Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“No more of Taormina,” the Gräfin said.

She was wearing another white dress and her wide-brimmed white hat, but even so, I could see her face plainly and she looked the same as always. I had expected her to seem much older. Perhaps the man’s seeming so decrepit made her appear girlish and spry in comparison. But no: she was a beauty, she had no age, though last night in the dark she had seemed very old. She ignored me but was attentive to the man, who had kissed her slowly on each cheek and was limping away, saluting behind him — not looking — as he left.

“Is he all right?”

“He was a soldier. He was injured in the war. Passchendaele.”

“The First World War!”

“He was an officer.”

“I can see it in his posture,” I said. “The Kaiser came here to Taormina with the royal party in 1905. Do you remember that?”

“How would I remember that? I was four.”

“Where were you then?”

A look of stubbornness surfaced on her face, hardening her eyes, stiffening her lips. “I was a little animal then, like all children.”

To help her I said, “I have the idea that you grew up in a magnificent castle.”

“I don’t remember,” the Gräfin said.

Her expression gave nothing away: her face was like marble — as lovely, as pale, as hard, as cold. I wanted to know more. The enduring mystery for me was her real identity. Who was she, where had she come from?

“What is there to remember?”

Didn’t remember her childhood? I said, “Taormina was Kesselring’s headquarters during the Second World War.”

“Yes. Lots of Germans here then.”

“Tell me about Hitler.”

“Always the American question,” the Gräfin said. She lifted her hat so that I could see her face better and she stared at me with her blue eyes and said, “He was a monster, with little education, but he had some greatness.”

“You met him?”

“On a formal occasion. I was married to an officer,” she said. Then eagerly, with a kind of passion, she said, “The Führer had beautiful hands. A woman's hands. No one will ever tell you that. When I saw them I looked at my own hands. So that gives you some idea.”

“Tell me more. Where did you live?”

“So many places. But in the war, in Berlin.” She sighed and said, “I hate having conversations. Especially this one.” Her face was still smooth impassive marble. “Your planes bombed my city.

“We never talked about these things before,” I said. “You know so much.”

“Of course,” she said. “Because I have lived.”

She walked away in the direction the old man had taken.

I spent the day packing, knowing that I was going to leave — this time not to Siracusa but more directly homeward, to start my life.

The next time I saw her — I was leaving the Palazzo d’Oro, Haroun was bidding me goodbye — the Gräfin’s back was turned. She was a stranger once more, just another German in Taormina, talking intimately to the old German soldier.

“Who is he?”

Haroun said, “He is the Graf, of course.”

I had just come to that last episode of revelation and was writing, “And this, my only story,” when the bare-breasted girl wearing only a shiny gold bikini bottom moved toward me, obliquely, like a cat, and stood between me and the sun without casting a shadow, for it was noon. She said, “So you’re a writer.”

All this time, on my return to Taormina, as I had been writing this story by the pool, the young girl was watching me, and her nipples too seemed to stare, goggling pop-eyed at me. When I looked at her she smiled. At a certain age, sixty for sure, it is impossible for a man to tell whether a young woman's friendliness is flirting. She flutters her eyelashes, she twitches her bum. Is this sexual frankness or is she just being sweet to me? If you don't know, you're old; and if you accept that such warmth is not sexual, you are too old.

So you’re a writer. I knew at once that she was simple. It was not a question but a strangely phrased demand, because English was not her usual language. I was woken from my meditation and in a self-conscious reflex I denied it, as though I had been doing something wicked.

That made her laugh — there was simplicity in her laugh as well. The sun was so bright I could not see her properly through the glare. She was a black blob hovering in front of me, bare tits and swinging hair — Slavic, not Italian, blond, small head, small chin, vaguely Asiatic eyes and cheeks, fox-faced. I had seen her all week with a deeply tanned man I took to be her husband.

“You are writing. You must be a writer.” A very simple soul, trying to initiate a conversation.

The novelty of my clipboard, my big pad, my leather folder of loose sheets, so much scribbling did not interest her. It was a talking point, a way of introducing herself.

“I have been watching you.”

And I had been watching her. Now and then in this story, at a loss for an image, I had used her. I had borrowed one of her gowns. I had used her see-through crocheted dress. Her wide-brimmed hat. Her tight bikini bottom had supplied me with a certain quality of gold. I had used the curve of her hip to describe the Gräfin's; the damp ringlets, the hint of weight in the rounded underside of her breasts, the hollow of her inner thighs. I had sketched these in this narrative. And her neck: I had closely watched her holding a glass to her lips and drinking, loving the way she swallowed, the way her neck muscles tensed, the beautiful pulsing throat, like a snake swallowing a frog.

She had chosen an awkward moment to interrupt me. I was not sure whether my memory was exhausted and I was faltering — my pen poised above the pad as I thought, And then—

And then the young bare-breasted girl blocked the sun and eclipsed my story.

“I wish I could write. My life has been incredible.”

“Have a seat,” I said.

I turned the pages over so that she would not see my handwriting, as I usually hid my pad from people who tried to peer at my sketching. And I told myself that I could not go any further today — or perhaps at all. What was left? Glimpses of myself on the road. The train to Messina. The night train to Palermo. A third-class berth next to seven Lebanese men on a Greek liner. The cold ocean crossing to New York. And then forty years more: my life.

“What do you do then, for a job?”

“I am a painter.”

“You can paint me.”

Her lovely body rose and arched and seemed to present itself to me. She knew she was beautiful, that her breasts looked edible. She had tiny hands and feet, a child’s fingers, and sun-brightened down on her back, a little pelt of gold fuzz on her lower spine.

“You are American.”

“Yes.”

“I would love to go to America.”

She reached into her cloth shoulder bag and showed me a CD player and a disk: Gloria Estefan.

“Where are you from?”

“Ex-Yugoslavia,” she said. “I came here with a friend. You have seen him? He had to leave. Business.” She shook her hair to fix it. “I like Taormina. Not many Italians. Where in America you live? New York? I know lots of people there.”

Everything she said sounded like either a lie or a half-truth. She didn't seem to care whether I believed her. And she hardly listened to me, as though she assumed I might be lying to her too, for when I said, “I live part-time in New York. I have a studio in—” she interrupted.

“New York is incredible,” she said. “You know Belgrade?”

“No.”

“Incredible energy. But your planes, they bomb my city.”

What she said shocked me — I had written those same words earlier that day. She took my bewilderment for sympathy.