Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

That first morning of shopping I walked around Mazzarò, went to the station and watched trains arrive and depart (German girl backpackers got off, looking innocent), talked with some fishermen who had just returned with their catch, smoked some of my Stop cigarettes, and sketched on my pocket pad — the salt-white house fronts, the diving swallows, the slender shadow of a church spire like the hand of a clock, the blue sea of Odysseus and Circe, and the thought: Character is plot, incident is meaning, my Italy is an erotic painting — and I even saw the painting in its gilded frame, with a title something like The Golden Age or The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, as detailed and suggestive as a Whistler, a baroque terrace on a hot day, a man directing a young virile boy to a drawing room where an older woman, golden-haired like a countess in a Grimm story and dressed in white (lingerie that resembled an elegant gown), looked at her reflection and his approach in a mirror.

Pleased with myself — I had never been happier; then, such happiness was my sense of being a man — I walked up the hill to Taormina and the palazzo.

The Gräfin was at her usual place on the terrace, staring at the sea. Her big black sunglasses made her seem not just mysterious but unknowable. Without turning, but she must have heard me place the string bag beside her chair, she spoke — the bug-eyed glasses seemed to give her an insect's voice.

“You are late.”

I smirked at the back of her head and murmured, hoping that she would interpret this ambiguous noise as an apology, though it was intended as nothing of the kind. And then I saw that she had been watching me the entire time in a mirror, just as I had imagined in my large dramatic painting.

When she turned, the large collar of her loose dress slipped sideways and exposed the lovely smooth snout of a breast with its dark spongy nipple. She cupped it, caressed it rather, with her black gloved hand, but did not tuck it away. She touched it with a kind of admiration. She did not look down, though she watched my hot eyes.

“I will take an Orangina.”

I lifted out a bottle and, gripping it by its potbelly, held it out to her.

“How can I drink it unless it is opened?”

I had been struck dumb by the sight of her soft plump breast in the palm of her black glove and the nipple between her lacy fingers. Not able to see her eyes because of her dense sunglasses, I could not read her expression, but it was pretty plain that she was teasing me.

A waiter had to be found, a bottle opener, a glass, a napkin, and then the presentation. By then her breast was back beneath her dress. She muttered that the glass should be served on a saucer. She took the glass without thanking me and I felt that Haroun — not I — was being mocked, and felt a stab of pity for the man.

“Let me feel the chocolate.”

I had made a point of keeping the Toblerone bar out of the sun. She slipped it from its wrapper and poked it with her finger. Satisfied that it was not soft, she grunted. Then she took the newspaper and glanced at it.

“All bad news,” she said with relish, and began to read.

“If there is anything else I can do for you”—and here I stepped in front of her and looked into her dark glasses, seeking her eyes—“just let me know.”

Her handbag, a Sicilian raffia handbag, was in her lap. She rummaged in it, making its weave lisp and creak, and took out some large serious-looking bank notes — German — that reminded me of engraved war bonds, and without paying much attention to them, not counting them, just crumpling them and pinching them as she had the chocolate, she handed them over. Her gloved hand returned to her dress, to her loose collar, and she stroked her throat, and kept stroking to where her breast bulged, a narcissistic gesture that was also a languid form of autoeroticism.

Putting the money in my pocket, I said, ‘Anything you like?”

She said, “Yes,” and made me alert, and then, “Tell Harry to get well.”

I waited in my room, blackening a page of my sketchbook. I could only doodle; I could not read or write, knowing I might be interrupted. Yet I was not summoned again that day. I walked in the town. I swam in the pool. I emptied my pockets and counted the money they had given me, both Italian money and deutschemarks — about forty dollars, which seemed to me quite a lot for a day’s work.

At sunset I saw her again. She wore a dress I got to know well, a sort of silken crocheted gown which reached almost to her ankles and ought to have seemed rather chaste for the complete way it covered her, except that it had a loose open weave and through the interstices I could see her body, which was as white as her white dress, her skin more silken. As she approached me on the terrace, the sunset behind her, her thinly veiled nakedness made me swallow and clutch at my knees like an oaf.

She sat opposite me and said, “I will have champagne. A half bottle of the Merrier.”

I felt distinctly that I was her servant. I relayed her request to the waiter, and watched her drink. She did not share. I ordered myself a glass of wine. She ate some of the chocolate. She said that she would not have anything more to eat and, grumbling about Haroun, she rose to go.

“Are you going out?”

“No. Ich muss pinkeln. ”

I stared at her.

“I must pass water.”

Later, walking down the corridor near her room, I thought I heard her laughing. No, she was sobbing. Hold on, she was laughing. God, I had no idea. That was my first day of wooing her.

The next three days were the same — the same shopping, the same waiting, the same snubs, even the same startling glimpses she gave me of her body; yet I was sure she was not teasing me. She did not expose herself because she was a flirt but rather for the opposite reason, because she was indifferent. And her aloofness was more erotic to me, because it made me a voyeur. The shame was mine.

“I am so hot,” she said one afternoon, seated by the wall of fragrant flowers and vines, and she lifted the hem of her dress to her thighs, baring her legs, and I felt a catch in my throat and struggled to breathe and I could not turn away from the sight of loose panties of delicate black lace which matched her gloves.

The fact that she wore gloves was itself erotic to me — I kept seeing her stroking her bare breast with her gloved hand; and how could she have known that the way she licked her lips and drank thirstily also aroused me, that I loved watching her swallow, the strange snakelike movements of the muscles in her neck and her active throat.

In my running errands for the Gräfin, returning with the items, and hovering, and repeating ‘Anything else I can do?” (a question which irritated her), I kept my eyes upon her body — the smooth skin of her cheeks, her lovely lips which pursed into little pleats when she looked at the newspaper, her sharp nose and dark nostrils, her thick unnatural strawlike hair, her skinny legs, her bony feet in those Sicilian sandals. I imagined licking and nibbling her body, which was for me a sort of visual foreplay, saw myself cupping her bare breasts, each one filling my hand, and sucking on them and holding her spongy nipples lightly in my teeth. I would be hovering next to her and fantasizing about pulling out my cock, grasping her head and parting her lips and pressing it on her face and, as it thickened, helping it into her mouth. But I did nothing; I watched her, I was polite — too polite for her. Once she let the paper slip, and when I grabbed at it I brushed her arm and she recoiled and said, “Please”—meaning, “Don't touch me!”

She would sit with one finger in her mouth, looking cross, and although her sucking on this gloved finger was also erotic to me, it was just another way for her to express her impatience.