The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  I had been rehearsing this sort of meeting ever since arriving in Italy. And here at last I had been chosen to play the part and was living it. I told myself: Sometimes life is like that—you fantasize so intensely that when the opportunity presents itself you know exactly what to do, repeating moves you have practiced in your head.

  Haroun had given me more money than I needed for the items on the Gräfin’s shopping list. Obviously he meant me to keep the change—and there was so much of it that I felt secure: money in my pocket, a lovely place to stay, all my meals paid for, and a mission—the easiest part of all, so I thought—becoming the Gräfin’s lover.

  That first morning of shopping I walked around Mazzarò, went to the station and watched trains arrive and depart (German girl backpackers got off, looking innocent), talked with some fishermen who had just returned with their catch, smoked some of my Stop cigarettes, and sketched on my pocket pad—the salt-white house fronts, the diving swallows, the slender shadow of a church spire like the hand of a clock, the blue sea of Odysseus and Circe, and the thought: Character is plot, incident is meaning, my Italy is an erotic painting—and I even saw the painting in its gilded frame, with a title something like The Golden Age or The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, as detailed and suggestive as a Whistler, a baroque terrace on a hot day, a man directing a young virile boy to a drawing room where an older woman, golden-haired like a countess in a Grimm story and dressed in white (lingerie that resembled an elegant gown), looked at her reflection and his approach in a mirror.

  Pleased with myself—I had never been happier; then, such happiness was my sense of being a man—I walked up the hill to Taormina and the palazzo.

  The Gräfin was at her usual place on the terrace, staring at the sea. Her big black sunglasses made her seem not just mysterious but unknowable. Without turning, but she must have heard me place the string bag beside her chair, she spoke—the bug-eyed glasses seemed to give her an insect's voice.

  “You are late.”

  I smirked at the back of her head and murmured, hoping that she would interpret this ambiguous noise as an apology, though it was intended as nothing of the kind. And then I saw that she had been watching me the entire time in a mirror, just as I had imagined in my large dramatic painting.

  When she turned, the large collar of her loose dress slipped sideways and exposed the lovely smooth snout of a breast with its dark spongy nipple. She cupped it, caressed it rather, with her black gloved hand, but did not tuck it away. She touched it with a kind of admiration. She did not look down, though she watched my hot eyes.

  “I will take an Orangina.”

  I lifted out a bottle and, gripping it by its potbelly, held it out to her.

  “How can I drink it unless it is opened?”

  I had been struck dumb by the sight of her soft plump breast in the palm of her black glove and the nipple between her lacy fingers. Not able to see her eyes because of her dense sunglasses, I could not read her expression, but it was pretty plain that she was teasing me.

  A waiter had to be found, a bottle opener, a glass, a napkin, and then the presentation. By then her breast was back beneath her dress. She muttered that the glass should be served on a saucer. She took the glass without thanking me and I felt that Haroun—not I—was being mocked, and felt a stab of pity for the man.

  “Let me feel the chocolate.”

  I had made a point of keeping the Toblerone bar out of the sun. She slipped it from its wrapper and poked it with her finger. Satisfied that it was not soft, she grunted. Then she took the newspaper and glanced at it.

  “All bad news,” she said with relish, and began to read.

  “If there is anything else I can do for you”—and here I stepped in front of her and looked into her dark glasses, seeking her eyes—“just let me know.”

  Her handbag, a Sicilian raffia handbag, was in her lap. She rummaged in it, making its weave lisp and creak, and took out some large serious-looking bank notes—German—that reminded me of engraved war bonds, and without paying much attention to them, not counting them, just crumpling them and pinching them as she had the chocolate, she handed them over. Her gloved hand returned to her dress, to her loose collar, and she stroked her throat, and kept stroking to where her breast bulged, a narcissistic gesture that was also a languid form of autoeroticism.

  Putting the money in my pocket, I said, ‘Anything you like?”

  She said, “Yes,” and made me alert, and then, “Tell Harry to get well.”

  I waited in my room, blackening a page of my sketchbook. I could only doodle; I could not read or write, knowing I might be interrupted. Yet I was not summoned again that day. I walked in the town. I swam in the pool. I emptied my pockets and counted the money they had given me, both Italian money and deutschemarks—about forty dollars, which seemed to me quite a lot for a day’s work.

  At sunset I saw her again. She wore a dress I got to know well, a sort of silken crocheted gown which reached almost to her ankles and ought to have seemed rather chaste for the complete way it covered her, except that it had a loose open weave and through the interstices I could see her body, which was as white as her white dress, her skin more silken. As she approached me on the terrace, the sunset behind her, her thinly veiled nakedness made me swallow and clutch at my knees like an oaf.

  She sat opposite me and said, “I will have champagne. A half bottle of the Merrier.”

  I felt distinctly that I was her servant. I relayed her request to the waiter, and watched her drink. She did not share. I ordered myself a glass of wine. She ate some of the chocolate. She said that she would not have anything more to eat and, grumbling about Haroun, she rose to go.

  “Are you going out?”

  “No. Ich muss pinkeln.”

  I stared at her.

  “I must pass water.”

  Later, walking down the corridor near her room, I thought I heard her laughing. No, she was sobbing. Hold on, she was laughing. God, I had no idea. That was my first day of wooing her.

  The next three days were the same—the same shopping, the same waiting, the same snubs, even the same startling glimpses she gave me of her body; yet I was sure she was not teasing me. She did not expose herself because she was a flirt but rather for the opposite reason, because she was indifferent. And her aloofness was more erotic to me, because it made me a voyeur. The shame was mine.

  “I am so hot,” she said one afternoon, seated by the wall of fragrant flowers and vines, and she lifted the hem of her dress to her thighs, baring her legs, and I felt a catch in my throat and struggled to breathe and I could not turn away from the sight of loose panties of delicate black lace which matched her gloves.

  The fact that she wore gloves was itself erotic to me—I kept seeing her stroking her bare breast with her gloved hand; and how could she have known that the way she licked her lips and drank thirstily also aroused me, that I loved watching her swallow, the strange snakelike movements of the muscles in her neck and her active throat.

  In my running errands for the Gräfin, returning with the items, and hovering, and repeating ‘Anything else I can do?” (a question which irritated her), I kept my eyes upon her body—the smooth skin of her cheeks, her lovely lips which pursed into little pleats when she looked at the newspaper, her sharp nose and dark nostrils, her thick unnatural strawlike hair, her skinny legs, her bony feet in those Sicilian sandals. I imagined licking and nibbling her body, which was for me a sort of visual foreplay, saw myself cupping her bare breasts, each one filling my hand, and sucking on them and holding her spongy nipples lightly in my teeth. I would be hovering next to her and fantasizing about pulling out my cock, grasping her head and parting her lips and pressing it on her face and, as it thickened, helping it into her mouth. But I did nothing; I watched her, I was polite—too polite for her. Once she let the paper slip, and when I grabbed at it I brushed her arm and she recoiled and said, “Please”—meaning, “Don't touch me!”

  She would sit with
one finger in her mouth, looking cross, and although her sucking on this gloved finger was also erotic to me, it was just another way for her to express her impatience.

  “He is a doctor! How can a doctor be sick?”

  Haroun remained in his room all this time. I was certain he was faking his stomach upset, but he was resolute in sticking to his story. I told the Gräfin that he was probably improving and that we would see him any day now.

  “He doesn’t care about me,” she said.

  “He does,” I said. “And I do too.”

  She frowned, looking insulted and intruded upon.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Not well,” she said, still sounding insulted. As though it was none of my business. She was eating chocolate, kissing dabs of it from her lacy fingertips—and it all looked like fellating foreplay to my eager eyes.

  “Maybe I can help.”

  She raised her head and looked at me as if I had just dropped from the sky. She said, “What could you do?”

  Even though she was wearing sunglasses I could tell from the curl of her lips that she was scowling.

  “Anything you suggest.”

  She went a bit limp just then, indicating a pause with her whole body, and her silence roused me. I was standing next to her, my tense cock level with her face. Still she did not say anything. Could she smell my desire?

  She looked away and said in a little-girl voice, “Haroun brings me presents. You don't bring me presents. You don't care.”

  I was not insulted. I was fascinated: I fantasized that she was a small girl urging me to corrupt her. I was willing, the thought would not leave me, and I was now pretty sure that she knew what she was doing to me.

  The next day, dipping into the stash of money she had given me, I bought her a bunch of flowers from the flower seller—another pretty girl—at her stall on the Corso.

  “They will die unless they are put into water,” the Gräfin said.

  But she was pleased, I could tell, the little girl’s satisfaction was as expressive as the little girl’s tyranny. In the following days I brought her a pot of honey, a lump of dense amber, a chunk of lapis lazuli, a length of lace (the black intricate sort that matched her gloves and panties), a small nervous bird in a wicker cage the shape of an onion. I used the money she had given me, for there was always a wad of lire left over, but so twisted from the way she crumpled and handled it, the notes had taken on the appearance of a leafy vegetable—wilted kale, dying lettuce.

  By now Haroun had emerged from his seclusion, frowning and clutching his stomach. “This is bad. When I have such an illness of the bowels it is like giving birth”—he made a face and grunted with pain—“to monsters.” Then he seemed to forget his ailment and he said, “You are succeeding?”

  “Of course.”

  The higher pitch in my voice was my inability to disguise my forcing a reply. Yet, even though I felt I was getting nowhere, it amused me to think that my efforts to woo this difficult woman were my bread and butter. Always I saw myself in a complex picture—these days it was like a full-page woodcut from a book of folktales.

  The next day the Gray Dwarf went to the Wanderer’s room and beckoned to him, and conducted him to a stone tablet on which was inscribed the task that had to be performed if the palace was to be released from enchantment.

  I was the Wanderer of the tale, dressed in my newly bought tunic, on the parapet of the palace, perplexed because the task I had been given was to woo the Countess, who looked haughty framed in the boudoir window of her palatial tower; and if I failed, I would be banished from the palace. This was not fanciful, it was the literal truth, for I was a young wanderer, she was a countess, and the Palazzo d’Oro had once been the palace of a principessa.

  If he did not succeed, he would be banished forever.

  Haroun vanished again, groaning, and on the night of his disappearance, the Gräfin said she was hungry, which was her oblique way of telling me that I would be joining her at dinner. We drank wine together in silence on the terrace. As usual, I sat fantasizing, imagining myself licking her cleavage, fondling her, and in one mood dominating her and in another being her sex slave as she led me naked to her bedroom, ordering me around like a dog. I was tipsy when the food was served and I flirted with her, none of it verbal but rather a sort of overfamiliar manner of gesturing and facial expressions, behaving like a much loved and trusted waiter, which seemed the only relationship that worked with her.

  She was wearing the dress I liked the most, the white crocheted one, all loops and holes and peekaboo, loose on her slender figure, her shoulder bare, her long collar affording glimpses of her breasts, which slipped against her dress as she leaned and moved, and now and then a nipple would catch and gape through a loop. Something sparkled in her hair, a small tiara, and tight around her neck was a ribbon of black velvet stitched with pearls, which she wore like a dog collar. She had applied her reddest lipstick, with a gleaming redness that made her lips swell, and in the candlelight of the Palazzo d’Oro she was beautiful to me, just like the vision of the Countess in the folktale that I was illustrating in my mind.

  I desired her, I ravished her with my eyes, I gaped and I swallowed. But even as I was staring at her in this way, enjoying a fantasy of her sitting on me, demanding that I lick her, she began complaining about Haroun, and a hard and ugly expression surfaced on her features, defined by shadows.

  I said, to divert her, “How about joining the natives in the passeggiata?”

  On Saturday nights, the locals in Taormina paraded, chattering, along the Corso from the church of Santa Caterina down to the Duomo: men with men, women with women, children playing, groups of boys eyeing groups of girls. It was like a tribal rite, and sometimes foreign visitors like us, couples usually, tagged along for the fun, for it was a great noisy pleasurable parade.

  “What a vulgar idea,” the Gräfin said. “I would never do that.”

  “But I would protect you.” I was still a little drunk.

  She touched her fingers to her nose. She sniffed. She said, “I will go to my room.”

  This sounded like an invitation. I walked with her to the second floor, loving each step, following slightly behind her, anticipating what was to come, wishing with all my heart that I could cup her buttocks in my hands. I imagined that I could feel the heat of her body, the warmth of her bare skin, through the perforations in her crocheted dress.

  At her room, she opened the door; in a distant second room I saw her bed, a frilly coverlet, some fur slippers. She turned briefly and said, “Good night.”

  I was tall enough to be able to look down into the collar of her dress and see each of her breasts, swinging slightly as she turned and then trembling as though eager to be touched.

  I leaned and put my face near hers, to kiss her. Swiftly, she pushed me with her hands and made as if to bat me on my head. I jerked backward, noticing that she had exposed her breasts even more in that lunging motion.

  “What do you think you are doing?” she said through gritted teeth.

  Although she had only grazed me, I reacted as though I had been slapped in the face. I was so embarrassed I was off balance. I tried to explain. She rejected me, rejected my explanation. She entered her room—fled into it—and shut the door hard.

  A foot-shuffle down the hall told me that someone had heard, and that bothered me more than anything.

  The next day she was at breakfast as usual, looking composed, even refreshed; no sign of distress.

  I said, “I am very sorry about last night.”

  Just a slight flash of her eyebrows indicated she had heard me, but there was nothing else, and not a word.

  I said, “I’m afraid I was a little drunk.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to cry. Her skin wrinkled around her eyes, her mouth quivered, and she struggled with it, the effort showing on the thin pale skin of her face, and as she fought it her eyes glistened. Then the emotion passed, and though she did not say anythin
g I knew she was angry—because of what I had tried to do, or because of my lame apology, I did not know, but I saw that afterward she turned to stone. Except for our chewing, breakfast was silent, and it was all so painful I finally crept away, feeling like the dog I was.

  Haroun recovered that day. He looked brighter, he offered to run the errands, taking a taxi to the shops below in Mazzarò. He spent the day with the Gräfin and by afternoon he looked harassed and impatient. I began to surmise that in his absence he had been enjoying a dalliance with one of the boys on the staff, that he resented having to reappear for duty with the Gräfin. They spoke German that day. I was excluded, and it seemed to me that not I but Haroun was being given an ultimatum.

  That night, exactly a week after I had arrived in Taormina, Haroun said, “The Gräfin is very unhappy. You must go.”

  “I did my best,” I said.

  He shook his head. He said, “No. I have failed.”

  It amazed me that he did not offer me any blame. He reproached himself. He sucked on his cigarette and spat out the smoke, looking rueful, hardly taking any notice of me, and not mentioning the fact that he had been paying my hotel room and all my expenses for a week, enriching me.

  “She does not think she is beautiful,” Haroun said.

  That was not at all the impression I had. The Gräfin seemed impossibly vain about her beauty, and I knew from the casual way she moved her body and exposed herself that she was utterly unselfconscious, which was the ultimate sexuality: no matter how many clothes she wore, she was at heart a nudist.

  “She is lovely,” I said.

  “You think so?” He looked into my face as though testing it for truthfulness.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “She doesn’t agree. She is not convinced.”