The Bay of Foxes (21 page)

I
NSIDE THE FOURTH-FLOOR APARTMENT
, E
NRICO CLOSES THE
door and leans against it, panting and laughing, holding Dawit’s hand, pulling him close. He drops Dawit’s leather bag to the floor with a groan. “God, you feel good to me,” he says, running his hands all over Dawit’s body, pressing himself against him. Dawit feels the warmth of Enrico’s soft body. He would like to rest in his arms and tell him everything.

But Enrico has other things in mind. He strips Dawit’s clothes off, first the linen jacket, then the shirt. He wants Dawit to take him here and now on the floor. He cannot wait, it has been too, too long, why has he not called? What has been going on? But Dawit resists. He pushes Enrico away, saying they must talk first, he has something he must tell him, must ask him, a big favor. He has come to him because he does not know whom else to ask.

They walk into the small living room, and Enrico strides across to open the French windows on the sunlight and the small terrace with its round earthenware pots and vines climbing up the wall. Dawit follows him into the light, draws in a great breath of delight. He looks down onto the Spanish Steps, the boat-shaped fountain below. “My God, what a
view!” he says. Enrico stands beside him looking across Rome, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “My gift to you,” Enrico says, then turns and kisses him.

How can Dawit tell him what has happened? How can he burden him with it all? He looks into Enrico’s eyes with longing. Enrico puts his hands around Dawit’s waist and drags them down his thighs. All he wants, it is clear, is to lie beside Dawit and have him enter his body. He says, “I’ve done nothing but think of you and that white room at the club, the most beautiful place in the world. Lovemaking will forever be filled with the sound of people swearing and tennis balls being hit!” he says, laughing.

Dawit tries to stall, to curb Enrico’s ardor. He asks for a drink. Enrico brings him a tall glass of cool mineral water from the small kitchen that opens onto the living room. They sit side by side on the gray love seat, which looks out over the steps, but Enrico looks at Dawit, frowning, puzzled. He rubs the end of his pointed nose, sighs, and says, “So what is so urgent that you have to tell me first? What can I do for you? I’ll do anything,” holding his freckled hands like a basket and thrusting them forward, to convey the extent of his willingness.

Dawit doesn’t know what to say.

“Do you need money? You can have all I’ve got,” Enrico says extravagantly, throwing up both his white hands as though throwing money to the sky, and grinning. Dawit shakes his head. “No! No! Not money,” he says angrily.

“Well, then what on earth is it ?” Enrico asks.

“That would be too simple,” Dawit says bitterly and looks
out the window. He cannot ask this man for anything, he decides. He has made a mistake. “Look, forget it. I can’t ask you for this. I can’t drag you into this. It’s all too, too sordid.”

“But I
want
to help you. I can see you are in trouble. I feel for you, as I would for myself!” Enrico says, holding on to him, both hands on his arms, looking concerned, his ancient face filled with melancholy.

“I don’t want your pity. I don’t want anything from you, from anyone. Do you understand?” Dawit shouts, suddenly enraged. He should never have come here. He’s tempted to get up and go. He stands up, looks wildly around the elegant room.

“Are you crazy? What is the matter with you?” Enrico says, getting up, holding him tightly, his arms around him, looking into his eyes. “Why didn’t you call me right away? Did something happen with M. after my visit? You had a quarrel? It was my fault? She is jealous? She turned you out? What happened?”

Dawit twists free and walks back and forth. He cannot speak truthfully even to this man he loves, because he loves him. He cannot drag him into something that might be dangerous to him and his whole family, the loving wife, the small children. Why make them suffer, too? He says, “It’s nothing, I keep telling you. Forget it. I cannot ask this of you.” He feels in that moment that he has never before experienced such awful sadness. It is a physical sensation that takes hold of his whole body. He feels he cannot move, can hardly speak at all. A fog of suffering seems to come down over him, envelop him. His head throbs, his throat feels raw, his eyes prick with
tears. He will have to tell him as little as possible. He slumps down on the sofa, leans forward, puts his aching head in his hands.

Enrico takes him by the arms and shakes him hard, forces him to look at him. He says, “So you’re in big trouble, no? I feel it. I will help you. Tell me now, you must. You must let me help you!”

Dawit looks at him and says, “Will you lie for me?”

Enrico grins and slumps back against the gray cushions, his hair rumpled, the buttons on his blue shirt undone. He has a wonderfully expressive face. There is no one in the whole world as precious to him. Enrico draws his shoulders up and lifts his hands. He says, “Of course, with ease. We Italians are pretty good at lying when we have to. I’d say no one else was quite as good at it. We can also steal. Do you need any stealing?” He opens his eyes wide, grinning, and then, seeing Dawit’s expression, he looks serious, draws him close. He says, “I would lie and steal for you, Dawit. What else do you want? Why do you have to even ask? You want me to lie for you to M.? But why would she believe me? Never mind, I’d do anything for you, surely you know?” and he drags his hands over Dawit’s chest, his thighs, his sex. Like M., he cannot keep his hands off his body, Dawit thinks, annoyed. All they want from him is his youth, his young body.

He looks at Enrico’s fine patrician face, one of ancient privilege. His ancestors have known nothing but privilege. He has never known real hardship, hunger, or thirst. People have always come to his aid. No one has ever beaten the soles of his feet, plunged his head and shoulders in filthy water, put
electrodes on his sex. How can he possibly understand? He is not so sure what Enrico would do for him, not sure at all. Would he betray him?

He says, “If they ask you, will you say you spent the night with me? The night when you left the villa? The night when M. found us together. Will you simply say you met me in a bar, and we went together to the beach, that we spent the night together there?”

“If who asks me?” Enrico asks, looking at him warily, his gaze fluttering back and forth across the room, as though he were watching a game of tennis. His face looks a little green around the fine nose.

Dawit looks at him and says, “The police.”

Enrico draws a breath sharply, looks out the window, and then looks at Dawit. He says, “I’ll say whatever you want me to, but now just make love to me.”

Dawit puts his hands into Enrico’s soft russet curls, he runs them over his face, his lips, down his sweet body, as Enrico pulls off the rest of Dawit’s clothes and his own and sinks down onto the carpet before him. Dawit kneels naked beside him, feels the gold fluff on his stomach, and buries his face in his chest. He strokes his pale skin, the curve of his spine as Enrico turns onto his side, offering himself up, waiting for Dawit to fill his body with his sex. But what Dawit sees stretched out before him is not Enrico but M., her white gown bubbling up and her chained body sinking down through the blue sea. As Enrico turns to him and tries to arouse him, taking his sex hungrily into his mouth, he sees himself diving from the side of the boat, plunging down in search of M.’s body, not this one beside him. His desire
is gone, stolen. He has left it down there in the deep of the Sardinian sea, buried in the sand of the Bay of Foxes. M. has managed to rob him not only of his sleep but also of his desire.

He struggles to his feet, tears on his cheeks. All he can say, as he once did to M., is “I’m sorry, but I just can’t.” Enrico, who is lying curled up on the Persian carpet in the Roman flat, the hum of the ancient city coming to them through the open door like the sound of the sea, lets out a deep, sustained moan. He calls on his God, asking for mercy, as though he has committed a crime.

Dawit says in a sort of furor, “It was her life or mine. She would have destroyed me, crushed me like a cockroach!” and as he says this he sees the expression in Enrico’s eyes, the look of complete terror.

Enrico rises up on his knees and presses his hands together as though praying, shaking his hands pressed together at Dawit. He says, “What are you saying? What on earth are you saying! What did you do to her?”

Dawit explodes, “For God’s sake! How much blood has been spilled and for how many absurd reasons? What does it matter? Surely the life of one hungry child, the life of little Takla, was worth more than hers?”

Enrico, still on his knees, looks up at Dawit and opens his arms wide, shakes his hands, his head, his whole body. He says, “Who are we to decide who is to live and die?”

Dawit looks away and says, “There was no other way out.”

“Don’t tell me that! Don’t tell me anything! I don’t want you to tell me what happened! I don’t want to know.” He bends over, lowering his head to the floor, touching the carpet
with his forehead, covering his ears as M. once covered her eyes. Then he gets up and starts frantically pulling on his clothes. He says, “I have to go. I have to leave immediately.”

“Go, then! Go ahead! Get away from me!” Dawit says.

Enrico finishes dressing, sitting on the sofa to pull on his elegant Italian socks, his fine, well-polished though worn shoes. He says, “Look, I’ll lie for you. I will, if they ask me, and you can stay here for as long as you like, but try for God’s sake to keep my family out of this. I don’t want their names blasted across the papers. Do you understand? I don’t want my wife, my children, dragged into this. I’ll try and call but I don’t know when I’ll be back. Just leave the key under the mat when you have to go,” and he gets up and goes toward the door. With his hand on the doorknob, he turns and looks at Dawit and for one wild moment Dawit hopes he might come back, take him in his arms, or at least say good-bye, but he tells Dawit there is food in the fridge, to help himself, and sheets for the couch, which folds out into a bed.

Up to the last moment a gentleman, Dawit thinks, blinking back tears. Then Enrico looks once at Dawit, his sorrow written clearly all over his face. He says with his small, sad, ironic smile, “
Ciao,
Dawit,
buona fortuna
.” As the door clicks softly behind him, Dawit feels as if he has been cut off from everything and everybody with a sharp knife.

D
AWIT LIES BACK DOWN ON THE CARPET, HIS KNEES DRAWN
up to his chest, as Enrico had done. He cannot stir. He can hardly breathe. His whole body aches as though he has been beaten once again. Hot and cold shivers run down his spine. He thinks he hears screams, glass shattering, the sound of boots coming near. Vaguely, he is aware that no one is screaming, but the telephone, the big black phone, which is on the counter between the living room and the open kitchen, is ringing and ringing. Finally, he manages to rouse himself and forces himself up from the floor where he has been lying curled up in a ball, beating the carpet with his fists as he would do the concrete in his cell. He picks up the receiver. At first he is not able to understand what the voice is saying, but eventually he realizes it is Gustave. “Can you hear me, for God’s sake? Dawit, I’m asking you if you have seen the papers today.”

Dawit says no, the last thing he thought of was to buy a paper today. He has just arrived in Rome.

“It’s all over the French papers, and I imagine the Italian ones, too,” Gustave says.

“What is?” Dawit says, trying to understand. He sits down on the sofa, still naked and shaking. All he can imagine is a
picture of himself in the paper with the word MURDERER underneath. Gustave says impatiently, “M.’s disappearance, of course. The police are looking for her. Look, I gave them your address in Rome. I had to. I wanted to warn you.”

“I see,” Dawit says, already imagining himself once again in a small cell, this time for life. He is tempted to get up and walk out onto the terrace and throw himself down onto the famous steps below. He thinks of Keats and the house where he died, which is very near here, he has noticed on his arrival. He thinks of the photo he saw of Keats’s death mask in a book. He, too, will die young in Rome, but without having lived or written any poems. What is there left to live for, in any case? What is the point of going on?
Get it over
with
, he thinks.

But Gustave encouragingly says, “Look, don’t worry. It’s just a formality. Nothing is going to happen to you. I spoke to them very highly of you, of course, and of your relationship with M. Everything should be fine. Just tell them where you were the night she took off. Perhaps she’ll turn up, and in the meantime, it’s good for business: a lost author! Very good for business. It couldn’t have been better if we’d made it up!” he says with a laugh. He does not sound particularly concerned about his lost author. Did he ever really care about M.? Was this simply a business arrangement? “We’re going to get that book out as soon as we can. November, probably,” Gustave says.