The Bay of Foxes by Sheila Kohler

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 heuses 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