The Bay of Foxes (14 page)

Does she not want him to go with her? he asks, leaning forward across the checked tablecloth to touch her hand. “I could drive you there,” he offers. He listens to the sound of the wind outside, the sand blowing against the window. She shakes her head without looking at him. She will drive herself. She seems determined, businesslike. She gazes at him dully. She finishes her breakfast fast, adjusts her cloche hat in the mirror in the hall, and allows him to carry her small brown leather suitcase up the hill to her car. “You have forgotten
your book,” he says as she is getting in, realizing she has left it on the console in the hall. He runs down the stone steps and then back up again to put her latest book beside her on the seat. He kisses her on the cheek through the open window. “Good luck. I hope it goes well,” he says, and she just looks at him. He asks again if she is sure she does not want him to accompany her. She shakes her head. He tells her to drive safely, to be careful and watches her drive off in her Jaguar in her smart navy linen suit, her black leghorn hat. He runs down the steps and waves gaily to her from the stone entranceway to the villa as she drives down the hill toward the bay, but she does not turn her head or wave out the window to him.

He goes inside and stands by the telephone for a moment, hesitating, listening to the wind, thinking of M. and her lonely drive along the windy coast, the dead expression in her eyes. At the same time, like an underground stream running continuously beneath the surface, he is thinking of Enrico. He knows he is leaving Porto Cervo within the week to join his wife and children in Rome, where the older girl is getting ready to start school. It is likely to be their last time together.

His heart drumming with hope, he picks up the phone and calls Enrico at the studio where he works with a group of architects in Porto Cervo. He invites him to come to the villa that afternoon. “Leave your car below at Cala di Volpe, in the parking lot in the shade of the eucalyptus, and walk up the hill,” he says. They can spend the whole afternoon and night together in the villa.

He leaves the front door open and watches through the
window as Enrico comes in under the stone archway and enters the villa. It gives him so much pleasure to see his familiar form and face here, to think they can spend the whole afternoon and night together in this beautiful place. He goes to him quickly and takes him tightly in his arms. “God, I’m so happy to see you! I’m so glad you are here,” he whispers, though he can hear the couple in the kitchen talking in their Sardinian dialect, gathering up their things. “They are leaving,” he says, as he has told them to leave after lunch. He beckons to Enrico to follow him through the living room, where he leaves his sweater and the book he is reading on the sofa.

They slip silently down the whitewashed corridor in the shadows of the afternoon and go into Dawit’s room at the end of the corridor with its blood-red iron canopied bed and the white-and-red-striped hangings. They pull down the shutters and throw themselves joyously across the double bed. “Now this is my home,” Dawit says, taking Enrico up in his arms.

They are side by side at the moment of no return, when Dawit becomes aware of footsteps coming to a halt outside the door. There is nothing much he can do but finish what they have so impetuously begun and then lie there holding his breath, listening. “There is someone out there,” Dawit whispers, shifting onto his back. He watches the handle on the door slowly turn. It is like something out of a nightmare.

“One of the servants?” Enrico whispers, but when Dawit looks at him he can see a glint of fear in his light brown eyes. Together they listen to the footsteps on the stone floor outside his room, retreating. Then there is silence again, with only the afternoon sounds of the wind moaning, the cicadas sawing, and the restless murmur of the sea.

“I doubt it,” Dawit says, for he has told the couple to go home after their lunch, to take advantage of M.’s absence and have the afternoon and evening off. They never sleep on the premises. There is no reason for them to disturb his siesta, and they would never try his locked door.

“Damn! And I think I left my sweater and a book on the couch in the living room,” Enrico whispers.

“Oh, God,” Dawit says, thinking of the dead white cushions on the couch and Enrico’s distinctive turquoise sweater and the thriller, an Italian translation of a book by Patricia Highsmith that Enrico is reading—not something Dawit would read. Lately he has been reading Italian poetry.

“But you assured me she was away spending the night in Sassari. How could it have been her?” Enrico says in a frightened voice, sitting up now, his head on one elbow. In the half-light of the shuttered room, Dawit can see the sweat on his brow, his damp russet curls, and his bare freckled shoulders.

H
E CAN FEEL THE TENSION THAT EVENING FROM THE MOMENT
M. appears on the terrace, though she says nothing about the locked door, Enrico’s book on the sofa, the sweater she must have seen. She pleads exhaustion, which she maintains has brought about her early return from Sassari. “I couldn’t go through with it. A crowd of people showed up, and I was about to read when I just told them I was feeling ill, got in the car, and came home.”

“You should have let me come with you,” he says, but he wonders if she ever went there or simply drove for a while and then came home. Was this all a test? She looks at him and says, “I’m exhausted and getting old” and that she needs a bath. Indeed, she does look older and sad in her rumpled linen suit and gray blouse. Without her hat her hair is flat and greasy. He offers to run her bath, but she shakes her head and goes slowly up the stairs into her room.

When she emerges from her bath, she has dressed up, put on her makeup, brushed her hair. She has a red cashmere shawl around her bony shoulders, though the evening is warm and still.

They eat the cold food Adrianna has left for Dawit’s dinner: prosciutto, melon, artichoke hearts, cold chicken in aspic
and cheese, which he spreads out on the blue-and-white-checked tablecloth on the round stone table in the dining area that gives onto a patio behind where the purple bougainvillea climbs up the rock. M. hardly eats, only drinking several glasses of red wine, which she pours for herself, holding the bottle at the neck, her hand visibly shaking. The silence reminds Dawit of that first dinner they ate together in her apartment on the Rue Guynemer when they had sat side by side awkwardly in silence. He gets up and offers to make coffee.

They are sitting out on the wide terra-cotta terrace, sipping the coffee Dawit has served in her gold-rimmed demitasses, when she speaks. She sits upright in the flowing silk trousers and a high-necked black blouse she had changed into before dinner. Her white hair is tied severely back from her face, which makes her nose seem even more sharp, her eyes more slanting. She stares out across the darkening hills and the glittering silver sea in the distance, puts down her cup, and leans forward for him to light her cigarette. There is a full moon illuminating the night sky, so that only the brightest of stars are visible in the vast expanse above them.

In the bright light of the moon, he can see how her eyes snap at him with malice. She is in a rage, smoldering and spiteful, blowing out smoke into the air. As she leans toward him, looking into his face, he can smell her fetid breath.

He thinks of a
kinae
from his childhood. The Capuchin monk who taught him as a young boy asked him to fathom its meaning. There were always two layers that he would have to find, the bronze and the gold. The gold to this particular
kinae
went something like, “Now that you have decided to
deny me my due, there is no point in continuing our relationship. I am not one of those who can forget or forgive.”

He thinks of Enrico but knows very well what he would do if Dawit arrived with his suitcase on his doorstep. Enrico is not, he knows, a man of courage or even determination. He doesn’t pretend to be. It is partly for this, his timidity, his self-deprecating honesty, that Dawit loves him. His weakness is part of his charm, but it makes him someone Dawit cannot count on in an emergency of this kind.

M. puffs on her cigarette, blows out the smoke, and says, “I had an interesting letter some time ago. I didn’t consider it seriously at the time, but I did have the foresight to stall. I told them I’d think it over and I would let them know.”

Dawit waits for her to go on.

“It was an offer to teach in America.”

“Surely you wouldn’t consider such a thing?”

He stares back at her. There is no possibility of his accompanying her there, of course, because he would never be granted a visa. He doesn’t have a working visa for France. The tourist visa she has obtained for him is temporary and will soon expire.

But M. goes on smoking her Gitane and speaking, waving her fine fingers, telling him about the position she has been offered. “It’s a chair at one of the most prestigious places. I wouldn’t have to do much teaching, just one course, with all my summers free, a month at Christmas, and sabbaticals. I wouldn’t even have to attend many meetings, they assure me. The means to procure a house would be provided, along with a generous salary, health benefits. A distinguished group of professors would be my colleagues. Basically, I would just be
lending the program a famous French name. It seems like a wise move at this point in my career, don’t you think? I’m not sure how much longer I can churn out books to support myself. In any case, I’ve decided to write and accept.”

“You would start teaching this fall?” Dawit asks.

“I would only have to start next spring, but I’d leave quite soon to look for a house in the area, settle in. It would be a change.” She looks at him and smiles in a grim, ghastly way. “I think we both need a change, don’t you?” She purses her lips and looks away from him. There is something of the rat about her, he thinks, looking at her profile in the moonlight, or perhaps it is a ferret.

He remembers his arrival in Marseilles, his fear of the police as he made a secret descent from the ship, and the misery of the train ride to Paris followed by a wash of gray days of rain, the cramped quarters, the smell of rotting drains in the crowded apartment in the
banlieue
where Asfa had so generously received him along with all the jetsam and flotsam of African society, the impossibility of finding any work without papers, without degrees or letters of recommendation. And ultimately roaming the damp gray streets, scorned and humiliated, hungry and terrified.

Without M.’s protection, her money and her fame, it is clear to him, and surely to her, what will happen to him. Sooner or later he will be picked up and sent home, where the same government, unbelievably, still clings to its ill-gotten power, despite famine in the land. He will not be as lucky a second time around. His Solomon, alas, is most probably dead, killed in one of the frequent purges.

“You would shut up the apartment in Paris?” he asks, his voice trembling.

“From now on, the apartment in Paris, this villa, as well as the chalet in Gstaad would certainly be shut to you,” she says and stubs out her half-smoked cigarette in the large glass ashtray at her elbow. She stares at him without seeing him, her blue-gray eyes blank. He can only stare back, but what he sees is himself, shuffling eight steps to the overflowing plastic bucket in the corner of his cell, the smell of feces and fear in the air, the sensation of his chest pressing into his spine.

Surely M. must know that by banishing him she is sending him back to certain death. Obviously, she no longer cares. She has toyed with him for a while—he has served a certain function—but now she has had enough.

“In fact, I’d like you to be gone by tomorrow morning. Leave your keys on the console in the hall, along with your checkbook, will you? I’ll give you something to tide you over, of course, enough to get you off the island, but you’ll have to fend for yourself after that. I’ll be closing your account in the morning.”

He thinks of her telling him how he had brought her youth back into her life. How can he go back to his other life now, after the one he has led with M.? His position has not changed. He has not acquired any degrees, or letters of recommendation, or permanent papers, and no money at all. Foolishly, he has spent all she has given him, giving most of it away, living through her, believing, hoping she would protect him as the courtiers in his homeland had expected the Emperor to do. He has learned nothing from his parents’
bitter experience. He has lived a fantasy, playing games, making believe. She well knows he has nothing to sustain him.

“What will I do?” he asks, his voice shaking, folding his fingers to stop their trembling. How can she abandon him so easily? Does she want him to go back to his country, back to prison? Is she trying to kill him? When he looks into her eyes, he feels, indeed, that her rage is such that she would like him dead.

“You’re an enterprising young man. You’ve survived so far. In fact, you’ve been very lucky. We’ve had a good summer together, haven’t we? We have brought each other a moment of reprieve.” For a moment she seems to see him again, and her eyes fill with tears. Will she relent, change her mind? But she quickly regains control of herself and goes on, “Let’s leave it at that. I’m sure you’ll figure it all out. Perhaps you could do some sort of secretarial work for someone else? I’m sure someone will pick you up, as I did, take pity on you. You tell your story rather well, I must say. A few tears and you’ll be in someone’s arms. You are so young, heartbreakingly beautiful, and very smart, to boot—an excellent secretary,” she says, then waves her hands in the air and looks at him now as though he were some sort of merchandise she was considering but has now decided is entirely unnecessary.