Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Like many such men who lived in lovely houses they had furnished themselves — anyway, men I knew, never women Leland Wevill regarded his unwelcome visitors as subjects and his house as the test. He judged people by how they behaved among his possessions. You went there and he watched you react and sometimes he gave you the third degree. He seldom entertained, but because he was a retired lawyer from the mainland, his former associates sent people to him, other lawyers mostly, who happened to be passing through the islands. He resented being on these travelers’ itineraries, a stopping place on their tour, and so out of hostility he put them to the test, judged them by the objects they touched and how they handled them, the details they noticed, the items they ignored — obvious treasures in some cases — what questions they asked, how they responded to his answers, how they reacted when he lied, as he often did.

“It’s just something I picked up in India,” he said of a rare Japanese inro.

“It’s one of Hiroshige’s classic images,” he said of a Hokusai print.

Of his favorite piece, an original Watteau, bought at an auction in New York for a fabulous sum — but he would have paid anything for the large detailed drawing of two disheveled nymphs, their tumbled hair and rumpled low-cut blouses — he said, “I’m told it’s a shoddy reproduction. It’s kind of fun.”

And, “I don’t know much about it. Just a chair, I guess. Shaker, maybe?” of the Chokwe chief’s throne.

Then he waited for the guest to speak. Tribal art so often looked indeterminate, ageless, generic even — a Masai rongo club like a Fijian head-basher, a Papuan highlander’s spear like a Kikuyu’s, Ethiopian icons could pass for crude Byzantine altarpieces.

To the trained eye, to anyone who visited museums, Wevill’s estate was a treasure house.

“Maybe some kind of kitchen implement,” he said of a whalebone slasher, called a patu, used by nineteenth-century Maoris in close-combat battle. “Maybe a false nose,” he said of a highlander’s phallocrypt.

Most people failed his house test — wanted the thing they were most ignorant about, took him at his word when he lied, admired the ordinary picture in the priceless frame or the fake stones in the jade dagger handle, accepted his saying that the beautiful thick-petaled blossom in the painting was by Mary Cassatt when it was an early Mondrian.

Just the way visitors handled objects told him everything he needed to know. Some people would pick up the dagger handle and not want to let go. There was a stare people had that meant they were taking possession of the painting and would have no hesitation in stealing it.

The visitors’ envy exhausted him because it gave him no rest, and he was suspicious — he saw them as potential thieves. They wanted what he had. One visit to his house revealed everything about them.

But here was the paradox. Rita and Nina, the cleaning women, asked no questions. They were as careful with the Tibetan silver-rimmed skullcup as they were with the plastic soap dish in the bathroom — and were careful without being covetous. He was impressed by the lightness of their touch without their having the least idea of what they were handling. Because of this, he knew almost nothing about these two women. He could not test them.

They talked intimately with each other, conversations he could not enter, on subjects that bewildered him, information they got from television programs he’d never heard of. He just listened.

“The Psychic Hot Line is a rip-off. Plus, they keep calling you up after, saying they got something else to tell you.”

“Psychics give you good news, like, ‘A big change is coming.’ But anyone can say that.”

“I actually visited one. I was pregnant with you and I says to the psychic, 'When am I going to have a baby?’ and she says, ‘Not for a few years.’ I was like sticking out and she didn’t even notice.”

“I want numbers from psychics. Like, if they can see the future, why aren’t they rich?”

“Maybe they can only see the past, but what’s so great about that?”

“I’d like to go to Vegas with a psychic. Just to see.”

“Or one of those cruises where you just play slots and eat.”

They often mentioned gambling, which seemed odd to Wevill, because they were two of the unlikeliest gamblers — just pretty island women, all smiles, easygoing, in old clothes, with none of the obsessive behavior and tasteless outfits he associated with gamblers, no superstitious rituals, no strange jackets.

They threw him, everything about them foxed him.

Most people walk a certain way in their own house, with a confident nakedness — efficient, unselfconscious, with an economy of gesture, not noticing anything, fixed on the one thing they happen to be doing, undistractible. 'I’m in here,' while stretching out a hand in the darkness to flick a switch, taking the shortest route among the sharp corners of furniture without looking, all the flourishes of ownership. Wevill was like that six days a week.

On Saturdays you would not have believed Wevill to be in his own home, this shrine to his life and taste, his enlarged being, for his distraction and his impatience were obvious. That was the day the cleaning women were at work in his rooms, and in his head Wevill was bereft, he never felt weaker or more superfluous.

Wevill, who told me “I bite people on the neck for a living,” watched helplessly as the cleaners possessed the house, possessed him, the pretty witch, the skinny ballerina, mother and daughter.

The day the cleaning women came was usually the day you went out or made yourself scarce—“The check is on the kitchen counter”—but that was the one day Wevill made a point of staying home, looking like a brain-sick potentate, big and ineffectual, bumping into his own chairs, too numb with desire to do anything but gape at their ungainly grace.

The women cleaned as though mimicking dancers, the same approximations of bending and stretching, sometimes on tiptoe, reaching straight-armed, darting forward and back, bowing to the lowest shelves, often kneeling, crouched like spaniels, showing Wevill their dusty footpads and their pretty buttocks. They wore no makeup, their hair was loose, they favored baggy sweatsuits. They might have just crept from bed, that was their look as they worked, disheveled nymphs.

Wevill — pretending to be busy, shifting vases, squaring-up papers — watched them, the twenty-year-old, her mother not yet forty; young, husbandless, no partners — he had obliquely asked, they had answered directly. “Let’s say you had a boyfriend.” “No thanks!” Knowing he could have been father to one and grandfather to the other, he desired both of them.

Mopping, scrubbing on all fours, lying on their backs to beat a feather duster at cobwebs under the sofa, straining on tiptoe to brush at geckos, they hiked up their shirts and showed smooth honey-colored down on their lower backs. All the demanding postures of housework, which represented the most passionate postures of lovemaking. And still they talked.

“Dwarfs marry each other sometimes, but sometimes they get normal big-sized kids and sometimes they get more dwarfs.”

“Britney and Christina used to be Mouseketeers, and so did Justin. That's why Britney and Justin are dating.”

“What makes a guy lolo is living with his mother.”

This is just a miscellaneous anecdote in the life of Leland Wevill, someone universally acknowledged to be a powerful man — who died a few years ago and has been written about endlessly for his contributions to charities, his shrewd investments, his vast holdings, his career as a lawyer, his role on the boards of several large corporations, his successful innovations, his superb art collection. In almost everything he did he acted from a position of strength — bought weak companies and built them up and sold them, found an inexpensive but ingenious product and represented it for a share of the proceeds, acquired paintings and sculptures years before the artists’ reputations grew and the prices shot up. Even in the case of the Watteau he had been bottom-feeding.