Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

AT ST. GEORGE'S BAR, rain dripped off the Campari umbrellas onto the patio. It was packed inside with foreigners and locals who felt the ambience worth the prices. The glass doors held in a rich scent of can-noli, biscotti, chocolate cassata, ground coffee, and perfume. A gramophone blended into the chatter of voices, the tinkle of cups and saucers, and the sharp sounds of chairs scraping back and glass smacking on Formica-topped tables.

He had just sat down at the bar when he saw Helen's reflection in the mirror—she was seated at a far corner table. She was shortsighted and probably wouldn't see him. Her fair features were striking against her jet-black hair. She was paying no attention to her companion, who was none other than Dr. Bachelli. Ghosh's instinct was to leave at once, but the barman stood waiting, so he asked for a beer.

“My God, Helen, you are beautiful,” Ghosh muttered to himself, studying her reflection. St. George's didn't employ bar girls, but it had no objections to the classier women coming in. Helen's legs were crossed under her skirt, the skin of her thighs white as cream. He remembered those generous glutei that obviated any need for a supporting pillow. A mole on her jawline added to her distinction. But why was it the prettiest half-caste girls—the killis, as they were often called, though the term was derogatory—put on this air of being above it all and bored?

Bachelli, his silk kerchief flowing out of his cream coat and matching his tie, appeared much older on this night than his fifty or so years. His carefully sculpted pencil mustache and his expression of equanimity cigarette in hand, bothered Ghosh because he saw in it his own inertia, the thing that had kept him in Africa so long. Ghosh was fond of Ba ch elli; the man was not a great physician, but he knew his limits in medicine, though he didn't always know his limit in alcohol.

Just a week ago, Ghosh had been shocked to see Bachelli drunk and singing the “Giovinezza,” goose-stepping down the middle of the road in the heart of the Piazza. It was near midnight, and Ghosh had stopped his car then and tried to get him off the street. Bachelli became loud and boisterous, screaming about Adowa, which was enough to get him beaten up if he persisted. Bachelli was lost in the memory of boarding his troop ship in Naples in 1934; he was a young officer again in the 230th Legion of the National Fascist Militia, off to fight for Il Duce, off to capture Abyssinia, off to expunge the shame of being defeated at the battle of Adowa by Emperor Menelik in 1896. At Adowa, ten thousand Italian soldiers, with as many of their Eritrean askaris, poured down from their colony to invade and take Ethiopia. They were defeated by Emperor Menelik's barefoot Ethiopian fighters armed with spears and Remingtons (sold to them by none other than Rimbaud). No European army had ever been so thoroughly thrashed in Africa. It stuck in the Italian craw, so that even men who weren't born at the time of Adowa, like Bachelli, grew up wanting vengeance.

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.

What little floor space remained held a table and two chairs. Here the barmaid sat with a customer who held her hand; the man seemed intent on keeping her attention. Just when Ghosh decided there was no point in staying, she wrenched her hand free, scraped her chair back, stood, and bowed. High heels to show off her calves. Dark polish on her toenails. Very pretty, he thought. The smile seemed genuine and suggested a better disposition than Helen's. The other man pushed sullenly past Ghosh and left without a word.

The land of milk and honey, Ghosh thought. Milk and honey, and love for money.

Now she and Ghosh traded how-are-yous and I-am-wells, bowing, the deep excursions diminishing till the last few were mere inclinations of the head. Ghosh eased onto the bar stool as she circled behind the counter. She was perhaps twenty, but with big bones, and the fullness of her blouse suggested she had mothered at least one child.