Authors: Bel Canto
“The General said we were to come and help with
dinner,” Carmen said. She spoke to the Vice President. She did not turn her
eyes to Gen, who did not look at her, so how did it seem that they were staring
at one another?
“We are most grateful,” Simon Thibault said. “We
know nothing about the operation of knives. If entrusted with something as
dangerous as knives there would be a bloodbath here in a matter of minutes. Not
that we would be killers, mind you. We’d cut off our own fingers, bleed to
death right here on the floor.”
“Stop it,” Ishmael said, and giggled. He had
recently received one of the amateur haircuts that had been going around. Where
his head had once been covered in heavy rolls of curls, the hair was now
snipped with irregular closeness. It bristled like grass in some places and lay
down neatly in others. In a few places it was all but gone and small patches of
pink scalp shone through like the skin of a newly born mouse. He was told it
would make him look older but really it just made him look ill.
“Do any of you know how to cook?” Ruben asked.
“A little,” Carmen said, studying the position
of her feet on the black-and-white checkerboard of the floor.
“Of course we can cook,” Beatriz snapped. “Who
do you think does our cooking for us?”
“Your parents.
That’s a possibility,” the Vice
President said.
“We’re adults. We take care of ourselves. We
don’t have parents looking after us like children.” Beatriz was only irritated
about missing television. She had done all of her work, after all, patrolled
the upstairs of the house and stood watch for two hours at the window. She had
cleaned and oiled the Generals’ guns and her own gun. It wasn’t fair that she
had been called into the kitchen. There was a wonderful program that came on in
the late afternoon, a girl wearing a star-covered vest and a full skirt
who
sang cowboy songs and danced in high-heeled boots.
Ishmael sighed and set his three knives on the
counter in front of him. His parents were dead. His father had been taken from
the house one night by a group of men and no one saw him again. His mother went
with a simple flu eleven months ago. Ishmael was nearly fifteen, even if his
body produced no evidence to support this fact. He was not a child, if being a
child meant that one had parents to cook your supper.
“So you know the onion,” Thibault said, holding
up an onion.
“Better than you do,” Beatriz said.
“Then take that dangerous knife and chop up
some onions.” Thibault passed out cutting boards and bowls. Why weren’t cutting
boards considered weapons? Hold the two edges firmly in your hands and it was
clear that these great slabs of wood were just the right size for hitting
someone on the back of the head. And why not bowls, for that matter? The heavy
ceramic in the colors of pastel mints seemed harmless enough while holding
bananas, but once they were broken how
were they
much
different from the knife? Couldn’t one drive a shard of pottery into a human
heart just as easily? Thibault asked Carmen to mince the garlic and slice the
sweet peppers. To Ishmael he held up an eggplant. “Peeled, seeded, chopped.”
Ishmael’s knife was heavy and long. Which of
them wielded a paring knife for self-defense? Who had taken the grapefruit
knife? When he tried to remove the skin he wound up cutting three inches into
the spongy yellow flesh. Thibault watched him for a while and then held out his
hands. “Not like that,” he said. “There will be nothing to eat. Here, give them
here.”
Ishmael stopped, examined his work, then he
held out the butchered vegetable and the knife. He held the blade out to
Thibault. What did he know about kitchen manners? Then Thibault had them both,
the knife and the eggplant, one in each hand. Deftly, quickly, he began to peel
back the skin.
“Drop it!” Beatriz shouted. On calling out she
dropped her own knife, the blade slick with onions, a shower of minced onions
scattering onto the floor like a wet, heavy snow. She pulled her gun from her
belt and raised it up to the Ambassador.
“Jesus!” Ruben said.
Thibault did not understand what he had done. He
thought at first she was angry that he had corrected the boy on his peeling. He
thought the problem was with the eggplant and so he laid the eggplant down
first and then the knife.
“Keep your voice down,” Carmen said to Beatriz
in Quechua. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”
“He took the knife.”
Thibault raised up his empty hands, showed his
smooth palms to the gun.
“I handed him the knife,” Ishmael said. “I gave
it to him.”
“He was only going to peel,” Gen said. He could
not recognize a word of this language they spoke to one another.
“He isn’t supposed to hold the knife,” Beatriz
said in Spanish. “The General told us that. Doesn’t anyone listen?” She kept
her gun aimed, her heavy eyebrows pointed down. Her eyes were starting to water
from the fumes of the onions, and soon there were tears washing over her
cheeks, which everyone misunderstood.
“What about this?” Thibault began quietly,
keeping his hands up. “Everyone can stand away from me and I can show Ishmael
how to peel an eggplant. You keep your gun right on me and if it looks like I’m
about to do something funny you may shoot me. You may shoot Gen, too, if I do
something terrible.”
Carmen put down her knife.
“I don’t think—” Gen started, but no one was
paying attention to him. He felt a small, cold hardness in his chest, like the
pit of a cherry had slipped into his heart. He did not want to be shot and he
did not want to be offered up to be shot.
“I can shoot you?” Beatriz said. It wasn’t his
place to give permission, was it? It had not been her intention to shoot anyone
anyway.
“Go ahead,” Ishmael said, taking out his own
gun and pointing it at the Ambassador. He was trying to keep his face serious
but he wasn’t having much luck. “I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to. Show me how
to peel the eggplant. I’ve shot men over less than an eggplant.”
Berenjena,
that
was the word in
Spanish.
A beautiful word.
It could be a woman’s name.
So Thibault picked up the knife and set about
his work. His hands stayed remarkably steady as he peeled with two guns pointed
on him. Carmen did not participate. She went back to mincing the garlic,
hitting her knife against the board in brisk, angry strokes. Thibault kept his
eyes on the deep luster of the purple-black skin. “It’s difficult to do with a
knife this large. You want to slide it just under the surface. Pretend that
you’re skinning a fish. See that.
Very fluid.
It’s delicate
work.” All that was lovely about the eggplant fell into ribbons on the floor.
There was something soothing about it, the way
it all came out so neatly. “Okay,” Ishmael said. “I understand. Give it to me
now.” He put down his gun and held out his hands. Thibault turned the knife,
gave him the smooth wooden handle and another eggplant. What would Edith say
when she heard he had been shot over an eggplant or turning on the television? If
he was going to die he had hoped for a little bit of honor in his death.
“Well,” Ruben said, wiping his face with a
dishtowel. “Nothing around here is a small event.”
Beatriz mopped up her tears against the dark
green sleeve of her jacket. “Onions,” she said, pushing the newly oiled gun
back into her belt.
“I’d be happy to do them for you if at any
point you deem me capable,” Thibault said, and went to wash his hands.
Gen stood next to the sink trying to decide the
best way to phrase his question. Any way it was put it seemed impolite. He
spoke to Thibault in French. He whispered, “Why did you tell her she could
shoot me?”
“Because they
wouldn’t
shoot you.
They
all like you too much. It was a harmless gesture on my part. I thought it gave
me more credibility. Telling her she could shoot me, now
that
was a risk. They care nothing for me and they think the world of you. It’s not
like I told them they could shoot poor Ruben. That girl might want to shoot
Ruben.”
“Still,” Gen said. He wanted to be firm on this
point but he felt it slipping away from him. Sometimes he suspected he was the
weakest person in captivity.
“I hear you gave her your wristwatch.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows. She flashes it around every
chance she gets. Would she shoot the man who gave her his watch?”
“Well, that’s what we don’t know.”
Thibault dried his hands and looped a careless
arm around Gen’s neck. “I would never let them shoot you, no more than I’d let
them shoot my own brother. I’ll tell you what, Gen, when this is over, you’ll
come and visit us in
The second this is over I’m resigning my post and Edith and I are moving back
to
you feel like traveling again, you will bring Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane. You can
marry one of my daughters if you want to, then you would be my son rather than
my brother.” He leaned forward and whispered in Gen’s ear, “This will all seem
very funny to us then.”
Gen inhaled Thibault’s breath. He tried to take
in some of the courage, some of the carelessness. He tried to believe that one
day they would all be in
beside his left eye and then let him go. He went off in search of a roasting
pan.
“Speaking in French,” Ruben said to Gen. “That’s
very impolite.”
“How is French impolite?”
“Because everyone here speaks Spanish.
I can’t remember the last time I
was in a room where everyone spoke the same language and then you go off
speaking some language I failed in high school.” And it was true, when they
spoke in Spanish no one in the kitchen waited for anything to be explained, no
one was forced to stare vacantly while the others tore through unintelligible
sentences. No one wondered suspiciously if what was being said was in fact
something horrible about them. Of the six people in the room, Spanish was a
first language only for Ruben. Gen spoke Japanese, Thibault French, and the
three with the knives had first learned Quechua in their village and then a
hybrid of Spanish and Quechua together from which they could comb out the
Spanish with varying degrees of success.
“You could take the day off,” Ishmael said to
the translator, a tough rubber spiral of eggplant skin dangling from his knife.
“You don’t have to stay.”
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.