The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  The nice word was one I knew from Fabiola: more than enamored—smitten.

  “This was—what? The twenties?”

  I took her shrug to mean yes. She hated my asking her to look back, she loathed acknowledging the passing of time, and as a result she had no past. I knew very little about her, and nothing at all about her earlier life. I took for granted that she had led a charmed life, and yet if she had, wouldn’t she have wanted to savor it?

  She said, “It doesn’t seem so long ago. Taormina gets more crowded but it doesn’t change.”

  “D. H. Lawrence was around here then.”

  “You mentioned him the first time we met,” the Gräfin said. “Yes. I met him. He was a nervous, irritable young man, and sick. His wife—I spoke to her, in German of course. He didn’t like it that I talked to her like this. And I think he was scandalized that I was going about with a man of sixty.”

  I wanted to believe that the time she had spent with Lawrence was a link to me, too. But she didn’t linger over the memory of Lawrence, she had something else on her mind.

  “The man, my English lover, didn’t like Lawrence or Frieda. He didn’t even like Taormina.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  Now that my eyes were accustomed to the dark, I could see her smile. “That’s the interesting part,” she said. “I wanted you to ask.”

  She left me hanging for a moment, and I thought how this evening was different from any other we had spent together. The others had been shadowy, wordless, passionate; this was serene and conversational. She was smiling again. Was this a long story after all?

  “He told me that when he was young, forty years earlier, he had come here—he had met an aristocrat and had a carezza.” At first it touched me that she knew such affectionate words, and then it occurred to me that she had learned them as endearments from her Italian lovers. “The aristocrat had been sixty. That’s why the Englishman had chosen me.”

  And that was why she had chosen me, because of that incident forty years earlier, in 1880. I said, “Was he famous?”

  “He was very rich.”

  It seemed odd to me that she, a German countess, would mention this detail of the man’s wealth, but I let it pass.

  “He was so rich I wanted his life.”

  For a moment, repeating her words in my mind, I could not speak. I knew exactly what she meant, but again I wondered why a German countess would think that, unless he was a giant. So I asked her, “What was his name?”

  “Who remembers names? You will forget my name.”

  “But I’m like you—as you were then.”

  “No,” she said with a ferocity that surprised me. “How dare you say that to me!” But she seemed to regret that in losing her composure she had given something away, and her tone changed as she said grandly, “It was just an affair. It meant very little to me. It meant a great deal to him.”

  “So you came here to find out how it feels to be sixty and be desired.”

  “Sixty is not old,” the Gräfin said. “Anyway, in my heart, and between my legs, I am not sixty, you know that. I think I am making you blush.”

  The blood rising in shame and embarrassment heated my reddening face and I could feel the heat on my hands when I covered my face.

  “It was like something you might buy that you enjoy for a while and then you grow tired of,” the Gräfin said. “Like a dream, sex with you in my room. I think it made me a bit strange, but now I am back to normal. You won't believe me, but it helped me to see you with that young girl.”

  “You were jealous,” I said.

  “No. I saw how foolish you were. How little you know of yourself. That your whole life is ahead of you.”

  A suspicion that I was being rejected made me want her again. Hearing her dismiss my ardor toward the girl aroused me. I desired the Gräfin again, with a lust that parched my mouth and made my tongue swollen. I remembered how she had pretended to be my dog, how she had groveled on all fours and howled like a bitch, and we had possessed each other completely; she had been ravenous and reckless. And now, in the neat nightgown, in the darkness of her suite, she seemed to me like a white witch.

  I touched her arm. With a kind of distaste she removed my hand and sat up and looked away.

  “I know what your life will be,” she said. “You will be very successful in whatever you choose to do. You have ambition and you are ashamed of your past. Because of that you are ruthless. You will take risks. You have no family name—you have everything to gain. You have sexual energy. That always makes me think of men who want power.”

  “I don’t want power.”

  “I know what you want. You are too young to know anything. You will get everything you want. You will be rich. Money matters to you—I know that. Do you think I haven’t counted every mark I have given you? You’d be surprised if you knew the total amount. I am a bit surprised myself.”

  “Look, I never asked you for money,” I said. But she was right: she had given me a lot of cash.

  “You don't know what will happen to you,” she said, “but I know. You are ambitious, certainly.”

  I said, “Staying at this hotel in Taormina, doing nothing for a whole month, doesn’t seem very ambitious to me.”

  “It is the height of ambition,” she said, laughing at what she took to be my self-deception. “In the future you will be well known, maybe famous. You will travel. You will accumulate wealth. You will have many admirers. What I am saying is that you will succeed brilliantly in whatever you choose to do. I can see this”—she began to falter and frown—“I can see it clearly.”

  A note of cynicism entered her prophecy. She had become somewhat sour and seemed to resent me in advance, to dislike me for the man she said I would become. She had begun to envy the success she predicted for me, seeing me as unworthy of it.

  “You will work hard, of course. But other people will work much harder and not achieve your success. Still, you will want to be expert about everything—you will be preoccupied with your life and your struggle.”

  I was laughing softly and insincerely at the portrait she was painting of my future self, this odd conflicted public figure.

  “But you will never talk about me, or how you fucked a sixty-year-old woman, who told your fortune and then rejected you.”

  That stopped me; already I was self-conscious and silent.

  “You will not know me until forty years pass,” she said. “By then I will have been dead a long time.”

  From that moment I was powerless, in her power. It was as though she had given birth to me and was abandoning me to the world; and she could see what I could not.

  She said, “If this were a novel, it would demand a tragic ending. I would kill myself, or you would do something foolish. But it isn’t a novel. Life goes on. Yes, I am humiliated, but I have a life, and the will to live it is very strong. I am a stranger to you. You will not know me until you are my age.”

  That was our last night together. I left her and went to my own room and slept as though in a haunted house, woken repeatedly by violent and mocking dreams that I could not remember. The Gräfin looked rested when I saw her in the morning. She was walking on the terrace with the old lame man I had seen from time to time in Taormina, who sometimes conversed with the Gräfin in German. They were holding an animated conversation today; at least the old man was smiling—limping, and grinning each time he limped.

  “He’s happy,” I said to the Gräfin.

  “Happy to be going home at last,” the old man said, surprising me by speaking English. I was abashed that I had not addressed him directly. It had not occurred to me that he could speak English.

  “No more of Taormina,” the Gräfin said.

  She was wearing another white dress and her wide-brimmed white hat, but even so, I could see her face plainly and she looked the same as always. I had expected her to seem much older. Perhaps the man’s seeming so decrepit made her appear girlish and spry in comparison. But no: sh
e was a beauty, she had no age, though last night in the dark she had seemed very old. She ignored me but was attentive to the man, who had kissed her slowly on each cheek and was limping away, saluting behind him—not looking—as he left.

  “Is he all right?”

  “He was a soldier. He was injured in the war. Passchendaele.”

  “The First World War!”

  “He was an officer.”

  “I can see it in his posture,” I said. “The Kaiser came here to Taormina with the royal party in 1905. Do you remember that?”

  “How would I remember that? I was four.”

  “Where were you then?”

  A look of stubbornness surfaced on her face, hardening her eyes, stiffening her lips. “I was a little animal then, like all children.”

  To help her I said, “I have the idea that you grew up in a magnificent castle.”

  “I don’t remember,” the Gräfin said.

  Her expression gave nothing away: her face was like marble—as lovely, as pale, as hard, as cold. I wanted to know more. The enduring mystery for me was her real identity. Who was she, where had she come from?

  “What is there to remember?”

  Didn’t remember her childhood? I said, “Taormina was Kesselring’s headquarters during the Second World War.”

  “Yes. Lots of Germans here then.”

  “Tell me about Hitler.”

  “Always the American question,” the Gräfin said. She lifted her hat so that I could see her face better and she stared at me with her blue eyes and said, “He was a monster, with little education, but he had some greatness.”

  “You met him?”

  “On a formal occasion. I was married to an officer,” she said. Then eagerly, with a kind of passion, she said, “The Führer had beautiful hands. A woman's hands. No one will ever tell you that. When I saw them I looked at my own hands. So that gives you some idea.”

  “Tell me more. Where did you live?”

  “So many places. But in the war, in Berlin.” She sighed and said, “I hate having conversations. Especially this one.” Her face was still smooth impassive marble. “Your planes bombed my city.

  “We never talked about these things before,” I said. “You know so much.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Because I have lived.”

  She walked away in the direction the old man had taken.

  I spent the day packing, knowing that I was going to leave—this time not to Siracusa but more directly homeward, to start my life.

  The next time I saw her—I was leaving the Palazzo d’Oro, Haroun was bidding me goodbye—the Gräfin’s back was turned. She was a stranger once more, just another German in Taormina, talking intimately to the old German soldier.

  “Who is he?”

  Haroun said, “He is the Graf, of course.”

  9

  I had just come to that last episode of revelation and was writing, “And this, my only story,” when the bare-breasted girl wearing only a shiny gold bikini bottom moved toward me, obliquely, like a cat, and stood between me and the sun without casting a shadow, for it was noon. She said, “So you’re a writer.”

  All this time, on my return to Taormina, as I had been writing this story by the pool, the young girl was watching me, and her nipples too seemed to stare, goggling pop-eyed at me. When I looked at her she smiled. At a certain age, sixty for sure, it is impossible for a man to tell whether a young woman's friendliness is flirting. She flutters her eyelashes, she twitches her bum. Is this sexual frankness or is she just being sweet to me? If you don't know, you're old; and if you accept that such warmth is not sexual, you are too old.

  So you’re a writer. I knew at once that she was simple. It was not a question but a strangely phrased demand, because English was not her usual language. I was woken from my meditation and in a self-conscious reflex I denied it, as though I had been doing something wicked.

  That made her laugh—there was simplicity in her laugh as well. The sun was so bright I could not see her properly through the glare. She was a black blob hovering in front of me, bare tits and swinging hair—Slavic, not Italian, blond, small head, small chin, vaguely Asiatic eyes and cheeks, fox-faced. I had seen her all week with a deeply tanned man I took to be her husband.

  “You are writing. You must be a writer.” A very simple soul, trying to initiate a conversation.

  The novelty of my clipboard, my big pad, my leather folder of loose sheets, so much scribbling did not interest her. It was a talking point, a way of introducing herself.

  “I have been watching you.”

  And I had been watching her. Now and then in this story, at a loss for an image, I had used her. I had borrowed one of her gowns. I had used her see-through crocheted dress. Her wide-brimmed hat. Her tight bikini bottom had supplied me with a certain quality of gold. I had used the curve of her hip to describe the Gräfin's; the damp ringlets, the hint of weight in the rounded underside of her breasts, the hollow of her inner thighs. I had sketched these in this narrative. And her neck: I had closely watched her holding a glass to her lips and drinking, loving the way she swallowed, the way her neck muscles tensed, the beautiful pulsing throat, like a snake swallowing a frog.

  She had chosen an awkward moment to interrupt me. I was not sure whether my memory was exhausted and I was faltering—my pen poised above the pad as I thought, And then—

  And then the young bare-breasted girl blocked the sun and eclipsed my story.

  “I wish I could write. My life has been incredible.”

  “Have a seat,” I said.

  I turned the pages over so that she would not see my handwriting, as I usually hid my pad from people who tried to peer at my sketching. And I told myself that I could not go any further today—or perhaps at all. What was left? Glimpses of myself on the road. The train to Messina. The night train to Palermo. A third-class berth next to seven Lebanese men on a Greek liner. The cold ocean crossing to New York. And then forty years more: my life.

  “What do you do then, for a job?”

  “I am a painter.”

  “You can paint me.”

  Her lovely body rose and arched and seemed to present itself to me. She knew she was beautiful, that her breasts looked edible. She had tiny hands and feet, a child’s fingers, and sun-brightened down on her back, a little pelt of gold fuzz on her lower spine.

  “You are American.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would love to go to America.”

  She reached into her cloth shoulder bag and showed me a CD player and a disk: Gloria Estefan.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Ex-Yugoslavia,” she said. “I came here with a friend. You have seen him? He had to leave. Business.” She shook her hair to fix it. “I like Taormina. Not many Italians. Where in America you live? New York? I know lots of people there.”

  Everything she said sounded like either a lie or a half-truth. She didn't seem to care whether I believed her. And she hardly listened to me, as though she assumed I might be lying to her too, for when I said, “I live part-time in New York. I have a studio in—” she interrupted.

  “New York is incredible,” she said. “You know Belgrade?”

  “No.”

  “Incredible energy. But your planes, they bomb my city.”

  What she said shocked me—I had written those same words earlier that day. She took my bewilderment for sympathy.

  “All the bridges, they break them. Because of Milosevic.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “A strong man and maybe a monster,” she said, and smiled. “I like strong men.”

  Her cell phone sounded, played two bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which she killed by flipping open the receiver. She peered at the caller's number, then turned to me again.

  “I see you all the time alone.” She had forgotten Milosevic and the bombing. “I think to myself, He is writing a long love letter to his wife.”

  “No wife.�
�

  “Girlfriend, maybe.”

  “No girlfriend,” I said. “Only you.”

  She liked that, an eagerness charged her body. “Yes. I your girlfriend. Nice.” She touched my leg, grazed it with her small fingers. “You paint picture of me in New York City.”

  “Or here.”

  The waiter in the Moroccan robes who always avoided me, seeing me at work, now approached and asked if we would like to drink anything.

  “I drink grappa,” she said with a kind of bravado to the boy.

  “That's rocket fuel,” I said when her grappa was brought with my glass of wine.

  “What do you mean?”

  I explained the lame joke, and we toasted each other, and only then did I remember to ask her name.

  “Silvina,” she said, and drank the grappa in two swallows.

  Because I was so distracted by her neck I did not look into her eyes for a moment, but when I did I saw they were watery and drowned-looking, she was already tipsy, she did not say anything, just smiled, looked at my shoes, my watch, my briefcase.

  “You travel all over, I think,” she said, inventing my life in her mind, imagining—what? “Like a bird. Free.”

  “An old bird,” I said, to test her reaction.

  “Not old,” Silvina said, still looking me over, as though wishing to drink me and make herself drunker. “You like your life.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want your life.”

  I was at a loss for words, and had to remind myself that this was the young girl I had seen all week and not spoken to. Had she really just said those words to me?

  “Another grappa,” she said to the attentive waiter.

  “How about dinner?” I said. “We could go to the Timeo.”

  Silvina did not reply until the waiter returned with her glass of grappa. She sipped at it, then tossed it down her throat, gagging slightly from its stinging fire.

  “Timeo is the most expensive in Taormina. For the two of us, maybe three hundred American dollars.”

  “Maybe.”

  Her eyes were weakly gleaming, glazed with grappa, as she said, “So we go there and eat, and we come back here, and you will say, 'Please fuck me.'”