Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Her appetite and her persistence made her seem much younger — younger than me, stronger, more sexual, greedier, more childish, more perverse, less inhibited, almost uncontrollable. I did not dread her beckoning, but after the first week I admitted to myself that my mood seldom matched hers. That was inconvenient, yet I could not make excuses: I belonged to her.

All we shared was sex. I liked that but I wanted more. These days we seldom talked, we never had a conversation. She was not a reader, not a sightseer, not the slightest bit animated by the Italians, whom she despised as cheats and monkeys ( Äffchen , another of her German words that I learned).

“I like Taormina because there are so few Italians here” was her repeated pronouncement.

She was purely a sensualist and she demanded that I be the same — but how could I? Sensuality was almost impossible to fake, and so I was always struggling to satisfy her. We were reduced to two creatures groping in the dark. A few weeks before, in those awkward yet instructive days of visiting the olive estate, and shopping for clothes, and the three of us dining together — when Haroun was still one of us — we enjoyed many conversations. We talked about travel, politics, music, food — that is, her travel, her politics, the music she liked, the food she preferred. But however self-centered at least it was an attempt at polite discourse, and it helped me understand her a little. Now days were passed in silence, in the weird woolly humidity of sexual anticipation. I was bored, she was impatient, and we were distant all day until nightfall, when we resumed grappling, and by then I might have pinned her to the floor and be throttling her as she cried out, Hoont! Hoont!

“I love you” was never spoken again. And so after our initial familiarity began to wane, I knew her less and less, for sex had turned her into a stranger.

She signaled obscurely with her head — her blond ringlets danced at her ears; she gestured with one finger rather than her whole hand; she had a way of using her lips — everting them — which meant “Now.” She wasn’t initiating sex, she was testing my obedience, giving an order, saying “Come,” and I had no choice but to obey, doglike, and go to my mistress, who was swishing her tail, for when she walked, her whole body in motion repeated, “Follow me,” especially her bobbing beckoning buttocks.

“Ach!” she would say after we finished, her characteristic postcoital mutter, which was as close as she ever got to forming a word at those times. “Ach” had three syllables, sometimes more. Looking broken and thrown down on the carpet, her lipstick so smeared she had a clown’s mouth, her hair and clothes tangled, satisfied in her ruin — more than satisfied, triumphant.

The resentment that built up in me during the day — a furious feeling that she seemed deliberately to provoke — I unleashed on her at night as soon as the door to her suite was locked and bolted. The double lock was necessary.

One night, early on in our lovemaking, she was loudly groaning and I was butting her hard with my hips. There was a knock at the door and a voice of worried, querying concern.

“Contessa…”

The Gräfin instantly ceased her pleading moans and through gritted teeth cried, “Via!”— Go away!

And almost without a transition we continued, all her bravado gone, for while outside the room she was an insulting countess, inside she was a cowering peasant girl, kneeling before me and pleading, imploring my hardened cock, holding it with her gloved hands, and caressing it with her lips and tongue with murmurs of satisfaction.

When she wanted something particular, she asked for it obliquely, using the childish method of paradoxical injunction — the way a panting bright-eyed child says, “Better not chase me! Better not tickle me!”

Only the Gräfin's suggestions were much more specific: “Whatever you do, I beg you, don't open the drawer of my dresser and find the dog collar and the leash. If you do, I will have to wear it and you will treat me like a dog and force me to lick you and get me on my hands and knees and take me from behind like a mastiff…”

She scattered rugs and pillows and blankets on the floor to protect her knees, for the Gräfin’s preferred position was on all fours, facing the sofa, near enough to rest her head on it, to howl into the cushions and muffle the cries she knew would startle the palazzo's staff again.

Sometimes she rolled over, the way a dog does to have its belly tickled, only she would raise her legs and, pretending to cover herself, claw at the lacy crotch of her panties and protest insincerely, saying “ Nein. ”

Licking her, humping her, nuzzling her back, buttock-sniffing like a spaniel, I was the dog — and a fierce one, too, for the way she treated me all day. I was the badly whipped and hectored hound that turned on its mistress, but in this case it was just what she wanted.

I did not naturally resist, I had lost the will, but instead I strayed, I procrastinated, absented myself, became scarce, wandered the side streets of Taormina, and generally avoided her during the day, as though not wanting to be reminded of my obligations. Haroun was never around. I guessed he had found a friend. I was the Gräfin’s companion now.

In that week of resentment, my third in Taormina, I began to avoid her more and more, as I attempted to initiate another life in the town, parallel to the one I led at the Palazzo d'Oro. I became friendly with some of the shopkeepers, knew them by their first names, chitchatted with them about the weather, the local soccer team, a boxing match that was about to take place in Palermo. When I mentioned America they said, “Jack Kennedy!” but were otherwise circumspect. They had guessed that I was a German, and while they were friendly I realized they were being polite, for they disliked Germans. But they made an exception for visitors who stayed in Taormina and spent money and handed out tips and, in the Italian way, said they disliked “the other ones — not these.”

All my clothes were from the men’s boutique on the Viale Nolfi, a small street off the Corso. The Gräfin and Haroun had bought me clothes in the Teutonic style — the pointed shoes, the short sports jacket, the narrow trousers, the turtleneck, the mesh shirt, the silk suit — the sort of stylish clothes an idle, self-conscious German wore on vacation. They were so stylish as to be almost formal: the light suit was easily soiled, the shoes had thin soles and were wrong for the cobblestones of Taormina, the turtleneck was too tight, the trousers too close-fitting. I was a dandy — out of character for me, I felt, but it was her desire, German pride mostly, that I should look rich and respectable, in her fashion. And clothing me was another way of making me hers. I had barely realized how I looked until I tried to talk with Italians, most of whom benignly forgave me for being foppish and prosperous.

Waiters in Taormina, however, loved such people as I seemed, for we lingered, we smoked, we had nothing to do, we spent money and humored them and tipped them. One day at the Mocambo, where I had begun to take refuge from the Gräfin — but I went there mainly because the waiters knew me by name — I was addressed by a young woman in Italian. I took her to be a student, maybe French — she had an accent — definitely a traveler: she was dressed like a hiker and carried a sun-faded bag and a map. She wore a headscarf which in its simplicity gave her a wholesome peasant look that was also chic. As she spoke, a waiter wandered over to listen.

“Scusi, signore, cerchiamo una pernione qui non più caro,” she said. She was looking for a place to stay that was not too expensive.