“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.
VIII
SHE 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 walk
ed 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.
Dawit adapts to M.’s schedule, her way of life. He listens to her, gives her good advice, and makes himself available to her. But there is a part of him she never reaches, a secret part that watches her with ironic detachment. Mentally he takes notes on the movements of her fine hands, her every expression, her particular words. He speaks her language perfectly, but she does not know a word of his. Despite her upbringing in Somalia, she has never taken the trouble to learn any of the languages of the country, he notes. He comes to know all about her intimate life, her work, her desires, but she knows very little about him. Like all colonizers, he thinks, she is ultimately the dupe.
IX
“I WANT YOU TO COME WITH ME THIS EVENING, SO THAT I CAN introduce you,” she says. She is sitting before her kidney-shaped dressing table with its sea green organdy skirt. She wears her silk dressing gown and brushes her long hair with a silver-backed brush. He comes over to her, takes it from her hand, and goes on brushing, as he did for his mother in her bedroom, where she kept the photo of herself in her schoolgirl uniform and her round felt hat on the table by her bed.
“You must wear something elegant,” she tells him, looking at him behind her in the mirror. “Wear that black Armani pantsuit of mine with the hand stitching.”
“Is it someone important?” he asks.
“Very important to me: my editor and his wife. I’ve known him for a long time. He’s been good to me, published many of my books, though lately he has been turning them down. I have to be nice to both of them.”
“Are you sure you want me to come? Won’t I just be de trop?” he asks her.
“It would make me less nervous. You’ll see. And it will amuse and distract them. They will like you. It will be fun,” she says, smiling at him in the mirror.
“But won’t they want to talk about your work?”
“Oh, not at all! Not over dinner. They will want to talk about other things—the wife will fall in love with you. She’s much younger than her husband. You have my permission— no, my command—to seduce her,” she says with a laugh, raising her eyebrows, adding, “Good for business.”
“Do you want me to make up your face for you?” he asks. Sometimes he had done this for his mother, who was very beautiful, with her light café au lait skin, her long neck, and her large dark eyes, which she would turn on him so lovingly. He felt she loved him unconditionally. He was both her son and her confidant, her friend. She would weep over his father’s infidelity, and he would comfort her, telling her what she wanted to hear: that his father loved her, would always love her best, that she was the most beautiful.
M. nods her head. He makes her lie down on the wide bed with her head propped up on the big white pillow. He sits beside her with her makeup kit. He plucks her eyebrows and removes a hair from her chin. He thinks of the folktale of the woman who needs a love potion and has to get a whisker from the lion to obtain it. M. is quite a lion, he thinks.
He massages her skin with her anti-wrinkle cream. Then he paints her face carefully, applying makeup, masking the lines around her eyes and mouth, hiding the age spots, what the French call “the marks of the cemetery.” He outlines her eyes with kohl, rouging her cheeks, puffing powder on her nose. He helps her up and chooses a long black dress with sequins on the bodice. He does up the zipper at the back, clasps a triple string of pearls around her long neck, spreads her diaphanous scarf decorously around her thin shoulders. He sprays a little perfume on her long neck. “Beautiful. Ravishing,” he says.
Saying, “You have made me beautiful,” M. kisses him on the lips. He stares back at her. She does, indeed, look beautiful and youthful with her white hair shimmering on her shoulders, the long black sheath of a dress that hugs her slender form, her face so skillfully made up, her arms covered with the fine silk scarf, a diamond bracelet that glints in the light. Almost he desires her.
He dresses up in the black pantsuit that she hands him from her closet. He stands beside her so that she can admire him. “Trés chic,” she says, smoothing down the lapel of the jacket. She takes his arm, and they walk up the road, linked together and laughing like an old married couple. They go through the revolving doors into the Closerie des Lilas at the top of the Rue d’Assas. He has seen it before, read the exorbitant prices on the menu, and imagined how many hungry Ethiopians the price of one of these dishes would feed. M. tells him famous authors have eaten here. “You can order a bifteck à la Hemingway, if you like,” she says, laughing.
The couple is waiting for them at the bar. Dawit is introduced to M.’s editor and publisher, Gustave, and his wife, Simone. “My most favorite people,” M. says, kissing them on both cheeks and once again. The editor is the head of the old and distinguished French publishing house that has published many of her books, a portly gentleman with a thick red neck, broken capillaries in his cheeks, small, astute, slightly slanting blue-gray eyes, and thick white hair carefully slicked back from his forehead. Dawit thinks he looks like Jean Gabin, whom he has seen in a French film. He wears a shiny gray double-breasted summer suit and a signature ring on his plump pinkie.
His much younger pretty wife is dark-haired, deep-blue-eyed, and small. She lifts her pale face up to Dawit, her dark eyes sparkling with malice and interest. She wears a large square diamond on her ring finger. She writes, too, M. tells Dawit, though nonfiction.
The headwaiter ushers them to a good table on the terrace near the trellis with its climbing plants. The night is warm, the stars visible, the sky an impossible midnight blue. Dawit feels distanced from the scene. What is he doing here with these people in this strange country? He watches himself from afar, as many of the other diners do. They stare at him, the only African in the restaurant, young and well-dressed in his tailored suit, sitting erect beside these older white people. They are wondering, as he is, what he is doing with these people in this celebrated place, while most of his kind suffer quietly. What would Asfa think?
Gustave leans toward Dawit, speaking slowly, as if he might not understand. “We are pleased to meet you. We have heard such good things.”
M. puts her hand on Dawit’s arm as though he belonged to her. “He’s quite brilliant, you know. Speaks so many languages! Perfect French! Even some Italian! He went to Le Rosey in Switzerland as a boy with all the Arab sheikhs, Egyptian royals, the Rothschilds. Imagine! And he’s remarkably diligent and efficient! You can’t imagine how much energy he has! Up at dawn. Works for hours! It’s quite frightening. Who would have guessed what a dark gem I found in a café? A brown diamond.”
Dawit sees the editor’s intelligent gaze travel admiringly from his face to his narrow waist and hips. Simone, too, eyes him hungrily from under thick black lashes. They clearly think Dawit is using all this energy for one purpose, and M. seems to enjoy their misapprehension. He smiles at them, batting his long eyelashes and showing off his white teeth in a wide grin, playing the role of the black lover. Like everyone else these French intellectuals are all au fond racists, he decides, though they have the good grace to pretend not to be. They are probably considering the length of his penis.
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