Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Haroun said, “And I want you to know who I am, too. You think I just hang around this rich woman. But I tell you she would be nothing without me.”

“She would still be a countess.”

“She would be a monster.”

He was too proud of the transformation of his surgery to keep it a secret. He wanted to impress me, but his boasting backfired. From that moment on the train, swinging down the coast, I saw the Gräfin as a desperate old woman, a crone, a witch, but a helpless witch. I knew that I had to go back and confront her — that, knowing her secret, I could not continue to Siracusa.

At Catania I got off and walked across the platform, Haroun following me, pleased with himself. We waited for the next train back to Taormina. Addio, Myra.

Rain had fallen on the town, washing its face. The piazza gleamed in the lamplight, the drenched leaves drooped and some that had lain plastered to the night streets were being lifted and peeled by a breeze funneling between the old stone walls. But there was something ghostly in the clean streets, for the lamplight illuminated their emptiness and made them seem abandoned and shadow-haunted.

Or was the feeling in me? I had given up on this ancient town, so luxurious on the lumpy mountainside, famous for its seasonal snobs, all its serious cracks hidden in layers of brittle stucco and whitewash, spruced up for sybarites and seducers, like an old whore winking from beneath a shadowy hat, not an Italian whore but rather some trespassing alien who refuses to go away.

“So lovely in the night, this town,” Haroun said, contradicting everything in my mind.

The Palazzo d’Oro was in darkness. I knew I did not belong there, so why had I come back tonight? The odd pointless trip to Catania, halfway to Siracusa, was characteristic of my time in Sicily — going nowhere. But I told myself that it had been a necessary trip: I had learned the Gräfin's secret. Sixty? The number made me feel ill, and reminded me of a morning in Palermo when I had been eating a meat pie, enjoying it, and Fabiola had laughed and said, “You like cat meat?”

The shutters were closed and latched on the Gräfin's windows. She was asleep, an old woman who had gone to bed early.

“Let us take some tisana ,” Haroun said. He snapped his fingers. “Boy!”

The sleepy doorman stood, leaning from fatigue, and smiled — the staff knew Haroun too well to take his demanding tone seriously. Haroun repeated the order several times before the man brought us the chamomile tea, and to show his displeasure he grumbled an obscure epithet and set the teapot and cups down hard on the marble-topped table, to demonstrate his objection. I liked the man for not being intimidated.

“The Gräfin got the procedure early, while her skin was still elastic,” Haroun said, picking up the thread of disclosure from the train. He had not stopped thinking about it, nor had I. “This is why she is so lovely. She didn't wait, she wasn't falling apart, it wasn’t a rescue operation.”

Yet that was just how she seemed to me: a corpse with a girl’s skin stretched over it. Before, I had seen only the skin. Now all I could think of were her old bones and her weak flesh and her brittle yellow skull.

“I am the originator of this procedure. I take a fold of skin and lift, like so,” Haroun said, raising and folding the edge of the table napkin. He tightened it and made it flat. “I stitch behind the ears. I tuck. I conceal. Like quilting. Ecco fatto!”

Conjuring with busy fingers, Haroun made the napkin small and smooth and gave its blankness a blind stare.

“I am so clever,” Haroun said. “I could have made her a virgin. I was this close.”

He measured with his thumb and forefinger, and seeing the expression on my face he began to laugh. I was thinking, You like cat meat?

I went to the Gräfin’s door, and before knocking I looked right and left down the corridors where I had once detected the self-conscious shuffle of a stranger’s footsteps. Seeing no one, I rapped on the door, and almost at once I heard her response, like a plea. And still with the door shut I heard, “Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

“Where have you been?” she said, dragging open the door and pulling me into the darkness.

She smelled of sleep and starch and perfume, and in her reaching out there was a flourishing of lacy sleeves. I hugged her and felt beneath her nightgown the frail old bones. But when she tried to kiss me I averted my head.

“I have been waiting,” she said in a whiny voice as we moved deeper into her suite. “Why are you punishing me?”

She sank to her knees and dragged me down to the carpet and embraced me. In that embrace was all her eagerness and in that same embrace she felt my leaden reluctance. I was inert, like clay, heavy and unwilling.

“What is it?”

She was suspicious, defensive — she knew in those seconds that I was not interested. I was capable of guile, but desire was one feeling I could not fake. The darkness, her touch, revealed everything to her.

Pushing me away she said, “Why did you come here?”

I was not sure why I had come back — perhaps to verify that she was indeed sixty, and now I was convinced of it. She was aged, feeble, uncertain, clumsy, as older people seem to someone quite young — and to the young the old give off an unlucky smell of weakness, which is like a whiff of death. The Gräfin seemed more fragile than ever. I was filled with sorrow and disgust, a sadness born of pity. She seemed at last powerless, and not just powerless but a wisp of humanity, like someone dying.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

That made her angry.

“Harry told you!” she said, poking me with her hand as she shouted. “He is a fool.”

“How do you know?”

“Your disgust. Your confidence. The way you are touching me, as though I am a crème chantilly. I can’t stand it. You are trying to look inside me. You’re like him.”

“Harry?”

“He is like a tailor. Always looking at stitches and lining. So proud of his stitches.”

I wanted to tell her that for Haroun she was a masterpiece — his masterpiece. He had needed me to prove it, and with just a little encouragement I had done so.

“You were attracted to me,” the Gräfin said. “You believed I was young. You sucked these breasts.” She snatched my hand, and without gloves her hand felt reptilian. She used my hand to touch her, and jammed my fingers against her. “You entered me here.”

Her frankness made me ashamed of myself.

“You desired this body,” she said. “That was all that mattered.”

I wondered whether she was saying “I don’t need you anymore.” This was sounding like a postmortem and I loathed it.

“Harry has a story, but so do I,” she said. “He does not know my story.”

There are deliberate postures people sometimes assume for long stories. An alteration in the Gräfin’s voice told me that she was reclining, and staring hard through the darkness I could see that her head was thrown back, revealing her white throat, the gleam on her neck. She seemed braced to speak. I prepared myself for a long story.

“I have been here before,” she went on. “I was your age, perhaps a bit younger. I came to Taormina with my friend Helga. We met a man — a very nice Englishman. I had an affair with him — one week. I liked making him happy, and of course he was very happy. He was sixty years of age.”

“Is there more?”

She straightened her neck and faced me, saying nothing, meaning: That’s all. So it wasn’t such a long story, but it meant a great deal to me.

I said, “What happened to him?”

“He wrote me passionate letters for a while. He was innamorato. ”