The Bay of Foxes (11 page)

She reclines in the shade, her head propped on her hand. She says this is a perfect place, where she would like to be buried, or rather that she would like her body to be left here among the reeds and rocks floating like Ophelia. She is claustrophobic and hates the idea of lying rotting in a closed tomb. “Did you know that Germaine de Staël’s mother, Madame Necker, who was married to the finance minister, had herself pickled and placed in a tomb with her husband and eventually Germaine—because she was so afraid of being buried alive?” He shakes his head in wonder and tells her of the small, airless spaces he has had to endure, that seemed like a series of coffins. In the security of this sun, pink sand, and the clear sea that stretches for as far as the eye can see, he tells her his story.

He recounts the tale of his ghastly voyage to freedom, first to the coast, hidden in the back of a truck, the hills disappearing and the flat land spreading around him as he peeped out at it from time to time from under a blue tarpaulin. He remembers the sun overhead, the sand in his mouth, the scorching heat, the children who waved to him when he stuck his
head up for air, the villages with their once-thatched huts so often razed to the ground.

Then there was the dreadful sea voyage to France from Djibouti. With the small amount of money he had got from the sale of his mother’s jewelry, he had bribed an official to smuggle him on board without papers or a ticket. He lay in the hold, buried in a box in the dark for days on end, sick and sore and already terribly homesick. The faces of his family: his mother’s dark curls, the scar on his father’s cheek from a childhood accident, the smell of their skin, the feel of their hands, the sounds of their voices, all of this was already going from him. They, who had come to him under torture, sustaining him, keeping him alive, were now fading, as the ship drew farther and farther away from his homeland. His stomach heaved with the dreadful rising and falling of the ship, his heart contracted in that dark, airless space, with the fear of discovery, his rapidly diminishing supply of food and water, the endless days of renewed and excruciatingly cramped captivity.

“You have suffered so terribly. And are you happy now, darling?” M. asks him, taking his hand and looking into his eyes with longing.

“Very happy. Are you?” he asks.

“Terrifyingly happy,” she says.

H
E ENJOYS HER COMPANY, THEIR IDLE DAYS TOGETHER, THE
sun and sea, the warm breezes, the quiet of the place, the delicious meals. She is witty, playful, and tender with him. She has the ability to laugh at herself. Sometimes she reminds him of his father, who had such a gift with words, and he remembers the dinners in the mansion with the lively and intelligent conversation, the puns and clever repartee. Also, she knows everyone, as his father did in his society of the time, and like many writers she is happy to pass on the intimate details of other famous lives. He could listen to her gossip for hours. She knows about Louis XVI’s sex life and how Nabokov’s wife carried his books for him when he taught at Cornell. She has read so much and has flashes of real brilliance and insight into the human mind, though there are subjects she ignores completely. She is terrible with figures and seems to have only a very vague acquaintance with geography. Her spelling is atrocious. Above all, her generosity never ceases to surprise and move him. He loves her for being so loving to him. From the start, he wonders why she is this way, and whether her generosity might ever wane. What would happen to him if she ever tired of him? “I want to try and undo some of the harm we have done to you and your people,” she says, staring
at him lovingly, and he wonders if such an estimable sentiment is true, and how long such altruism might last.

He knows from reading her work that she can be cruel. He remembers reading about her role in France during the Nazi occupation, when she worked to suppress certain publications that spoke out against Pétain by denying them access to the paper they needed to be printed. He remembers her book on the war where she was more concerned about her lover than her Jewish husband, who was starving in a concentration camp.

There are times now, too, when this cruelty emerges. She likes to dine at the restaurant of the splendid hotel at the foot of the hill, Cala di Volpe. They sit outside on the terrace under the stars in the warm air. The service is excellent, and the food delicious. One evening, though, he watches nervously as the young busboy, a fresh-faced island youth, who is replenishing her glass, accidentally brushes against M. When he leans over to refill the bread basket, she stares at the boy, and Dawit sees her eyes flash with a sudden dislike. She is angry in a way Dawit has never seen before, something smoldering and spiteful. “You keep coming too close to me,” she snaps at the boy, who has no idea what this white-haired signora is talking about. “
Scusi, signora
,” he says, flushing bright red, hanging his head, humiliated and terrified, Dawit imagines, of losing his lucrative job at this elegant hotel that is, probably, keeping his entire family alive.

She can be stingingly abrasive with anyone who shows stupidity. At a large cocktail party, at a French family’s grand villa overlooking the sea, Dawit watches a blond, red-faced young man come rushing up through the crowd on the terrace
in his pink Lacoste shirt and loafers. He pushes his way toward her eagerly, coming up close, his champagne flute in hand, red in the face and obviously thrilled to find this celebrated writer at this event and to accost her and show off his knowledge of her work. Perhaps he is a little drunk. Dawit listens in horror as he praises M. fulsomely, saliva flying in the bright air, but for a popular book she has not written. He has mixed up his names and authors.

She just stares back at him for a dreadful moment of silence while he goes on grinning foolishly, waiting for her response. She says, “That is a book I not only didn’t write but would never have wanted to. You have not only no memory, young man, but no taste.” Dawit wonders how the young man can leave the party intact, and if he goes home and slits his wrists. Indeed, he seems to crumple before Dawit’s eyes as he excuses himself and beats a hasty retreat. Dawit recalls the moment in the restaurant with M.’s editor.

But with him she is invariably perfect, loving and thoughtful. She does not interfere in his life; rather she encourages him to go out at night after dinner. “Go to the bars. You need to be with people your own age, your own kind. Play the field. There is safety in numbers, I feel. I understand, you know, I, too, was young once,” she says, smiling at him mischievously.

He laughs, says he’s too tired. He’s been swimming and running and learning Italian all day. He’s going to bed. She insists, says he must feel free to do what he wants, to exercise, too. “I want you to be healthy and happy after so much suffering,” she says. “Take the car. Running is fine, but why don’t you join the tennis club, too? It’s very nice and relatively
inexpensive. Play some tennis. It would be good for you. You’ll meet other young people there.”

He decides he will take a tennis lesson. It is ages since he has played. He learned to play as a boy in Switzerland and plays very well. It is a sport he likes particularly. He makes an early morning appointment at the tennis club in Porto Cervo, where he meets Enrico.

W
ITH THE TOP DOWN, HE DRIVES THE
J
AGUAR INTO TOWN AT
dawn. The first light of day barely illumines the sky as he parks the white car outside the club. He finds the young tennis pro waiting for him on the tennis court, its purple morning glories growing up the fence around it.

The pro sends him an easy forehand, and Dawit slams the ball back hard, aiming for the corner and thinking of the guard in the prison who tormented him. The pro responds in kind, returning the ball to the other side of the court, setting up a difficult backhand for Dawit. But Dawit responds with a fierce cross-court, a ball the pro is unable to retrieve. “You have a wicked backhand,” the tennis pro says, laughing, coming up to the net to retrieve a ball, smiling at him, panting. He runs back and forth across the court, sweating, all through the game.

Out of the corner of his eye Dawit notices someone standing at the fence, watching their game. There is something mysterious and melancholy about the man’s fine face. He seems to have something ancient about him, though he looks relatively young, probably in his early forties, the lines around his eyes only adding to his attractiveness. From the way the man stands, feet apart, idly tilting his curly head back slightly
in the sunlight, Dawit comes to the conclusion he is someone of privilege, though there is no indication of any belief in his ability to prevail. On the contrary there is something endearingly tentative about the way he stands there considering them, turning his head back and forth, his lips slightly parted with interest.

He comes onto the court as Dawit is leaving. In the gold light of the early morning, as he picks up a ball, Dawit notices the reddish hairs on his bare, freckled legs. An amber-eyed man with curly reddish hair and a delicate profile, he looks as though he has stepped out of a Renaissance painting despite his Lacoste shorts and V-necked tennis sweater. He has the lesson after Dawit’s.

“Would you consider playing with me? You are awfully good,” he says in Italian, with a charming smile. “I’m afraid you would beat me hollow with that killer backhand.” Dawit smiles at him, says he would be delighted to beat him, and they exchange amused glances. The tennis pro introduces them, and they shake hands across the net. Enrico asks Dawit if he would like to have breakfast with him after his lesson. Would Dawit mind waiting for him? “I have all the time in the world,” Dawit says and grins. He feels as if he could wait forever for this man.

He takes a long shower, dresses, and sits at the bar in the small restaurant with its climbing plants, a mirror running along the wall behind the bar. He orders a bottle of mineral water and waits for Enrico, excited at the prospect of this encounter, hoping his Italian is up to an extended conversation, which it turns out to be. Enrico speaks clearly, simply, and slowly enough for Dawit to understand, and above all he
uses his hands so expressively, he hardly needs words. They sit side by side on the bar stools and order cappuccinos and sticky brioches, and Dawit watches him move his hands. Enrico tells him he is an architect and painter and lives in Rome. He comes from an ancient Roman family, though they have no money any longer, he says. “We are the poor cousins,” he says with a charming, self-deprecating laugh and an elegant gesture, though he still has to spend his Sundays during the year in the Vatican, parading about in black as a papal guard.

“What are you doing here?” Dawit asks.

They are here for the summer. His wife is from a prominent Sardinian family. They are powerful politicians Dawit has heard M. mention. They own many newspapers and television stations on the mainland. The family are rather awful, according to Enrico—
prepotente
, he says, grinning, which Dawit does not understand at first but eventually gathers means they are rather full of themselves—but they have been helpful with his career, Enrico admits. Without them he’s not sure what would have happened to him, he says. He has built some of the new houses in the vicinity, thanks to his in-laws, he says with modesty. “They know everyone,” he explains with a shrug and an expressive gesture. Their own house, which Enrico designed, too, is in Liscia de Vacca on the beach. There are two young children.

Dawit listens to him talk with pleasure, watching his freckled hands hovering over the meaning of words like spotted butterflies over flowers. They remind him of a conductor using his hands to express the meaning of the music.

“What about you? What brings you here?” Enrico asks, looking at him with curiosity in his light brown eyes.

Dawit finds himself speaking in his halting Italian about his past, his country. “Ah, so you are from the oldest place in the world—Ethiopia, the birth of humanity!” Enrico says, smiling. Dawit speaks frankly as he has not done for a long while, of his recent days in Paris, his inability to find work, his crushing poverty. His lack of fluency enables him to say more than he might have in French or even in his own language. He finds that words without any childhood connotations are somehow easier to use. Or perhaps it is that Enrico seems so frank and open, Dawit is encouraged to be equally so. He says he is staying with a famous writer who has befriended him. She has a villa above Cala di Volpe.