The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (12 page)

“No!” he said in a child's screech.

I could not imagine her being fifty, and so anything older than that was not an age at all, and sixty, to my young mind, was a sort of death, the end of a life, something unthinkable. Yet I spoke the absurd number.

Haroun stared, he said nothing; and his absence of expression was the most expressive he had been.

“Sixty?” I said.

“Golden age! Isn't she lovely? She is my masterpiece. And you are the proof I have succeeded.”

The train clatter penetrated my body and nauseated me, and the carriage swayed, too, and the motion and noise intensified my sense of shock, for he had been right: the secret was shocking. I was disgusted and ashamed, as though I had broken a taboo. Perhaps I really had, for my mother was hardly fifty. I tried to summon up the Gräfin's face by looking out the window of the train, but all I saw was my own face and the cracked and elderly façades of the villas by the shore. What had seemed to me a ridiculous melodrama of greed and innocence and opportunism now seemed serious and portentous. The strangest thing to me was that someone else had been the object of my desire, not the young Gräfin but the elderly woman inside her.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“So that you will understand how important you are. I need you to be kind. She is not the woman you think she is.”

As I had thought, there was a stranger inside her. But I also felt more powerful knowing this. I had learned her secret—I had something on her. Knowing her secret gave me power over her. I need not fear her anymore.

Haroun said, “And I want you to know who I am, too. You think I just hang around this rich woman. But I tell you she would be nothing without me.”

“She would still be a countess.”

“She would be a monster.”

He was too proud of the transformation of his surgery to keep it a secret. He wanted to impress me, but his boasting backfired. From that moment on the train, swinging down the coast, I saw the Gräfin as a desperate old woman, a crone, a witch, but a helpless witch. I knew that I had to go back and confront her—that, knowing her secret, I could not continue to Siracusa.

At Catania I got off and walked across the platform, Haroun following me, pleased with himself. We waited for the next train back to Taormina.
Addio,
Myra.

Rain had fallen on the town, washing its face. The piazza gleamed in the lamplight, the drenched leaves drooped and some that had lain plastered to the night streets were being lifted and peeled by a breeze funneling between the old stone walls. But there was something ghostly in the clean streets, for the lamplight illuminated their emptiness and made them seem abandoned and shadow-haunted.

Or was the feeling in me? I had given up on this ancient town, so luxurious on the lumpy mountainside, famous for its seasonal snobs, all its serious cracks hidden in layers of brittle stucco and whitewash, spruced up for sybarites and seducers, like an old whore winking from beneath a shadowy hat, not an Italian whore but rather some trespassing alien who refuses to go away.

“So lovely in the night, this town,” Haroun said, contradicting everything in my mind.

The Palazzo d'Oro was in darkness. I knew I did not belong there, so why had I come back tonight? The odd pointless trip to Catania, halfway to Siracusa, was characteristic of my time in Sicily—going nowhere. But I told myself that it had been a necessary trip: I had learned the Gräfin's secret. Sixty? The number made me feel ill, and reminded me of a morning in Palermo when I had been eating a meat pie, enjoying it, and Fabiola had laughed and said, “You like cat meat?”

The shutters were closed and latched on the Gräfin's windows. She was asleep, an old woman who had gone to bed early.

“Let us take some
tisana
,” Haroun said. He snapped his fingers. “Boy!”

The sleepy doorman stood, leaning from fatigue, and smiled—the staff knew Haroun too well to take his demanding tone seriously. Haroun repeated the order several times before the man brought us the chamomile tea, and to show his displeasure he grumbled an obscure epithet and set the teapot and cups down hard on the marble-topped table, to demonstrate his objection. I liked the man for not being intimidated.

“The Gräfin got the procedure early, while her skin was still elastic,” Haroun said, picking up the thread of disclosure from the train. He had not stopped thinking about it, nor had I. “This is why she is so lovely. She didn't wait, she wasn't falling apart, it wasn't a rescue operation.”

Yet that was just how she seemed to me: a corpse with a girl's skin stretched over it. Before, I had seen only the skin. Now all I could think of were her old bones and her weak flesh and her brittle yellow skull.

“I am the originator of this procedure. I take a fold of skin and lift, like so,” Haroun said, raising and folding the edge of the table napkin. He tightened it and made it flat. “I stitch behind the ears. I tuck. I conceal. Like quilting.
Ecco fatto!”

Conjuring with busy fingers, Haroun made the napkin small and smooth and gave its blankness a blind stare.

“I am so clever,” Haroun said. “I could have made her a virgin. I was this close.”

He measured with his thumb and forefinger, and seeing the expression on my face he began to laugh. I was thinking, You like cat meat?

I went to the Gräfin's door, and before knocking I looked right and left down the corridors where I had once detected the self-conscious shuffle of a stranger's footsteps. Seeing no one, I rapped on the door, and almost at once I heard her response, like a plea. And still with the door shut I heard, “Who is it?”

“It's me.”

“Where have you been?” she said, dragging open the door and pulling me into the darkness.

She smelled of sleep and starch and perfume, and in her reaching out there was a flourishing of lacy sleeves. I hugged her and felt beneath her nightgown the frail old bones. But when she tried to kiss me I averted my head.

“I have been waiting,” she said in a whiny voice as we moved deeper into her suite. “Why are you punishing me?”

She sank to her knees and dragged me down to the carpet and embraced me. In that embrace was all her eagerness and in that same embrace she felt my leaden reluctance. I was inert, like clay, heavy and unwilling.

“What is it?”

She was suspicious, defensive—she knew in those seconds that I was not interested. I was capable of guile, but desire was one feeling I could not fake. The darkness, her touch, revealed everything to her.

Pushing me away she said, “Why did you come here?”

I was not sure why I had come back—perhaps to verify that she was indeed sixty, and now I was convinced of it. She was aged, feeble, uncertain, clumsy, as older people seem to someone quite young—and to the young the old give off an unlucky smell of weakness, which is like a whiff of death. The Gräfin seemed more fragile than ever. I was filled with sorrow and disgust, a sadness born of pity. She seemed at last powerless, and not just powerless but a wisp of humanity, like someone dying.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

That made her angry.

“Harry told you!” she said, poking me with her hand as she shouted. “He is a fool.”

“How do you know?”

“Your disgust. Your confidence. The way you are touching me, as though I am a crème chantilly. I can't stand it. You are trying to look inside me. You're like him.”

“Harry?”

“He is like a tailor. Always looking at stitches and lining. So proud of his stitches.”

I wanted to tell her that for Haroun she was a masterpiece—his masterpiece. He had needed me to prove it, and with just a little encouragement I had done so.

“You were attracted to me,” the Gräfin said. “You believed I was young. You sucked these breasts.” She snatched my hand, and without gloves her hand felt reptilian. She used my hand to touch her, and jammed my fingers against her. “You entered me here.”

Her frankness made me ashamed of myself.

“You desired this body,” she said. “That was all that mattered.”

I wondered whether she was saying “I don't need you anymore.” This was sounding like a postmortem and I loathed it.

“Harry has a story, but so do I,” she said. “He does not know my story.”

There are deliberate postures people sometimes assume for long stories. An alteration in the Gräfin's voice told me that she was reclining, and staring hard through the darkness I could see that her head was thrown back, revealing her white throat, the gleam on her neck. She seemed braced to speak. I prepared myself for a long story.

“I have been here before,” she went on. “I was your age, perhaps a bit younger. I came to Taormina with my friend Helga. We met a man—a very nice Englishman. I had an affair with him—one week. I liked making him happy, and of course he was very happy. He was sixty years of age.”

“Is there more?”

She straightened her neck and faced me, saying nothing, meaning: That's all. So it wasn't such a long story, but it meant a great deal to me.

I said, “What happened to him?”

“He wrote me passionate letters for a while. He was
innamorato.
”

The nice word was one I knew from Fabiola: more than enamored—smitten.

“This was—what? The twenties?”

I took her shrug to mean yes. She hated my asking her to look back, she loathed acknowledging the passing of time, and as a result she had no past. I knew very little about her, and nothing at all about her earlier life. I took for granted that she had led a charmed life, and yet if she had, wouldn't she have wanted to savor it?

She said, “It doesn't seem so long ago. Taormina gets more crowded but it doesn't change.”

“D. H. Lawrence was around here then.”

“You mentioned him the first time we met,” the Gräfin said. “Yes. I met him. He was a nervous, irritable young man, and sick. His wife—I spoke to her, in German of course. He didn't like it that I talked to her like this. And I think he was scandalized that I was going about with a man of sixty.”

I wanted to believe that the time she had spent with Lawrence was a link to me, too. But she didn't linger over the memory of Lawrence, she had something else on her mind.

“The man, my English lover, didn't like Lawrence or Frieda. He didn't even like Taormina.”

“What was he doing here?”

Now that my eyes were accustomed to the dark, I could see her smile. “That's the interesting part,” she said. “I wanted you to ask.”

She left me hanging for a moment, and I thought how this evening was different from any other we had spent together. The others had been shadowy, wordless, passionate; this was serene and conversational. She was smiling again. Was this a long story after all?

“He told me that when he was young, forty years earlier, he had come here—he had met an aristocrat and had a
carezza
.” At first it touched me that she knew such affectionate words, and then it occurred to me that she had learned them as endearments from her Italian lovers. “The aristocrat had been sixty. That's why the Englishman had chosen me.”

And that was why she had chosen
me,
because of that incident forty years earlier, in 1880. I said, “Was he famous?”

“He was very rich.”

It seemed odd to me that she, a German countess, would mention this detail of the man's wealth, but I let it pass.

“He was so rich I wanted his life.”

For a moment, repeating her words in my mind, I could not speak. I knew exactly what she meant, but again I wondered why a German countess would think that, unless he was a giant. So I asked her, “What was his name?”

“Who remembers names? You will forget my name.”

“But I'm like you—as you were then.”

“No,” she said with a ferocity that surprised me. “How dare you say that to me!” But she seemed to regret that in losing her composure she had given something away, and her tone changed as she said grandly, “It was just an affair. It meant very little to me. It meant a great deal to him.”

“So you came here to find out how it feels to be sixty and be desired.”

“Sixty is not old,” the Gräfin said. “Anyway, in my heart, and between my legs, I am not sixty, you know that. I think I am making you blush.”

The blood rising in shame and embarrassment heated my reddening face and I could feel the heat on my hands when I covered my face.

“It was like something you might buy that you enjoy for a while and then you grow tired of,” the Gräfin said. “Like a dream, sex with you in my room. I think it made me a bit strange, but now I am back to normal. You won't believe me, but it helped me to see you with that young girl.”

“You were jealous,” I said.

“No. I saw how foolish you were. How little you know of yourself. That your whole life is ahead of you.”

A suspicion that I was being rejected made me want her again. Hearing her dismiss my ardor toward the girl aroused me. I desired the Gräfin again, with a lust that parched my mouth and made my tongue swollen. I remembered how she had pretended to be my dog, how she had groveled on all fours and howled like a bitch, and we had possessed each other completely; she had been ravenous and reckless. And now, in the neat nightgown, in the darkness of her suite, she seemed to me like a white witch.

I touched her arm. With a kind of distaste she removed my hand and sat up and looked away.

“I know what your life will be,” she said. “You will be very successful in whatever you choose to do. You have ambition and you are ashamed of your past. Because of that you are ruthless. You will take risks. You have no family name—you have everything to gain. You have sexual energy. That always makes me think of men who want power.”

“I don't want power.”

“I know what you want. You are too young to know anything. You will get everything you want. You will be rich. Money matters to you—I know that. Do you think I haven't counted every mark I have given you? You'd be surprised if you knew the total amount. I am a bit surprised myself.”