The Bay of Foxes: A Novel Page 9

  XVII

  AS THE SUMMER DRAWS TO A CLOSE, DAWIT WONDERS WHAT M. knows. Nights, she comes frequently now into his room and wakes him by turning on the lamp. He is naked in the high heat of the summer, exhausted after his days in the sun, the running, the swimming, the tennis, and above all the lovemaking. Or rather, when M. wakes him, switching on the small lamp on the heavy wooden dresser, he pretends to sleep, trying to ignore her, hoping she will retreat, but he feels her presence, hears her coming closer, bending over him, studying him. He feels her hot, fetid breath on his cheek. Sometimes she even touches him gently, runs her hands over his back and his shoulders and pushes at his body to turn him. He pretends to stir sleepily, turns over obediently, and curls up on his side. Then she stretches out beside him, her hot, bony body suffocatingly against his. She holds on to him, or she even lies across his body, her mouth over his, puts his hands on her sex, begs him to ease her growing desire. “Please,” she says. “Please. I will give you more money, anything you wish.”

  “I don’t need more money. I need sleep. You have given me quite enough money,” he says crossly, groaning, half asleep, though he has recently had a letter from Asfa, to whom he had written, giving him his Sardinian address. Little Takla is ill. He has asthma, and the doctor says he needs medicine: cortisone. As the family is illegally in Paris, they have no insurance. So when she insists, he allows M. to augment his monthly stipend, and he sends Asfa a large check. As he withdraws from M. into his mind and Enrico’s arms, into his past, she grows hungrier for his caresses, his affection.

  She insists on taking him shopping to buy him his own clothes, the expensive items in the elegant shops in Porto Cervo or the one at the foot of the hill that is part of the hotel at Cala di Volpe. She sits in a plush armchair, her thin legs crossed in pale stockings, and taps her long fingers impatiently on the arm of the chair. She has him parade before her in the elegant clothes and watches him hungrily. “That looks divine on you. You must have it,” she insists despite his protests. “I don’t need it,” he says. “Yes, yes, you must take it,” she insists. She wants to buy him soft Italian shoes, linen shirts in pale blues, mauves, and pinks, Armani ties, scarves, and well-cut linen suits in white, navy, or black. She even wants to buy him a Borsalino hat. He protests. He says, “I don’t need more summer clothes. Besides, everything here is ridiculously expensive.” He thinks of the hungry people in his homeland and what they could do with all this money she wants to spend on these unnecessary items.

  “You look so good. You are more beautiful every day,” she says, admiring him as he strides impatiently before her. She gets up to touch his smooth, dark skin. “My beautiful dark David,” she murmurs amorously in his ear. He sees the young salesgirl, who stands with yet another linen suit over her arm, watching them with an amused glance that seems to say, Just take the clothes. You deserve them.

  It is true he has grown more muscular with all the exercise, the lovemaking, and the good Sardinian food. He gluttonously gobbles up all the ripe melons, the plump black figs and prosciutto, the tomatoes with mozzarella and basil, the delicious honey on flat bread, the black olives that Adrianna brings from their farm. M., who eats less and less, likes to watch him eat. She insists on serving him in the evenings, carrying out the silver tray with the hors d’oeuvres onto the terrace: the black olives, salted almonds, smoked salmon, grilled calamari, bottles of champagne. She presses presents on him: leather-bound books she orders from France, Montblanc pens, tennis rackets and whites and shoes, little ivory boxes for the gold cuff links she buys him. She watches him come and go. “What time will you be home this evening? Don’t be late,” she says anxiously.

  He knows that she studies the marks of Enrico’s passion all over him. Nights, he falls back asleep aware that she is still there, hovering over him, pressed against him, watching him sleep, the light still lit as it was sporadically in the prison. Sometimes he wakes with her mouth on his, suffocating him. “I cannot breathe,” he says, turning from her. Her constant attention becomes more and more irksome, the disturbance to his sleep, her demands on his body increasingly hard to bear. It begins to make him think of the torture his body was submitted to in prison, the repeated near-drownings, which were the hardest to withstand.

  He finds he dreams repeatedly, waking trembling, grinding his teeth and drenched in sweat. He dreams of the moment in his cell when the guard came in. He sees himself as he threw the chain around his neck and pulled as hard as he could, suddenly filled with a rush of savage strength, which seemed to come from elsewhere, from outside himself. He watches as the guard lifts his hands to pull the chain away, searching desperately to free himself, gasping for breath, his eyes staring and seeming to protrude in the flat face. He listens to the final feeble throttled cry that comes from the man’s swollen lips, waking with a dreadful start to find M. moaning his name at his side. “Dawit, please, please,” she says. “I need you. Help me, darling heart.”

  XVIII

  THIS MORNING, WHEN HE COMES BACK FROM HIS RUN TO THE beach, he finds M. already awake and out on the terrace, sipping coffee in her white silk robe. “You’re up early,” he says, surprised. Usually he has the morning hours, at least, to himself and can make his escape to the tennis club undetected.

  “I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t work,” she says, looking up at him accusingly, tears in her pale eyes.

  It is a hot, still, late August day, the sky a transparent blue, only the monotonous sound of the cicadas, the smell of bitter herbs in the air.

  “Shall I bring you some breakfast?” he asks in a conciliatory tone. She purses her lips but nods her head. She eats with him in silence on the terrace, eating from a tray, nibbling at the thin slices of grilled German black bread with a little butter that she eats every morning for her breakfast, and sipping cappuccino from the blue-and-white terra-cotta cups made in the factory on the island. Dawit slathers his bread with butter and delicious Sardinian honey the couple brings them from their farm in the interior of the island as well as the olive oil and the olives they cure themselves. M. is saying something to him, but he is not listening. He imagines the curve of Enrico’s spine, the sweet lift of his buttocks. He can feel his body pressed close. He becomes aware that she is watching him closely while he eats. “You know, you have changed. I don’t know you. I feel you’re not really listening to me at all. You don’t hear me. I don’t even hear you play the piano anymore,” she says with a little catch in her voice. He just looks out at the horizon shimmering in the heat of the day, wondering if he will see Enrico that afternoon.

  She goes on, “You have marks all over your body—do you know? Scratches, bites—signs of someone else’s lust.”

  What can he say? Has she not told him herself to go out and enjoy himself? He looks at her pale, thin face, with its pointed nose. She looks back at him, and now he sees an empty look in her blue-gray eyes, something he has never seen there, as though she has withdrawn from him. He remembers how she looked at the busboy who brushed against her accidentally in the restaurant. She is looking at him without seeing him. “You are making me suffer, and I warn you, I don’t like to suffer. Unnecessary suffering is distracting and finally just plain stupid. I can’t sleep or work, or even eat when I feel like this.”

  “The last thing I want to do is to make you suffer,” he says sincerely, putting down the slice of bread he holds in his hand.

  “Well, act accordingly, make sure I don’t, then,” she tells him with a flash of rage in her eyes. “Don’t jeopardize something so precious.” She gets up and walks stiffly, awkwardly across the terrace, through the living room, and up the steps, toward her room. He is moved by her distress, her awkwardness.

  He makes an effort to be more discreet. He curtails his afternoons at the tennis club and takes her out to her favorite island for picnics as before. He plays the piano in the evening and listens to her read from her book. He attempts to listen carefully, but his mind wanders.

  One afternoon, Enrico calls him
to tell him his wife has returned to Rome with the children, so he has the whole afternoon and evening free. It is an offer Dawit cannot refuse. He knows Enrico will soon join his wife and children in Rome. They have little time left.

  They linger on in the dimly lit room above the tennis courts until it is late in the day, making love repeatedly with a desperation that verges on violence. Again and again, Dawit enters Enrico’s tender white flesh. He cannot bring himself to rise from the bed, to leave him.

  When he finally arrives back at the villa, driving dangerously fast along the coast in the Jaguar, it is almost dark. He has missed the magic sunset hour when M. reads her work to him, and when she starts her drinking. Like many alcoholics she has a precise hour when she allows herself to start drinking seriously, though she will occasionally drink beer with lunch; but the vodka and tonics come out at seven in the evening.

  He finds her walking up and down on the terrace in a long Missoni dress, the vivid red, orange, and purple stripes emphasizing her pale skin, the dark circles under her eyes. Even in the dim light, he realizes she has lost more weight and looks almost haggard. She has her vodka and tonic in hand, the ice clinking ominously, as she walks in her elegant Italian sandals, waving her burning cigarette in the air with a shaking hand. He can see she must have already drunk several vodkas, her purple lipstick running in the lines around her thin lips, her hair disheveled on her shoulders. Her eyes smolder. She shouts at him. “Where were you? I was worried! I was frightened! I thought something had happened to you! You could have telephoned! I drove into town to look for you, but I couldn’t find you anywhere!” He can imagine her rushing up and down the narrow streets of the small town frantically, distraught, making a spectacle of herself in her long, thin dress.

  “I’m so sorry I worried you. I forgot the time,” he says, looking at the thin Piaget watch she has given him among so many fine things.

  She looks at him, her eyes flashing with spite. “I bet you did. I don’t mind you going to bars at all hours to find other men, doing whatever cochonnerie you want to do with them. I understand that, but I expect a certain consideration, after all I have done for you, and if you want to continue to lead the life I’ve made possible for you.”

  He does not know what to say. He lowers his gaze to the terra-cotta tile at his feet. Indeed, he owes her for everything he wears, everything he eats, for the roof over his head. Without her he would have nothing. He feels like a chastised child, a humbled servant. He remembers her shrill voice shouting at the poor concierge in Paris whom she made weep. He, too, would like to weep like a child. He is her chattel, her slave.

  She says, “What is happening to you? Are you falling in love?”

  He says nothing, looks at her briefly and then away from the rage in her eyes, out across the hills and into the darkness of the night. How can she expect him to be in love with her?

  “About yourself you know nothing, do you? You don’t seem to know if you are hot or cold.”

  “You are right about that,” he says, though he could tell her that he feels Enrico’s presence has spread all through his body like his own blood, burning in his veins like a secret fire.

  XIX

  ALL THROUGH THE HOT, STILL LAST DAYS OF AUGUST HE AVOIDS Enrico and does not answer his calls or go to the tennis club. Then, one morning—it is early September but still hot in Sardinia, a dry wind blowing wildly in the scrub—he comes back from his morning run and is taking out a bottle of San Pellegrino from the refrigerator when he finds M. in the kitchen. She is already up and dressed in a dark linen suit with a gray blouse, her hair tied back from her face. Over breakfast, which they eat together inside, she tells him she will be away overnight. She is going to Sassari today, on the other side of the island, on some book business, a speaking engagement. She will stay overnight—there is a decent hotel there—and come back the next morning.

  Does she not want him to go with her? he asks, leaning forward across the checked tablecloth to touch her hand. “I could drive you there,” he offers. He listens to the sound of the wind outside, the sand blowing against the window. She shakes her head without looking at him. She will drive herself. She seems determined, businesslike. She gazes at him dully. She finishes her breakfast fast, adjusts her cloche hat in the mirror in the hall, and allows him to carry her small brown leather suitcase up the hill to her car. “You have forgotten your book,” he says as she is getting in, realizing she has left it on the console in the hall. He runs down the stone steps and then back up again to put her latest book beside her on the seat. He kisses her on the cheek through the open window. “Good luck. I hope it goes well,” he says, and she just looks at him. He asks again if she is sure she does not want him to accompany her. She shakes her head. He tells her to drive safely, to be careful and watches her drive off in her Jaguar in her smart navy linen suit, her black leghorn hat. He runs down the steps and waves gaily to her from the stone entranceway to the villa as she drives down the hill toward the bay, but she does not turn her head or wave out the window to him.

  He goes inside and stands by the telephone for a moment, hesitating, listening to the wind, thinking of M. and her lonely drive along the windy coast, the dead expression in her eyes. At the same time, like an underground stream running continuously beneath the surface, he is thinking of Enrico. He knows he is leaving Porto Cervo within the week to join his wife and children in Rome, where the older girl is getting ready to start school. It is likely to be their last time together.

  His heart drumming with hope, he picks up the phone and calls Enrico at the studio where he works with a group of architects in Porto Cervo. He invites him to come to the villa that afternoon. “Leave your car below at Cala di Volpe, in the parking lot in the shade of the eucalyptus, and walk up the hill,” he says. They can spend the whole afternoon and night together in the villa.

  He leaves the front door open and watches through the window as Enrico comes in under the stone archway and enters the villa. It gives him so much pleasure to see his familiar form and face here, to think they can spend the whole afternoon and night together in this beautiful place. He goes to him quickly and takes him tightly in his arms. “God, I’m so happy to see you! I’m so glad you are here,” he whispers, though he can hear the couple in the kitchen talking in their Sardinian dialect, gathering up their things. “They are leaving,” he says, as he has told them to leave after lunch. He beckons to Enrico to follow him through the living room, where he leaves his sweater and the book he is reading on the sofa.

  They slip silently down the whitewashed corridor in the shadows of the afternoon and go into Dawit’s room at the end of the corridor with its blood-red iron canopied bed and the white-and-red-striped hangings. They pull down the shutters and throw themselves joyously across the double bed. “Now this is my home,” Dawit says, taking Enrico up in his arms.

  They are side by side at the moment of no return, when Dawit becomes aware of footsteps coming to a halt outside the door. There is nothing much he can do but finish what they have so impetuously begun and then lie there holding his breath, listening. “There is someone out there,” Dawit whispers, shifting onto his back. He watches the handle on the door slowly turn. It is like something out of a nightmare.

  “One of the servants?” Enrico whispers, but when Dawit looks at him he can see a glint of fear in his light brown eyes. Together they listen to the footsteps on the stone floor outside his room, retreating. Then there is silence again, with only the afternoon sounds of the wind moaning, the cicadas sawing, and the restless murmur of the sea.

  “I doubt it,” Dawit says, for he has told the couple to go home after their lunch, to take advantage of M.’s absence and have the afternoon and evening off. They never sleep on the premises. There is no reason for them to disturb his siesta, and they would never try his locked door.

  “Damn! And I think I left my sweater and a book on the couch in the living room,” Enrico whispers.

  “Oh, God,” Dawit says,
thinking of the dead white cushions on the couch and Enrico’s distinctive turquoise sweater and the thriller, an Italian translation of a book by Patricia Highsmith that Enrico is reading—not something Dawit would read. Lately he has been reading Italian poetry.

  “But you assured me she was away spending the night in Sassari. How could it have been her?” Enrico says in a frightened voice, sitting up now, his head on one elbow. In the half-light of the shuttered room, Dawit can see the sweat on his brow, his damp russet curls, and his bare freckled shoulders.

  XX

  HE CAN FEEL THE TENSION THAT EVENING FROM THE MOMENT M. appears on the terrace, though she says nothing about the locked door, Enrico’s book on the sofa, the sweater she must have seen. She pleads exhaustion, which she maintains has brought about her early return from Sassari. “I couldn’t go through with it. A crowd of people showed up, and I was about to read when I just told them I was feeling ill, got in the car, and came home.”

  “You should have let me come with you,” he says, but he wonders if she ever went there or simply drove for a while and then came home. Was this all a test? She looks at him and says, “I’m exhausted and getting old” and that she needs a bath. Indeed, she does look older and sad in her rumpled linen suit and gray blouse. Without her hat her hair is flat and greasy. He offers to run her bath, but she shakes her head and goes slowly up the stairs into her room.

  When she emerges from her bath, she has dressed up, put on her makeup, brushed her hair. She has a red cashmere shawl around her bony shoulders, though the evening is warm and still.

  They eat the cold food Adrianna has left for Dawit’s dinner: prosciutto, melon, artichoke hearts, cold chicken in aspic and cheese, which he spreads out on the blue-and-white-checked tablecloth on the round stone table in the dining area that gives onto a patio behind where the purple bougainvillea climbs up the rock. M. hardly eats, only drinking several glasses of red wine, which she pours for herself, holding the bottle at the neck, her hand visibly shaking. The silence reminds Dawit of that first dinner they ate together in her apartment on the Rue Guynemer when they had sat side by side awkwardly in silence. He gets up and offers to make coffee.