The Bay of Foxes (7 page)

She looks at him so sadly, tears shining in her eyes.

He recalls the moment when she told him about her lost lover. “That first day in the café, I wanted you, I really did. I remembered that beautiful description of the ferry on the Blue Nile, the African light glinting on the water, the elegant, dark young man. It was a book I read when I was young—I had never read anything quite like that, and I have always remembered that scene. Later I saw it, too, in a film. I
don’t know who played the role but I wanted
him
, the man in the white linen suit.”

“Have you never desired a woman?” she asks.

“Never,” he says, shaking his head.

“It seems inconceivable,” she says. “Surely there must have been a moment, someone, sometime? Even your mother, when you were very young?”

He sits on the bed beside her in the hot, dark room and thinks of his mother finding him one morning with Solomon in his bed. She had taken him into her study, sat him down on her blue chintz-covered chair. She told him that these things happened in adolescence. She had felt the same way about a girl in her boarding school. She thought she was in love, had held her in her arms, but she had grown out of it. She had gone on to love his father so much, to have so much pleasure with him. “We change as we get older,” she told him. He must not be ashamed, she said. She kissed him and told him that in any case she would love him, whatever happened, that he was her beautiful, beautiful boy.

Then she advised him not to say anything to his father. “Men, even sophisticated ones like your father, don’t always understand these things. They see the world in black and white. We women understand that things are not as simple as they might seem,” she had said. She added, “Your father, despite all his fancy degrees, was brought up to think of Ethiopian men as soldiers, and to consider valor in battle the ultimate aim for a man.”

Now he leans back against the wall, his chest bare, and shakes his head, conceding, “Only you—for that second in the café.”

“It sounds like a song,” she says, laughing at him, singing in English now, “Only youooo!”

“Would you prefer that I go?” he asks, folding his fingers together in a position of prayer.

“No!” she says quickly. “If you stay with me I would be so glad; I would like you to stay very much. I feel as if I have found part of myself again, part of my youth.” She holds his hands gently in hers.

“I so much want to stay,” he says and turns his gaze away, so that she will not see his desperation, his need for her help. She adds something that reassures him, as it is intended to do, though he is not sure he believes her. She says casually, shrugging her narrow shoulders and in her deep, hoarse smoker’s voice, “After a certain age, what women are looking for most is companionship and tenderness.”

She tells him she is leaving for her villa in Italy soon, as she does every summer, and sometimes stays through the fall. Would he like to come with her? “The house is on the side of a steep hill with a beautiful view of the bay, Cala di Volpe. There is a little motorboat, islands, clear, clear sea.”

“Cala di Volpe? The bay of the fox? Is that what it means?”

“You speak Italian, too?” she asks.

“A little.” He has learned some from one of the Italian workmen who had remained after the brief occupation and worked in the summer palace. “Where is it?” he asks, intrigued, thinking of the Blue Nile, of the waters of Lake Tana and the monasteries his mother took him to visit as a boy. He was not allowed to swim in the lake because of the bilharzia, a parasitic disease in which worms enter the veins and feed on the blood cells.

“That’s it. The Bay of Foxes. There are still some there. Also wild boar, which they hunt in the fall. We drive from here to Genova and take a ferry from there to the island of Sardinia. It’s a beautiful island, still quite wild. D. H. Lawrence wrote about it. It has a wonderful smell—they say sailors passing in the night near their island can recognize it by its smell. I don’t know what it is, some sort of herb, perhaps. Do you drive?” she asks him.

“That I
can
do. I love to drive,” he says with a smile.

“Then you will drive my Jaguar,” she says and adds, laughing, “A white one, a convertible.”

“I don’t have a proper visa, papers,” he says, looking down at his hands, which he presses together.

“We’ll get you the papers you need. I know the right people. Sometimes fame is useful. And in the winter you’ll come with me to my chalet in Gstaad, will you?” she asks and reaches out again to touch his hands with both of hers.

“I will do anything I can to help,” he says and looks at her directly.

“Just rest now here on me,” she says and lies down on the bed. She parts her legs. He lays his head in the chink, his face against her sex. He lies there meekly. He can hear the sounds of the concierge coming into the courtyard to drag out the dustbins at dawn. She asks him to do it to her with his mouth, and he does, he does what she wishes him to do with his hands, his mouth.

S
HE LEAVES THE DOOR OPEN NOW SO THAT HE CAN ENTER THE
kitchen in the morning early, make his coffee, grill toast, boil eggs, if he wishes. She gives him work to do for her.

He spends long hours every day at her Louis XVI desk, which faces the gardens. From time to time he lifts his gaze to the light in the leaves of the chestnut trees. It is hard to believe he is here. For so long he stared at concrete walls. He feels he has been in a series of barely concealed coffins: the cement walls in the prison, the back of the truck with the tarpaulin hiding him, and the dark hold of the boat; the crowded bedroom in Clichy-sous-Bois. On the desk is a pretty blue glass flute filled with a bouquet of black Montblanc pens, a small African Venus with a big belly, a roll of stamps, and a black telephone. He moves his hands over these things as he reads.

She asks him to read books for her that people send her to review, to blurb, or just to read. “Say something kind that sounds generous but not stupid,” she tells him with a smile. He is happy to oblige. He is a fast reader and can turn a phrase to advantage. About a book he does not understand at all, he says, “The author expresses all our bewilderment before the world.”

“I see you are the perfect diplomat,” M. says, standing over him, putting her hand on his shoulder, smiling down at him.

“I was brought up by diplomats. They trained me well. I learned the tricks of the trade,” he says, grinning. He tells her how important it was to have access to the Emperor’s ear in order to advance. The Emperor, with his excellent memory as well as his paranoia, played one faction against another. He held all the strands of the state in his hands. One had to learn to appear perfectly sincere in one’s admiration. Dawit’s father had indeed admired the Emperor’s skill at creating a myth around himself, but he had used that admiration to advance his own career. He was a skilled courtier, a bon vivant, and a Francophile who liked women and wine.

Dawit answers her many fan letters, too. “Just say a few words, thank them for their kind thoughts, and sign my name,” she tells him. He writes the kind of letters he would have liked to receive from her. He tells her fans how much their opinion matters, how much it is appreciated, how much it pleases her that someone far away has understood what she has tried to say. She reads a few of his letters. “Beautiful! You do this much better than I do!” she says. “You are an excellent scribe!” He practices the famous signature over and over, signing her name with a flourish.

She reads to him in the cool evenings before dinner as he lies on the black leather daybed with the doors open onto the terraces, staring out at the emerging stars. She reads what she has written during the night before, sometimes just a paragraph, sometimes several pages. He listens carefully. He knows how to concentrate. He responds without flattery. In
the morning he pores over her manuscript, edits her sentences, leaves comments in the margins.

“I see you can be an honest critic, if you want to,” she says, looking at him. “Thank you. It’s rare, a precious gift.”

She drifts into the study one rainy afternoon in her wide gray linen trousers. She is carrying an armful of unopened envelopes she has scooped up from beside her bed. “Can you sort these out?” she asks him, dropping the heap of letters onto the desk. They are from her bank, from magazines, newspapers, and her agent.

He has a good memory and a facility with figures. He knows how to read a balance sheet. He arranges her bank statements in chronological order. He sorts out the incoming checks, which tumble out of many envelopes. He balances her checkbook. He writes down sums in long columns. “So many of them!” he says, showing her the high pile he has made by that evening when she emerges with her drink.

“Let me sign a few over to you. You work so hard,” she says, coming over to the desk, putting down her drink, plucking a pen from the blue vase. “I forget about them half the time.”

“If you really want to give me money, I would prefer a monthly sum sent to an account in my name on a regular basis. Something small,” he says, looking up at her.

“Of course,” she says. “We’ll go to the bank tomorrow, first thing,” and they do go, though in the afternoon. Together they walk up the road to the Société Générale on the Rue d’Assas. She introduces him to the manager, an elderly gentleman in an elegant gray suit who ushers them into his office. She leans forward and tells him she wants to open an
account for this young man. The bank manager smiles at him graciously from behind his wide desk, bowing his head and murmuring, “
Oui, bien sûr, avec plaisir, monsieur, bien sûr, monsieur.
” She arranges something generous to be deposited monthly to his account. He is given a checkbook, for the first time in his young life.

The first check he writes is for Asfa. He sends it to the apartment in Clichy-sous-Bois with a note with his thanks for taking him in, feeding him, giving him a place to sleep. He tells him to give little Takla a kiss and buy him some new clothes. He promises to come and see them all, but he does not. He does not take the long bus ride to the dangerous
banlieue
. Though he feels ashamed, he cannot bring himself to leave the comfortable
sixième
, where he is beginning to feel safe in his elegant clothes, shiny shoes, and affluence as he walks through the orderly streets. Nor does he write his return address on the letter.

Instead, he goes to the
boulangerie
and buys himself three
pains au chocolat
, and eats one after the other on the spot, as though someone might take them from him if he walked out into the street. He buys a big tin of sweets, too, which he hides under his bed in his room.

Then he sits down on a rented iron chair in the Gardens in the sunshine, all through the afternoon. Fascinated, he watches the grave French children in their long white socks and long smocked dresses, their knickers and shirts, being led back and forth, their little feet sticking out in their lace-up shoes, sitting on fat donkeys. The following Sunday, he stands on a corner and observes the smartly dressed couples with their small children, the father bearing a big bouquet of flowers
for the grandparents, perhaps. The order of French bourgeois life is like a balm, though he studies it from a lonely distance.

He establishes a routine. Every morning he rises early, runs, buys a croissant and a café au lait from the café on the corner, and then returns to work at M.’s desk. He opens her mail for her, answers it, takes out the books she is sent.

There are packets from her agent, who sends M. her books in translation. “What language is this?” he asks M., taking a book out of a packet, lifting it up.

“No idea,” she says and laughs. “I can’t even remember which book it is.”

He writes thank-you letters to her agent, signs her name.

She asks him to answer the phone for her, too. An answering service is so impersonal, she says, no one should have to talk to a recorded voice on the phone, and she doesn’t want to be disturbed. “Just say you are me and say something polite,” she says. “You’re such a diplomat and a good actor. You sound just like me, anyway,” she says, grinning at him with amusement, listening to him speak with her hoarse, trembling man’s voice, saying, “Allo,” as she does, followed by polite things. He does not find it very difficult. He has already imitated her style as a teenager, writing in his diary. “How lovely to hear from you. I’ve been thinking about you, darling, and wondering how you were,” he says, leaning back in her Queen Anne armchair with its pink silk covering, putting his arms on the wooden armrests. He stares out at the leaves on the chestnut trees, which hang down like ripe fruit ready to be plucked. They remind him of the mango trees in the garden of his childhood.

“You do that perfectly. You could fool my mother! If she were alive,” she says.

Generally, he takes care of all the mundane details of her life, leaving her free to write, like so many literary couples before them. He considers himself naturally easygoing, pliable up to a point. He aims to please. He is used to trying to ingratiate himself, to question, to listen, and to give good advice. He was an only child who was often in the company of intelligent adults, courtiers in the various palaces of the Emperor or on trips abroad. He learned at an early age what to say to please his sophisticated father, who had loved him in a distracted, distant way, and how to calm his mother’s constant anxiety. Only Solo, though older, followed him around the palace gardens and into the hills. Only Solo deferred to him completely, obeying his every wish.