The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  “Yes, Gräfin. Thank you, Gräfin.”

  She said to me, ‘Are you interested in Harry's little business?”

  She was inviting me to mock him. I pitied him and tried to be gentle, saying, “Not exactly.”

  “Go on, then, Harry. Go and play.” She twitched her veil as though shutting him out.

  Alone with her, I did not know what to say. I finished my glass of wine feeling that I was at the center of a great silent void, like a boy in a bubble. She pushed her glass toward me almost contemptuously, as though reluctant to satisfy my gluttony. I finished it, saying nothing, but feeling that it might help to be a bit drunk because I did not know what to do next.

  I finally said, “What is it about Harry that you don't like?”

  She made just the slightest facial tic, using the tip of her nose and her upper lip, like a handsome animal reacting to a buzzing insect.

  “That he's queer?” I said.

  “What is queer?”

  “That he’s a sodomite.”

  She smiled and said, “The one thing I understand.”

  “Sure,” I said, and she knew I doubted her.

  Leaning forward, her warm champagne breath on my face, she said with a satisfaction like appetite, “I am a sodomite.”

  No words were available to me then, and with my mind a blank, I touched her hand, which was hot and eager.

  She said—wicked child—“I don't like that jacket. You always wear that jacket. It’s too dark.”

  “You bought it for me.” Or rather, Haroun bought it for me, with the Gräfin’s money. Haroun had loved fussing with the tailor in a small street behind the Naumachia, discussing textures of velvet.

  “I suppose I’ll have to buy you another.”

  “Good idea,” I said, telling myself that I was humoring her and not being insulted.

  “Tomorrow we will go to the tailor. I want you to wear a light-colored jacket, one that will look well with my dresses. This one is wrong. It attracts attention.”

  A child's demands are often meaningless, pay attention to me their only motive—even then, at twenty-one, I knew that, perhaps better than she.

  “I suppose you want my key,” she said.

  The thought had not occurred to me. I had to think hard in my drunken slowness to reason what she was talking about. Key? I thought, and smiled, and she smiled back. What key?

  Instead of replying—what was I to say?—I put my hand out. She pouted, putting on a sulky malicious face, and smacked the key into my palm. There were bite marks, hers, on the meat of my palm, the dark roulettes of her teeth.

  In her suite that second night I was more confident. I knew what she wanted, I understood her contradictions, I was more polite, kissed her more gently, held her in my arms and delighted in the darkness, loving the feel of her clothes and the skin beneath them, and sometimes slipping my fingers through a placket and not knowing which was silk and which was skin, for both were warm to my touch.

  I took my time, to give myself a chance to adjust to seeing in the dark, and when she began to glow slightly—as a darkened room grows warmer and emits a sort of frosty light—I could pick out her shape and soon the texture of her clothes: the loose dress of white loops, the velvet collar and the white shoes with such high heels she was nearly as tall as I was. The Chanel hat with the little veil she had worn at dinner she kept on, and the gloves. All in white tonight—I saw her easily.

  “What do you want?”

  “How can you ask me that?” Her tone was sharp.

  We kissed. My hands roved delicately over her clothes.

  “I have everything. How dare you ask me that?”

  She pushed me aside, surprising me. I was offended and annoyed, and in a quick reflex I snatched at her wrist and held on, too tight, although it had not been my intention. She did not resist. Before I could let go, she went limp and dropped to her knees, her hat and veil brushing my shirt front and down my trousers, and I was thinking what a stiff skewering hat pin must have held it in place that it could rub me like that without moving.

  I had not released her wrist, and the texture of her lace gloves gave me a better grip than if I had held her bare hands. I guided her fingers to the bulge in my trousers and rubbed them against me. Before I realized it—she was that adroit—she had unzipped me with her free hand and in the next moment she had me in her mouth. That heat, that busy tongue, and the fingers of her gloves on the shaft of my cock, the lacy fretwork of her fingertips stroking my hardness, as I held her head, her hat, her veil, my hands tightening on all this brocade. The harder I held her head, the more eagerly she sucked me and stroked me with her gloved hands, chafing me with the white lace. I came, sooner than I wanted, spurting in a succession of involuntary jerks, stabbing at her mouth and face and spattering creamy mucus on her veil and face and lacy fingers.

  Seeing what I had done to her pretty gloves and her veil, I began to apologize in the shallow staticky tone of a man who has just had an orgasm. She was not listening, she was licking her gloves and her veil like a little girl licking the last sweet drops of syrup from her fingers.

  I had hardly touched her, yet that was enough.

  That she was cruel and fickle the following day made me smile at the sight of her play-acting, for now she was predictable. And I even knew the reason: she intended to enrage me so that later, in her room, I would dominate her and treat as my slave. It was role-playing, it was harmless, it was perfect. I was not enraged, I was aroused; if she could pretend to be cruel during the day, I could imitate that cruelty at night—it was easy to make my passion into fury.

  The softness of her skin in the dark, far softer-seeming because of the dark, was irresistible. And the aroma of her lily-fragrant perfume, mingled with the cat smell of her steaming cunt, made me salivate and pant like a lion, my nose tormented by damp feline fur and hot blood. Still I could not tell where her soft skin ended and her silk began, and the complexity of her vaginal lips was like another elaborate silken garment she had put on for me to stroke. I adored the gleam of her body in the light from the Taormina street lamps and the blistered moon.

  But she preferred darkness to light, the floor to the bed, silence to words, my roughness to my gentleness, clothes to nakedness; preferred serving me to my making love to her. She knelt and worshiped my cock with her mouth and her gloved hands, and she cried out louder than I did when I came, spattering her face as she licked. One of those times when she was done with me I knelt myself and touched her between her legs, and she was so wet with desire my fingers sank into her, and as they slipped between the hot flesh folds into her enlarged hole it was as though they were being swallowed.

  After her daytime sulks, her fickleness, her trickery, her cruel remarks and her imperious bearing, her contradictions, her outright insults, turning away from me to show me an uplifted profile of contempt and indifference, she liked nothing better, as darkness fell, than to be led to her suite and commanded to kneel before me; and for me to take my cock out and demand that she suck me off. And often when I was done she still had not had enough, and I watched from above as she went on sucking and gulping.

  The strings and muscles in her neck, the pulsing of her throat, the motions of swallowing—I could see it all, as fascinated by her neck and throat as I had been weeks ago when she had turned away and drunk the wine to snub me. I loved to watch her swallowing, and there was no prettier sight than her subtle gulps, the active gullet, like a thirsty cannibal drinking her victim drop by drop.

  So we lived on in the Palazzo d’Oro, and we flourished in Taormina, and the summer days went by, seeming to grow hotter as the nights grew cooler, and I kept wondering how far she wanted me to go with her, for I was, even after ten days or so, still learning. The Gräfin was my earliest lesson on the topic that every woman is different.

  Nothing in my sexual experience had prepared me for this woman, and while she seemed positively to glow with health and strength, I was showing signs of physical strain. Her a
ppetite was far greater than mine.

  The season in Taormina was ending, the few summer guests leaving, the larger autumn crowd of older visitors about to arrive—so the manager of the palazzo said: English people, gli Inglesi.

  “The partita is coming in a few days,” the Gräfin said, and I knew she had been there before, that the party was an annual event, one of the other rituals in the routine of the Palazzo d’Oro.

  When the day came, the long-term guests were present and they were gaped at by the people who were staying for just a few days or a week. This was an intimate occasion, like a family affair, welcoming some people, excluding others. Each group was seated at its usual table, though out of politeness—for we in the palazzo were a little family—other male guests danced with the Gräfin.

  She wore a gown I had never seen before, and a tiara, and her jewels, and gloves, black ones that reached almost to her elbows, and stiletto heels, her hair in ringlets. She had lovely long legs, slender and straight. She was naturally glamorous and had never looked more chic.

  “She is so happy,” Haroun said with a grateful glance at me, but he looked even happier. He beamed at her while I marveled at how I had seen this perfect body attending to me, completely at my service, those beautiful legs bent and kneeling, that serene face eating me.

  The Gräfin refused to dance with me, and I knew better than to dance with anyone else. She danced spiritedly with an Italian man (“He is a principe,” Haroun said) and more sedately with an elderly German, who always sat alone at another table, often eyeing the Gräfin, especially when I was with her.

  “Who is he?”

  Haroun just smiled.

  “Tell me, Harry.”

  “Too much to tell,” Haroun said, making a complex gesture of helplessness with his whole body—eyes, mouth, fingers, shoulders. “He owns a fabbrica.”

  “What kind of factory?”

  With the same helpless gesture, he said, “Many.”

  She danced with the swarthy overdressed man at the next table (“Greco”). She even danced—arms raised in teasing delicacy, a kind of puppeteering—with a woman, who was dressed severely in a suit. She held the woman’s hands in the air and twirled her gently, glancing at my reflection in the mirror from time to time: our eyes met, she scowled with pleasure.

  Near the end of the party the staff thanked her—effusive Italian gratitude you knew you had to pay for: the wine steward with his absurd chain and key and cavatappi, the fat sweaty-faced waiter, the pretty boy from the bar, the lurking Moro. She tipped them, fluttering Italian money at them, and they laughed and snatched at it like monkeys. The young scullery maid approached, about eighteen, very pretty. Gräfin pinched her cheek and kissed her passionately on the lips and then curtsied, the Countess making a low bow to the maidservant while the embarrassed girl clutched the money that had been passed to her. This business with the girl was one of the most sexually arousing scenes I had ever witnessed.

  The Gräfin had the money, I had none. I was properly emasculated, and even while I was watching this spectacle the woman in the suit elbowed past me, hoping for another dance with the Gräfin.

  The Gräfin turned to me, looking insolent, nostrils like a horse, and Haroun, seeing her sneering, seemed to take this as a signal to leave.

  “A little business for Harry,” she said. “And what about you?”

  I was so angry I was on the point of leaving altogether, except that by now I recognized this as an established ritual.

  I said, “We have some unfinished business.”

  When I stepped forward, she leaned back, looking anxious.

  I put my face against the bright ringlets and found her ear and said, “Go to your room and wait for me.”

  She left the party hurriedly, eagerly, and seeing her, the woman in the suit snarled in my direction as I followed. I locked the Gräfin's door as I shut it behind me. She was on her knees, still elegantly clothed in her gown and tiara, facing away from me, the spikes of her shoes protruding backward, the remote and icy woman now cowering. I knelt, I gathered her skirts and petticoats and lifted, and I held her, hipbone in each hand.

  “Hund! Hund!” she cried. “Dog! Dog!”

  6

  “You have succeeded brilliantly,” Haroun said. “You remind me of myself, you are so genius.”

  “Thanks, Harry.”

  “And yet you are not smiling! You should be so happy.”

  I was embarrassed to be praised for what I had done—especially to be praised by Haroun; and I seriously wondered whether it was I who had succeeded or the Gräfin.

  “Thank you,” he said, locking on my eyes and thumping his heart with his right fist in a matey Middle Eastern gesture of sincerity. I took this to mean that he was grateful for my liberating him—he was free to wander the streets, and his evenings were his own, for the Gräfin was my concern now.

  She was willing, submissive, sexual—more than I had ever known in my life. I would have felt like a rapist had the Gräfin not also been so enthusiastic. Her full-throated gusto for submission aroused me, and after her surrender I was excited whenever she turned to me with a speculative “got anything for me?” smile, or tapped the back of my hand with Germanic insistence. From her I discovered how pathologically impatient the very rich could be. When she wanted something, she was fussed and furious until she got it, and she often touched me as though poking a Start button.

  Muttering the slushy word Schlüssel —she mouthed German words all the time; I was beginning to learn some—she slid her key to me, and I preceded her to her suite. Always at dusk, often by candlelight, she remained dressed, or at least half dressed, showing her silken underclothes, the lingerie with its tiny ribbons and bands of lace, the pale colors, pinks and lavender, the flesh tones of her trimmed slip. Her shoes were spectacular and she never removed them, and so she always kept her silk stockings on, and the associated tangle of belts and garters, fasteners and straps, more beautiful for their clumsy complexity and more sensual than nakedness.

  Her clothes were part of the attraction, for they emphasized her slim body by giving it teasing highlights. At the end of our lovemaking her clothes were disheveled and damp, twisted on her in a way that made her look lovely and wrecked, and I stood over her, triumphant. But she was not wrecked, I was not triumphant: she was made whole, and I was helpless.

  She was physically much stronger than I had guessed. Often, when I had finished, she would say, “I want you again—take me now,” and of course it was impossible for me to proceed. Perhaps she said that knowing that I could not perform at that moment. Was this her way of reminding me that she was in charge? She could be demanding. In my adolescence I had fantasized that this might be pleasant. It was more trying than I had ever guessed, for after the beginning, she was the one who initiated sex, not me. She sent for me, she sought me out, she poked me with her button-pressing finger and smiled wickedly. And because of the peculiar arrangement—she, not Haroun, was paying for my room—I had to be on call.

  “Where were you?” she would say.

  “Here I am.”

  “But I wanted you one hour ago.”

  Put in the wrong like that, I had to be more obedient, and when I was, only then would she submit—the logic was predictably perverse. She was able to exhaust me by being submissive, because in her pretense of submission, her hoarse barking eroticism, was a kind of dominance: I was serving her, not the other way around. She got on all fours and went woof-woof, but really she was the mistress mimicking a dog: I was the kept pet who had been commanded to hump her. She had always been the mistress; she had turned me into a dog. And when I was not a big jowly hound humping her from behind, I was her obedient lap dog.

  Her appetite and her persistence made her seem much younger—younger than me, stronger, more sexual, greedier, more childish, more perverse, less inhibited, almost uncontrollable. I did not dread her beckoning, but after the first week I admitted to myself that my mood seldom matched hers. That was inconven
ient, yet I could not make excuses: I belonged to her.

  All we shared was sex. I liked that but I wanted more. These days we seldom talked, we never had a conversation. She was not a reader, not a sightseer, not the slightest bit animated by the Italians, whom she despised as cheats and monkeys (Äffchen, another of her German words that I learned).

  “I like Taormina because there are so few Italians here” was her repeated pronouncement.

  She was purely a sensualist and she demanded that I be the same—but how could I? Sensuality was almost impossible to fake, and so I was always struggling to satisfy her. We were reduced to two creatures groping in the dark. A few weeks before, in those awkward yet instructive days of visiting the olive estate, and shopping for clothes, and the three of us dining together—when Haroun was still one of us—we enjoyed many conversations. We talked about travel, politics, music, food—that is, her travel, her politics, the music she liked, the food she preferred. But however self-centered at least it was an attempt at polite discourse, and it helped me understand her a little. Now days were passed in silence, in the weird woolly humidity of sexual anticipation. I was bored, she was impatient, and we were distant all day until nightfall, when we resumed grappling, and by then I might have pinned her to the floor and be throttling her as she cried out, Hoont! Hoont!

  “I love you” was never spoken again. And so after our initial familiarity began to wane, I knew her less and less, for sex had turned her into a stranger.

  She signaled obscurely with her head—her blond ringlets danced at her ears; she gestured with one finger rather than her whole hand; she had a way of using her lips—everting them—which meant “Now.” She wasn’t initiating sex, she was testing my obedience, giving an order, saying “Come,” and I had no choice but to obey, doglike, and go to my mistress, who was swishing her tail, for when she walked, her whole body in motion repeated, “Follow me,” especially her bobbing beckoning buttocks.

  “Ach!” she would say after we finished, her characteristic postcoital mutter, which was as close as she ever got to forming a word at those times. “Ach” had three syllables, sometimes more. Looking broken and thrown down on the carpet, her lipstick so smeared she had a clown’s mouth, her hair and clothes tangled, satisfied in her ruin—more than satisfied, triumphant.