The Bay of Foxes (12 page)

“Who is it?” Enrico asks, and Dawit tells him.

Enrico knows M.’s work. He knows her villa, too. He is visibly impressed and makes an expression of awe, opening his eyes wide and pulling down his lips at the corners. He knows the architect who built the villa, a distinguished older man, Vietti. It was one of the first houses on the hill. “
Una villa bellissima
,” he says, looking at Dawit, obviously considering him anew. Then he asks him, “Are you two…. involved?” crossing two fingers in the air to make his meaning clear.

Dawit shakes his head. “She’s an interesting woman and she has been very good to me, but how
could
I be?” he says and looks at Enrico.

“Because of her age?” Enrico asks.

“Not only that,” Dawit says, looking into his eyes and then lowering his gaze.

“Oh, I see.
Bene!
” Enrico says with a flash of white teeth, a frank smile which is always a surprise in his melancholy
face. “I have to go now, but I hope we can meet again soon. I’d like to get to know you better.”

Later Dawit meets an adorable little boy with blond hair and flushed cheeks who is perched on Enrico’s shoulders, his hands gripping his father’s thick russet curls. Dawit thinks of Takla with a lonely tilt of the heart.

T
HEY DO NOT COME TO THE VILLA WHEN THEY SPEND AFTERNOONS
together. They meet at the tennis club in Porto Cervo. Dawit feels he cannot see enough of Enrico. He knows he is moving back to Rome at the end of the summer, that their time together will be brief. Each moment is precious. When he is not with Enrico, he replays their time together in his mind like a film. He finds it difficult to think of anything else, to concentrate on what M. is saying to him.

“How can you play tennis in the heat of the day?” M. asks him, looking worried.

He shrugs. “You know the heat doesn’t bother me.”

“Ah, youth,” she says and smiles with fond indulgence.

They do, indeed, play tennis in the heat of the day. Dawit usually beats Enrico, but sometimes he concedes out of pity. Then they have a quick shower, a light lunch in the restaurant, a glass of white Sardinian wine. Afterward they use one of the upstairs rooms.

There, in the small white room, with the shutters drawn, Enrico’s pale skin glows as he lets Dawit undress him. Dawit loves the freckles on his shoulders and back. With a half smile, complicitous and yet slightly ironic—there is often something
slightly detached about Enrico—he allows Dawit to enter his body with passion. They make love to the accompaniment of the
pong
of the tennis balls hit back and forth and an occasional expletive in the air.

Enrico loves pleasure. He whispers in a low, almost strangled voice into Dawit’s ear. He tells him he loves his smooth black skin. “How you shine for me!” he says, calling him his Dark King, his Balthazar, a wise man come to adore the child. He makes love passionately, using his nails and teeth, his tongue, as though he wishes to absorb more and more of Dawit’s body, his strength and youth.

Even so, he is often in a hurry, checking the time, afraid of leaving late and arousing his wife’s suspicion. He fears discovery. Obviously, he is a devoted husband, son-in-law, and father. He is the one who tells Dawit when they can meet and for how long, saying succinctly, “I have an hour tomorrow afternoon,” without further explanation. Dawit often feels Enrico is halfway out the door, only giving himself up completely for a moment at the height of passion. From the second he enters the room, he is ready to leave, folding his clothes neatly on the chair, leaving his car keys—he drives an old Alfa Romeo—available.

Only if his wife is absent for the afternoon or is at her parents’ house with the children does he permit Dawit to tarry on the bed beside him with the shutters drawn and the sound of the tennis players below. As long as Dawit is home by seven in the evening to hear her work, M. does not seem to mind.

Enrico gazes at the ceiling, and Dawit encourages him to
talk about his life. He wants to know everything about him. Also, he loves lying beside him and listening to the sound of his patrician voice, with its Italian cadences, which he doesn’t always understand but sound to him like singing. He feels he has entered an Italian opera, one about love and death.

He thinks of his father, who loved Italian opera and particularly
Aida
, with its Ethiopian story, which he listened to again and again.

Dawit lies quietly and stares at Enrico’s small, almost pointed ears, his endearingly boyish curls, his fine profile, with the pointed nose, almost pencil-thin at the tip, the sensuous lips. He adores the slight swell of the stomach and the dusting of reddish hair on the pale skin that goes with it. Dawit winds his own dark arm around Enrico’s white waist to hold him gently, caress his soft, freckled skin. “Together, we make art,” Enrico says.

Dawit watches the way Enrico stands on one foot, leaning slightly against a wall, the tilt of the hip, the tentative, soft-footed, graceful walk. Even his tennis, the steady game he plays, hitting the ball regularly, elegantly, but never with much force, Dawit finds endearing. Somehow, Enrico’s delicacy moves Dawit more than a muscular frame would have. He seems vulnerable, boyish, easily swayed. Dawit wants to protect him despite his worldly success as an architect, despite his rich wife, his powerful family, his aristocratic antecedents. He seems unsure of himself in so many ways, always sees both sides to every question, vacillating, uncertain. “You may be right,” he often says, laughing, shrugging his narrow shoulders.

He talks about his life in Rome. He is in love with Rome and proud of his city as only a Roman can be. He says, “It’s so beautiful. Every time you turn a corner it is with an orgasm. The Romans are so beautiful, too, even the policemen in their white helmets in the summer with their batons lifted are beautiful.”

He invites Dawit to visit. He wants to show him the streets, the monuments that he loves particularly: the little circular temple of Vesta in the Roman forum—he makes a gesture to convey his admiration. He offers to find him a job, perhaps even at the firm where he works. Dawit must bone up on his Italian. “With your gift for languages, it would be easy enough. It’s amazing how much Italian you’ve learned in a few weeks. It would be great to have you there,” he says. He laughs when Dawit sometimes uses the archaic words he has found in Dante. “You are too much,” he says. “You speak archaic Italian! You must come and stay in Rome. We could see one another every day.” He tells Dawit he goes every evening to have a drink with his widowed mother before dinner, and she is a wonderful alibi and always understanding.

“How lucky you are!” Dawit says, thinking of his own mother and how understanding she was.

Dawit imagines a small apartment in Rome, a job, the possibility of spending every evening with Enrico, above all his own freedom. They even speak of living together openly, but Dawit is quite aware this is just a fantasy, as is most probably the job at the architectural firm in Rome. Enrico’s position, if Dawit has understood rightly, though he is a good architect, still depends largely on his wife’s family’s powerful
influence as the source of his commissions. Besides, Dawit is certain this man would never leave his wife or do anything to jeopardize his marriage.

The wife, of course, knows nothing about this secret summer life. Enrico says he feels terrible about her. She is young and lovely and loves him very much. “Lying is a lonely business,
amico mio
,” he says remorsefully.

S
OMETIMES, AFTER MAKING LOVE, THEY LEAVE THE TENNIS
courts and dare to drive together in M.’s Jaguar with the top down along the coast. They park in an isolated clearing overlooking a small, quiet beach. They sit side by side in silence in the car. Nothing stirs, and all they can hear is the soft, sad lapping of the sea, the lonely cry of a seagull, the monotonous chirring of the cicadas. Everything speaks to Dawit of death. He looks at the calm, clear water, the stunted bushes that grow wild along the coast, and the bullrushes almost pink in the twilight. This lovely place will still be here, eternal and indifferent when he and Enrico are no more.

He does not recount the torture, the beatings of the feet held suspended in the air, or the repeated near-drownings in filthy water, or even the interminable loneliness of his cell, but rather the few moments of reprieve during his imprisonment. Sporadically and inexplicably, he would be dragged out, wounded, bleeding, and half mad from solitude, from his cell. He was allowed to clean himself. The guard removed his shackles, ordered him to undress and shower. He was given disinfectant soap to cleanse his wounds and to scrub at the lice in his hair and the other vermin crawling all over his aching body.

Sometimes, he was allowed to walk about for an hour or so, still shackled but in the light and air of the courtyard. There he would stare up at the sky or fall to his knees at the sight of a blade of green grass and offer up his thanks to God. Green grass! He remembers the thrill of it. A few times he found himself in the company of other prisoners, shuffling around half demented with pain and hunger. Once or twice he spoke to someone else for a moment, sitting shackled side by side, fearing always that what was said might be reported. “How long have you been here?” they would ask. He would shrug his shoulders and say he couldn’t tell. “Forever,” he would say, for so it seemed. Once an older woman with cracked teeth, blind in one eye, had looked at him sadly and said, “So young to be shut away in darkness,” and he was moved by her sympathy.

One evening, they brought an old Orthodox priest into his cell, and he was certain then that they were preparing to execute him the next day. The ancient bearded monk, who spoke French, seemed as terrified as he was but allowed him to read his favorite passages from his Bible. Together they sang the familiar hymns.

Occasionally, he would find with his bread an unexpected boon, a small, wrinkled apple, a bunch of radishes, a raw onion, or a tomato, and once a whole, perfect orange, which he devoured with bliss. He never knew what caused these occasional kindnesses, if they came because of some inspection by a Red Cross agency or were simply the result of some guard’s humanity, perhaps even the guard who tormented him so. These moments come back to him vividly, sitting in the car in the twilight beside Enrico.

“How did you get out?” Enrico asks.

Dawit turns to him and tells him some of the story. He describes the guard who tormented him, Solo’s appearance in his cell, the gift of the file, and the wait behind the door with the chain.

“What happened?” Enrico asks.

“Eventually, at dawn, someone came, and I was waiting for him and able to do what was necessary to save my life,” Dawit says. Enrico turns his head to look at him, opens his eyes wide. “You killed him with your bare hands?” he asks, touching Dawit’s hand.

Dawit nods his head and makes a gesture to show how he held the chain around the man’s neck and throttled him.

Enrico smiles and pretends to shake. He says, “Such a violent black man!”

Dawit shows Enrico the marks of his nails and teeth on his skin and says, “Such a violent white one!”

Outside the prison, Dawit says, the half-dark streets were filled with flares and absurd cries: “Revolutionary motherland or death!” “Long live Marxism!” “Viva proletariat Ethiopia. Viva Mengistu!”