Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Nothing in my sexual experience had prepared me for this woman, and while she seemed positively to glow with health and strength, I was showing signs of physical strain. Her appetite was far greater than mine.

The season in Taormina was ending, the few summer guests leaving, the larger autumn crowd of older visitors about to arrive — so the manager of the palazzo said: English people, gli Inglesi.

“The partita is coming in a few days,” the Gräfin said, and I knew she had been there before, that the party was an annual event, one of the other rituals in the routine of the Palazzo d’Oro.

When the day came, the long-term guests were present and they were gaped at by the people who were staying for just a few days or a week. This was an intimate occasion, like a family affair, welcoming some people, excluding others. Each group was seated at its usual table, though out of politeness — for we in the palazzo were a little family — other male guests danced with the Gräfin.

She wore a gown I had never seen before, and a tiara, and her jewels, and gloves, black ones that reached almost to her elbows, and stiletto heels, her hair in ringlets. She had lovely long legs, slender and straight. She was naturally glamorous and had never looked more chic.

“She is so happy,” Haroun said with a grateful glance at me, but he looked even happier. He beamed at her while I marveled at how I had seen this perfect body attending to me, completely at my service, those beautiful legs bent and kneeling, that serene face eating me.

The Gräfin refused to dance with me, and I knew better than to dance with anyone else. She danced spiritedly with an Italian man (“He is a principe,” Haroun said) and more sedately with an elderly German, who always sat alone at another table, often eyeing the Gräfin, especially when I was with her.

“Who is he?”

Haroun just smiled.

“Tell me, Harry.”

“Too much to tell,” Haroun said, making a complex gesture of helplessness with his whole body — eyes, mouth, fingers, shoulders. “He owns a fabbrica. ”

“What kind of factory?”

With the same helpless gesture, he said, “Many.”

She danced with the swarthy overdressed man at the next table (“Greco”). She even danced — arms raised in teasing delicacy, a kind of puppeteering — with a woman, who was dressed severely in a suit. She held the woman’s hands in the air and twirled her gently, glancing at my reflection in the mirror from time to time: our eyes met, she scowled with pleasure.

Near the end of the party the staff thanked her — effusive Italian gratitude you knew you had to pay for: the wine steward with his absurd chain and key and cavatappi, the fat sweaty-faced waiter, the pretty boy from the bar, the lurking Moro. She tipped them, fluttering Italian money at them, and they laughed and snatched at it like monkeys. The young scullery maid approached, about eighteen, very pretty. Gräfin pinched her cheek and kissed her passionately on the lips and then curtsied, the Countess making a low bow to the maidservant while the embarrassed girl clutched the money that had been passed to her. This business with the girl was one of the most sexually arousing scenes I had ever witnessed.

The Gräfin had the money, I had none. I was properly emasculated, and even while I was watching this spectacle the woman in the suit elbowed past me, hoping for another dance with the Gräfin.

The Gräfin turned to me, looking insolent, nostrils like a horse, and Haroun, seeing her sneering, seemed to take this as a signal to leave.

“A little business for Harry,” she said. “And what about you?”

I was so angry I was on the point of leaving altogether, except that by now I recognized this as an established ritual.

I said, “We have some unfinished business.”

When I stepped forward, she leaned back, looking anxious.

I put my face against the bright ringlets and found her ear and said, “Go to your room and wait for me.”

She left the party hurriedly, eagerly, and seeing her, the woman in the suit snarled in my direction as I followed. I locked the Gräfin's door as I shut it behind me. She was on her knees, still elegantly clothed in her gown and tiara, facing away from me, the spikes of her shoes protruding backward, the remote and icy woman now cowering. I knelt, I gathered her skirts and petticoats and lifted, and I held her, hipbone in each hand.

“Hund! Hund!” she cried. “Dog! Dog!”

“You have succeeded brilliantly,” Haroun said. “You remind me of myself, you are so genius.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

“And yet you are not smiling! You should be so happy.”

I was embarrassed to be praised for what I had done — especially to be praised by Haroun; and I seriously wondered whether it was I who had succeeded or the Gräfin.

“Thank you,” he said, locking on my eyes and thumping his heart with his right fist in a matey Middle Eastern gesture of sincerity. I took this to mean that he was grateful for my liberating him — he was free to wander the streets, and his evenings were his own, for the Gräfin was my concern now.

She was willing, submissive, sexual — more than I had ever known in my life. I would have felt like a rapist had the Gräfin not also been so enthusiastic. Her full-throated gusto for submission aroused me, and after her surrender I was excited whenever she turned to me with a speculative “got anything for me?” smile, or tapped the back of my hand with Germanic insistence. From her I discovered how pathologically impatient the very rich could be. When she wanted something, she was fussed and furious until she got it, and she often touched me as though poking a Start button.

Muttering the slushy word Schlüssel — she mouthed German words all the time; I was beginning to learn some — she slid her key to me, and I preceded her to her suite. Always at dusk, often by candlelight, she remained dressed, or at least half dressed, showing her silken underclothes, the lingerie with its tiny ribbons and bands of lace, the pale colors, pinks and lavender, the flesh tones of her trimmed slip. Her shoes were spectacular and she never removed them, and so she always kept her silk stockings on, and the associated tangle of belts and garters, fasteners and straps, more beautiful for their clumsy complexity and more sensual than nakedness.

Her clothes were part of the attraction, for they emphasized her slim body by giving it teasing highlights. At the end of our lovemaking her clothes were disheveled and damp, twisted on her in a way that made her look lovely and wrecked, and I stood over her, triumphant. But she was not wrecked, I was not triumphant: she was made whole, and I was helpless.

She was physically much stronger than I had guessed. Often, when I had finished, she would say, “I want you again — take me now,” and of course it was impossible for me to proceed. Perhaps she said that knowing that I could not perform at that moment. Was this her way of reminding me that she was in charge? She could be demanding. In my adolescence I had fantasized that this might be pleasant. It was more trying than I had ever guessed, for after the beginning, she was the one who initiated sex, not me. She sent for me, she sought me out, she poked me with her button-pressing finger and smiled wickedly. And because of the peculiar arrangement — she, not Haroun, was paying for my room — I had to be on call.

“Where were you?” she would say.

“Here I am.”

“But I wanted you one hour ago.”

Put in the wrong like that, I had to be more obedient, and when I was, only then would she submit — the logic was predictably perverse. She was able to exhaust me by being submissive, because in her pretense of submission, her hoarse barking eroticism, was a kind of dominance: I was serving her, not the other way around. She got on all fours and went woof-woof, but really she was the mistress mimicking a dog: I was the kept pet who had been commanded to hump her. She had always been the mistress; she had turned me into a dog. And when I was not a big jowly hound humping her from behind, I was her obedient lap dog.