The Bay of Foxes (15 page)

She rises stiffly and strides across the stone floor into the living room, where he follows her. He considers going down on his knees, weeping, as he did that first day in the café, or jumping up on the brick wall, threatening to throw himself off the cliff, but he senses it would not change her decision. She would just allow him to jump. In her furor she is like a rock, unbreakable, immovable. Besides, his pride prevents
him from begging. He can only watch her go. He can see that her excessive passion has changed into excessive hate. She is bent on humiliating him completely.

She bends over and opens up her safe, which is in an alcove in the wall beside the sofa. She pulls out a small stack of bills, puts them on the inlaid table beside her, closes the safe, and twists the knob. “This will get you off the island. I expect you to be gone by noon tomorrow. I don’t like lingering good-byes. You can take the Land Rover and leave it at the airport. Put the keys under the mat. I’ll have Michelino come and pick it up. You’d better start packing tonight. Take whatever clothes you want. At least you’ll be well dressed this time. I’m going to take some sleeping pills and try and get some sleep.” And she walks away and goes up the steps to her bedroom without a backward glance, or another word.

H
E WALKS BACK AND FORTH IN HIS ROOM IN THE HEAT AND
silence of the quiet summer night. Then he stands at the open window for a while. He looks out at the scintillant sea in the moonlight. His whole life rushes back to him like a wave, as though he were drowning in his humiliation—as his torturers once almost drowned him or as if he were about to face his own execution. Indeed, he feels death is close. What happens now will determine his future and somehow even his past, all that had gone before since his and his mother’s and father’s births. This moment had always awaited him.

Memories from his childhood come to him: the dawns in Harar, with the smells of overripe fruit and wood smoke in the air, the cries of the hyenas disappearing at dawn, the crescendo of birdsong in the lime and pomegranate trees, the calls to prayer from the ninety-nine mosques, the bells from the church Medhanie Alem. He sees the men in their splendid white robes and turbans, a large painting of Jesus on his cross over the altar. With his dark complexion and large dark eyes, he looked more like a youthful Ethiopian than a poor Jew. He remembers the smell of incense rising up in the air from a pair of giant censers, the chandeliers with their lit candles, the stone baptismal, the sounds of the drums and the
sitra
, the
incantatory sounds of the chanted liturgy, and the clapping of hands.

The villa is completely silent apart from the sawing of the crickets, the soft
hush, hush
of the waves in the distance. The servants have long since returned to their village for the night. He is alone, completely alone with M. So often she has come into his room to watch him sleep, turning on the light, stealing not just his sleep but something more precious with her avid gaze, her grasping hands, her pleas. She has used him up, prodding and poking at his flesh as if she wanted to possess his youth, his beauty, his life. He has been her chattel, her sex slave. She has forced him to lie on her thin body, to penetrate her with his tongue, his hands. Now she has discarded him, sloughing him off like the old skin of a snake; she has humiliated him deeply, wiping out his existence, to the point that he no longer knows who he is.

He creeps quietly along the corridor, clinging close to the wall like a shadow. He walks silently across the living room and up the stone stairs and opens the door to her suite. Now he is the voyeur. He turns on the small lamp on her desk and quietly opens her shutters on the moonlit night. He lets the night invade her room with him. He stands by her bed and looks down at her, as she lies beneath the splendid blue iron bed-head. He watches her helpless sleep. Her mouth is half open, her breathing stertorous, a thin trickle of saliva in a corner of her lips.

He remembers watching Solo sleep quietly beside him and how smooth his dark, dewy skin was. How touching he was in his defenselessness. M.’s body tilts to one side slightly, the angular lines, the thrust of the hip bone, the parted thin
legs visible beneath the white sheet. Her body looks dislocated, lifeless, caught up in this artificially created little death.

He remembers her floating into the café, that other woman with the famous face, whom he recognized with such a thrill. He remembers the exciting, smoky sound of her masculine voice, his fear and his hope, the large, limpid eyes, full of sympathy. “I will help you,” she had promised.

Now all her glamour has vanished. Without her elegant clothes, without the mask of her makeup—there are still traces of blue mascara around her eyes—without the hat to conceal the thin, greasy hair, without her emerald rings lying now in a tulip-shaped glass bowl by her bed, without the allure of her reputation, she looks simply old and ugly to him. He notices the brown spots on the sides of her face, the lines, the sharp, pointed nose, the thin lips, an unsightly gray hair on her chin. He would like to pluck it out.

He has glimpsed this many times before, but now he sees it all so clearly, as if under a magnifying glass. The chapped lips gape in an unseemly way. He sees the lined neck, the gray skin, the slump of the loose breasts she has made him hold. When he leans closer, he smells the breath that stinks of alcohol and bitterness. The bottle of sleeping pills and the half-empty vodka bottle are on the nightstand beside a glass, the rim stained with purple lipstick. She likes vodka, she says, because it has no taste, but perhaps she thinks you cannot smell it on her breath. She is mistaken.

The manuscript of her new book that she calls a novel is piled on her desk beside her typewriter, all 150 pages, carefully edited by him. Her books are often short, hardly novels, rather novelettes, he thinks, but nobody seems to mind. They
print them in large print with frequent white spaces, her name enough to sell them, apparently.

He wonders if her work will last. Correcting her repetitive prose, he has lost much of his admiration for her as an artist. Her books have been overrated, in his opinion; even her early ones don’t have the allure they had once, now that he knows her so well. Her publishers and above all her publicists have done good work for her. The strength of one or two successful short books has carried all the rest. Fame is mostly a game of luck, it seems to him, an elusive whip-poor-will that may or may not last. Certainly she can no longer write anything with the energy of her early years. Without his corrections he is certain her editor would turn down the book that lies stacked on the desk.

A
S HE STANDS THERE AT HER BEDROOM WINDOW ASKING HIMSELF
if he is capable of this, he becomes aware that the sun is beginning to rise, the edges of the horizon stained pink above the sea. The night is almost gone. He must decide fast. Soon the couple will arrive from Abbiadori to start work.

His head is filled with the voice that has come back to record his actions. He is Dawit, a young man with large dark eyes, in a fine linen shirt and navy linen trousers with a gold cross around his neck, standing at the window, and he is also someone else, someone unknown, watching himself. He tries to concentrate on the task at hand, but extraneous thoughts float through his mind as he stands there. He wonders why the desk was built as a long plank of shining wood without drawers, which would have been useful in a room of this kind, and why, indeed, M. had this villa built on the side of such a steep hill, though obviously it was for the view that lies before him, in the first light of day: the splendid sweep of the half-moon-shaped bay.

Then he turns his back on the view and looks at her, still sleeping so soundly while he has been awake all night. For her he has been just a small link in what was probably a long
chain of young lover-cum-secretaries, available young men who would do her bidding and whom she has taken into her house and used for a while. She has decided to banish him and will forget him fast, he is certain. In the end he has meant little to her. She intends to go on with her life, her successful career, and forget him completely. Perhaps she hopes that he will be banished far from her sight, sent back to his homeland, his cell.

He remembers standing with the chain in his hands; the guard entering his room. In the end it had been a simple choice, one that soldiers make every day: their own life or that of another. It is an act many men commit again and again in battle. Birth and death; one unimportant, useless life lost for the good of many.

He picks up her emerald rings from the bowl and slips them onto his two pinkies. Afterward, it is this action that he will find the most incomprehensible, the theft of a few stones, though what follows is surely stranger. He lifts the glass on the blue bedside table and mixes the vodka left in the bottle with the rest of the sleeping pills, stirs them together. He wants to fill her with this liquid, to invade her being just as she has invaded his. He will give her everlasting sleep, in return for having so often stolen his. Also, despite everything, he is loath to make this elderly woman, who has loved him in her way, suffer.

He sits down by her side on the bed and gently pushes her over onto her back. Then he props her up, so that her mouth opens wider, and he pours the liquid easily into her throat. She wakes immediately, of course, which he realizes
he should have known she would do. What is he thinking? What is he doing? He can see the liquid is not going down her throat. She is trying to sit up and spit it out, but he holds her down, pushing against her chest, her head. His efforts are misdirected. She spits out the liquid and thrusts the glass away from her mouth, clawing at his hand with her nails, thrusting it away from her, trying to sit up. She reaches back to hang on to the iron bed-head to draw herself up, and for a moment he thinks the whole thing will crash down and kill them both.

He draws back from her, stands up, and pushes on the bed-head to keep it upright. He hesitates, afraid of her now that she is awake and protesting so violently, shouting at him, “What are you doing?” He is so used to doing her bidding, obeying her orders, trying always to please. How can he do this to her, this woman who has been his benefactor? But he thrusts her back against the pillows roughly, bending over her and placing one hand in the middle of her chest, where the guard had thrust the gun into his mother’s. He wrenches her fingers from the iron bed-head behind her and recommences uselessly trying to force as much of the liquid as he can down her throat, jamming the glass between her yellowed, nicotine-stained teeth. Sputtering and choking, beating the glass away, so that much of the alcohol is soaked up by her white silk nightgown, the white lace pillow slip, she shouts at him again—“Get away from me!”—in groggy surprise, her voice so loud and forceful it frightens him.

“I’m trying to make this easy for you,” he says absurdly, trying to justify himself, but she continues to struggle with him, screams loudly for help, and beats away the glass so that
it flies onto the tiled floor, where it shatters. For a moment he wonders if he should abandon everything, give himself up to her, not so much out of fear but out of horror at what he is doing and repulsion for himself. At the same time, he knows that he cannot retreat now. It is too late.

Instead, he rips the cord from her white silk robe, sits behind her, and slips it around her neck. “For God’s sake!” she cries out, tugging at the cord with both her hands, arching her back and kicking. He holds on and pulls even harder with all his force, dragging her head and neck back against his own body, as he had with his chain on the guard’s neck, but now his strength seems to fail him with this weak white woman. He feels so feeble, exhausted, and unable to hurt an elderly woman who has given him back his life. She yanks the cord away from her neck, turning and kicking out at him brutally, thrusting at his sex with her knee and thrashing wildly around with her arms on the bed, and for a moment he feels he will not have the strength to hold her.

Driven now more by her violence than his own, remembering the electrodes on his genitals, trying to protect himself from her fury, he fights back. He is overtaken by some force that seems outside of himself, like the voice that speaks in his head. Watching himself from afar, he tightens the cord again and pulls so tightly that she cannot slip her fingers under it. Her hands give way, and he pulls tighter and tighter. She makes a strangled, gurgling sound, murmurs a name, as he, with as much pleasure as he had with the guard, listens to her gasp for breath before her long, bony body sinks down limply before him, back onto the soft white pillows behind her head.
White on white. Is she dead? For a moment he thinks he sees her flat chest rise and fall beneath the white gown. Is she just pretending, waiting for the moment to strike out at him like a snake? He cannot bring himself to touch her body, to feel her pulse.