Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [64]
Ghosh didn't understand any of this till he came to Africa. He hadn't realized that Menelik's victory had inspired Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa Movement, and that it had awakened Pan-African consciousness in Kenya, the Sudan, and the Congo. For such insights, one had to live in Africa.
The Italians never forgot their humiliation, and so on the next try, some forty years later, Mussolini took no chances; his motto was Qualsi-asi mezzo!—win by any means. The monkey-maned Ethiopian horsemen with leather shields and spears and single-shot rifles found the enemy was a cloud of phosgene gas that choked them to death, Geneva protocol be damned. Bachelli had been part of that. And looking at Bachelli's face, so flushed with liquor and pride, as he did his victory march in the Piazza, Ghosh had realized it must have been Bachelli's proudest moment.
Ghosh sat trying to be inconspicuous at the bar, but watching the couple in the mirror. When Ghosh first met Helen, he'd fallen madly in love with her—for a few days. Every time Helen saw him she'd say, “Give me money, please.” When he asked for what, she'd blink and then pout as if the question were unreasonable. She'd say, “My mother died,” or “I need abortion”—whatever came into her head. Most bar girls had hearts of gold and eventually married well, but Helen's heart was of baser metal.
Poor Bachelli was smitten by Helen and had been for years, even though he had a common-law Eritrean wife. He gave Helen money. He expected and accepted her selfishness. He called her his donna delin-quente, offering the mole on her cheek as proof. Ghosh meant to ask Bachelli if he actually believed anything in Lombroso's abominable book, La Donna Delinquente. Lombroso's “studies” of prostitutes and criminal women uncovered “characteristics of degeneration”—such things as “primitive” pubic hair distribution, an “atavistic” facial appearance, and an excess of moles. It was pseudoscience, utter rubbish.
Ghosh slipped out abruptly without finishing his beer, because suddenly the idea of making small talk with either of them that evening was intolerable.
THE AVAKIANS WERE LOCKING UP their bottled-gas store, and beyond their shop the lights of the Piazza, the transitory illusion of Roma, came to an end. Now it was all darkness, and the road ran past the long, gloomy, fortresslike stone wall that held up the hillside. A gash in the moss-covered stones was Säba Dereja—Seventy Steps—a pedestrian shortcut to the roundabout at Sidist Kilo, though the steps were so worn down that it was more a ramp than stairs, treacherous when it rained. He drove past the Armenian church, then around the obelisk at Arat Kilo— another war monument at a roundabout—past the Gothic spires and domes of the Trinity Cathedral and then the Parliament Building, which took its inspiration from the one on the banks of the Thames. At the Old Palace, because he was not quite ready to head home, he turned down to Casa INCES, a neighborhood of pretty villas.
He wasn't in the mood for the Ibis or one of the big bars in the Piazza that employed thirty hostesses. He saw a simple cinder-block building up ahead. It appeared to be partitioned into four bars. There were hundreds of such places all over Addis. A soft neon glow showed from two doorways. A plank forded the open gutter. He chose the door on the right, pushing through the bead curtain. It was, as he had suspected given the size, a one-woman operation. The tube light had been painted orange, creating a womblike interior, exaggerated by the frankincense smoking on the charcoal brazier. Two padded bar stools fronted a short wooden counter. The bottles on the shelf on the back wall were impressive—Pinch, Johnny Walker, Bombay gin—even if they were filled with home-brewed tej. His Majesty Haile Selassie the First, in Imperial Bodyguard uniform, gazed down from a poster on one wall. A leggy woman in a swimsuit smiled back at His Majesty from a Michelin calendar.