The Bay of Foxes by Sheila Kohler Read Free Book Online Page B

that beautiful description of the ferry on the Blue Nile, the African light glinting on the water, the elegant, dark young man. It was a book I read when I was young—I had never read anything quite like that, and I have always remembered that scene. Later I saw it, too, in a film. Idon’t know who played the role but I wanted
him
, the man in the white linen suit.”
    “Have you never desired a woman?” she asks.
    “Never,” he says, shaking his head.
    “It seems inconceivable,” she says. “Surely there must have been a moment, someone, sometime? Even your mother, when you were very young?”
    He sits on the bed beside her in the hot, dark room and thinks of his mother finding him one morning with Solomon in his bed. She had taken him into her study, sat him down on her blue chintz-covered chair. She told him that these things happened in adolescence. She had felt the same way about a girl in her boarding school. She thought she was in love, had held her in her arms, but she had grown out of it. She had gone on to love his father so much, to have so much pleasure with him. “We change as we get older,” she told him. He must not be ashamed, she said. She kissed him and told him that in any case she would love him, whatever happened, that he was her beautiful, beautiful boy.
    Then she advised him not to say anything to his father. “Men, even sophisticated ones like your father, don’t always understand these things. They see the world in black and white. We women understand that things are not as simple as they might seem,” she had said. She added, “Your father, despite all his fancy degrees, was brought up to think of Ethiopian men as soldiers, and to consider valor in battle the ultimate aim for a man.”
    Now he leans back against the wall, his chest bare, and shakes his head, conceding, “Only you—for that second in the café.”
    “It sounds like a song,” she says, laughing at him, singing in English now, “Only youooo!”
    “Would you prefer that I go?” he asks, folding his fingers together in a position of prayer.
    “No!” she says quickly. “If you stay with me I would be so glad; I would like you to stay very much. I feel as if I have found part of myself again, part of my youth.” She holds his hands gently in hers.
    “I so much want to stay,” he says and turns his gaze away, so that she will not see his desperation, his need for her help. She adds something that reassures him, as it is intended to do, though he is not sure he believes her. She says casually, shrugging her narrow shoulders and in her deep, hoarse smoker’s voice, “After a certain age, what women are looking for most is companionship and tenderness.”
    She tells him she is leaving for her villa in Italy soon, as she does every summer, and sometimes stays through the fall. Would he like to come with her? “The house is on the side of a steep hill with a beautiful view of the bay, Cala di Volpe. There is a little motorboat, islands, clear, clear sea.”
    “Cala di Volpe? The bay of the fox? Is that what it means?”
    “You speak Italian, too?” she asks.
    “A little.” He has learned some from one of the Italian workmen who had remained after the brief occupation and worked in the summer palace. “Where is it?” he asks, intrigued, thinking of the Blue Nile, of the waters of Lake Tana and the monasteries his mother took him to visit as a boy. He was not allowed to swim in the lake because of the bilharzia, a parasitic disease in which worms enter the veins and feed on the blood cells.
    “That’s it. The Bay of Foxes. There are still some there. Also wild boar, which they hunt in the fall. We drive from here to Genova and take a ferry from there to the island of Sardinia. It’s a beautiful island, still quite wild. D. H. Lawrence wrote about it. It has a wonderful smell—they say sailors passing in the night near their island can recognize it by its smell. I don’t know what it is, some sort of herb,