, you know. He just picked it up from watching.” The boy’s accomplishment had put him in a good mood. It reminded him of when he used to be a schoolteacher.
“Come into the hall for a moment,” Ruben said to him quietly. “I must speak to you about something.”
“Then speak to me here.”
Ruben cast his eyes towards the boy, indicating that this was a private matter between men. Benjamin sighed and pushed himself off the couch. “Everyone has a problem,” he said.
Outside the doorway, Ruben put down his bag of trash. He did not like to speak to the Generals. His first encounter with them had set a precedent which he followed, but no decent man could pretend not to notice such a thing.
“What is it you need?” Benjamin said, his voice heavy.
“What you need,” Ruben said. He reached into his pocket and took out a bottle of pills with his name on them. “Antibiotics. Look, they gave me more than I would ever need. They stopped the infection in my face.”
“Good for you,” General Benjamin said.
“And you. There are plenty here. Take them. You be will surprised by the difference they make.”
“You are a doctor?”
“You don’t need to be a doctor to see an infection. I’m telling you.”
Benjamin smiled at him. “How do I know you don’t mean to poison me, little Vice President?”
“Yes, yes.” Ruben sighed. “I mean to poison you. I mean for us to die together.” He opened the bottle and shook one of the pills into his mouth and after making sure to show Benjamin how it sat there on his tongue, he swallowed it. Then he handed the bottle over to the General. “I will not ask you what you mean to do with them, but there, they are yours.”
After that, Benjamin returned to the chess game and Ruben picked up the trash and headed on to the next room in the hall.
It was Saturday, but since all the days were essentially the same, the only two people who gave this any thought at all were Father Arguedas, who heard confession on Saturday and planned for his Sunday mass, and Beatriz, who found the weekends to be an unbearable wasteland because the program she liked, The Story of Maria, was only on Monday through Friday.
“It is a healthy thing to wait,” General Alfredo told her, because he enjoyed the show himself. “It gives you a sense of anticipation.”
“I don’t want to wait,” she said, and suddenly thought that she might cry with frustration, the dull white stretch of the afternoon pushing out endlessly in every direction. She had already cleaned her gun and passed inspection and she didn’t have to stand guard until night. She could have taken a nap or looked at one of the magazines she had seen and not understood a hundred times before, but the thought of it all seemed unbearable. She wanted out of this place. She wanted to walk down the streets in the city like any other girl and have men tap their horns as they drove by her. She wanted to do something. “I’m going to see the priest,” she said to Alfredo. She quickly turned her face away. To cry was strictly forbidden. She thought of it as the worst thing she could do.
Father Arguedas adopted a “translator optional” policy in regard to confession. If people chose to confess in a language other than Spanish, then he would be happy to sit and listen and assume their sins were filtered through him and washed away by God exactly as they would have been if he had understood what they were saying. If people would rather be understood in a more traditional way, then they were welcome to bring Gen along if it worked out with his schedule. Gen was perfect for the job, as he seemed to have a remarkable ability not to listen to the words coming out of his own mouth. But that didn’t matter because today Oscar Mendoza was confessing in the language they both grew up speaking. They sat face-to-face on two dining-room chairs pulled over to the corner. People respected the arrangement and avoided the dining room when they saw the priest was sitting down with someone there. At first, Father Arguedas had brought up the idea of trying to rig up some sort of proper confessional in the coat closet but the Generals would not allow it. All of the hostages must be out in the open where they could be clearly seen at all times.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been three weeks since my last confession. At home I go every week, I promise you that, but there isn’t a great deal of opportunity to sin in our present circumstances,” Oscar Mendoza said. “No drinking, no gambling, only three women. Even to try and sin with yourself is nearly impossible. There is so little privacy.”