She just stares back at him for a dreadful moment of silence while he goes on grinning foolishly, waiting for her response. She says, “That is a book I not only didn’t write but would never have wanted to. You have not only no memory, young man, but no taste.” Dawit wonders how the young man can leave the party intact, and if he goes home and slits his wrists. Indeed, he seems to crumple before Dawit’s eyes as he excuses himself and beats a hasty retreat. Dawit recalls the moment in the restaurant with M.’s editor.
But with him she is invariably perfect, loving and thoughtful. She does not interfere in his life; rather she encourages him to go out at night after dinner. “Go to the bars. You need to be with people your own age, your own kind. Play the field. There is safety in numbers, I feel. I understand, you know, I, too, was young once,” she says, smiling at him mischievously.
He laughs, says he’s too tired. He’s been swimming and running and learning Italian all day. He’s going to bed. She insists, says he must feel free to do what he wants, to exercise, too. “I want you to be healthy and happy after so much suffering,” she says. “Take the car. Running is fine, but why don’t you join the tennis club, too? It’s very nice and relatively inexpensive. Play some tennis. It would be good for you. You’ll meet other young people there.”
He decides he will take a tennis lesson. It is ages since he has played. He learned to play as a boy in Switzerland and plays very well. It is a sport he likes particularly. He makes an early morning appointment at the tennis club in Porto Cervo, where he meets Enrico.
XIV
WITH THE TOP DOWN, HE DRIVES THE JAGUAR INTO TOWN AT dawn. The first light of day barely illumines the sky as he parks the white car outside the club. He finds the young tennis pro waiting for him on the tennis court, its purple morning glories growing up the fence around it.
The pro sends him an easy forehand, and Dawit slams the ball back hard, aiming for the corner and thinking of the guard in the prison who tormented him. The pro responds in kind, returning the ball to the other side of the court, setting up a difficult backhand for Dawit. But Dawit responds with a fierce cross-court, a ball the pro is unable to retrieve. “You have a wicked backhand,” the tennis pro says, laughing, coming up to the net to retrieve a ball, smiling at him, panting. He runs back and forth across the court, sweating, all through the game.
Out of the corner of his eye Dawit notices someone standing at the fence, watching their game. There is something mysterious and melancholy about the man’s fine face. He seems to have something ancient about him, though he looks relatively young, probably in his early forties, the lines around his eyes only adding to his attractiveness. From the way the man stands, feet apart, idly tilting his curly head back slightly in the sunlight, Dawit comes to the conclusion he is someone of privilege, though there is no indication of any belief in his ability to prevail. On the contrary there is something endearingly tentative about the way he stands there considering them, turning his head back and forth, his lips slightly parted with interest.
He comes onto the court as Dawit is leaving. In the gold light of the early morning, as he picks up a ball, Dawit notices the reddish hairs on his bare, freckled legs. An amber-eyed man with curly reddish hair and a delicate profile, he looks as though he has stepped out of a Renaissance painting despite his Lacoste shorts and V-necked tennis sweater. He has the lesson after Dawit’s.
“Would you consider playing with me? You are awfully good,” he says in Italian, with a charming smile. “I’m afraid you would beat me hollow with that killer backhand.” Dawit smiles at him, says he would be delighted to beat him, and they exchange amused glances. The tennis pro introduces them, and they shake hands across the net. Enrico asks Dawit if he would like to have breakfast with him after his lesson. Would Dawit mind waiting for him? “I have all the time in the world,” Dawit says and grins. He feels as if he could wait forever for this man.
He takes a long shower, dresses, and sits at the bar in the small restaurant with its climbing plants, a mirror running along the wall behind the bar. He orders a bottle of mineral water and waits for Enrico, excited at the prospect of this encounter, hoping his Italian is up to an extended conversation, which it turns out to be. Enrico speaks clearly, simply, and slowly enough for Dawit to understand, and above all he uses his hands so expressively, he hardly needs words. They sit side by side on the bar stools and order cappuccinos and sticky brioches, and Dawit watches him move his hands. Enrico tells him he is an architect and painter and lives in Rome. He comes from an ancient Roman family, though they have no money any longer, he says. “We are the poor cousins,” he says with a charming, self-deprecating laugh and an elegant gesture, though he still has to spend his Sundays during the year in the Vatican, parading about in black as a papal guard.
“What are you doing here?” Dawit asks.
They are here for the summer. His wife is from a prominent Sardinian family. They are powerful politicians Dawit has heard M. mention. They own many newspapers and television stations on the mainland. The family are rather awful, according to Enrico—prepotente, he says, grinning, which Dawit does not understand at first but eventually gathers means they are rather full of themselves—but they have been helpful with his career, Enrico admits. Without them he’s not sure what would have happened to him, he says. He has built some of the new houses in the vicinity, thanks to his in-laws, he says with modesty. “They know everyone,” he explains with a shrug and an expressive gesture. Their own house, which Enrico designed, too, is in Liscia de Vacca on the beach. There are two young children.
Dawit listens to him talk with pleasure, watching his freckled hands hovering over the meaning of words like spotted butterflies over flowers. They remind him of a conductor using his hands to express the meaning of the music.
“What about you? What brings you here?” Enrico asks, looking at him with curiosity in his light brown eyes.
Dawit finds himself speaking in his halting Italian about his past, his country. “Ah, so you are from the oldest place in the world—Ethiopia, the birth of humanity!” Enrico says, smiling. Dawit speaks frankly as he has not done for a long while, of his recent days in Paris, his inability to find work, his crushing poverty. His lack of fluency enables him to say more than he might have in French or even in his own language. He finds that words without any childhood connotations are somehow easier to use. Or perhaps it is that Enrico seems so frank and open, Dawit is encouraged to be equally so. He says he is staying with a famous writer who has befriended him. She has a villa above Cala di Volpe.
“Who is it?” Enrico asks, and Dawit tells him.
Enrico knows M.’s work. He knows her villa, too. He is visibly impressed and makes an expression of awe, opening his eyes wide and pulling down his lips at the corners. He knows the architect who built the villa, a distinguished older man, Vietti. It was one of the first houses on the hill. “Una villa bellissima,” he says, looking at Dawit, obviously considering him anew. Then he asks him, “Are you two…. involved?” crossing two fingers in the air to make his meaning clear.
Dawit shakes his head. “She’s an interesting woman and she has been very good to me, but how could I be?” he says and looks at Enrico.
“Because of her age?” Enrico asks.
“Not only that,” Dawit says, looking into his eyes and then lowering his gaze.
“Oh, I see. Bene!” Enrico says with a flash of white teeth, a frank smile which is always a surprise in his melancholy face. “I have to go now, but I hope we can meet again soon. I’d like to get to know you better.”
Later Dawit meets an adorable little boy with blond hair and flushed cheeks who is perched on Enrico’s shoulders, his hands gripping his father’s thick russet curls. Dawit thinks of Takla with a lonely tilt of the heart.
XV
THEY DO NOT COME TO THE VILLA WHEN THEY SPEND AFTERNOONS together. They meet at the tennis club in Porto Cervo. Dawit feels he cannot see enough of Enrico. He knows he is moving back to Rom
e at the end of the summer, that their time together will be brief. Each moment is precious. When he is not with Enrico, he replays their time together in his mind like a film. He finds it difficult to think of anything else, to concentrate on what M. is saying to him.
“How can you play tennis in the heat of the day?” M. asks him, looking worried.
He shrugs. “You know the heat doesn’t bother me.”
“Ah, youth,” she says and smiles with fond indulgence.
They do, indeed, play tennis in the heat of the day. Dawit usually beats Enrico, but sometimes he concedes out of pity. Then they have a quick shower, a light lunch in the restaurant, a glass of white Sardinian wine. Afterward they use one of the upstairs rooms.
There, in the small white room, with the shutters drawn, Enrico’s pale skin glows as he lets Dawit undress him. Dawit loves the freckles on his shoulders and back. With a half smile, complicitous and yet slightly ironic—there is often something slightly detached about Enrico—he allows Dawit to enter his body with passion. They make love to the accompaniment of the pong of the tennis balls hit back and forth and an occasional expletive in the air.
Enrico loves pleasure. He whispers in a low, almost strangled voice into Dawit’s ear. He tells him he loves his smooth black skin. “How you shine for me!” he says, calling him his Dark King, his Balthazar, a wise man come to adore the child. He makes love passionately, using his nails and teeth, his tongue, as though he wishes to absorb more and more of Dawit’s body, his strength and youth.
Even so, he is often in a hurry, checking the time, afraid of leaving late and arousing his wife’s suspicion. He fears discovery. Obviously, he is a devoted husband, son-in-law, and father. He is the one who tells Dawit when they can meet and for how long, saying succinctly, “I have an hour tomorrow afternoon,” without further explanation. Dawit often feels Enrico is halfway out the door, only giving himself up completely for a moment at the height of passion. From the second he enters the room, he is ready to leave, folding his clothes neatly on the chair, leaving his car keys—he drives an old Alfa Romeo—available.
Only if his wife is absent for the afternoon or is at her parents’ house with the children does he permit Dawit to tarry on the bed beside him with the shutters drawn and the sound of the tennis players below. As long as Dawit is home by seven in the evening to hear her work, M. does not seem to mind.
Enrico gazes at the ceiling, and Dawit encourages him to talk about his life. He wants to know everything about him. Also, he loves lying beside him and listening to the sound of his patrician voice, with its Italian cadences, which he doesn’t always understand but sound to him like singing. He feels he has entered an Italian opera, one about love and death.
He thinks of his father, who loved Italian opera and particularly Aida, with its Ethiopian story, which he listened to again and again.
Dawit lies quietly and stares at Enrico’s small, almost pointed ears, his endearingly boyish curls, his fine profile, with the pointed nose, almost pencil-thin at the tip, the sensuous lips. He adores the slight swell of the stomach and the dusting of reddish hair on the pale skin that goes with it. Dawit winds his own dark arm around Enrico’s white waist to hold him gently, caress his soft, freckled skin. “Together, we make art,” Enrico says.
Dawit watches the way Enrico stands on one foot, leaning slightly against a wall, the tilt of the hip, the tentative, soft-footed, graceful walk. Even his tennis, the steady game he plays, hitting the ball regularly, elegantly, but never with much force, Dawit finds endearing. Somehow, Enrico’s delicacy moves Dawit more than a muscular frame would have. He seems vulnerable, boyish, easily swayed. Dawit wants to protect him despite his worldly success as an architect, despite his rich wife, his powerful family, his aristocratic antecedents. He seems unsure of himself in so many ways, always sees both sides to every question, vacillating, uncertain. “You may be right,” he often says, laughing, shrugging his narrow shoulders.
He talks about his life in Rome. He is in love with Rome and proud of his city as only a Roman can be. He says, “It’s so beautiful. Every time you turn a corner it is with an orgasm. The Romans are so beautiful, too, even the policemen in their white helmets in the summer with their batons lifted are beautiful.”
He invites Dawit to visit. He wants to show him the streets, the monuments that he loves particularly: the little circular temple of Vesta in the Roman forum—he makes a gesture to convey his admiration. He offers to find him a job, perhaps even at the firm where he works. Dawit must bone up on his Italian. “With your gift for languages, it would be easy enough. It’s amazing how much Italian you’ve learned in a few weeks. It would be great to have you there,” he says. He laughs when Dawit sometimes uses the archaic words he has found in Dante. “You are too much,” he says. “You speak archaic Italian! You must come and stay in Rome. We could see one another every day.” He tells Dawit he goes every evening to have a drink with his widowed mother before dinner, and she is a wonderful alibi and always understanding.
“How lucky you are!” Dawit says, thinking of his own mother and how understanding she was.
Dawit imagines a small apartment in Rome, a job, the possibility of spending every evening with Enrico, above all his own freedom. They even speak of living together openly, but Dawit is quite aware this is just a fantasy, as is most probably the job at the architectural firm in Rome. Enrico’s position, if Dawit has understood rightly, though he is a good architect, still depends largely on his wife’s family’s powerful influence as the source of his commissions. Besides, Dawit is certain this man would never leave his wife or do anything to jeopardize his marriage.
The wife, of course, knows nothing about this secret summer life. Enrico says he feels terrible about her. She is young and lovely and loves him very much. “Lying is a lonely business, amico mio,” he says remorsefully.
XVI
SOMETIMES, AFTER MAKING LOVE, THEY LEAVE THE TENNIS courts and dare to drive together in M.’s Jaguar with the top down along the coast. They park in an isolated clearing overlooking a small, quiet beach. They sit side by side in silence in the car. Nothing stirs, and all they can hear is the soft, sad lapping of the sea, the lonely cry of a seagull, the monotonous chirring of the cicadas. Everything speaks to Dawit of death. He looks at the calm, clear water, the stunted bushes that grow wild along the coast, and the bullrushes almost pink in the twilight. This lovely place will still be here, eternal and indifferent when he and Enrico are no more.
He does not recount the torture, the beatings of the feet held suspended in the air, or the repeated near-drownings in filthy water, or even the interminable loneliness of his cell, but rather the few moments of reprieve during his imprisonment. Sporadically and inexplicably, he would be dragged out, wounded, bleeding, and half mad from solitude, from his cell. He was allowed to clean himself. The guard removed his shackles, ordered him to undress and shower. He was given disinfectant soap to cleanse his wounds and to scrub at the lice in his hair and the other vermin crawling all over his aching body.
Sometimes, he was allowed to walk about for an hour or so, still shackled but in the light and air of the courtyard. There he would stare up at the sky or fall to his knees at the sight of a blade of green grass and offer up his thanks to God. Green grass! He remembers the thrill of it. A few times he found himself in the company of other prisoners, shuffling around half demented with pain and hunger. Once or twice he spoke to someone else for a moment, sitting shackled side by side, fearing always that what was said might be reported. “How long have you been here?” they would ask. He would shrug his shoulders and say he couldn’t tell. “Forever,” he would say, for so it seemed. Once an older woman with cracked teeth, blind in one eye, had looked at him sadly and said, “So young to be shut away in darkness,” and he was moved by her sympathy.
One evening, they brought an old Orthodox priest into his cell, and he was certain then that they were preparing to execute him the next day. The ancient bearded
monk, who spoke French, seemed as terrified as he was but allowed him to read his favorite passages from his Bible. Together they sang the familiar hymns.
Occasionally, he would find with his bread an unexpected boon, a small, wrinkled apple, a bunch of radishes, a raw onion, or a tomato, and once a whole, perfect orange, which he devoured with bliss. He never knew what caused these occasional kindnesses, if they came because of some inspection by a Red Cross agency or were simply the result of some guard’s humanity, perhaps even the guard who tormented him so. These moments come back to him vividly, sitting in the car in the twilight beside Enrico.
“How did you get out?” Enrico asks.
Dawit turns to him and tells him some of the story. He describes the guard who tormented him, Solo’s appearance in his cell, the gift of the file, and the wait behind the door with the chain.
“What happened?” Enrico asks.
“Eventually, at dawn, someone came, and I was waiting for him and able to do what was necessary to save my life,” Dawit says. Enrico turns his head to look at him, opens his eyes wide. “You killed him with your bare hands?” he asks, touching Dawit’s hand.
Dawit nods his head and makes a gesture to show how he held the chain around the man’s neck and throttled him.
Enrico smiles and pretends to shake. He says, “Such a violent black man!”
Dawit shows Enrico the marks of his nails and teeth on his skin and says, “Such a violent white one!”
Outside the prison, Dawit says, the half-dark streets were filled with flares and absurd cries: “Revolutionary motherland or death!” “Long live Marxism!” “Viva proletariat Ethiopia. Viva Mengistu!”
The Bay of Foxes: A Novel Page 8