The Bay of Foxes (17 page)

He puts his hands to his eyes, tells her she’s right, and attempts a smile. Clearly they want more information. They look so crestfallen and, it occurs to him, almost certainly have not yet been paid for their work this summer.

He claps his hand to his forehead in a dramatic gesture and says, “Oh! I almost forgot. The signora left something for you, a little bonus, after all your hard work.” He goes into the living room, where the stack of money M. had left to get him off the island remains. Without counting it, he sweeps it up off the table, goes back into the kitchen, and thrusts the pile into Michelino’s hands. “Here, this is what she left for you,” he says. While Michelino looks down at the pile of bills in his hands, Dawit tells the couple M. had said they must take a week off. They deserve a little holiday. They must leave now. He is frantic to be alone, to sleep.

“Are you certain?” Michelino says, looking at Dawit, puzzled. “We’d be happy to work. We always work through September in the French signora’s villa.”

“No, no, I’ll be fine alone for a week,” Dawit says.

Michelino looks into his face and then back at the stack of bills in his hands. He is too polite to count them. “Are you quite sure?” he asks again, suspiciously. “The signora doesn’t usually pay us until the end of September.”

Adrianna says something to Michelino in the Sardinian dialect that Dawit does not understand. Then she says in Italian, “If the signore needs anything he can just give us a ring. He has our number,” in a bright, cheerful voice as she picks up her cream handbag from the kitchen table. She takes the money from Michelino—clearly she is the one who manages the finances—and puts it away in her bag. “Come on, Miche,” she says gaily and takes him by his hand. He follows her lead reluctantly, looking back over his shoulder at Dawit, who wonders what he is thinking and what he might say if anyone inquired about M.’s whereabouts. Do they believe his story? Or is it just convenient to pretend to? Are they too polite to ask any more questions? They go out the door, with Adrianna leading the way, waving happily, reminding Dawit to ring if he needs their help, and Michelino giving a worried backward glance at the house he has always tended so carefully.

H
E GOES INTO HIS BATHROOM AND PEELS OFF ALL HIS CLOTHES
fast. He turns on the shower tap hard and has a long, hot shower, washing the scrapes on his stomach with soap, scrubbing himself all over. Then he wraps himself in a toweling robe and climbs into his bed. He lies back shivering despite the hot water, the thick robe, the heat of the day. His teeth clack, and he cannot still his trembling body. His heart beats so fast it seems to shake the bed. He rises again to cover himself with a heavy blanket, but the long dive to the depths, the endless swim in the sea, the events of the entire night without sleep, have all chilled him through and through. He has never felt so tired in his whole life.

Eventually he falls into a deep and undisturbed sleep. He sleeps and sleeps. When he wakes it is late afternoon, and he realizes he has eaten nothing since he and M. had eaten their silent meal the evening before. He is now strangely calm and completely famished. It is his birthday, after all. An important birthday. He prepares a huge feast, using everything he finds in the refrigerator. He scrambles eggs and lays out all the prosciutto, figs, cheese, the flat bread and yogurt and honey for dessert. He goes into the cellar and takes out a bottle and then opens the champagne, carrying everything on a tray out onto
the terrace, where he sits with his feet up, surveying the beauty of the bay in the twilight. He savors each morsel with deep satisfaction, as though he has never eaten enough in his life before, gluttonously consuming all the flat bread with honey, sucking the sweetness from the tips of his fingers. He drinks the entire bottle of champagne.

He drifts alone through the empty rooms as night falls, listening to the hollow sound of his footsteps.
This is my domain now
, he thinks. He is free to do exactly as he wishes for the first time in his life, though, in a way, he feels as he did on his escape from prison. He is light-headed, floating through the beautiful twilit rooms as though he were still underwater. He swims across the polished floors, hardly touching the ground, switching on lights, opening closets, drawers, exploring all the secret spaces of the house, ferreting through all of M.’s intimate things, her papers, her clothes, her jewelry. He opens her safe. He knows the combination, which, always forgetful of numbers, she has written down in her address book. Besides, he has seen her open it many times and unlike her he has a good memory for numbers. He counts the money, a considerable sum, and then puts it back.

He is drawn back into her bedroom. He switches on the bedside lamp and stares at the empty bed with its bright embroidered counterpane. He opens up her closet, pulls out certain garments he has seen her wear, and throws them on the bed. He tries on the ones she wore that he admired the most: a velvet jacket in a deep midnight blue, with a seahorse pin in diamonds on the lapel, a pair of black tailored pants, crocodile shoes in black with little tassels. He stands erect before the mirror in her bathroom. He angles a maroon brimmed
hat rakishly, as M. once did, and smiles at his reflection, with a glimmer of his old arrogance in his large eyes. He places a Gitane in her tortoiseshell cigarette holder, draws in the smoke, and puffs it at his reflection in the mirror. He says to himself in her hoarse voice, “Take anything you want, darling. It’s all yours now.”

“Beautiful,” he says. “You look beautiful!” and he gives himself a kiss in the mirror.

As night falls, he pours himself a stiff vodka and tonic, drinks it stretched out luxuriously in her armchair, looking over the beautiful bay in the moonlight. He sits at the grand piano in the living room and plays until late that night, playing her favorite pieces, the Debussy she loved. “I’m playing this for you, M.,” he says.

H
E AWAKES WITH A HEADACHE, HIS MOUTH DRY, BUT HE DRAGS
himself from his bed. He must maintain the same rhythm to his days. He must not take to his bed. He runs barefoot as usual down to the Piccolo Pevero. He goes on through the calm, sheltered area with its low shrubs and white sand, over the hill to the next beach, panting and hot, the sweat running down his back, but he cannot plunge back in the water. He stands at the edge of the sea, shading his eyes from the glare. The clear emerald water now seems dangerous to him. Somewhere down there, M.’s body lurks. He fears he may meet some part of her if he swims. She is waiting for him. He imagines a hand reaching up for his neck, to pull him under, a foot springing out to kick at his most intimate parts, as she had done on the bed, her white hair veiling his face, blinding him. He turns away and runs fast back to the villa.

He showers and forces himself to sit at her desk in her bedroom, but what he thinks of now is Enrico. He wants desperately to talk to him. His hand goes to the black telephone on the desk, but it stops in midair. He knows he is not to call him. He cannot speak to him over the telephone. He rises and walks back and forth in the room, looks at his watch.
It is near noon. He considers going to the tennis club, but he doesn’t trust himself to speak to Enrico in person. He knows Enrico will be leaving for Rome soon. He needs to talk to him, at least to say good-bye. But what can he say? He does not want to lie to him. He’s not sure he is able to lie to him. He looks out the window at the bay and hears him saying, “Lying is a lonely business,
amico mio
.” Nor can he burden Enrico with the truth. Besides, thinking about it in the bright light of noon, he is not at all sure he can trust Enrico to be discreet. He imagines him telling someone, blurting the story out in a moment of sincerity. He is not a discreet man. He might even tell his wife, perhaps, whom, despite everything, Dawit knows Enrico loves. And to whom might the wife speak? Might she then pass on the news to her father, who could blast it across Italy? Dawit is not sure that Enrico wouldn’t betray him without even meaning to. He decides silence is the only solution for the moment.

He sits down again and tries to concentrate on the work before him, but he is terribly distracted. He hears M. saying “an excellent secretary.” He will be one indeed: his own. He forces himself to answer the letters that need to be answered in his neat hand. He finds the letter from the college in America and politely refuses the position. He pays the bills that are due, as he always does.

He even manages to work on her book, making further improvements freely now, rewriting many of the chapters. He moves the plot along faster, introduces more dialogue, heightens the drama.

But the thought that he can no longer speak to the one
person whom he cares about more than anyone else keeps coming back to him—a dreadful thought. If he cannot speak to Enrico, to whom will he be able to speak? To no one, he realizes. He is tormented by the desire to speak to someone, to tell someone what he has done. He is alone again in all this luxury, with the sun shining, the sea glittering before him, with the plumbago and the hibiscus blooming and the olive trees glinting silver in the sun—as alone as when he lay in his prison cell.

When the phone rings, he startles, and then lets it ring. When he can no longer bear the ringing, feels obliged to answer, he tells the man who asks for her that M. is not there. He is not sure when she will be back. He leaves it at that.

In the afternoon he makes a point of taking the Jaguar out and going into the bank in Porto Cervo to say a few words to the bank manager, a young, handsome, neat Sardinian, in his dark linen suit, sitting in his little orange office. Dawit knows him quite well, as he would go there to draw money for M. or for himself. His own money transfer has not been stopped, he is relieved to see.

The bank manager inquires politely after M. He hesitates a moment, and then tells the man she has gone to her house in Switzerland. He has already calculated that the three houses will come in handy. He has all the keys. M. drifted from one to the other as well as traveling to other places for her work or pleasure. It was always hard to pin her down.

He goes to the small post office in the town with his checkbook and writes out a large check, standing at the high counter under the window. He will send it to Asfa with a little
note: “Please go to church for me and say the prayer for the dead,” he writes. There is no need to explain. Asfa will assume he is thinking of his dead parents. Indeed, he does think more and more of them.

As he stands in the post office writing out the note on the dusty wooden counter, he remembers a moment with his father. Dawit had met him during his holidays in Paris, where his father was staying at the Ethiopian Embassy near the Eiffel Tower. He must have been fourteen, an awkward age. It was one of the few times he had been on his own with his father. He was not used to talking to him alone. His mother was the one who made the conversation, asked the questions. His father told him he wanted to take him to see his favorite opera, an opera by Verdi:
Aida
. He had taken Dawit out to dinner beforehand in a famous restaurant not far from the opera house, a hushed place with deep red walls and red velvet curtains and chairs. His father spent the elaborate meal telling Dawit about the plot of the opera and how much he loved Verdi’s music. Dawit had heard only something vague about an Ethiopian king and his daughter, who has been captured and made into a slave. He had not dared to say anything, but he would much have preferred to listen to his own music in his room. He was a Beatles fan as an adolescent, playing their records incessantly. “Here comes the sun,” he would sing joyously, his mood suddenly shifting.

During the long opera he had sat restlessly at his father’s side, hardly able to hide his boredom, moving around uncomfortably in his seat. He found the plot ridiculous. The large singer who played Aida, despite her spectacular voice,
her tragic dilemma, did not stir him, other than into fits of giggles, which he had difficulty controlling. His father sat beside him, swaying his head from side to side to the rhythms of the music, conducting with one finger and humming along to the arias he loved particularly. “Celeste Aida,” he hummed, much to Dawit’s extreme embarrassment. He could see that his father was annoying his neighbors but seemed oblivious to their muttered comments. Dawit wanted alternately to giggle—the “celeste Aida,” a large lady in a wig and bright blue caftan who tottered on tiny feet across the stage, seemed hardly divine to him—or to weep with embarrassment at his father’s absurd antics.