by Martin, M.
I’ve ended up spending the waning months of summer in Taormina, eight days so far with about half of the work left to do. Sicily is not what most people imagine. The decayed buildings with porches where round grandmothers gather feels more like the South of France before writers were chased away to places like Capri, Positano, and Ravello, and then onto these dramatic hills and precarious mountains that cradle this incredible town where poets churned, actors agonized, and the Greeks left their magnificent ruins.
It’s about as good a gig as you get in my line of work. An international luxury hotel group based in London purchased two iconic properties and embarked on a massive overhaul plagued with permitting hurdles and terminally over budget. After they had purchased two of the town’s most iconic hotels, their British sensibility made them think the Italians would be less Italian and not put up as many obstacles and schemes as they’ve encountered given they would essentially be saving two iconic dilapidated landmarks. However, greed and corruption prevails in these parts.
Like a hilltop enclave of style and culture, Taormina is an irreverent antonym to bigger and brasher Palermo, and somewhere you actually imagine spending a lifetime in lieu of just a semester of school like in larger, more-urban Catania. Taormina lures you in even before you arrive, hilltop drama of structures you can’t imagine could ever be built along terrifying roads that rise from the sea to twist along hairpin turns where century-old houses hug the land. Having come here as a teenager, I remember two things about the town, namely those colorful pots of various pottery heads where ferns and orchids grow. Then I remember the coliseum and some techno-style dance party that seemed so cool at 4:00 a.m. on an August night.
I’m given the dutiful job of assessing in-house budget forecasting and conversion options at their two hotel properties, made all the more difficult by late-summer weather in Sicily that means sweltering afternoons where men, women, children, and even pigeons vanish to the beach. Grand Hotel Timeo sits at the very top of the town next to the old Greek amphitheater. Its now-sibling property, Villa Sant’Andrea, lies on the seashore, and a stunning, somewhat stagnant rocky beach where hairy eighty-year-old men wear their underwear into the water and voluptuous nineteen-year-olds look for sex on the beach while sipping Malvasia wine, a super-sweet and bubbly local wine.
I’ve developed a routine I quite like in a relatively short time, which isn’t very unusual except that I haven’t tired of Taormina. To the contrary, I could linger doing pretty much nothing in this place for an undetermined amount of time. I began my first few days at the Villa Sant’Andrea with its seaside location that’s truly incredible. The interiors reminded me of a rich Sicilian grandmother’s house with a side of Versace at the beach. The crowd, however, wasn’t one you’d want to see on the beach and the location so removed from town that getting back after dinner or drinks with friends was daunting, especially if the tram wasn’t running.
I decided to move to the Gran Hotel Timeo, which is nestled within a compound at the very top of the town. After a honking and hollering journey up to the mountaintop, you’ll see wrought iron gates open to indiscriminate glass doors that lead down a narrow hallway with herringbone floors that groan as you pass over them next to ornate vanities topped with marble busts of Zeus and Puccini.
The endless hallways dump out into unexpected gardens and terraces that face the Bay of Naxos in the identical visual once absorbed by the eyes of Goethe, Tennessee Williams, and D. H. Lawrence that I know would truly speak to Catherine. You want to be in love in this kind of place. There’s femininity to the hotel’s interiors despite its thoroughly dominant facade, mostly blue and pale pink decor in muted powdery finishes in the rooms. It’s all a bit lost on me, especially the starched linen sheets that feel more like cardboard for the first half of the night until they conform to perfection around your body.
In Italy, your workday begins no earlier than 10:00 a.m., and in Sicily, it starts at 11:00 a.m. I kick it off with a 9:00 a.m. wake-up call with three double espressos and then an immediate early morning run. I don’t try to adhere to the hotel’s ridiculous dress code of long pants and shirts in the lobby that’s out of sync with summer and especially its crotchety air-conditioning system. In nothing but a pair of shorts and running shoes, I run from the hotel and down into town as fast as I can through the old market that’s a mix of mothers and grandmothers shopping, and tourists looking for a Starbucks equivalent. You can easily lose your bearings on a downhill run, but it’s also impossible to avoid in a town built on a hilltop. At the entrance of town, I head through the main gate and down the side street that leads toward the beach. I gauge whether I want to take the tram down and run a longer distance on the beach or run the whole way down and then immediately head back.
Today, my arrival at the tram comes at the same time as a girl I’ve been watching for the entire week. She’s not my usual type; she’s on the short side with curves that makes her feel far taller. She wears the shortest shorts I’ve ever seen in public, and her thighs look like they were molded to fit just below. Her soft skin is crimson, and a deeper, richer bronze toward the knees and down to her filthy bare feet that look as if she’s walked barefoot for a lifetime despite her young age.
We stand as the tram approaches, like a gondola in a snowless ski resort that links the town to the road at the bottom of the mountain next to the beach. There are four people waiting for the tram, two fully clothed, including a grandmother with plastic bag full of fruit that looks like it won’t make it through the five-minute trip, and a city worker who looks to be heading toward the train station or bus terminal. Then of course, there’s me, standing somewhat sweaty already in shorts that are probably too short for this crowd and bare chest, at which I notice the young woman concealing her stare between glances at the bus timetable and community bulletin board freckled with household items for sale and missing-dog notices.
I have not had sex since being in Somerset with Catherine, which is actually a record for me, amounting to almost six weeks. This results in constant erections and an easily stoked temper. I’m also almost constantly thinking about sex in some way. These are the tough moments, in the breeze that brings in the scent of game as the senses heighten and distractions come to quiet. She notices my constant gaze at her thighs. I imagine myself between them and touching every curve of her in a way that she’s never felt. I imagine us alone in this tram that we now both enter at arm’s length; she feeling the heat come off my readied body as we make our first eye contact of the day that forces me to hunch over to avoid the most inappropriate of silhouettes.
We face each other standing on opposite sides, not noticing the sun bouncing off the Ionian Sea below, or the handful of riders who just miss the closing door. We notice only each other, passing glances, and then easing into a long meeting of the eyes that breaks with her looking down at my chest, along my stomach, and me standing up just a bit to show her a tad more. Her breasts hang naturally under her sleeveless white shirt with a beach club name emblazoned across the front. She has that Italian sex appeal that lingers in its women from her age until the day they die, that silent stalk of the eyes that lures you in and has you doing anything they desire to earn their attention. She looks away yet again and then back at me.
She’s the type who orders you around during sex, telling you exactly what she wants, and how she wants you in a delirium of fantasies that come to an eruptive halt as the tram ends its short trip, and she leaves without another look. She marches down the sidewalk and toward a row of beach clubs lining the shore next to Villa Sant’Andrea, not turning around once, or lingering in step hoping I was to follow. My path leads farther up the beach and along the main highway where I could be the first person ever to run, or at least it feels as buses honk, cars swerve, and trucks inevitably boom their horns along my morning ritual.
The heat is blistering as I make my way up the narrow road past Lido la Pigna, and il Gabbiano with the best involtini I
’ve had on the trip. It’s essentially a piece of rolled-up swordfish grilled on the fire. I’ve completely sweat through my shorts as I forsake my run for a bypass onto the rocky beach that faces a series of offshore islands, including the much-talked-about and little-understood Isola Bella. The beach is essentially a shoreline of palm-size gray rocks that surround a swimming cove lined in thousands of loungers in royal blue and orangey-yellow stripes next to the water that seems thicker and soupier than you’re used to with a slow-motion wake as my shoe touches the surface and sinks to the dark pebble bottom.
Even though it is the first day of fall, this midday feels like summer. The beach is essentially empty except for workers tending to nearby juice bars and cafés. Sun-withered venders are waiting for people like me to rent one of their chaise lounges. High season doesn’t really end in these parts of Italy; it simply gets slower and slower to the point that workers no longer find the patience to show up anymore.
It’s simply too glorious a day not to swim; the water is as if drawn for my own bath at its warmest temperature of the year that almost feels too hot to be refreshing. I take a seat on one of the larger rocks camouflaged among the equally colored stones around it. I pull off my running shoes and essentially sprint the distance between the shore and the deeper water that protects these sensitive feet that hate a pebble beach.
Few places are as visually stimulating as this, I think as I backstroke toward the small little island offshore. The Italian seaside is alit in colors with its murky green-blue waters that contrast against a beach of gray-blue rocks and a shoreline arranged in white and aged terra-cotta buildings awash in orange, yellow, and blue-striped awnings. Even the locals are a unique color, a sun-kissed bronze so dark the whites of their eyes allow you to see the subtleties between their dark brown and almost black pupils. The Taormina hilltop looks like an architectural Eden with its majestic ruins punctuated by teetering villas and timeless towers.
Despite all the passion and longing that I feel for Catherine, I still find myself fighting those inner demons of self-discipline. I’m constantly distracted, even from passersby along the beach, imagining what it might be like to take one of them back to my hotel or even to one of the private cabanas along the beach. This is why I insisted on Catherine visiting me for a few days despite bemoaning the endless flying and inability to settle back in New York. She resisted rather methodically, saying she’s never going be much of a writer if she was constantly a hedonist tagalong. I insisted I had one of the best hotels of her career coming if she committed. She countered that the expenses were slowly adding up, that she’s “not a banker after all,” which is why I offered to give her the miles for a nonstop flight and not insist she stay any longer than a few days over a weekend.
With a swelling sex drive, I can only do so much Skype sex and texting. I’ve even resorted to preventative masturbation on my morning swims, whenever I can get a moment of privacy in the deep water. Which is essentially how I reasoned with her, at least somewhat successfully, after a few abrupt conversations and unanswered texts on my part. She obviously still wants to be in this relationship, but she must make the choice to grow our bond; otherwise, she’s going to be one of those women who only have a job and not much else.
Alas, no privacy today as a familiar old man joins for a free swim and simply vanishes into the horizon with goggles and skin cap. I try to drift away from him, but he swims strategically around the Isola Bella and then back in my direction. Isola Bella manages to distract me with its own beauty as I backstroke in the stillness of the morning water. The small offshore island looks like a smaller version of Sveti Stefan in Montenegro. Today, it’s a wild and overgrown nature reserve with a decaying monument to someone by the name of Lady Florence Trevelyan, who lived in Taormina and apparently was a cousin of Queen Victoria.
If you ask around, everyone seems to have a different version of Isola Bella, but from the stories I pieced together from the kiosk owner and hotel manager, it’s long been a center of controversy and scandal.
Lady Florence Trevelyan was a Brit who would spend childhood summers with her cousin and confidante Queen Victoria. Although twenty-five years separated them in age, the two women shared a knobby penchant for birds and botany. They also shared a common interest in Queen Victoria’s son, the future King Edward. Lady Florence Trevelyan became involved in a torrid and well-publicized affair with the future King Edward VII, who was already married, in a scandal that ended in Queen Victoria giving Lady Trevelyan just forty-eight hours to leave England.
Lured by the bohemian lifestyle and countless authors of the day who wrote of the area’s beauty, Trevelyan relocated to Taormina and built a glamorous life of her own in the freethinking utopia. She went on to create this sort of ode to Florence Nightingale known as Isola Bella, with a series of ornate Asian-theme structures intersected by elaborate English gardens and populated with rare bird species that live on the island to this day.
Perhaps the legacy of that bohemian exile lingers today. No fetish lifestyle or crime goes judged as long as you’re able find an island or hilltop to build another lifetime. Ever since I met Catherine, the isolation of life on the road has begun to wear on me, and I crave the continuation of such inner thoughts with someone who finds what I find just as interesting. It’s not the physical as much as the mental that I crave of Catherine, like an inner companion who takes a two-color life and turns it into a rainbow of exponential color. When she leaves, it’s as if my world returns to black and white.
The rocks hurt my feet more on the way out of the water. I struggle to find that camouflaged stone that’s high enough to sit on to put my shoes back on. The beach is a bit busier in the distance as an older set make their way off the buses from Catania for day trips with lunch stops at the more affordable restaurants outside of town. I weave my way back along the shore and up to the road as my pace slowly increases to a steady uphill run. My shorts have now thoroughly dried. The sun beats down on my exposed shoulders, and my forehead struggles in the exposure as I try to stay tucked under the few trees that provide a space of shade along the side of the road.
The time leading up to Catherine’s arrival always seems to pass in slow motion, a mix of inability to concentrate and to solidify last-minute plans of our seventy-two-hour weekend in Panarea. I must admit, she’s a good sport to travel all this way, but my endless threats of taking an autumn break from work and following her around New York had her horrified. In the hours before her evening arrival, I have the blonde Swiss girl upgrade my room to a suite and assure the hotel car picks Catherine up promptly in Catania.
The suite sprawls from room to room with shiny parquet floors and powdery white walls strewn with satin-striped curtains that barely budge in the gusty wind. The room is sexy in a noble way with its polished antiques and gilded mirrors. The terrace wraps around the room with a ballast railing and a linen-covered pergola where two chairs face what looks like a painting of the Bay of Naxos and neighboring Greek theater. The inhospitable afternoon yields to an unexpected twilight of a rose-hued horizon framed by dramatic clouds that usually give way to booming thunder, but tonight just make a beautiful sky a little more dramatic.
Just before 7:00 p.m., the front desk rings to let me know her car has arrived. In a matter of seconds, I can hear a rolling sound echoing through the cavernous lobby mixed with the heavy heel of a woman walking. With no knock on the door or ring of the bell, the room door opens. I linger a bit on the balcony. The heavy heels circle the main room a bit before I hear her rattle a few words to the bellman, who promptly shuts the door behind him. I expect her to come out immediately, but instead, she lingers in the room as I get up to peek in to see what’s keeping her.
She’s even more beautiful than I remember. She’s also thinner than she was last time. She’s in a hot black skirt that tapers from her ass to her ankles with a simple white T-shirt that looks as if she changed in the lobby. She busies with her phone
for longer than I expect, as I cough from the balcony.
“Oh my god, you’re here,” she cries as she presses long enough on her phone to shut off the power. She runs up to me, hugs me first, and then takes my lips with her mouth that smells of fresh waxy lipstick.
“I know that was a long haul, and I’m so glad you’re here.” I look into her eyes, and she absorbs the horizon that couldn’t be of lesser interest to me with her standing near.
“Look at this place, David. It’s just incredible. Is that Mount Etna?”
“Yes, and down there are the famous ruins.”
“Roman ruins?” she asks.
“Greek. And that’s the Ionian Sea just beyond what here is the Bay of Naxos. There’s a sister hotel down by the water that I’ll take you to if you want in the morning, but we need to get a fairly early start in order to get to Panarea.”
“I’m so excited. I’ve heard it’s just incredible, but seeing this makes me barely want to leave this place.”
“Maybe you should come for longer than three days then, my love.”
“I know, too bad I’m not one of your rich friends who only works professionally in order to maintain an approachable social decorum.”
“Maybe we don’t start off on that note; our time is so limited,” I say, trying to disregard her snide comment.
Catherine struggles to sit in the iron garden chair in her tight skirt. It makes me wonder at what point exactly she changed; the taxi ride and flight from Rome would have been far too impractical for such a getup.
“You look incredible, la dolce vita,” I say in my best accent surveying her legs. My pent-up libido makes me think of nothing else but thrusting inside of her as fast as I possibly can.