Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“All the bridges, they break them. Because of Milosevic.”

“What do you think of him?”

“A strong man and maybe a monster,” she said, and smiled. “I like strong men.”

Her cell phone sounded, played two bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which she killed by flipping open the receiver. She peered at the caller's number, then turned to me again.

“I see you all the time alone.” She had forgotten Milosevic and the bombing. “I think to myself, He is writing a long love letter to his wife.”

“No wife.”

“Girlfriend, maybe.”

“No girlfriend,” I said. “Only you.”

She liked that, an eagerness charged her body. “Yes. I your girlfriend. Nice.” She touched my leg, grazed it with her small fingers. “You paint picture of me in New York City.”

“Or here.”

The waiter in the Moroccan robes who always avoided me, seeing me at work, now approached and asked if we would like to drink anything.

“I drink grappa,” she said with a kind of bravado to the boy.

“That's rocket fuel,” I said when her grappa was brought with my glass of wine.

“What do you mean?”

I explained the lame joke, and we toasted each other, and only then did I remember to ask her name.

“Silvina,” she said, and drank the grappa in two swallows.

Because I was so distracted by her neck I did not look into her eyes for a moment, but when I did I saw they were watery and drowned-looking, she was already tipsy, she did not say anything, just smiled, looked at my shoes, my watch, my briefcase.

“You travel all over, I think,” she said, inventing my life in her mind, imagining — what? “Like a bird. Free.”

“An old bird,” I said, to test her reaction.

“Not old,” Silvina said, still looking me over, as though wishing to drink me and make herself drunker. “You like your life.”

“Yes.”

“I want your life.”

I was at a loss for words, and had to remind myself that this was the young girl I had seen all week and not spoken to. Had she really just said those words to me?

“Another grappa,” she said to the attentive waiter.

“How about dinner?” I said. “We could go to the Timeo.”

Silvina did not reply until the waiter returned with her glass of grappa. She sipped at it, then tossed it down her throat, gagging slightly from its stinging fire.

“Timeo is the most expensive in Taormina. For the two of us, maybe three hundred American dollars.”

“Maybe.”

Her eyes were weakly gleaming, glazed with grappa, as she said, “So we go there and eat, and we come back here, and you will say, 'Please fuck me.'”

I tried not to seem astonished.

She was not smiling when she added, “So maybe just give me the three hundred and you can fuck me now.”

I felt a sort of discouraged relief, as when an appalling secret is revealed, a person is caught in a lie. And my mind went back to my story, to the Gräfin, her dignity, her recklessness, and at last her coldness.

“Maybe we can discuss it,” I said. I put my papers away, packed my notes, my pad, my pen, hefted my briefcase, and started away. Silvina followed me to my room.

“You want a massage?” she said, tweaking the bows on her bikini bottom and letting the tiny garment drop to the floor, the gold bikini bottom that had mimicked and masked the black patch of pubic hair. She picked it up like a monkey seizing a big leaf, with a movement of her foot and a scissoring of two toes.

I had no desire, and yet I wanted her to stay. I felt nothing, I felt sixty. But I knew, as the Gräfin knew, that she would do anything I suggested, anything at all. This knowledge, the anything, made me reticent.

“Let me make a picture of you.”

The last of the daylight slipped across her body as she sidled next to the window, the golden and pink sunset, as though a fire was burning on the sea, blazing on her skin.

I sketched her slowly. I loved her small head and straight legs, her boyish buttocks. The sunset gilded her expression, made it ambiguous, something like a scowl. She touched herself between her legs. “You are arousing me.”

“You are my model. You must not move.”

“Not done yet?” she said a moment later. “This takes longer than sex!”

“That’s the fun of it,” I said, sketching her sneering lips.

“It will cost you more.”

“Money, money,” I said, and I thought: Hungry little whorelet.

“I need the money,” she said. “Not now, but when I am old I will need it.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Buy what I want.”

“Maybe come back here to Taormina when you’re sixty and find a man,” I said, glad that she had relaxed, because the sketch was not done.

“First marry a rich man. Live my life. Then, afterwards, come here and find a young man. A Stallone. Give him money,” she said. She reflected on this. “Nothing is wrong with buying sex. It is a tragedy if you want it and have no money to buy it.”

I said, “You don’t need my life. You’ll be all right. You are willing to take risks.”

I talked, I sketched. She was too impatient to be useful, but that did not matter anymore. I knew who she was: my picture was precise.

She still believed that she was pleasing me. I spared her the truth. That I knew she was repelled by me and I by her. That she would never remember this. That I knew she was eager to get away. Nor did I want her to stay. I too needed to leave Taormina and would never go back.

At last my sketch was done. Silvina took the money and peered at the picture, frowning.

“It is all wrong,” she said. “Why you give me a hat? Why you make my hands with gloves? Why you dress me with this horrible old dress? You are laughing at me. And you make me look like an animal.”

“Like a Gräfin,” I said. “A contessa.”

“A monkey.”

She tucked the money into the front of her bikini, where it made another bulge. When she left my room, a whore in a hurry, I knew everything, and especially that the Gräfin had spared me her past. Long ago, I thought that in knowing the secret of the Gräfin’s age I would be stronger than she. But the secret was elsewhere. It was about being a stranger and having no past, the sense of shame that impels people to succeed. She had come from nowhere, which was why she had seen me so clearly, as I had seen Silvina. At sixty, I now knew, you have no secrets, nor does anyone else.

I WAS GOING NOWHERE alone up the wet Medford street through slashes of drizzle pretending my footsteps in puddles proved I was braving a storm. The rain was personal, falling especially on my head, testing my willpower. Then I saw the girl hurrying ahead of me. Her jacket was drenched in patches, her soaked skirt flapping against her legs, and a swag of slip, satiny, pink-edged, with a ribbon of lace drooping beneath the hem. She was there for a reason, I felt: because I was there, braving the rain. She turned at the sound of my puddle-slapping steps, her face pale and small. She seemed to study me with her narrowing lips. So I dogged her in the rain, following that hanging scrap of slip.

She went into St. Ray’s, I entered just after her, and the heavy iron-studded church door banged shut behind us. We were both in a shadow that smelled of hot wax and candle smoke and damp wool and a residue of incense, all the stinks of veneration. But there was candle shine on the girl’s pretty face.

The holy water was tepid from all the dipped fingers, and dripping from my fingertips to my palm I smelled its stagnation as I crossed myself. The church was clammier and cooler than outside, dank with sweaty varnish and dying flowers. Though the church was large, entering it on this dark day was like going downstairs into a damp cellar.