“What is he doing there?” the General asked her. He couldn’t help but notice how pretty this girl was becoming. Had she been this pretty before, he never would have let her sign up. He should tell her to keep her hair under her cap. He should let her go just as soon as they were home.
“Sulking.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He feels embarrassed.”
Maybe it was wrong to let a pretty girl go after him. One of the boys should have gone and simply shaken the tree until Cesar fell out. General Benjamin sighed. He had been impressed with Cesar’s singing. He wondered if the talent would make the boy high-strung, the way the soprano was high-strung. If that was the case he would be forced to dismiss Cesar as well, and then he would have lost two soldiers. Even as he was thinking this he remembered where he was, and the thought of ever getting home, of ever having a choice so simple as to let someone go or to keep them, seemed impossible. Why was he even wasting his time with this? Cesar in a tree? What did it matter? “Leave him up there.” General Benjamin looked over Carmen’s head to the far side of the room, which was his way of saying that the conversation was over.
“May I tell Miss Coss?”
He looked back down at her and blinked. She was obedient, well mannered. It was a shame that things hadn’t turned out better. Certainly there would be a role for pretty girls in a revolution. There was no sense being hard on her. “I think she would want to know.”
Carmen, happy, grateful, bowed to him.
He said to her sharply, “Salute!”
Carmen saluted him, her face as serious as any soldier’s, and then skated away.
“Cesar’s in the tree,” Carmen said. She stood between Mr. Hosokawa and Mr. Kato. She stood across from Gen, where she would not be tempted to hold on to his sleeve in front of everyone. She loved the sound of his voice, translating.
“Won’t he come in?” Roxane said. Her blue eyes were shadowed in purple. Never had Carmen seen her look so tired, except at the very beginning.
“Oh, he’ll come in. He’s just embarrassed. He thinks he made a fool of himself. He thinks you think he’s an idiot for trying to sing.” She looked at Roxane, her friend. “I told him you didn’t think that at all.”
Gen translated her words into English and Japanese. Both the men and Roxane Coss were nodding. Carmen’s words translated into Japanese. They had such a beautiful sound.
“Would you ask the General if I could go outside?” Roxane said to Carmen. “Do you think it would be possible?”
Carmen listened. She was included. It was thought that she would be the best person to make the request. Her opinion was sought out. It was more than she could believe, of all the people in the room with all their money and education and talent, they thought that she was the one. She wanted to say to Roxane Coss in her most polite voice, No, they will never let you outside, but I am very pleased that you asked me. Not that she had any idea how to say that in English. The Generals were ignoring her conversation, the Generals Hector and Alfredo had left the room altogether, none of the boys cared, but Beatriz was listening. Carmen could see her out of the corner of one eye. She wanted to trust Beatriz. She had trusted her. And anyway, she wasn’t doing anything wrong now. “Tell her I would be glad to ask for her,” she said to Gen. She was aware of her posture and she tried to hold her back straight like Roxane Coss. She tried to train her shoulders to go back though the effect was mostly lost inside the dark green shirt that hung over her like a piece of tarp.
They thanked her in English and Japanese and then in Spanish. Gen was proud of her, she could tell. Gen, if circumstances allowed, would have put his hand on her shoulder and told her so in front of his friends.
There was no way Roxane Coss would be allowed to go outside to speak to Cesar in the tree. Keeping the hostages inside was a top priority. Certainly, no one knew that better than Carmen, who had broken this important rule just last night. But it wasn’t her place to refuse the request. No one had asked Carmen for an answer, they had only asked her to approach the General with the question. In truth, she would have rather not done it. What was the point in asking for something that you knew would be denied? Carmen wondered if she could ask the General something else, say, if he wanted a fresh cup of coffee, then everyone would see her asking without being able to hear her. She could come back with the news that they had been turned down. But she didn’t want to lie to Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa, people who valued her opinion and treated her as a friend, and certainly she couldn’t lie to Gen. She would have to ask because she said she would. It would have been better if she could have waited an hour or two. The generals did not like being approached when they had so recently been bothered. But there wasn’t an hour or two to wait. Cesar would be long out of the tree by then. Carmen had sat in that tree herself and she knew it to be both lovely and uncomfortable. The amount of time anyone could sulk while sitting in a tree was limited, and the point was that Roxane Coss wanted the opportunity to coax him down. There was no sense trying to explain the General’s inner workings to her dearest hostages, any more than she would bother to try and explain Roxane Coss’s motives to General Benjamin, who certainly would not have cared. All she could do was ask. Carmen smiled and left her group, crossed back over the room where General Benjamin was sitting in a wing-backed chair near the empty fireplace. He was reading papers. She couldn’t tell what the papers were, although she saw that they were written in Spanish. She could read a little now but not so well as that. His eyebrows were pointed down towards the bridge of his nose and his eyes were squinting. His shingles ran across the side of his face and into his eye like a slash of molten lava but they no longer appeared to be so infected. He lifted a finger and touched them once gently, then he winced and went back to his reading. Truly, Carmen knew better than to disturb him.
“Sir?” she whispered.
They had been speaking not five minutes before but now he looked at her as if he was confused. His eyes were red and watery, especially his left eye, which was rimmed in blisters no bigger than pinheads.
Carmen waited for him to speak to her but he said nothing. It was up to her to start the conversation. “Forgive me for bothering you again, General, but Roxane Coss asked me to ask you . . .” She paused, thinking surely he would cut her off, tell her to go away, but he didn’t. He did nothing. Had he turned away and gone back to reading his papers, she would have understood that. She would have known how to act if he shouted at her, but General Benjamin only stared. She took in her breath, straightened up her shoulders, and started again. “Roxane Coss would like to go outside to speak to Cesar. Cesar in the tree? She wants to tell him he did well.” Again she waited but nothing happened. “I think the translator would have to go, too, if Cesar was to understand what she was saying. We could send some guards out with them. I could get my gun.” She stopped and waited patiently for him to deny the request. She had never considered any other possibility, but he didn’t say anything, and for a minute he closed his eyes so as not to look at her anymore. She glanced down at the papers he was holding and felt a chill pass through her thin chest. She was suddenly afraid that the General had received bad news, that there was something in those papers that would ruin her happiness.