Cutting for Stone (18 page)

“But I do. After that first time I've never had unrubberized intercourse. Don't you believe me? That is why I don't understand this burning some mornings. And you, sir? Why don't you use a condom, W.W.?”

Gonad wore heel lifts that made him walk with an ostrichlike pelvic tilt. He teased his hair into a lofty halo that would one day be called an Afro. Now, he pulled himself to his full five foot one and said haughtily, “If I wanted to make love to a rubber glove I would never have to leave the hospital.”

IF GHOSH HAD BEEN AWARE
that at this very moment Sister Mary Joseph Praise was in distress in her quarters, he'd have rushed to help; it might have saved her life. But at that point no one knew. The probationer had yet to deliver her message, and when she did, she failed to tell anyone how sick Sister was.

Ghosh made leisurely rounds with the ward nurse and the probationers. He pointed out a sulfa rash to the newest probationers, removed ascitic fluid from the belly of a man with cirrhosis. The outpatient clinics then took most of the day, except for a formal lecture to the nursing students on tuberculosis. Keeping busy helped him forget about Hema, who should have been back two days ago. He could think of only one explanation for her delay, and it depressed him.

In the late afternoon, Ghosh drove out of Missing. He missed by a few minutes the hue and cry when Thomas Stone carried Sister Mary Joseph Praise out of the nurses’ hostel.

HE PARKED
near the towering Lion of Judah, a landmark for the area near the railway station. Carved out of blocks of gray-black stone, with a square crown on its head, that cubist lion resembled a chess piece. The eye slits beneath the low brow stared across the plaza; the sculpture gave this part of town an avant-garde sensibility.

Ghosh stepped into the chromed and lacquered world of Ferraros, where a haircut cost ten times as much as at Jai Hind, the Indian barbershop. But Ferraros, with its frosted-glass window and red-and-white-striped barber's pole, was rejuvenating. The mirrored walls, the necklace of globe lights, the oxblood leather chair with more knobs and chrome levers than Missing's operating table—you could only get this at the Italian establishment.

Ferraro, dazzling in his collarless white smock, was everywhere: behind Ghosh to slip off his coat, alongside him as he led him to the chair, then in front of him to slip on the gown. Ferraro chatted in Italian and it didn't matter that Ghosh knew only a few words; the conversation was offered as background music, not requiring a response. He felt at ease with the older man. “Beware of a young doctor and an old barber” went the saying, but Ghosh thought both he and Ferraro were in good hands.

Ferraro had soldiered in Eritrea before becoming a barber in Addis. Had they shared a common language, there was much that Ghosh would have asked. He'd have loved to hear about the
1940
s typhus epidemic during which some brilliant Italian official decided to douse the whole city with DDT, getting rid of lice and the typhus. How had the Italians handled VD in the troops who couldn't possibly have confined themselves to the six Italian ladies in Asmara who were the official garrison
puttanas?

He felt an urge to confide in Ferraro, to tell him how his chest ached with jealousy; how he was leaving the country because of a woman who didn't take his love seriously. Ferraro made a soft clucking noise, as if he had intuited the problem and its gender; easing the chair into a reclining position was Ferraro s first step to finding a solution. Neither man could have guessed that at that moment Sister Mary Joseph Praise's heart had stopped beating.

Ferraro gently draped the first hot towel around Ghosh's neck. When the last towel was in place, blotting out all light, Ferraro fell tactfully quiet. Ghosh heard him tiptoe to where he'd parked his cigarette, and then the sound of his exhaling smoke.

If I could have a valet, this would be my man, Ghosh thought. One never doubted for a moment that it was Ferraro s destiny to be a barber; his instincts were perfect; his baldness was inconsequential.

GHOSH EMERGED
in a cloud of aftershave. Driving away, he took in the sights as if for the last time: up the steep slope of Churchill Road and past Jai Hind to the traffic light where a balancing act between accelerator and clutch was required before the light turned green. He turned left and went past Vanilal's Spice Shop, Vartanian's Fabrics, and stopped at the post office.

The leper child who staked out this territory where foreigners abounded had blossomed into a teen seemingly overnight. Her perky breasts pushed through her
shama
while the cartilage of her nose had collapsed to form a saddle nose. He put a one-birr note into her clawed hand.

He turned at the sound of castanets. A
listiro,
bottle caps threaded onto a nail on his shoe box, looked up at him. Ghosh stood against the post office wall along with a half-dozen other men who were smoking or reading the paper while
listiros
worked like bees at their feet. The Italians are responsible for this, too, Ghosh thought: people getting their shoes shined more often than they bathe.

It was starting to drizzle, and the
listiro's
elbows flew like pistons. On the nape of the boy's neck, Ghosh noticed a patch of albino-white skin. Surely not the collar of Venus? So young, and already with scars of healed syphilis?
Venereum insontium
—”innocently acquired” syphilis— was still in the textbooks, though Ghosh didn't believe in such a thing. Other than congenital syphilis where the mother infected the unborn child, he believed that
all
syphilis was sexually acquired. He'd seen five-year-olds at play mimicking the act of copulation with each other and doing a good job of it.

A sudden cloudburst sent Ghosh scrambling to his car. The rain washed off a coat of ennui that had enveloped the Piazza. The streetlights came on and reflected off the chrome of passing cars. The Ambassa buses turned a vivid red. On the rooftop of the three-story Olivetti Building (which also housed Pan Am, the Venezia Ristorante, and Motilal Import-Exports) the neon beer mug filled up with yellow lager, foamed over in white suds, then went dark before the cycle started again. That sign had been a source of such wonder when it was first put up. The barefoot men driving their sheep into town for Meskel festival had stopped to watch the show, knotting up traffic as the herd got away from them.

AT ST. GEORGE'S BAR,
rain dripped off the Campari umbrellas onto the patio. It was packed inside with foreigners and locals who felt the ambience worth the prices. The glass doors held in a rich scent of can-noli, biscotti, chocolate
cassata,
ground coffee, and perfume. A gramophone blended into the chatter of voices, the tinkle of cups and saucers, and the sharp sounds of chairs scraping back and glass smacking on Formica-topped tables.

He had just sat down at the bar when he saw Helen's reflection in the mirror—she was seated at a far corner table. She was shortsighted and probably wouldn't see him. Her fair features were striking against her jet-black hair. She was paying no attention to her companion, who was none other than Dr. Bachelli. Ghosh's instinct was to leave at once, but the barman stood waiting, so he asked for a beer.

“My God, Helen, you are beautiful,” Ghosh muttered to himself, studying her reflection. St. George's didn't employ bar girls, but it had no objections to the classier women coming in. Helen's legs were crossed under her skirt, the skin of her thighs white as cream. He remembered those generous glutei that obviated any need for a supporting pillow. A mole on her jawline added to her distinction. But why was it the prettiest half-caste girls—the
killis,
as they were often called, though the term was derogatory—put on this air of being above it all and bored?

Bachelli, his silk kerchief flowing out of his cream coat and matching his tie, appeared much older on this night than his fifty or so years. His carefully sculpted pencil mustache and his expression of equanimity cigarette in hand, bothered Ghosh because he saw in it his own inertia, the thing that had kept him in Africa so long. Ghosh was fond of Ba ch elli; the man was not a great physician, but he knew his limits in medicine, though he didn't always know his limit in alcohol.

Just a week ago, Ghosh had been shocked to see Bachelli drunk and singing the “Giovinezza,” goose-stepping down the middle of the road in the heart of the Piazza. It was near midnight, and Ghosh had stopped his car then and tried to get him off the street. Bachelli became loud and boisterous, screaming about Adowa, which was enough to get him beaten up if he persisted. Bachelli was lost in the memory of boarding his troop ship in Naples in
1934
; he was a young officer again in the
230
th Legion of the National Fascist Militia, off to fight for Il Duce, off to capture Abyssinia, off to expunge the shame of being defeated at the battle of Adowa by Emperor Menelik in
1896
. At Adowa, ten thousand Italian soldiers, with as many of their Eritrean
askaris,
poured down from their colony to invade and take Ethiopia. They were defeated by Emperor Menelik's barefoot Ethiopian fighters armed with spears and Remingtons (sold to them by none other than Rimbaud). No European army had ever been so thoroughly thrashed in Africa. It stuck in the Italian craw, so that even men who weren't born at the time of Adowa, like Bachelli, grew up wanting vengeance.

Ghosh didn't understand any of this till he came to Africa. He hadn't realized that Menelik's victory had inspired Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa Movement, and that it had awakened Pan-African consciousness in Kenya, the Sudan, and the Congo. For such insights, one had to live in Africa.

The Italians never forgot their humiliation, and so on the next try, some forty years later, Mussolini took no chances; his motto was
Qualsi-asi mezzo!
—win by any means. The monkey-maned Ethiopian horsemen with leather shields and spears and single-shot rifles found the enemy was a cloud of phosgene gas that choked them to death, Geneva protocol be damned. Bachelli had been part of that. And looking at Bachelli's face, so flushed with liquor and pride, as he did his victory march in the Piazza, Ghosh had realized it must have been Bachelli's proudest moment.

Ghosh sat trying to be inconspicuous at the bar, but watching the couple in the mirror. When Ghosh first met Helen, he'd fallen madly in love with her—for a few days. Every time Helen saw him she'd say, “Give me money, please.” When he asked for what, she'd blink and then pout as if the question were unreasonable. She'd say, “My mother died,” or “I need abortion”—whatever came into her head. Most bar girls had hearts of gold and eventually married well, but Helen's heart was of baser metal.

Poor Bachelli was smitten by Helen and had been for years, even though he had a common-law Eritrean wife. He gave Helen money. He expected and accepted her selfishness. He called her his
donna delin-quente,
offering the mole on her cheek as proof. Ghosh meant to ask Bachelli if he actually believed anything in Lombroso's abominable book,
La Donna Delinquente.
Lombroso's “studies” of prostitutes and criminal women uncovered “characteristics of degeneration”—such things as “primitive” pubic hair distribution, an “atavistic” facial appearance, and an excess of moles. It was pseudoscience, utter rubbish.

Ghosh slipped out abruptly without finishing his beer, because suddenly the idea of making small talk with either of them that evening was intolerable.

THE AVAKIANS WERE LOCKING UP
their bottled-gas store, and beyond their shop the lights of the Piazza, the transitory illusion of Roma, came to an end. Now it was all darkness, and the road ran past the long, gloomy, fortresslike stone wall that held up the hillside. A gash in the moss-covered stones was Säba Dereja—Seventy Steps—a pedestrian shortcut to the roundabout at Sidist Kilo, though the steps were so worn down that it was more a ramp than stairs, treacherous when it rained. He drove past the Armenian church, then around the obelisk at Arat Kilo— another war monument at a roundabout—past the Gothic spires and domes of the Trinity Cathedral and then the Parliament Building, which took its inspiration from the one on the banks of the Thames. At the Old Palace, because he was not quite ready to head home, he turned down to Casa INCES, a neighborhood of pretty villas.

He wasn't in the mood for the Ibis or one of the big bars in the Piazza that employed thirty hostesses. He saw a simple cinder-block building up ahead. It appeared to be partitioned into four bars. There were hundreds of such places all over Addis. A soft neon glow showed from two doorways. A plank forded the open gutter. He chose the door on the right, pushing through the bead curtain. It was, as he had suspected given the size, a one-woman operation. The tube light had been painted orange, creating a womblike interior, exaggerated by the frankincense smoking on the charcoal brazier. Two padded bar stools fronted a short wooden counter. The bottles on the shelf on the back wall were impressive—Pinch, Johnny Walker, Bombay gin—even if they were filled with home-brewed
tej.
His Majesty Haile Selassie the First, in Imperial Bodyguard uniform, gazed down from a poster on one wall. A leggy woman in a swimsuit smiled back at His Majesty from a Michelin calendar.