Tell me if this is how last day of your vacation goes:
You gather up your toiletries and dirty laundry and stuff them into your suitcase.
You buckle into your car/plane seat and watch sadly out the window as the skyscrapers/seacoast/mountain range recedes from view
You regret all the shops you didn’t shop/restaurants you didn’t try/views you didn’t gaze on.
You wish you could stay longer.
You eat one more indulgence, because vacation isn’t officially over until you toss your suitcase onto your bed at home.
How about that wish to stay longer? What would you do if you could? How much longer would you like to stay?
Be careful what you wish for.
Joachim Messner, a Swiss Red Cross employee, landed in an unnamed Latin American country and ended up staying — well I won’t tell you how long.
In Bel Canto, a novel by Ann Patchett, Messner plays a minor but essential role as the Red Cross emissary in a terrorist standoff.
The terrorists interrupt a birthday party at the Vice President’s mansion, taking all the guests and household servants hostage. Messner carries the daily lists of demands between the generals inside the mansion and the throng of military and press outside the walls.
The whole point of the party was to honor the birthday of Katsumi Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman, and to convince him to invest in the impoverished little country. Hosokawa might never have come to his own celebration, but he loves opera and they invited his favorite soprano, Roxane Coss, to sing.
Now they’re all trapped in the mansion together.
Good thing Hosokawa brought along his translator, and good thing the translator has a lot of languages under his belt because, among the hundred or so inhabitants of this mansion, the languages include Spanish, Quechua, English, French, Japanese, German, Greek, Danish and Russian.
Besides the three generals in charge of this hijacked party, the terrorists are mere children. With guns. “They stretched their little hands around butts of their rifles and kept their faces blank. . . . They were moody, irrational, anxious for confrontation.”
Coming from the jungle, these children have never seen the luxury that they find here. They “spent their time staring at the details of the house. They bounced on the beds and tried on the clothes in the dressers. They flushed the toilets again and again for the pleasure of watching the water swirl away.”
As for the hostages, “The day no longer progressed in its normal, linear fashion. But instead every hour circled back to its beginning, every moment was lived over and over again. . .. Guns were pointed, commands were given and obeyed, people slept in rows on the living-room carpet and asked for permission in the most personal of matters.” As the crisis drags on, “the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.”
In the middle of it all is the lovely opera singer. She is a public figure, someone millions of people know about but never get to see any closer than a toy figure down on a stage. Yet here she is, brushing her teeth, napping, wearing clothes borrowed from the closets of the vice president and his wife.
I loved this book. You wouldn’t think a story full of guns, soldiers and imprisonment could be heart-warming or even funny. But I loved every character, every micro-story, and every surprise.
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At the beginning of this crisis, Messner delivered sandwiches into the mansion. But as things dragged on, the fatigue of the outside world showed in the food they sent in.
Had I been there myself, I might have hoped they’d send in the makings for Cheesy Wild Rice Soup and Honey Oat Casserole Bread.
In this bread, I added a special ingredient that I recently raved over in my newsletter. It’s re-igniting my excitement for making bread.
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