Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

After all this she was still clothed. That had added to my sense of ambiguity — so strange, all those clothes in the semidarkness of her suite. I wondered if she was serious and sexual, and when I put my hands on her breasts and held their softness, the stems of her nipples hardening against my thumbs, I felt that she was on the point of rejecting me.

So I could not disguise my hostility. I gripped her tighter, and roughly, like snatching the arm of an unruly child, like a furious parent intending the gesture to hurt as well as restrain. I did this almost unconsciously, unaware of how angry I was until my fingers sank into the flesh of her upper arm where I fingered helpless softness, no muscle at all, finding the weak woman beneath the skin. Something in that softness roused me — I had never touched more appealing skin or such yielding flesh. It seemed to me so tender that I could eat it, chew on her edible arm — I felt like biting her, or at the very least holding on as though grasping a piece of delicious meat. I could not stop myself. I was on the verge of gathering her whole slim body tightly in my hand and raising her to my mouth — all my frustration and arousal concentrated in this one gesture, this revealing touch. As I had snatched her arm, I had become a rapist, an animal, a cannibal.

Did she smell this bloodthirstiness on me? She took a step forward and kissed me. I was surprised but not calmed — surprised because she was fiercer than me. She chewed softly on my lips, and still I held on, remembering again how she had rejected me before, saying no and holding my erection. I felt sure this might end that way too, that I would be sent off, sobbing with lust.

I pushed her away, my hand against her face, my palm jammed against her big wet mouth — and she kissed my hand, licked it like a frantic puppy, and as she struggled to clutch at me I tried to keep her back, to give myself space to slap her.

To show her that I was in control, I held her off with one hand and took an insolent sip of champagne with the other.

The struggle was mute: she said nothing, only sighed. I was afraid of startling the hotel staff: I said nothing. But when I relaxed my grip a little she went a bit limp and was less amorous, and so I grasped her more tightly and began to understand that my rough handling of her aroused her.

It was not in my nature to be rough. My experience until then had been with willing and eager girls. But this was a complex woman and she had made me angry. Of course I did not hit her — I couldn’t — but I was furiously aroused with a kind of passion that was as urgent and blind as anger. The moonlit room and the shadows and her clothes maddened me more.

I fumbled and found her breasts again, loving the weight of them, loving their softness; they were full and heavy and now her nipples were hard. I lowered my head and licked and sucked them and could not restrain myself from nibbling them, and when I did she took her breasts with her gloved hands and lifted them into my face, sighing with pleasure as she touched herself.

My mind was still set against her — untrusting. At any moment I felt she would reject me. Yes, even as she was pushing her warm breasts against my mouth I suspected she was just perverse enough to stop herself cold and send me away, saying, “That’s enough for you! What more do you want!”

And though she didn’t, though she was compliant, more than compliant — active and eager — I was using more strength than was necessary, sensing somehow that I needed to overpower her. I thrust her backward, could not reach the bed, got her to the floor, and hiked up her clothes — silks, straps, garters, stockings, ribbons, all the underpinnings of the old-fashioned feminine Europe, a wilderness of lush lingerie and lace. I was surprised and obstructed by her large elaborate panties, and when I found I could not remove them, could not disentangle them from the silken underpinnings, I parted the lacy crotch of these panties, felt with my fingers the wet mouth and lips of her cunt, and drove my purple cock forward. It was then I knew she could not stop me, though I still gripped her arms and pumped, and each time I thrust she moaned like someone being stabbed to death.

I must not let her stop me, I felt, but the feeling was more intense than the words: I had animal hunger and this was the nearest thing to rape that I had ever known, because I still felt that although she would never succeed, she might try to stop me. She moaned but it was not protest; she writhed but it was not resistance. She wanted more.

The darkness was dazzling. I was convinced of her hunger now, for she reached down and gripped me with her gloved hand and squeezed her lacy fingers on my rigid cock. I felt the ribs and stitching on my hot skin, her whole glove encircling the stalk of my erection and tugging it, planting it deeper into her body. When I came, with a scream that tore through my guts, falling across her body, tangled in her clothes, she let out a little disappointed ‘Ach” that died away, scraping into silence.

The first word spoken in the darkness was my whisper: “Sorry.”

She put her face against the side of my head. Her breath was so hot it scorched my ear. She said, “I want more,” and in the darkness and in her hunger she had never sounded more Germanic. I made a picture in my mind: a forest demon demanding blood.

But I had nothing more to give her. She clung to me for a while, saying nothing, and when, sighing, she let go, I knew she was telling me to leave.

The next day, golden in the golden sunlight, under the brim of her big Panama hat, she was in charge again, sulky and spiteful, perhaps slightly worse than usual, as though tormenting me in revenge for having surrendered to me.

“That is not what I asked for,” she said when I brought her the Campari and soda she had requested.

Haroun was there and heard this obstinacy. He smiled — he seemed to understand what lay behind her imperiousness.

“I said Punt e Mes. I never drink Campari at this hour.”

A lie.

“And do stop staring at me. You are making me feel there is something wrong. Get the drink and go.”

That hot day, the day in Taormina after we had made love in her room at the Palazzo d’Oro, was the worst, the most miserable, I had so far spent in her company. She was a shrew to me — demanding, insulting, unreasonable, reminiscing about ex-husbands and former lovers, mentioning large sums of money and her extensive travels, treating me as though I was another species — reminding me that I was an American, a mere boy, with no money except what she gave me, who could be sent away at any moment. But she was not a glamorous German countess speaking in this way; she seemed to me like a dreadful child.

I said, “What sort of childhood did you have?”

“How dare you ask me that!”

That was the daylight. In the evening, at dinner, she was calmer, as always studying her face in the dining room mirror, though pretending not to. She wore a small white Chanel (so she told me) hat with a little wisp of a veil and matching gloves of lace.

After dinner, Haroun sipped his coffee and said, “I must go and attend to a little business.”

“Is that your name for it?” the Gräfin said, making an actressy gesture, holding her gloved hand against her cheek, her fingers delicately splayed in support.

Haroun smiled, he smoked, he knew he would be granted permission to go but that he would have to endure some teasing beforehand. He knew — and now I did too — that the Gräfin had to have her way.

“I do not want to think about your little business. Please take your little business somewhere else.”

“Gräfin — of course, Gräfin.”

She said, “Sometimes people speak words in an opera, and they are perfect, and there is a big pause. And the aria begins with those words, the people singing them in an aria. This aria begins, 'Little business'—wonderful. Kleines Geschäft. ”