The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  She said, “I give you the key. You run and open the door to my suite—you are faster than me. Also, I think I can't open the door.”

  She was a bit breathless and almost hysterical in the same girlish way.

  “This is so funny. The chauffeur is sitting in the back!”

  At the hotel, she pressed the key into my hand. I hurried through the palazzo and into her suite, racing ahead of her, opened the door and switched on the lights. The suite was beautiful, smelling of floor wax and fresh flowers.

  I was in the hall, turning on the light in the toilet stall when she pushed past me, flung the door open and ducked into the toilet, lifted her skirt and lowered herself. Not quite sitting, and canted slightly forward, she pissed loudly into the shallow ceramic bowl, sighing, straining, her face shining with pleasure, while I stood gaping, too fascinated to move. I thought that if I ducked aside and hid my face, she would be embarrassed. As it was, she seemed triumphant, like a suddenly spattering fountain.

  I had heard of people so used to having servants that they walked around naked in front of them, got the servants to dress them, treated them as though they were blind, obedient, without emotion. But this was different. The Gräfin was engaged in an intimate, deeply satisfying act, and, still crouched there, she groaned with satisfaction. Then she straightened and slowly, fastidiously wiped herself with tissue, pulled the chain, rearranged her dress, and stepped into the hall where I stood, glowing from the sight of her.

  “That was great,” she said in a hearty way, and kissed me. “Now, you go,” and she flicked the dampness from her fingers at me, but playfully.

  I was not disgusted. I thought, Germans! The breakdown, this simple inconvenience, was our adventure. I told her that I liked her courage. I used this trivial event to apotheosize her. And she saw the day as a triumph with a terrific ending, the payoff that farce in her suite.

  She told Haroun: “We were left by the side of the road. The driver was an idiot. Ich musste pinkeln. We could have died!”

  As a result of this successful day, we spent more time together, and on better terms than before. She seemed much happier and more trusting. I began to dislike her, first in an irritated way and then with a deep loathing.

  Haroun said to me confidentially, “Yet you have not succeeded.”

  I wondered whether I ever would. I wondered now whether I wanted to. I still saw her in the bright light of the narrow stall of her toilet, smiling, pissing, utterly human and helpless and happy, less like a countess on her throne than a small girl on her potty, crying, Look at me! Look what I'm doing!

  Then, a few days after Yet you have not succeeded, we were sitting on the terrace.

  Haroun said, “Now I go.”

  The Gräfin said nothing. Last week she would have said, “What about me?” or “Why so early?”

  I said, “That smell, is it jasmine?”

  “Gelsomino,” she said, teaching me the word.

  I used the perfume to lead her into the garden, where the fragrance was stronger. She picked a blossom, sniffed it, inhaled the aroma. I sidled up to her and touched her. She was so slender, and there was so little of her—small bones and tender muscles that were wisps of warm flesh—she seemed brittle and insubstantial. I always thought of the Gräfin as breakable. I tried to hold her.

  “Nein,” she said, startled into her own language.

  I was thinking, If this doesn't work I am done for. I did not want to leave Taormina, yet leaving was the only alternative, the consequence of my failure. This was my last hope, and I truly hated her for making me do this.

  I said, “The first time I saw you I wanted to kiss you.”

  “You're drunk,” she said.

  “No. Listen. You have the face of a Madonna. Kissing it is wrong. I want to worship it.”

  “How stupid,” she said, but even saying that, she was thinking—I knew her well—not about my words but about her face.

  “Please let me,” I said, grappling with her a little, and also glancing around the garden to make sure that we were alone, that we were not being observed.

  She did not say anything yet she was definitely resisting; she had a body like a sapling, skinny but strong. I got my mouth close to her ear. I breathed a little and my breath was hot as it returned to me from the closeness of her head. I was at the edge, I knew that; I had to fling myself off.

  I said, “I love you,” and as I said it the wind left me, and I went weak, as though I had said something wicked, or worse, uttered a curse—as though I had stabbed her in the heart and then stabbed myself. And that was how she reacted, too, for she began to cry, and she held me, and sobbed, and was a little girl again.

  “Help me,” she said. Her small voice in the twilight.

  5

  Then silence, and darkness fell; the darkness suited the silence.

  In the long night that followed her surrendering words everything changed, and there were no more words, there was no language at all, hardly anything audible except a murmur in the silence—a sigh lengthening in desire. We communicated by touch, flesh was everything, and as though in mimicry of language, we used our mouths, our lips, our teeth, kissing, licking. My mouth was all over her body, hers on mine. After days of starvation we were devouring each other in the dark.

  We had stepped into her room and shut the door. I expected her to turn on the light but she didn't. At first I could not see her at all and seemed to be nowhere near her. I smelled the lily aroma of her perfume. I heard her moving on the far side of the room, the chafing of her lovely stockings—black, I knew—and from the kissing sound, a silk thigh slipping against another silk thigh, I knew she had taken her dress off. I headed toward the silken sound and realized she was in another room, the door open. We were in her large suite whose floor plan I did not yet understand. But I got to know it well; we were to spend hours of the night on that floor. I got to know all the carpets and all the sharp edges of furniture, the tables, the obstacles, the sliding oblongs of moonlight.

  More distinct sounds: the familiar one of a cork being popped out of a champagne bottle, of glass flutes being chinked on a marble-topped table, and for a moment I thought, She will need a light. But when I heard the explosive release of the cork I knew she was able to manage in the dark. And now I could make out her profile in the darkness, for there was no real darkness in Taormina. The word “chiaroscuro” said it all—she was a clear shadow, a fragrant presence. I smelled her, I heard her, then I saw her, luminous and tinged blue in the Sicilian moonlight, as though glowing, radioactive.

  But even then, especially then, in her suite, hearing the champagne cork, dazed by the crushed lilies of her perfume which was powerful in the dark, and reflecting on her admitting me at last to her room—her mirrored boudoir I had glimpsed from the distant front door, her bed with its frilly coverlet, her fur slippers, her silks like perfect skin, her kissing me with her famished mouth—even then I felt it might all be a trick. She might be teasing me, tantalizing me as she had before.

  I was reminded of the many times she had exposed herself to me, shown me her breasts, opened her legs casually, held her gloved hands seductively between her legs. The worst for me, the cruelest of her teasing—if it was teasing and not indifference that I took for sensuality—was when she sat next to me and leaned over, placing her thin hand straight down on my stiffening penis, first exploring it and then using it like a handle to steady herself, while she said in a lecturing tone, “I am sorry, I hardly know you. I cannot imagine what you want from me. You seem to be a very presumptuous young man. Where did you get these ideas? It is so hard for me to say 'you'. I should be addressing you as Sie, not du—'you' is just useless...”

  She had used the flat of her hand to press down harder, and then I felt her warm palm and active fingers. Lecturing me with her voice but keeping her fascinated hand against my hard-on—that was the worst time. A woman who would do that would do anything. I did not assume because we were licking each other and kissing
in the suite that we would become lovers. I was bracing myself for another reversal, more frustration.

  That was why, when I said I loved her, I did so with hatred. Even pressed against her parted thighs I felt great hostility. As I spoke into her ear I was possessed by an impulse to bite it, and saying “I love you,” I felt a strong desire to hit her. I spoke the endearments through gritted teeth, trembling, feeling violent, wishing to push her to the floor and shove her legs apart.

  I think she knew this. She was trembling, fearful, cowering. She knew how much I resented the way she had treated me, how I disliked her most for making me say this, like the young peasant boy in my folktale woodcut who was forced to endure humiliation to obtain a favor from the Countess. And so the desperate Wanderer kneels and utters the forbidden formula and at that moment he is consumed by a fury of loathing, hating himself, hating the noblewoman who has put him in this position.

  The instant I gave in and told the Gräfin finally that I loved her, I wanted to force her to the floor and fondle her until she begged me to stop. I actually still felt a strong sexual desire, but it was sullen and violent and not so much sex as a visceral wish to assault her. I felt the stirrings of what it meant to be a rapist—despising her as I spread her legs, and in my hatred and humiliation, on top at last. Not sex at all but penetrating her roughly, using my prick like a weapon in a vicious attack. Now I could not kiss her without enjoying a resentful fantasy of biting her, tearing at her lips with my teeth.

  I tried to calm myself. I was almost fainting with frustration. She was pressed against me and, as I was preparing myself for rejection, I felt myself losing control.

  She moved away from me, and though there was no direct light I could see by the glow from the town and the luminosity of the moon and stars that she was pouring champagne into glasses that made the rising wine into music, a note increasing in pitch as the liquid filled the narrow flutes.

  In that somber starry light her lips were black, her skin was greenish, her golden hair was blue. She was a specter handing me a wine glass and still she wore her lace gloves. I drank and touched her hand and was surprised by the warmth of the lace, how her flesh had heated her gloves, and when I reached to touch her breasts I was surprised by the way in which her body had heated her silk chemise, her gown, her sleeves.

  After all this she was still clothed. That had added to my sense of ambiguity—so strange, all those clothes in the semidarkness of her suite. I wondered if she was serious and sexual, and when I put my hands on her breasts and held their softness, the stems of her nipples hardening against my thumbs, I felt that she was on the point of rejecting me.

  So I could not disguise my hostility. I gripped her tighter, and roughly, like snatching the arm of an unruly child, like a furious parent intending the gesture to hurt as well as restrain. I did this almost unconsciously, unaware of how angry I was until my fingers sank into the flesh of her upper arm where I fingered helpless softness, no muscle at all, finding the weak woman beneath the skin. Something in that softness roused me—I had never touched more appealing skin or such yielding flesh. It seemed to me so tender that I could eat it, chew on her edible arm—I felt like biting her, or at the very least holding on as though grasping a piece of delicious meat. I could not stop myself. I was on the verge of gathering her whole slim body tightly in my hand and raising her to my mouth—all my frustration and arousal concentrated in this one gesture, this revealing touch. As I had snatched her arm, I had become a rapist, an animal, a cannibal.

  Did she smell this bloodthirstiness on me? She took a step forward and kissed me. I was surprised but not calmed—surprised because she was fiercer than me. She chewed softly on my lips, and still I held on, remembering again how she had rejected me before, saying no and holding my erection. I felt sure this might end that way too, that I would be sent off, sobbing with lust.

  I pushed her away, my hand against her face, my palm jammed against her big wet mouth—and she kissed my hand, licked it like a frantic puppy, and as she struggled to clutch at me I tried to keep her back, to give myself space to slap her.

  To show her that I was in control, I held her off with one hand and took an insolent sip of champagne with the other.

  The struggle was mute: she said nothing, only sighed. I was afraid of startling the hotel staff: I said nothing. But when I relaxed my grip a little she went a bit limp and was less amorous, and so I grasped her more tightly and began to understand that my rough handling of her aroused her.

  It was not in my nature to be rough. My experience until then had been with willing and eager girls. But this was a complex woman and she had made me angry. Of course I did not hit her—I couldn’t—but I was furiously aroused with a kind of passion that was as urgent and blind as anger. The moonlit room and the shadows and her clothes maddened me more.

  I fumbled and found her breasts again, loving the weight of them, loving their softness; they were full and heavy and now her nipples were hard. I lowered my head and licked and sucked them and could not restrain myself from nibbling them, and when I did she took her breasts with her gloved hands and lifted them into my face, sighing with pleasure as she touched herself.

  My mind was still set against her—untrusting. At any moment I felt she would reject me. Yes, even as she was pushing her warm breasts against my mouth I suspected she was just perverse enough to stop herself cold and send me away, saying, “That’s enough for you! What more do you want!”

  And though she didn’t, though she was compliant, more than compliant—active and eager—I was using more strength than was necessary, sensing somehow that I needed to overpower her. I thrust her backward, could not reach the bed, got her to the floor, and hiked up her clothes—silks, straps, garters, stockings, ribbons, all the underpinnings of the old-fashioned feminine Europe, a wilderness of lush lingerie and lace. I was surprised and obstructed by her large elaborate panties, and when I found I could not remove them, could not disentangle them from the silken underpinnings, I parted the lacy crotch of these panties, felt with my fingers the wet mouth and lips of her cunt, and drove my purple cock forward. It was then I knew she could not stop me, though I still gripped her arms and pumped, and each time I thrust she moaned like someone being stabbed to death.

  I must not let her stop me, I felt, but the feeling was more intense than the words: I had animal hunger and this was the nearest thing to rape that I had ever known, because I still felt that although she would never succeed, she might try to stop me. She moaned but it was not protest; she writhed but it was not resistance. She wanted more.

  The darkness was dazzling. I was convinced of her hunger now, for she reached down and gripped me with her gloved hand and squeezed her lacy fingers on my rigid cock. I felt the ribs and stitching on my hot skin, her whole glove encircling the stalk of my erection and tugging it, planting it deeper into her body. When I came, with a scream that tore through my guts, falling across her body, tangled in her clothes, she let out a little disappointed ‘Ach” that died away, scraping into silence.

  The first word spoken in the darkness was my whisper: “Sorry.”

  She put her face against the side of my head. Her breath was so hot it scorched my ear. She said, “I want more,” and in the darkness and in her hunger she had never sounded more Germanic. I made a picture in my mind: a forest demon demanding blood.

  But I had nothing more to give her. She clung to me for a while, saying nothing, and when, sighing, she let go, I knew she was telling me to leave.

  The next day, golden in the golden sunlight, under the brim of her big Panama hat, she was in charge again, sulky and spiteful, perhaps slightly worse than usual, as though tormenting me in revenge for having surrendered to me.

  “That is not what I asked for,” she said when I brought her the Campari and soda she had requested.

  Haroun was there and heard this obstinacy. He smiled—he seemed to understand what lay behind her imperiousness.

  “I said Punt e Mes. I
never drink Campari at this hour.”

  A lie.

  “And do stop staring at me. You are making me feel there is something wrong. Get the drink and go.”

  That hot day, the day in Taormina after we had made love in her room at the Palazzo d’Oro, was the worst, the most miserable, I had so far spent in her company. She was a shrew to me—demanding, insulting, unreasonable, reminiscing about ex-husbands and former lovers, mentioning large sums of money and her extensive travels, treating me as though I was another species—reminding me that I was an American, a mere boy, with no money except what she gave me, who could be sent away at any moment. But she was not a glamorous German countess speaking in this way; she seemed to me like a dreadful child.

  I said, “What sort of childhood did you have?”

  “How dare you ask me that!”

  That was the daylight. In the evening, at dinner, she was calmer, as always studying her face in the dining room mirror, though pretending not to. She wore a small white Chanel (so she told me) hat with a little wisp of a veil and matching gloves of lace.

  After dinner, Haroun sipped his coffee and said, “I must go and attend to a little business.”

  “Is that your name for it?” the Gräfin said, making an actressy gesture, holding her gloved hand against her cheek, her fingers delicately splayed in support.

  Haroun smiled, he smoked, he knew he would be granted permission to go but that he would have to endure some teasing beforehand. He knew—and now I did too—that the Gräfin had to have her way.

  “I do not want to think about your little business. Please take your little business somewhere else.”

  “Gräfin—of course, Gräfin.”

  She said, “Sometimes people speak words in an opera, and they are perfect, and there is a big pause. And the aria begins with those words, the people singing them in an aria. This aria begins, 'Little business'—wonderful. Kleines Geschäft.”