The Bay of Foxes (10 page)

T
HEY ARRIVE AT THE VILLA ABOVE
C
ALA DI
V
OLPE AT THE
beginning of July. In the early evening light they park the car on a steep incline in the garden under a straw awning and walk down the stone steps to the front door. Blue plumbago, pink hibiscus, and orange
amanti del sole
grow along the path. In the distance Dawit sees the sweep of the vast, tranquil bay with the sparkling blue sea lit up with the sun’s dying rays. The scent of the mysterious herb M. has spoken of is in the air, the scent that will always mean Sardinia to him.

She opens the front door, and across the entrance hall he sees the grand living room, a wide terrace, and the scintillant sea. After the tiring drive along narrow streets and winding roads, listening to M. tell him not to drive so fast, grinding her teeth as he took the curves, he is suddenly filled with a surge of joy and gratitude. He sweeps her up in his arms to carry her inside this beautiful home. “My bride,” he says extravagantly, laughing. Her body feels heavy, as she drops her head back over his arm, her long hair hanging down. She throws out her arm in a dramatic gesture. He has still not gained back all his strength, and he staggers a little, panting and laying her down on the white linen couch with its bright hand-embroidered orange cushions.

There is a shiny black grand piano in one corner, angled so that the player can see the spectacular view of the sea. He gets up and plays Debussy’s “La Mer” for her, as she lies there on the sofa looking across the sea.

“I’m so happy you are here with me,” she says. She adds, “Come, you must see your room. I hope you like it,” and rises. She takes him down the whitewashed corridor with its arched ceiling to a room on one side of the L-shaped house. From the window there he can still see the sea and part of the steep garden with its olive trees, vines, and bright hibiscus bushes. His canopied iron bed is painted red. The white-and-red-striped flounces that hang from it, as well as the curtains, were all chosen by M.’s French decorator, who decorated the whole house, she tells him. “She did a good job,” Dawit says. “What a beautiful room.”

“Come and see mine,” M. says. She leads him by the hand to the master suite. In the middle of its large bedroom is a wide bed, with a blue bedspread, hand-embroidered in bright colors, and a blue iron bed-head that spreads like a peacock’s tail. A polished wooden desk runs all the way beneath the wide window, which looks over the sparkling bay. The bathroom has a tub the size of a small pool, tiled in gray, that takes, she says, hours to fill.

He thanks her profusely for bringing him to this beautiful place as they sit out on the wide terrace in the warm, soft breeze. He brings her vodka and tonic with the olives he has found in a jar on the kitchen table with a note saying, “
Benvenuto
.”

She says the olives are a gift from the couple who take care of the house for her, Michelino and Adrianna. He will meet them.

She is too good to him, he says, sitting on the footstool at her feet, feeling the warm air, and listening to the quiet of the evening. How still it is here, how calm. What a relief to have left the gray and rain of Paris and to find himself again in a warm, bright landscape, surrounded by the familiar vegetation of his youth. It is M. who has given him this opportunity to escape to the sun. She gives him a generous monthly allowance and, above all, the security he needs. She has somehow obtained a passport with a temporary travel visa for Italy for him. And now she has brought him to this place.

She tells him a little about its history, how the Aga Khan had seen the island from his yacht and fallen in love with the clear water, the wild, unspoiled land. He had bought up the territory in the area from the local farmers and developed it, keeping it as pristine as possible, preserving much of the local vegetation, ensuring that the houses were low and inconspicuous, nestled into the side of the coast, not allowing any high-rises or garish neon signs. There are wonderful small beaches. The perfectly clear green water earned it the title of Costa Smeralda, the Emerald Coast.

Early the next morning, he runs down the hill past the smooth green golf course of the Pevero, designed, M. has told him, by a famous American, Trent Jones. He comes to the small beach, the Piccolo Pevero, on the other side of the hill. In the silence and the bright light he runs across the beach and up a gentle slope, a sheltered, sunny area with low shrubs and grapevines. The wild flapping wings of a bird break the stillness. He stops for a moment, falls to his knees in the warm white sand. He looks up at the smooth sky, the sea through the bushes, clasps his hands together, and says a prayer of
thanksgiving, overcome with gratitude at the bounty of the Lord. Then he goes on over another hill and down onto a small beach, where he plunges into the cool, clear waters of the Mediterranean. He swims out and turns on his back to survey the beach. A gull swoops down low, hunting for its prey, its shadow on the water. In all this dreamy landscape, everything, including his own dark body in the water, contributes to what seems perfection.

“I am so lucky to be here with you,” he tells M., when he brings her breakfast in bed on a tray later in the day, a red hibiscus peeping out of the folded white napkin. “I’m so grateful to you,” he says, sitting on the bed beside her, taking her hand. He is grateful and tries here, too, to make himself useful.

He continues to listen to her read from her new book. In the evenings before dinner they sit outside on the terrace in the wicker chairs with their feet up on footstools covered in white canvas. She sits in her loose silk trousers and high-necked blouse, drinks vodka, and reads slowly. Her hoarse man’s voice rises and falls monotonously. He listens carefully and murmurs his approval, though often now he finds her writing repetitious, exaggerated, and finally dull. It is too much her private fantasy. The word that comes to him is
self-indulgent
, though he does not say that aloud, too afraid of offending. He is so delighted to be here, and too afraid of banishment. But, despite his efforts to listen, he is continuously distracted by thoughts of his dead parents, his compatriots dying of famine, the war-torn country he has left behind, and the poverty of his friends in Paris, the waste of so many worthy lives, to be moved by her depictions of unfulfilled desire.

How easily our heads are turned by fame, is what he thinks, and how dangerous fame is, distancing the writer from the world around him or her. He watches her sip her drink in her elegant gray and black clothes. Then she resumes her reading, waving a bejeweled hand in the air. How can she believe that this is worth writing about? How can she not be aware that someone might find this private fantasy tiresome? She writes about an older woman like herself, with her long white hair, slim body, and desire for a beautiful young black man, who closely resembles himself. There is a lot about long limbs, glowing ebony skin, and large, luminous black eyes. She writes from both the man’s and the woman’s point of view, switching back and forth between the two characters and back and forth in time confusingly, though she writes all in the present tense with very little about the characters’ pasts. Everything happens in the moment, and both of them sound the same to him. There is little dialogue. Nothing much happens between them. The woman desires the man, but he does not desire her. The place with the sea, the heat, a sleek white boat that skips over the clear water is described at length. Dawit says polite things about the hypnotic flow of the sentences and the incantatory cadences of the words, but what he means is that it puts him to sleep— indeed, he finds that he is nodding off and quickly shakes his head.

Every night she leaves him what she has written that day, saying, “Have a look at it again in the morning, will you, darling? I don’t want to make a fool of myself.” Of course, he says, and shortens the sentences, moves the story along, takes out the chaff, though he still feels the text has no real life in it.

He polishes his Italian, too, diligently with the help of
an Italian grammar book in the early afternoons, lying out on the terrace under the awning. He enjoys the sound of the words, which he says aloud.

He takes pains to make friends with the Sardinian couple who work in the house, the couple who left the olives for them. He thinks of his mother telling him as a boy always to be polite to the servants, all of them, even the dark-skinned Oromo. “In the end they are the most important people, you will find out,” his mother would warn prophetically. While M. sleeps, he often takes his breakfast sitting in the kitchen with the couple, who come, they tell him, from the village nearby, Abbiadori, where they live in a compound with their extended families.

Adrianna is a young and pretty woman with large dark eyes and a mole on the side of her cheek. She smokes surreptitiously in the kitchen, when M. is absent or asleep. Though M. smokes herself, she does not like her maid to do so, and complains that the house smells of smoke. Michelino, as his name indicates, is diminutive, a small man, and, Dawit can see, fiercely loyal and honest. M. is an exacting employer, but they voice no complaint. They are both hard workers, and he likes both of them sincerely. “You are my professors. You are teaching me Italian,” he says and slips them a few bills surreptitiously.

“
Non! Non! Troppo, signore!
” they say, politely protesting.

They talk to him at length over the breakfast table, sipping cups of delicious coffee and sharing the big sticky buns they bring from their own house, infinitely patient with his stumbling Italian, which improves fast. They tell him about their dreams for a better life for their little girl, Rosetta, a
plump, sulky, sallow-skinned child whom Dawit meets when he accepts an invitation to dinner. Secretly, he is afraid the child will be hopelessly spoiled and, if she is not gifted, which she doesn’t appear to be, will be unable to take advantage of this wealth of doting interest.

He talks to Michelino while he works, busy with the maintenance around the house, unblocking a drain that is stopped up, cleaning out gutters. He works on a stone wall on the edge of the property, carrying heavy stones and piling them up and securing them with cement that he brings to the villa in large bags. Though M. employs two men who work in the hillside garden, Dawit sometimes works beside them in the bright sunlight, at peace in the warmth and silence of the place, in his light clothes, shorts, his chest bare, digging, weeding, or planting flowers, his hands in the earth. The sort of plants that flourish here are not unlike those in the garden of the mansion in Harar: pink and yellow hibiscus, olive trees, cypresses,
amanti del sole
, dahlias, bright purple bougainvilleas that climb up the patio wall.

M. laughs at him, because she says everything reminds him of Ethiopia. It is particularly true in Sardinia, which seems to him closer to home, with its bright light, endless summer sunshine, and blue skies, the brilliant flora, and the wind, which blows so frequently here: the sirocco, bringing sand from the African desert, or so people say. Sometimes, standing in the garden, he opens his mouth when the wind blows, and imagines the sand from his homeland entering inside him. He misses his mother, his father, Solo, and his friends in Paris, the sound of his own language. Even the Dante he tries to read in the afternoons to improve his Italian
speaks to him of his life in Ethiopia, heaven suddenly appearing as Dante exits from hell, those brief moments of reprieve in a violent life.

Laughingly he plays the chauffeur for M., driving her car, parking the white Jaguar under the straw awning, on the steep incline, opening the door for her with a mock bow. Sometimes, as the summer advances and the crowds grow, she finds the beach at Cala di Volpe or the Piccolo Pevero too crowded. She wants to be alone with him. “Let’s take a picnic tomorrow and go to the islands. You can drive the boat for me.”

She has the couple prepare a picnic basket, and they drive down to the harbor at the hotel of Cala di Volpe and leave the car in the parking lot under the eucalyptus trees. He helps her into the long white motorboat, which she keeps tied up there. He starts the outboard with one quick, strong pull, and the motor turns over, churning water. He sits at the back of the boat and steers it out of the harbor and across the smooth, clear sea. He enjoys the sensation of speed, of the powerful boat skimming fast across the water. She reclines on the white cushions in the prow of the boat, in her large floppy cream hat, her gauzy white cover-up, staring at him. “You are my Virgil,” she says, laughing at him. “Lead me where you will,” but she tells him where she wants to go.

He takes her out to the islands for their picnic. She points out Mortorio, which she says is one of her favorites. “There! Over there!” she says, which is where they go. He throws the anchor over the side in shallow water at a short distance from the pink sand. He hops out, lifts her up, and carries her, laughing, to shore. He balances the straw picnic basket on his head
and then the cushions. He spreads the cushions out on the sand under the big white umbrella, which he drives deep into the sand so the wind will not carry it away. They have the whole beach to themselves: the long grasses, the rocks, and the clear sea. “It has looked like this since the beginning of time,” M. says, when he points out a rock perched precariously on top of another. He spreads out the food on a checked tablecloth on the sand. Adrianna has packed prosciutto, figs, cheese, and the flat bread that is called
carta da musica
, music paper, that he loves. They drink red wine from red plastic beakers.