The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (11 page)

“It's not far—you said so yourself.”

“I thought we were going together.”

She said in a warning tone, “You're keeping your friend waiting, Gilford.”

She had indeed written me off. She knew everything, it all fitted, my clothes, my presumption, my vagueness, “Long story,” the sudden appearance and unequivocal demand of the Gräfin.

“These Germans really overdress. Especially the older ones,” she said, and turned and passed the waiter, leaving a thousand-lire note on his saucer for the coffee and the tip: pride.

I felt like a small boy exposed in a needless insulting lie, who would never be trusted again.

“See ya.”

Her false bonhomie gave her a sort of pathos, but she seemed brave as she crossed the Piazzale Nove Aprile with her bag in one hand and her map in the other. She walked purposefully but she was weary and burdened and so she was a little lopsided; but she was free. She was the person I had once been, before I had met the Gräfin. I could not bear to watch her go.

The Gräfin was on the terrace of the palazzo when I got back. The waiter stood beside her holding a bottle of wine. I sat down. He poured me a glass.

“Drink, drink,” the Gräfin said.

I did so, and my anger flattened the taste of the wine, soured it in my mouth. I watched the shadows rise up the walls of the terrace, saw the last of the daylight slip from the roof tiles. I said nothing, only drank. When the waiter approached—and now I was self-conscious: what did he make of me?—and lit our candle, the Gräfin stroked the inside of her handbag and found her key, which she handed to me.

In her suite, I locked the door and shot the bolt. I drew out my leather belt with a sliding sound as it rasped through the trouser loops, lifting it as though unsheathing a sword.

“No,” the Gräfin said with what seemed like real fear.

I prepared to tie her wrists with the belt and she relaxed a little—she had thought I was going to beat her.

In a calm voice she said, “There are silk scarves in the drawer of my dresser. Use them—they won't leave marks on my skin.”

She extended her arms so that her wrists were near each bedpost and she lay while I bound her with scarves. She slipped one leg over the other, looking crucified.

“Please, whatever you do, be gentle. Don't rape me—don't humiliate me.”

Not desire, nor even lust, but anger kept me there, forcing her legs apart, fumbling with her clothes. In my determination to have my way I did not even reflect on her desire but was singleminded, thrusting myself into her. Only when I was done did I realize that her sighs were sighs of pleasure. She had exhausted me again.

“We rest now.” Her voice came out of the darkness, waking me. “Zen we eat.”

Meeting Myra had retuned my ear: I heard the Gräfin's German accent as never before.

Over dinner, the Gräfin said, “Who was zat silly girl?”

“American.”

“What shoes she had. Her blouse so dirty. And did you see her fingernails? She could at least brush her hair. Of course, American.”

I could not escape without encouragement. My inspiration was Myra Messersmith disgustedly turning away from me to pick herself up and swinging her bag and, without looking back, walking away across the piazza, into the Via Roma. The Gräfin's contempt for Myra's clothes made me remember everything she wore, from the white blouse and headscarf to her blue jeans and hiking shoes. She was my example. And she might still be in Siracusa.

We had a great deal in common, Myra and I, but I knew that she was the stronger, and that it would help me to spend a few days with her. Just the half hour I had spent with her at the Mocambo had lifted my spirits and shown me who I really was, an opportunistic American who was out of his depth here, being used by Haroun and the Gräfin. In a flash, Myra saw me with some accuracy as an idle parasite who needed the patronage of a rich woman, I wanted to disprove that. I was twenty-one, still a student, who until meeting these people had been traveling light, passing through Italy making sketches. Well, not many sketches lately. I had done hardly any, as though I feared incriminating myself, or feared having to face the person I had become, a flunky in the Gräfin's entourage.

And what images would I have recorded in my sketchbook? A howling woman in twisted underclothes. A doglike woman on all fours, buttocks upraised. A woman—I now saw—addicted to rituals: a certain time of day, a particular sequence of sexual gropings, always in the same room on the same carpet on the same portion of the floor. All of this was shocking, for sex was the last thing I wanted to depict. Sex was a secret; sexual portraiture was the stuff of lawsuits. This was 1962: the topic was forbidden. You could buy “Snake,” but
Lady Chatterley's Lover
was still a scandal. The Gräfin's suite was another country, without a language, without literature, almost without human speech, with no words for its rituals; where it was always night.

I woke as always in the daylight of my own room—the Gräfin insisted on sleeping alone—and felt preoccupied, with an excited edge to my determination, my hands shaking slightly as I drank my coffee like a farewell toast. To steel my resolve I did not talk to anyone; I needed to concentrate. I dressed, took all the cash I had, and hurried out of the Palazzo d'Oro and through the town, my head down, moving like a phantom.

A beautiful September day, fragrant with the sweet decay of dying leaves and wilting flowers; most of the summer people had gone. I had been in Taormina long enough to notice a distinct change in the weather—the intense heat and humidity were over, days were sunny and nights were cool, and the smell of ripeness, of yellow leaves and fruit pulp, and a dustiness of threshing in the air from the wheat harvest.

Halfway down the hill I hailed a taxi, and at the station I found that a train was due soon. I calculated that I could be in Siracusa by midafternoon, still lunchtime in Sicily, and I might find Myra. I also knew that the very impulse to look for her would liberate me.

A voice croaking from the strain of urgency called my name and I saw Haroun crossing the road toward the station platform where I stood. He was puffing a cigarette, looking terribly pale and rumpled, as though he had been casually assaulted—roughed up, warned rather than mugged. But he smiled, it had been pleasure, he was dissolute, careless, happy, like a child playing in mud.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for the train.”

“No, no—the Gräfin must not be left.”

He had read my intention exactly: he saw my wish to flee on my face and in my posture, like an ape poised to leap from a branch, an alertness in my neck.

“I can do anything I like,” I said, and I remembered how at one time he had the choice of letting me stay or sending me away. Now the choice was mine. “I am going to Siracusa.”

“Too far, too far,” he said.

His sudden distress made me laugh—just a snort, but unambiguous, defiant. I said, “I need a vacation,” though what I wanted was to leave for good. I had lost all my willpower in Taormina. I had become the lap dog of the Gräfin, who now seemed to me a woman of enormous strength and appetite. I needed to get away from her. I did not want to be possessed.

Haroun said, “There is a lovely beach across the road. Would you like to see it?
Bello
Golfo di Naxos.”

“The train is coming pretty soon.”

“Better we sit and talk on the beach,” he said. He touched my arm and made a hook of his finger and hung on. “There is something I must tell you.”

“Tell me now.”

“A secret,” he said.

“I know about you, Harry. It's pretty obvious.”

“It is the Gräfin.”

A stirring on the platform, a vibration on the tracks, a grinding down the line, all the sounds of an approaching but unseen train kept me from answering. I shrugged instead.

“It will astonish you,” he said.

That tempted me. I took nothing for granted—one of the lessons of Taormina and the enchanted castle of the Palazzo d'Oro was that the unexpected happened.

Yet when the train drew in I got on, because that was my plan and I did not want to be dissuaded from it. Only when the doors closed did I see that Haroun had followed me into the train, and he sat beside me, looking reckless, still imploring me to listen.

“You take the train but the Gräfin can offer you her car!”

“That's why I am taking the train.”

He threw up his hands, a theatrical gesture.

“So what's the secret?”

The train had started to race, to clatter, to offer up glimpses of the gulf and the seaside villas. The very sound of the speeding wheels excited me: I was going away—as I had come, with nothing but a little bag.

“She is very happy,” Haroun said, sitting sideways, his hand clutching his jaw, speaking confidentially. “As you know, I am her doctor. So I also am very happy.”

“Because she's healthy?”

The thought of Italian graduates with first degrees in something like language studies calling themselves
dottore
made me smile again.

“I have known the Gräfin a long time,” Haroun said. “I have never seen her so happy.”

“Really?” She didn't seem so happy to me.

“Happiness is different according to your age. And is relative. She was desolate before. She was suicidal.” He looked out the window at the sight of a Vespa being steered by a young man, with an old woman in black sitting sidesaddle on the rear seat. “How does she seem to you?”

“Fine.”

At twenty-one I did not look closely at anyone's mood. A person might seem sad, but it did not occur to me that she might be “desolate.”

“I mean physically.”

“She's pretty strong,” I said. Her mantra was
More!

“As you are.”

“She's stronger than me in some ways.”

“Good skin?”

“Like silk.”

“Muscle tonus?”

I said, “Harry, what is this all about?”

“About the Gräfin. My patient. Your lover.”

Instead of answering, I looked around to see whether anyone in the carriage had reacted to those last two words.

“You are beautiful together,” he said.

“What are you trying to tell me?”

He sucked smoke from his cigarette and made a face. “It is hard. I don't want to shock you.”

That I liked very much. Certain statements, when I heard them spoken like that—in a speeding train, under the blue sky—made me think: This is real life, this is my life, this is drama, this will be the source of my work, and moreover, now I have the images for it in the words.
I don't want to shock you
pleased me and made me patient.

I wanted to be shocked, I deserved it, I saw it as my right, not a gift but something I had earned.

Haroun flipped the cigarette butt out the window and lit another. He said, “When the Gräfin first came to me she was in great distress. She felt her life was troubled, she hated herself, she actually spoke of suicide.”

“She certainly isn't that way now.”

“I am speaking of many years ago.”

“How many?”

He raised his eyebrows in an oddly comic way. The noise of the train, this public place, made him exaggerate his expressions. “Quite a few years now.”

Quite a few seemed too many, and so I said, “How old is she?”

Haroun smiled and set his face at me: Was this his secret? He said, “Old enough to worry about her looks.”

I laughed, since “worry” was not a word I associated with the Gräfin at all. She was supremely confident and imperious as she demanded
More!

“I have been looking after her all this time. Many years.”

“You're a psychiatrist?”

“My field of medicine is reconstructive surgery.”

“Did the Gräfin have some sort of accident?”

“Growing old is worse than any accident,” he said. “Old age can make you a monster.”

“So you're a plastic surgeon?”

“I hate the American expression.”

“It is true, though.”

“It is imprecise, like 'cosmetic surgery.'”

“You give people face-lifts. You fix their big ears.”

He waved his hands at these words as they came out of my mouth. He said, “Much more than that. You are talking about surfaces. I go deeper.”

“How deep?”

He loved this question. He said with a suitable facial expression—solemn, priestlike, unctuous, straining to be heard over the banging wheels—“To the very heart and soul.”

“What did you do to the Gräfin?”

As though expecting the question, he raised his head, tipping his chin up defiantly, not answering for a while, but when he spoke it was like boasting.

“It would be easier to tell you what I did not do.”

“Like what?”

“There is little that one can do with the hands except remove liver spots and age blotches. And the skin becomes slack.”

“The Gräfin wears gloves,” I said.

Haroun nodded a bit too vigorously, liking the attention I was giving him. I was happy to grant it: I was heading for Siracusa and the fugitive Myra. Yet he had said enough to make me curious about the Gräfin.

“Tell me her age.”

“Golden age.” He hadn't hesitated.

“What does that mean?”

“You too. Golden age.”

At his most playful, Haroun was at his most irritating.

“How old is she?” I said in a sharp voice.

The clatter of the steel wheels on the steel rails was in great contrast to the peaceful sea and sky. Now Haroun looked coy and unhelpful.

“You will never guess.”

“It doesn't matter. I am leaving,” I said. “So, what—thirty-five, thirty-eight?”

“I love you for saying that.”

“Forty-something?”

“I want to kiss you.”

“Fifty?”