The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

1

THIS IS my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it. Years ago, when Taormina was a village most travelers avoided in the summer, because of the heat, I sought it out, to feel the heat. Heat was everything in the poem “Snake,” that D. H. Lawrence wrote in Taormina. Great names and associations also mattered to me, which was another reason, lingering in the steep town of old stone and fresh flowers, I stopped by the Palazzo d'Oro, loving that name too. Beyond the gilded cast-iron faces on the spiked gateway to the terrace, I saw a handsome couple, a golden-haired woman and a beaky-faced man, dressed in loose white clothes enjoying a big Italian lunch. I imagined being seated at that table. I thought, I want your life — the sort of envious wish I was too young to know was like asking for my undoing.

I always excused my waywardness by saying that I was poor and so was forced into this or that course of action. The truth was that I enjoyed taking risks. I should have been ashamed. It was not that I behaved badly, rather that I was secretive and seldom straight. I was creative in my lies. Saying I was poor was one of them.

The world knows me as a hero. My paintings are like good deeds, the pictorial record of my lifetime of travel, the nearest thing to the pharaonic “profession of sinlessness”—the negative confession: all my arduous journeys, the discoveries I made my own, the arrivals I turned into triumphs. At a time when celebrated painters stayed home and splashed paint or used slide rules, or glued feathers and broken pots to canvases, painted stripes and circles and whole large monochromes, I was in distant lands painting portraits of people in their landscapes — ornery people, kind people, all of them native, none of them posing. I have had my detractors, professional critics mostly, who carped about the explicitness of my line, my clear figures, their sideways glances, but I believe that what rankles are my other figures, the profits I have made. Yet my patrons and collectors have defied the belittlers and chosen to travel with me through my pictures, my exotic views, the many series available in signed lithographs, Pictures of India, Pictures of China, Pictures of Africa—not single pictures but narratives.

When I am disparaged for painting “accessible” pictures I say that my strength is storytelling. What I have never said is that the most resourceful storytellers are the ones who avoid a particular story, the only story the teller has; the very avoidance of it is the reason for the other, wilder tales. The source of fantastic narratives is often this secret, the fantasist using a concealment to hint at the truth, but always skirting the fundamental story. Or the stories may not be bizarre, but numerous and various, for the same reason. This is one ritual of creation. As I say, this is my only story.

Such a traveler as I was could easily have found a way to return to Taormina, but I steered clear of the place, even when I was traveling in Sicily. I resisted, yet I knew that the time would come, when I was myself turning sixty. Not old — though everyone else seemed to think so.

At fifty, I had painted a birthday self-portrait of my watchful face, and the subtle suggestion of the haunted eyes only made people praise it for seeming beatific. Ten years passed. But sixty was not an occasion for that sort of self-portrait. I needed to travel, and in the same spirit as before, for in travel I became someone else — in this case, in my birthday month, the person I had once been, a boy of twenty-one, in the hot summer of 1962, when I found myself in Sicily, being rebuffed by a girl I liked, Fabiola, a principessa. “It means nothing here!”

The title meant something to me, though. I had followed her to Palermo from Falconara and Urbino — more lovely names — but she was home in Sicily and it was forbidden in those days for her to be seen with me unless we were engaged, or nearly so. She had to be my fidanzata, I had to tell her I loved her, otherwise she was a slut, she said. Maybe she suspected I was not very serious, just a brash, too young American (Fabiola was twenty-three) searching for the Italy of Fellini and Antonioni, hungry for experience. I told her I was an existentialist — it was a popular word in the Italy of 1962—because it was a convenient way of avoiding responsibility. I was intense, impatient, game, and wary of being trapped. These qualities made me a loner. Fabiola wanted romance, she wanted me to adore her. Love me, was the appeal in her eyes, love me and I will give you what you want, but to me love was surrender, love was death. In those days I swore I would not utter the word.

And then I had my life, forty years more, the ones that matter most: the years of family and struggle, love and acclaim, but with enough disillusionment and loss to show there would be worse to come in the tapering off nearer my death.

In Sicily again, a man of sixty, I retraced my steps, avoided the good hotels, looked for traces of my earlier self. Palermo was a more Americanized place these days, and freer — women using cell phones, men in blue jeans, even the nuns looked somewhat secular in their dowdy dresses. I called Fabiola, but she was unknown at the only address I had for her and she was not in the phone book. I prowled and looked for the past and found very little that related to the frugal boy I had been, moving lightly through Sicily.

I took the train to Messina, changed for the express to Catania, got off at Taormina-Giardini, climbed the hill, as I had done many years before, glad for this chance to test my memory, sketching in my head, mumbling as I do when I want to remember.

Hotels stand up better than restaurants. The Palazzo d’Oro on the Via Roma was surrounded by newer and fixed-up places yet it had aged well. I was relieved to see that I could happily stay there again, to recall the old days, and do some serious sketching, and write my story — making this visit a significant occasion, or, more than that, a kind of ceremony, a ritual to mark the passing of all those years.

Walking by the pool, a new pool, I saw a girl of no more than seventeen, with short untidy sun-struck hair, sprawled on a striped chaise longue. She was topless, small breasts with no weight in them. Her legs were open, her hands behind her head, a Balthus fantasy but only for seconds, for she crossed her legs, yanked on her knees, rolled over, plucked at her gold bikini bottom like a sprite, half innocent half wicked, or else just a bored teenager. I was tormented. Because she did not see me I stared, and could not take my eyes off her — breasts so small and firm, nipples so pale they made her seem chaste.

I was led past her by a room boy in a robe and a white skullcap — Arab, a Moro in the Palazzo d'Oro.

The young sunbathing girl reached for a glass of pink liquid and drank. I watched her drinking, loving the motion of her neck muscles working in a pulsating way, her throat filling as she swallowed. I imagined that she was looking at me over the rim of her glass.

In 1962, on my way from the Via Fontana Vecchia, where Lawrence had lived and — I guessed — written his lovely poem of sorrow and self-accusation, I had lingered by the wall of this palazzo. I was struck by the name, the images of the gilded faces, and, still looking around, the sight of the man and woman at lunch. I had wanted to stay but had no money for anything except one of those very dirty places on the road below the town, between the public beach and the railroad track. I was hot and tired, having traveled third class on the train, a slow train, and at just this time of year, in the heat.

In those days I traveled with one change of clothes. I wore a seersucker jacket over a T-shirt, and a pair of jeans. My bag was so small I didn’t look like a traveler but rather like a student on his way from school with books and papers. With so little to carry it was easy for me to explore and make sudden decisions: to stay, to move on, to kill time at the beach, to hitchhike, or to sleep third class on the night train to save money. It was not until nightfall that I would decide where to stay, and now it was hardly midmorning in Taormina. I imagined writing someone — perhaps the Principessa, Fabiola — a letter on the headed notepaper of the Palazzo d'Oro. I saw a sheet of it on a menu posted near the terrace — the two gilded Moorish faces, and palm trees, a glimpse of Africa in Sicily.

From my room, I saw my younger self entering the hotel, crossing the hot terrace, passing the wall of yellow glazed tiles, ordering a cup of coffee and asking for a glass of water, pretending to be poised.

And where that half-naked teenager lay on the chaise longue there had been an awning — few people sunbathed in Sicily then — and under it the couple near the pool wall, like lovers, wearing identical Panama hats, the woman in white, and wearing lovely lacy gloves, intent in conversation, no one else around.

From a distance — and I had been a little bleary-eyed from my sleepless night — the golden-haired woman looked young and attractive — mid-thirties, maybe — and the man seemed more attentive than a husband. I took them to be lovers for the way he beseeched her, imploring her, looking helpless, the way Fabiola beseeched me. The meal set up in front of them looked delicious — the sorts of salads and antipasti served at lunch in the Italian summer, yellow tomatoes, red lettuce, sliced meat, lobster tails, prawns, olives and pickles, artichokes and palm hearts, fruit drinks in tall glasses, and this lovely day, the blue sea in the distance, a rising trickle of gray smoke from Etna, and the squat thick-walled palazzo. The two people looked magical in their white hats under the big green awning.

Thinking again, I want your life, I envied them with an envy I could taste on the roof of my mouth, something unfamiliar and corrosive. They had no idea how lucky they were, and I tried to imagine displacing them, being at their table myself this fine Sicilian noon, eating lunch, with nothing else to do, with a room in this amazingly named hotel. My curiosity made me bold. I got up and strolled nearer to them as I made sketches of the glazed plates and the flower vines on the wall and the beautiful blue sea beyond the tops of the poplars and cypresses. Often bystanders said to me, “Let's see,” asking to look at my sketches.

The couple said nothing and, closer to them, I realized that only the sea was real.

The sun's glare had been kind to the woman, had smoothed and simplified her features. I could see from her lips that she was older than I had guessed, a tight white fish face and bleached-blond hair, a very skinny figure — a girl's stick figure, somewhat starved. But I was still intrigued by her hat and her sunglasses and her strawlike hair and her gloves of lace. The man was scribbling on a pad, the meal was untouched and probably inedible.

I was on the point of walking back to my table when the man said hello and beckoned. The way he crooked his finger, and his intonation, told me he was foreign, not Italian.

“We want to see your sketches,” he said.

Just as I had guessed, yet I hesitated.

“You’ll have to show us, you know,” he said with the sort of confidence I associated with wealthy people. “There is no one else here.”

In the moment of saying okay I was betrayed by my first feeling, my sense of I want your life. I had seen these people as lovers enjoying a romantic lunch. I could not have been more mistaken. I knew at once that I was wrong and it seemed to me that I would have to pay for this envious feeling of finding them attractive and wishing to displace them and wanting what they had. I approached their table feeling disappointed and yet compelled to follow through, for I had nowhere else to go.

“Have you just come to Taormina?”

“I’ve been here awhile,” I said, being evasive. “In town doing some drawings and a little literary research. D. H. Lawrence lived up the road in the Via Fontana Vecchia in the 1920s.”

Ten minutes at Lawrence’s house, looking for a water trough to sketch. I could not tell them the truth, or give anything away: the hard seats of third class, the long walk up the hill, the stink of cigarettes called Stop, were just too awful.

“His wife was German,” the woman said in a correcting tone. “Thomas Mann was also here.”

The statement, and her accent, told me she was German, but she said nothing else. The man, who was swarthy and yet fine-featured, with a thin face and a beaky nose, did the rest of the talking, praising my sketches and asking questions. I answered him untruthfully to put myself in a good light.

I had been wrong about their ages. A twenty-one-year-old knows nothing of time and cannot assign anyone an age — thirty-eight is old, forty is hopeless, fifty is ancient, and anyone older than that is invisible. Desirable and ugly are the only criteria. The German woman was not ugly, but in attempting to appear young she seemed faintly doll-like and trifled with.

Yet they were obviously rich, and the rich to me then were like the mythical El Dorado: a race of golden giants, powerful in every way, even physically superior, protected, able to buy anything, confident, speaking a special language and, from their towering position in their palaces, regarding only each other. It was painful for me to think about the couple in this way. I tried to forget how limited my choices were. And how, if I were to succeed in life, I would have to penetrate that palace and inhabit it — not lay siege to its fortifications but insinuate myself, creep in through a mouse hole, use the postern.

The woman seemed to be smiling to herself and presenting her profile to me, her chin slightly lifted on a lacy finger of her gloved hand.

“We were just talking about opera, what a shame it is that the Teatro Greco here has no production,” the man said.

This was a helpful cue. I had no material resources but I was well read, I spoke Italian, and in my determined self-educating mission I had tried to know as much as possible about opera.

I said, “I’ve just seen a new production of Otello in Urbino.”

“The common people love Mr. Green,” the woman said.

“Not Verdi’s Otello,” I said.

This seemed to perplex them, which pleased and emboldened me.

“Rossini’s Otello. They did the version with the happy ending.”

“French opera is more to my taste,” the man said.

“I wish Bizet had succeeded with Salammbô.”

“There is no Salammbô,” the woman said, a querulous tone of literal-minded contradiction pinching her face.

“He never finished it. Flaubert wouldn’t let him.”

Was what I was saying true? Anyway they believed it. They were listening closely to my cleverness. Instead of dealing with Wagner or Verdi, whom they would have known well, I made myself seem intelligent by mentioning obscure works. We would take the others for granted — though I knew very little, just the records, not the performances. Removing the great works from the discussion deflected their scrutiny. I was young but rich in ruses.

“I get tickets for Glyndebourne every year.”

Saying this, the woman revealed that the man was neither husband nor lover. Otherwise she would have said “we.” The man was a flunky or a friend.

“We have very good opera where I come from. In Boston. And at Tanglewood, in Lenox.”

“I have heard so,” the man said.

This was to impress them with the fact that they were dealing with a bright and cultivated person.

“You're right — it’s a shame they don’t use the Greek theater here for operas.”

“Well, they do of course,” the man said.

Fearing that I had revealed my ignorance, I risked another generalization and said, “I mean, this summer,” and the man nodded, and I knew I was flying blind.

“The seats are so hard,” the woman said. “I refuse to sit on marble stone. I want a soft chair in a balcony!”

Spoiled bitch, you’re supposed to think, but I admired her for her forthrightness and for being uncompromising. No Greek ruins for me, forget the ancient stone benches of Siracusa and Taormina.

We talked some more — trivialities about the heat, the blinding brightness of noon, the wildflowers, the emptiness, the absence of visitors.

“It is why I come,” the woman said.

Again that “I” told me she was in charge and the man a mere accessory.

“Have you had lunch?” the man said with a gesture that took in all the plates of food. “You are welcome to help yourself.”

I was ravenous yet I said, “No, thank you.” I was too proud to accept, and anyway, by my seeming restrained and polite they would be reassured and would respect me more.

“You will forgive us?” the man said, and picked at some salad. The woman, still with her gloves on, and using a silver tool, pierced olives from a dish of antipasto and nibbled them.

“Such a pleasure to talk with you,” I said, and excused myself. I went back to my table, my empty coffee cup, and opened my sketchbook again and indulged myself in shading a sketch I had done.

The couple conferred some more. Then the woman got up slowly and, in a stately way, for her white dress was long and lovely, she left the terrace, shimmering in the dazzling light. The man paid the check — the Italian business, the saucer, the folded bill, the back and forth, and more talk with the waiter. When the waiter left, saucer of money in hand, the man came to my table.

He looked at me intently and then smiled in a familiar way, as though he knew me well.

“I have arranged for you to stay here,” he said. “I was once a student”—I had started a polite protest—“no, no. It will be pleasant to have you as a neighbor. We will talk.”

He had read me perfectly.

2

So, within an hour of happening past the Palazzo d’Oro, I was installed in a room with a view of the sea, seated on my own balcony, in a monogrammed bathrobe, eating a chicken sandwich, clinking the ice in my Campari and soda, the breeze on my face. I had been transformed: magic.

“This is my guest,” the man had said — I still did not know his name — and he asked for my passport, which he glanced at. “Mr. Mariner requires a double room with a view of il vulcano. Put it on my bill.”

A moment later he gave me his name but in an offhand way: “You can call me Harry”—as though the name was fictitious; and it was. His name was Haroun.

When I tried to thank him he put a fingertip to his lips and then wagged the finger sternly. There was no mistaking this gesture. He made this admonishing finger seem a very serious instrument, if not a weapon.

“This can be our secret,” he said. “Not a word to the Gräfin.”

That gave me pause, yet I had no choice but to agree, for I had accepted the free room. To ease my conscience, I told myself that if I wished I could leave at any time, as impulsively as I had come; could skip out and be gone, as I had left Fabiola, the Principessa. Even so, I felt that in acquiring the room I had been triumphant, it was a windfall, and there was a hint of mystery about Haroun that I liked, a conspiratorial tone that was comic and pleasing. And Gräfin? I supposed Gräfin was the woman.

“Not a word to anyone,” I said.

“The Gräfin is not my Gräfin, as you probably think, but she is a very dear friend. I have known her for years — we have been absolutely everywhere together.”

This was in my room — he had followed me there with the room boy — not a Moro, then, but a square-shouldered Sicilian boy, and Haroun was sort of eyeing the boy as he spoke to me, sizing him up as the boy bent and stretched, putting my bag on a small table and adjusting the fastenings of the shutters.

“Look at the skin these people have!”

He pinched the boy’s cheek and arm, like someone choosing cloth for a suit. The boy, preoccupied with the shutters, smirked and allowed it.

“Never touch their women,” Haroun said. “That is the iron rule in Sicily. They will kill you. But their boys — look what skin!”

Now it seemed to me that the boy knew he was being admired, and he stepped away from Haroun and said, “Bacio la mano”—I kiss your hand — and somewhat giddy with this byplay, Haroun snatched the boy’s hand and pressed some folded money into it.

“Ciao, bello,” Haroun said to the boy, smiling as he watched him leave my room and shut the door.

Alone with Haroun I felt more uncomfortable than I had when the boy was there — the compromising sense that it was not my room, that in accepting it I had accepted this small, dark, smiling man who I felt was about to importune me. But from what he said next I realized that his smile meant he was remembering something with pleasure. Sometimes people smile to show you they are remembering something happy in their past.

“The Gräfin is such a dear friend,” he said. “And we have our secrets too.”

Something in the way he spoke made me think the woman was giving him money.

“She is a fantastic person,” he said. “Wonderful. Generous.”

Then I was sure of it.

“And she is very sensitive.” The way he stood in the room, lingering and looking around, conveyed the impression that the room was his — and of course it was. “All her noble qualities have given her a great soul and a fantastic capacity for friendship. I think somehow you guessed that about her.”

I had guessed that she was a rich, difficult woman who was not interested in anyone but herself, yet I smiled at Haroun and agreed that she was a sensitive person with a great soul. In this room I felt I had to agree, but agreeing was easy — this was small talk, or so I thought.

“I can see that you understand things quickly,” he said. “I admire you Americans, just showing up in a strange place with your passport in your pocket and a little valise. Fantastic.”

He saw everything. He made me shy.

“Probably you want to rest,” he said. “We usually have a drink on the terrace at seven. This is a lovely place. I think you will enjoy it. Ciao for now.”

Was that an invitation? I didn't know, but it did seem to me that I was part of a larger arrangement that at the moment I could only guess at. After he left I ordered the sandwich and the Campari and soda and tried not to ponder what the larger arrangement was. I told myself: I can leave tomorrow, just as I came, on the train to Messina. Being hard up in Italy didn't frighten me — people were friendly, strangers could be hospitable, I spoke Italian, I was personable — well, this hotel room was proof of that.

I guessed that something was expected of me. I did not know what, but something.

Because I had not been specifically invited, I did not appear on the terrace until nearly eight o'clock. The woman Haroun called Gräfin was holding a glass of wine and looking at the lights on the distant sea — fishing boats — and Haroun raised his hand in an effortless beckoning gesture that had a definite meaning: the languid summons of a person who is used to being obeyed. The woman herself, her head turned to the bobbing lights, seemed uninterested in me.

“Look, Gräfin, our friend the American.”

I was convinced now that he was a man of calculation. This can be our secret and We usually have a drink on the terrace at seven. I was glad I saw this conspiratorial gleam in his eye, for it made me wary enough to listen for meanings and look for motives.

I joined them. Gräfin — a name I first heard as “Griffin”—still showed no interest in me. She sipped her wine, she might have been a little drunk — the way drunks can seem to concentrate hard when they are just tipsy and slow, with a glazed furrow-browed stare. I studied her smooth cheeks. She was German, he was not. She looked like a ruined and resurrected queen — someone who had suffered an illness that had left a mark on her beauty, not disfiguring it but somehow fixing it, aging it.

We talked. Haroun asked me questions which, I felt sure, were intended to impress Gräfin, or any listener — sort of interviewed me in a friendly appreciative way, to show me at my best, to establish that I had been an art teacher at the selective school inside the ducal palace at Urbino, that I was traveling alone through Sicily, that I was never without my sketchbook, which was a visual diary of my trip, that I was knowledgeable about artists and books—“Raphael was born in Urbino, he says.”

“I know that,” Gräfin said. She always spoke with a lifted chin, into the distance, never faced the listener, never faced the speaker for that matter. “I prefer Tiziano.”

“Would that be Titian?”

She didn’t answer. “I have one, like so, not large.” But her slender measuring hands made it seem large. “However, yes, it is a Tiziano.”

“You bought it yourself?”

“It has been in my family.”

“And your Dürer,” Haroun said.

“Many Dürer,” Gräfin said.

“I’d hate to think what those would have cost,” I said, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them for their vulgarity.

“Not much,” Gräfin said. She was addressing a large glazed salver hooked to the brick wall of the terrace. “Very little, in fact. Just pennies.”

“How is that possible?”

“We bought them from the artist.”

I saw Albrecht Dürer putting some dark tarnished pfennigs into a leather coin purse and touching his forelock in gratitude as he handed over a sheaf of etchings to one of Gräfin’s big patronizing ancestors.

Gräfin had a brusque uninterested way of speaking — but saying something like We bought them from the artist was a put-down she relished. She never asked questions. She seemed impossible, spoiled, egotistical, yet strong; in a word, she was the embodiment of my notion of wealth. I did not dislike her, I was fascinated by her pale skin and soft flesh in this sunny place, by her full breasts and pinched doll’s face and bleached hair and plump disapproving lips, even by her posture — always facing away from me. I saw her as incurious and something of a challenge.

“I am hungry,” she said to Haroun. “Will you call the boy?”

This was also interesting, the fact that she spoke to him in English when I was present. When they were alone, I was sure they spoke German. The English was for my benefit — I didn’t speak a word of German. But why this unusual politeness, or at least deference, to me?

Haroun snapped his fingers. The waiter appeared with two menus. Gräfin opened hers and studied it.

Holding his menu open but looking at me, Haroun said, “Have you seen the olive groves?”

I said no, feeling that it was expected of me, to give him a chance to describe them.

“They are quite magnificent,” he said, as I had expected. “We are driving out tomorrow to look at one near Sperlinga. You know Sperlinga? No? Perhaps you would like to accompany us?”

“Morning or afternoon?” I didn’t care one way or the other, but I did not want to seem tame.

“It must be morning. Afternoons here are for the siesta,” he said.

“I’d love to go with you.”

“We leave at eight.”

“I want the fish,” Gräfin said. “Grilled. Tell them no sauce. Small salad. No dressing.”

She snapped her menu shut. So, in that way, I was informed that I was not a dinner guest. But once again I saw how, in the manner of trying to appear offhand, Haroun was manipulating the situation. Gräfin was indifferent, though, or at least made a show of indifference. She did not look up as I excused myself and left. My audience was over. I had been summoned, I had been dismissed.

I walked through the upper town, from the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele down the Corso Umberto Primo, where most of the shops and bars were, the ones that catered to foreigners.

Down an alleyway I found a bar where some older Sicilians sat and smoked, listening to a soccer match being loudly broadcast on a radio. It reminded me of a religious ritual, the way they were seated around the radio with its glowing dial. I sat near them, ordered a bottle of beer and a panino, and I stewed, resenting the fact that my little discussion had taken place at Haroun and Gräfin’s table, and that I had been sent away. My frugal meal was proof that I had very little money and because of that was at the beck and call of these people. So what, I told myself; I could leave at any time: just board the train at the foot of the hill and head east, where life was cheap and cheerful. And somewhere in Palermo, Fabiola was yearning for my love.

Haroun was in the lobby the next day before eight. Gräfin was already in the car. These people were prompt. I imagined that their wealth would have made them more casual. Haroun greeted me and directed me to the front seat, where I would sit next to the driver. This made me feel like an employee, one of Gräfin's staff. But Haroun, too, seemed like an employee.

We drove through Taormina and down the hill, took a right on the main road, and then another right after a short time, heading upward on a narrow road into the island.

“Bustano,” Haroun said. Then he conversed with the driver in a language that was not Italian — and not any language I recognized.

Haroun laughed in an explosive way, obviously delighted by something the driver had said.

“He said it will take more than one hour,” Haroun said. “Because, he says, this is a macchina and not a flying carpet.”

“What is that language?”

“Arabic. He is originally from Tunisia.”

“The Moro of the Palazzo d'Oro.”

“Exactly.”

“How do you know Arabic?”

Gräfin said, “Harry knows everything. I am lost without this man.”

“I can speak English. I can write English,” Haroun said. “I can write on a 'piss' of paper. I can write on a 'shit' of paper.” He made a child's impish face, tightening his cheeks to give himself dimples. He tapped his head. “Ho imparato Italiano in una settimana. Tutto qui in mio culo. ”

“Now he is being silly.”

“Where did you learn Arabic?”

“Baghdad,” he said. “But we didn't speak it at home. We spoke English, of course.”

“You're Iraqi?”

He winced at my abrupt way of nailing him down, and rather defensively he said, “Chaldean. Very old faith. Nestorian. Even my name, you see. And my people…”

“He is German,” Gräfin said, and patted his knee as though soothing a child. “He is now one of us. A wicked German.”

Iraq then was an exotic country which had recently overthrown its king and massacred his whole family, but Baghdad a rich cosmopolitan city, colorful and busy, full of banks and socialites, not the bomb crater it is now.

“Ask him anything.” Gräfm's hand still rested on Haroun's knee. She was looking out the window at a village we were passing, near Randazzo, on the mountain road, a cluster of cracked farmhouses, one with black lettering that had faded but was readable on the side, a pronouncement in Italian.

I pointed to the lettering. “What does that say?”

Without hesitating, Haroun said, “'Do not forget that my'—genitori is 'parents'—‘were farmers and peasants.' It was put there long ago.”

“Who said it? Why is it there?”

I had been through this in another village with Fabiola; she had sheepishly explained these old Sicilian slogans.

“Mussolini said this. It is from the war.”

“You see?” Gräfin said with a mother's pride, and for the first time showed an interest, turning to read the peeling slogan on the cracked stucco wall of the ancient farmhouse. She turned to me and said, “It is so charming how they leave the words there!”

“Fascisti,” Haroun said.

“Even fascisti can be sentimental,” Gräfin said.

“What's the capital of Bali?” I asked Haroun, to change the subject.

“Denpasar,” he said. He folded his arms and challenged me with a smile.

I was thinking how, when fluent foreigners uttered the name of a known place, they left the lilt of their suppressed accent on it.

“I sailed there once on my boat,” Gräfin said.

“Your famous boat,” Haroun said.

“My famous boat.”

“But that’s a long way,” I said.

“Not long. I flew to Singapore and joined the boat. We sailed to Surabaja. Then I went by road to Bali. I stayed some nights with a member of royalty at his palace. Djorkoda Agung— agung is prince. He lives in Ubud, very beautiful village of arts, and of course very dirty. The people dance for me and they make for me a”—she searched for a word, she mumbled it in German, Haroun supplied the translation—“yes, they make for me a cremation. Dancing. Music. Spicy food served on banana leafs. Like a festival. We sail to Singapore and I fly home. Not a long trip but a nice one. I love the dancing. Ketjak! The Monkey Dance!”

That was the most she had said since the moment I met her. It was not exactly self-revelation, but it was something — something, though, that did not invite comment or further questions. It was a weird explanation, a sort of truncated traveler’s tale. She was so wealthy she was not obliged to supply colorful detail. I wanted to ask her about the cremation — I wanted to joke about it: So they killed and burned someone in your honor? — but irony is lost on Germans.

“No more questions, Haroun,” I said. “You know everything.”

“Where is the olives?” Gräfin asked.

We were passing a settlement signposted Nicosia.

“Just ahead, beyond Sperlinga.” There was something anxious in Haroun’s helpfulness that suggested he was afraid of her. He said, “Bustano — that is not Italian. It is from Arabic. Bustan is 'garden.' Caltanissetta, near here, has a place Gibil Habib. From Arabic, Gebel Gabib, because it is a hill.”

“But where is the olives?” Gräfin asked again, in the impatient and unreasonable tone of a child.

The olives was what she called the place, but Bustano was not a village, it was an estate, outside the pretty town of Sperlinga — many acres, a whole valley of neat symmetrical rows of ancient olive trees, and at the end of a long driveway a magnificent villa, like a manor house, three stories of crusty stucco with a red tiled roof, and balconies, and an enormous portico under which we drove and parked.

A man appeared — not the squat stout Sicilian farmer I was used to but a tall elegant-looking man in a soft yellow sweater and light-colored slacks and sunglasses. His dark skin was emphasized by his white hair, and there were wisps of it like wings above his ears. He greeted us, and though I spoke to him in Italian — and he deftly complimented me — Gräfin and Haroun spoke to him in French, to which he replied in fluent French. I smiled and nodded and stepped aside. I understood a little of what they said, but my study of Italian had driven the French I knew out of my head. I could hear what was being suggested. The Italian olive baron was urging us in French to come inside and look around and to relax.

I said in Italian, “I need to walk a little after that long ride.”

“Yes, you are welcome,” the man said in English, which disconcerted me. “Over there is a little pond, with ducks. And many flowers for you. Bellina.”

Haroun said he would come with me. We walked to the ornamental lily pond. Haroun picked a flower and held it to his nose.

I said, “He's right. It is bellina.”

Haroun shrugged. “The flowers, yes. But the trees. The frantoio. The storage and cellars.” He crumpled his face, which meant, I am not impressed. “It is not great quality. Toscano is better. But this villa is charming — very comfortable. And the Gräfin wants it. She likes the business.” He made a gesture of uncorking a bottle and pouring. “`This is my olive oil. I grow it. I press it. You eat it’—she is a romantic, you see?”

He had a way, in speaking of Gräfin, of being able to turn his criticism into a compliment, which made me admire him for his loyalty.

I plucked the petals from the flower I was holding and said in a stilted way — I had been practicing the speech: “This is nice, very pleasant. And you have been very kind to me. But — forgive me if I’m wrong — I feel you expect something from me. That you are arranging something. That you want me for some purpose. Tell me.”

I was glad we were outside, alone. I would never have been able to say this back in Taormina, at the palazzo, where he had made me a guest. This setting, the olive groves, made me confident.

Haroun looked away. “See how they dig and scratch the roots to fertilize the tree. Some of these trees are hundreds of years old. Maybe here in Norman times.” He walked ahead of me, and he glanced back at the villa in which Gräfin had vanished with the elegant olive man.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You are very intelligent,” he said. “I like that. Very quick. Bold, too, I can say.”

Two things struck me about this speech. The first was that he wasn’t telling me what he really felt — that my intelligence made him uneasy. Second, even then I knew that when someone complimented me in that way, he was about to ask a favor.

As a way of defying him, and taking a gratuitous risk, I told him this.

“You are my guest, so you should be a little more polite to me,” he said, laughing in a peculiar mirthless way to show me he was offended.

So I knew then that what I had said was true and that his reply was a reprimand. Given the fact that I had accepted his hospitality, I should have felt put in my place, but I resisted, wishing to feel free to say anything I liked.

He said, “What do you think of the Gräfin?”

“I don't know anything about her.”

“Exactly. You are right,” he said. “She is a great mystery. That is why I love her.” He came closer to me. I seldom noticed anything more about Haroun than his beaky nose, yet his nose was so big and expressive it was all I needed to notice. “But when you see the Gräfin, what do you feel?”

What did this man want? I said, “I feel curious. I feel she is very nice.”

“She is fantastic,” he said, another reprimand. “She has everything. But do you believe me when I say to you she is lonely?”

“I believe you.”

“Because you are intelligent. You can see.”

“But you’re her friend. So how can she be lonely?”

“That’s the mystery, you see,” Haroun said. “I am her friend, yes. I am also her doctor. I qualified in Baghdad, I studied more in Beirut. I went to Germany for further study. I did my residence in Freiburg. And I stayed there. The Gräfin became my patient.”

We had begun to kick through the avenues between the rows of olive trees. Men were trimming the trees, lopping branches, fussing with ladders and buckets.

“A doctor can be friendly with a patient, but not intimate,” he said. “So we travel, and I take care of her. But it ends there.”

“What a shame,” I said, hoping for more.

“But you see, even if I were not her doctor I could not help her,” he said. He was looking away. “I am of a different disposition.” His gaze fell upon a strapping bare-chested man with a pruning hook, and Haroun glanced back as we walked on, seeming to hold a conversation with his eyes alone, the bare-chested man, too, responding with a subtly animated and replying gaze.

“What a shame.”

“It is how God made me.”

“I think you want me to be her friend.”

“More than friend, maybe.”

“I see.”

As though he too had been practicing sentences, he said, “I desire you to woo her.”

The expression made me smile.

“Do you find her attractive?”

I had to admit that I did. She was pretty in a brittle old-fashioned way. She was chic, she was demanding. Yes, she was much older than me — I could not tell how much; thirty-five, perhaps — and I was twenty-one. But strangely, her age did not prejudice me against her. I was attracted to her for it, for the oddness of it. She was certainly unlike any woman I had ever met — in fact, she was a woman; I did not know any women. I had only slept with girls, the nubile, pleading, marriage-minded girls like Fabiola. What did a woman want? Not marriage. Perhaps a woman of such experience as Gräfin wanted everything but marriage, and that included debauchery, and that I craved.

“But she’s not interested in me.”

“Because she doesn’t know you,” Haroun said, and I hated him for agreeing with me.

We walked some more, Haroun steering our course toward more young men trimming the thick twisted olive trees.

“Another question,” he said. “Do you find Taormina to your taste?”

“Oh, yes.”

The prompt way I answered showed that I had been a little reluctant in replying to his first question — the one about her. My sudden eagerness about Taormina made him laugh.

“What is it about Taormina?” he asked.

“Taormina has existed continuously for over two thousand years and has always been beautiful. People have gone there for its beauty — great people, famous people. I want to be one of them.”

“You ask me what I want,” Haroun said. “I want you to be content in Taormina. I want my friend to be content. I think you can find contentment together.”

I saw exactly what he meant: he was, in a word, pimping for Gräfin. Well, I was not shocked. I was pleased. I was even flattered. I liked the obliqueness that had characterized the beginning — his getting me a room at the Palazzo d’Oro. And I liked the fact that he was petitioning me, soliciting my help in performing a certain specific task, as in a fairy tale’s plot. I liked his asking me to do him this favor; for his strange request gave me some power.

“You will be my guest,” he said.

His way of saying that he would support me at the hotel for this romance.

“And the guest of the Gräfin too.”

“What a funny name,” I said.

He half smiled with a distinct alertness, as though divining through a slip I had made that I was not so bright as I appeared.

“Not a name. Her name is Sabine, but I would never call her that.”

“Why not?”

He looked a little shocked, and he stiffened and said, “Because she is the Gräfin. It is her title. You would say Countess.”

“From her family?”

“From her husband. The Graf.”

With that revelation I was dazzled, I was lost. But before I could reply, there was a scurrying sound on the road — a boy summoning us to the house.

“If the answer is no, you must leave tomorrow,” Haroun said in a very businesslike way, as though trying to conclude a difficult sale, and he started toward the house where the olive man and the Gräfin stood waiting for us.

3

The day dawned fine and clear, another Sicilian day of high skies and golden heat, and I loved everything I saw and smelled — the prickly aroma of pine needles and hot bricks, the whiff of salt water from the blue sea, the cool air on my shaded balcony, my freshly laundered clothes, the new espadrilles I had bought in town, my breakfast of fruit and coffee, my feet outstretched on the chaise longue. I was reading Il Gattopardo, a novel — written by a Sicilian prince — recently published, which Fabiola had given to me so that I would be encouraged to improve my Italian. I read it slowly, using a dictionary with a sort of stealth, as though not wanting to admit I needed help. I had it in mind to visit the villa mentioned in the novel, Donnafugata, another beautiful name to drop. Donnafugata was in Agrigento province, in the village of Santa Margherita di Belice. I would go on a sketching tour, doing the settings of the novel, and I even imagined buying a special sketchbook, titled “Donnafugata,” and filling it with this dramatic topography. In that moment on my balcony, which was full of promise and fragrant with the Taormina morning, I loved my life.

After breakfast I walked downstairs to the terrace, where I knew the two of them would be.

“Good morning,” Haroun said.

“Hello,” I said with as much friendliness as I could muster, trying to look at the Gräfin's face, which of course was turned aside. She was idly examining her gloves, twisting the lacy fingers to give them a tight fit.

“You mentioned something about leaving Taormina,” Haroun said.

“I changed my mind. I think I will stay awhile.”

Haroun smiled, exhaled, and looked away. The Gräfin turned her big blue eyes on me with curiosity, but again peering as though she hardly knew me.

“Contessa,” I said.

She shrugged and lifted her gloved hand again, a fan of fingers that held her attention. And while she was preoccupied I imagined kissing her, holding her head, sucking slowly on her lips, slipping my hands beneath her dress and stroking her body.

Yes, I was staying. I excused myself by claiming I was poor; not ruthless but desperate. This excuse made me untruthful, it made me willing.

Haroun had given me the impression that the Gräfin was lonely and desperate. But in spite of that epiphany on my balcony, I was myself lonely, and I was probably feeling more desperation than she had ever known.

To succeed with her I had to convince myself that I desired her. I had to make her desire me. I did desire her, yet I could see that she was not particularly interested in me. She was vain, she seemed shallow, even her most offhand remarks sounded boastful, she was certainly aloof — now I knew why: not just money, she was an aristocrat.

Gräfin was a title, not a name. I had just found out her name, but I did not know her well enough to use it when speaking to her. I was still wondering whether to address her by her formal distancing title, for it was impossible for me to use her title without feeling submissive, even groveling.

Lonely? I did not think so, nor did it seem that she needed me.

There is wealth that makes people restless and impatient and showy — American wealth, on the whole. But the Gräfin was European. Her wealth had made her passive and presumptuous and oblique, indolent, just a spender, and as a countess she seemed to me regal now, queenly, superior-seeming, slow and somewhat delicate, even fragile.

I found it hard to get her attention. That morning, pleased by my announcing that I would be staying, Haroun began to devise ways of giving me access to the Gräfin. To me, his ruses were transparent; but she was so bored and inattentive she did not seem to suspect a thing. At the beginning Haroun developed a stomach upset; later that morning he disclosed his infirmity in a solemn, self-mocking way.

“Africa is taking its revenge upon my entrails.”

“What are you talking about?” the Gräfin demanded, without seeming to care about Haroun's reply.

Another obvious trait of very rich European aristocrats was their literal-mindedness, I felt: you didn’t become wealthy by being witty and alliterative, or hyperbolic like Haroun. He was the Gräfin's retainer, a sort of lap dog and flunky, roles I was rehearsing for myself.

“Africa?” I said.

“Africa comincia a Napoli,” he said.

“What revenge?” the Gräfin asked.

“The Visigoths came here, as you know, and they engaged in systematic plunder, raping and pillaging. And I am being blamed for these misfortunes.”

“How can that be so? You are Arab.”

Haroun's toothy smile was a keen expression of pain. But gallantly he said, “Not an Arab, my dear, but a Christian. Chaldean. From Baghdad. We spoke English at home. My father was a distinguished merchant. He had powerful friends.”

“You are not white. You are semitisch. Arab-speaking.”

“You are speaking English, dear Gräfin, but are you an Englishwoman?”

She said to me, “He makes me tired with his arguments, but he is my doctor, so I must listen.”

“I am a witch doctor,” Haroun said.

“Idiot!” the Gräfin said. She hated this sort of facetiousness.

Haroun said sadly, “I am not well.”

The Gräfin gave him a querying stare, as though he was a clock face showing the wrong time.

“What will I do now?” she said, twisting her gloved hands in impatience. “This cannot be so.”

“I will take some medicine.”

“You really are saying you are sick?” The Gräfin was indignant. “How can the doctor be sick?”

Tapping his tummy through his shirt buttons, Haroun said, “I shall improve very soon.”

“What about today?”

Still, she clung to him. Hearing this exchange, I got a distinct sense of witnessing a father and daughter at odds — an indulgent father, a spoiled daughter. This did not put me off or intimidate me, nor did it diminish the desire I had for her. If she had been highly intelligent and subtle, I would have been more wary, but her diabolical girlishness was something I felt I could deal with. Besides, her air of spiteful superiority was like a goad to me; I found something stimulating in it, a kind of spirit. I saw the Countess on a stallion, galloping through gold shafts of light, smacking the big excited beast with a riding crop and digging her heels into his sweaty flanks.

“I must go to my room,” Haroun said.

“You cannot leave me alone.”

“Gräfin, you are not alone.”

All this time they were speaking English for my benefit in this stilted way, yet the Gräfin refused to acknowledge my presence. When they were alone — I knew this from my approaches to their terrace table — they spoke German.

“Would you be so kind?” Haroun said to me. “The Gräfin will need some things from the town. A particular shop near the station.”

“Mazzarò?”

“Yes, down there.”

“What things?”

The Gräfin behaved as though the question was inappropriate. She pouted and looked annoyed. In her role of little helpless girl she refused to make things easier by naming the things she wanted.

“Cosmetics, newspapers, some chocolate, a fruit drink, bottled.”

“Maybe the hotel could send someone.”

“You see?” the Gräfin said to Haroun. “He does not want to help.”

“I do want to help,” I said.

“The boys at the hotel are careless. They hold the chocolate all wrong. They melt it in their hot hands. How can I eat it?”

Whatever else I did, I would not bring the Countess melted chocolate.

Haroun said, “You will assist?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll go right away. But I will need a list. I mean, what kind of fruit drink?”

Haroun took out a prescription pad and wrote the shopping list on it while the Gräfin looked away, seemingly preoccupied — with what? I could not imagine what was in this woman’s mind. She was like another species: I did not discern a single thing we had in common. The paradox was that this sense of difference made me desire her, but not in a way I had ever felt toward a woman. Though I did not fully formulate the thought at the time, I wanted to dominate her, and I saw that our difference gave me an advantage. It was true that I knew nothing of aristocracy, but I was astute enough to understand that she knew absolutely nothing of me or my background. I also guessed that her wealth had made her complacent and unsuspicious — Haroun ran all her errands, like this one he was foisting onto me.

The shopping list, which I came to see as a young girl's ritual list, was very specific: mascara, a copy of today’s Bild Zeitung, a large bar of Toblerone (“no nuts”), and Orangina — three small bottles. She believed that the Orangina served at the Palazzo d’Oro was adulterated: her general belief was that Italians were cheats and dolts. She said that she liked Taormina because it was not popular with Italians.

I was given a string bag and directions to the lower town, Mazzarò, at the seaside — twenty minutes down, forty minutes up. I enjoyed the walk, for it reminded me of my freedom, reminded me especially that there was an adjacent world to the one in which I lived more or less like a house pet, with the same advantages and disadvantages: I was well fed and well housed but I had a master and a mistress jerking at my leash.

“This should cover it,” Haroun said, handing me a sheaf of new, inky ten-thousand-lire notes. The Gräfin turned away as she always did when someone produced money, or a bill to pay.

I loved walking down the Via Pirandello into Mazzarò, by the shore below the cliffs of Taormina. The settlement was hardly more than a village and still inhabited by many fishermen. I drank an espresso at the local cafe, exchanged pleasantries with the owner, caught the eye of the pretty girl wiping the tables, and then set off to do the Gräfin’s shopping, a task so simple as to seem unnecessary — but perhaps I was being tested? I didn’t care. The weather was perfect, late August, and the life I had begun to live there was a variation of much of what I had seen in Italian movies.

In those black-and-white neo-realist movies, a solitary fellow, bright but hard up, encounters some bored wealthy people on the shores of the Mediterranean and is ambiguously adopted — the hitchhiker, the chance meeting, the stranger at the party, the wanderer. What seemed like random and apparently meaningless events were full of tension and complexity and were part of a larger design, which, as the movie advanced, became apparent. The arrangement was not American — it was European, dissolute, heavily textured, unmistakably vicious, with shocking plot twists — Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Rossellini. The films featured hot days, long nights, strangers, whispers, risks, excesses, and they were all tantalizingly vague. Even then I thought of these years as the era of the chance encounter. The foreign hitchhiker was picked up by the wealthy jaded Italians and from that moment his life was changed.

I had been rehearsing this sort of meeting ever since arriving in Italy. And here at last I had been chosen to play the part and was living it. I told myself: Sometimes life is like that — you fantasize so intensely that when the opportunity presents itself you know exactly what to do, repeating moves you have practiced in your head.

Haroun had given me more money than I needed for the items on the Gräfin’s shopping list. Obviously he meant me to keep the change — and there was so much of it that I felt secure: money in my pocket, a lovely place to stay, all my meals paid for, and a mission — the easiest part of all, so I thought — becoming the Gräfin’s lover.

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.

“He is a doctor! How can a doctor be sick?”

Haroun remained in his room all this time. I was certain he was faking his stomach upset, but he was resolute in sticking to his story. I told the Gräfin that he was probably improving and that we would see him any day now.

“He doesn’t care about me,” she said.

“He does,” I said. “And I do too.”

She frowned, looking insulted and intruded upon.

“How do you feel?”

“Not well,” she said, still sounding insulted. As though it was none of my business. She was eating chocolate, kissing dabs of it from her lacy fingertips — and it all looked like fellating foreplay to my eager eyes.

“Maybe I can help.”

She raised her head and looked at me as if I had just dropped from the sky. She said, “What could you do?”

Even though she was wearing sunglasses I could tell from the curl of her lips that she was scowling.

“Anything you suggest.”

She went a bit limp just then, indicating a pause with her whole body, and her silence roused me. I was standing next to her, my tense cock level with her face. Still she did not say anything. Could she smell my desire?

She looked away and said in a little-girl voice, “Haroun brings me presents. You don't bring me presents. You don't care.”

I was not insulted. I was fascinated: I fantasized that she was a small girl urging me to corrupt her. I was willing, the thought would not leave me, and I was now pretty sure that she knew what she was doing to me.

The next day, dipping into the stash of money she had given me, I bought her a bunch of flowers from the flower seller — another pretty girl — at her stall on the Corso.

“They will die unless they are put into water,” the Gräfin said.

But she was pleased, I could tell, the little girl’s satisfaction was as expressive as the little girl’s tyranny. In the following days I brought her a pot of honey, a lump of dense amber, a chunk of lapis lazuli, a length of lace (the black intricate sort that matched her gloves and panties), a small nervous bird in a wicker cage the shape of an onion. I used the money she had given me, for there was always a wad of lire left over, but so twisted from the way she crumpled and handled it, the notes had taken on the appearance of a leafy vegetable — wilted kale, dying lettuce.

By now Haroun had emerged from his seclusion, frowning and clutching his stomach. “This is bad. When I have such an illness of the bowels it is like giving birth”—he made a face and grunted with pain—“to monsters.” Then he seemed to forget his ailment and he said, “You are succeeding?”

“Of course.”

The higher pitch in my voice was my inability to disguise my forcing a reply. Yet, even though I felt I was getting nowhere, it amused me to think that my efforts to woo this difficult woman were my bread and butter. Always I saw myself in a complex picture — these days it was like a full-page woodcut from a book of folktales.

The next day the Gray Dwarf went to the Wanderer’s room and beckoned to him, and conducted him to a stone tablet on which was inscribed the task that had to be performed if the palace was to be released from enchantment.

I was the Wanderer of the tale, dressed in my newly bought tunic, on the parapet of the palace, perplexed because the task I had been given was to woo the Countess, who looked haughty framed in the boudoir window of her palatial tower; and if I failed, I would be banished from the palace. This was not fanciful, it was the literal truth, for I was a young wanderer, she was a countess, and the Palazzo d’Oro had once been the palace of a principessa.

If he did not succeed, he would be banished forever.

Haroun vanished again, groaning, and on the night of his disappearance, the Gräfin said she was hungry, which was her oblique way of telling me that I would be joining her at dinner. We drank wine together in silence on the terrace. As usual, I sat fantasizing, imagining myself licking her cleavage, fondling her, and in one mood dominating her and in another being her sex slave as she led me naked to her bedroom, ordering me around like a dog. I was tipsy when the food was served and I flirted with her, none of it verbal but rather a sort of overfamiliar manner of gesturing and facial expressions, behaving like a much loved and trusted waiter, which seemed the only relationship that worked with her.

She was wearing the dress I liked the most, the white crocheted one, all loops and holes and peekaboo, loose on her slender figure, her shoulder bare, her long collar affording glimpses of her breasts, which slipped against her dress as she leaned and moved, and now and then a nipple would catch and gape through a loop. Something sparkled in her hair, a small tiara, and tight around her neck was a ribbon of black velvet stitched with pearls, which she wore like a dog collar. She had applied her reddest lipstick, with a gleaming redness that made her lips swell, and in the candlelight of the Palazzo d’Oro she was beautiful to me, just like the vision of the Countess in the folktale that I was illustrating in my mind.

I desired her, I ravished her with my eyes, I gaped and I swallowed. But even as I was staring at her in this way, enjoying a fantasy of her sitting on me, demanding that I lick her, she began complaining about Haroun, and a hard and ugly expression surfaced on her features, defined by shadows.

I said, to divert her, “How about joining the natives in the passeggiata?”

On Saturday nights, the locals in Taormina paraded, chattering, along the Corso from the church of Santa Caterina down to the Duomo: men with men, women with women, children playing, groups of boys eyeing groups of girls. It was like a tribal rite, and sometimes foreign visitors like us, couples usually, tagged along for the fun, for it was a great noisy pleasurable parade.

“What a vulgar idea,” the Gräfin said. “I would never do that.”

“But I would protect you.” I was still a little drunk.

She touched her fingers to her nose. She sniffed. She said, “I will go to my room.”

This sounded like an invitation. I walked with her to the second floor, loving each step, following slightly behind her, anticipating what was to come, wishing with all my heart that I could cup her buttocks in my hands. I imagined that I could feel the heat of her body, the warmth of her bare skin, through the perforations in her crocheted dress.

At her room, she opened the door; in a distant second room I saw her bed, a frilly coverlet, some fur slippers. She turned briefly and said, “Good night.”

I was tall enough to be able to look down into the collar of her dress and see each of her breasts, swinging slightly as she turned and then trembling as though eager to be touched.

I leaned and put my face near hers, to kiss her. Swiftly, she pushed me with her hands and made as if to bat me on my head. I jerked backward, noticing that she had exposed her breasts even more in that lunging motion.

“What do you think you are doing?” she said through gritted teeth.

Although she had only grazed me, I reacted as though I had been slapped in the face. I was so embarrassed I was off balance. I tried to explain. She rejected me, rejected my explanation. She entered her room — fled into it — and shut the door hard.

A foot-shuffle down the hall told me that someone had heard, and that bothered me more than anything.

The next day she was at breakfast as usual, looking composed, even refreshed; no sign of distress.

I said, “I am very sorry about last night.”

Just a slight flash of her eyebrows indicated she had heard me, but there was nothing else, and not a word.

I said, “I’m afraid I was a little drunk.”

For a moment I thought she was going to cry. Her skin wrinkled around her eyes, her mouth quivered, and she struggled with it, the effort showing on the thin pale skin of her face, and as she fought it her eyes glistened. Then the emotion passed, and though she did not say anything I knew she was angry — because of what I had tried to do, or because of my lame apology, I did not know, but I saw that afterward she turned to stone. Except for our chewing, breakfast was silent, and it was all so painful I finally crept away, feeling like the dog I was.

Haroun recovered that day. He looked brighter, he offered to run the errands, taking a taxi to the shops below in Mazzarò. He spent the day with the Gräfin and by afternoon he looked harassed and impatient. I began to surmise that in his absence he had been enjoying a dalliance with one of the boys on the staff, that he resented having to reappear for duty with the Gräfin. They spoke German that day. I was excluded, and it seemed to me that not I but Haroun was being given an ultimatum.

That night, exactly a week after I had arrived in Taormina, Haroun said, “The Gräfin is very unhappy. You must go.”

“I did my best,” I said.

He shook his head. He said, “No. I have failed.”

It amazed me that he did not offer me any blame. He reproached himself. He sucked on his cigarette and spat out the smoke, looking rueful, hardly taking any notice of me, and not mentioning the fact that he had been paying my hotel room and all my expenses for a week, enriching me.

“She does not think she is beautiful,” Haroun said.

That was not at all the impression I had. The Gräfin seemed impossibly vain about her beauty, and I knew from the casual way she moved her body and exposed herself that she was utterly unselfconscious, which was the ultimate sexuality: no matter how many clothes she wore, she was at heart a nudist.

“She is lovely,” I said.

“You think so?” He looked into my face as though testing it for truthfulness.

“Yes, I do.”

“She doesn’t agree. She is not convinced.”

Haroun stared in silence at the stars and dropped his gaze to where they sparkled on the sea.

“A lovely face,” I said. “Like a Madonna.”

This was a bit excessive, but what did it matter? I was on my way out. Why not leave them smiling? But Haroun liked what I said, and nodded heavily, looking moved.

“If you truly think so, you must find a way of convincing her. I will give you some days. Otherwise you must go.”

4

That was my challenge: the strange task assigned by the Gray Dwarf to the Wanderer in the folktale, the young man on the parapet of the palace. The Countess was still in her tower, facing her looking glass — and in my version of this scene she had a mirrored glimpse of the young man on the balcony above her, as well as of her pretty face.

I had to succeed or else I would be banished. That was the narrative. But there was something beneath it. I had not been lying to Haroun in praising the Gräfin. I thought she was beautiful, I knew she was wealthy, she seemed like a sorceress, I desired her. I wanted badly to make love to this seemingly unattainable woman, who did nothing but insult me and reject my advances.

I did not want to think that I was in a trap. But a week in that great hotel, a week of luxury, had spoiled me—“corrupted” is too big a word; I was softened. I had become accustomed to the sweet life that, up to then, I had known only in Italian films. I was habituated to luxury, the easiest habit to acquire, like a taste for candy or for lying in a hammock, like being on a fine yacht and saying, “I don’t want to get off — sail on!”

In this mood I had fantasies of inviting Fabiola, the Principessa, down to the palazzo and dazzling her with my new clothes (gift of the Gräfin) and my new friends, my vastly improved circumstances, my money. She would have been impressed, but not enough. She had a title but no money. She would have been pleased for me in her generous way, and then she would have begged me to tell her I loved her, implored me to utter the word. After that soft pitiful pleading, she would have raged at my selfishness, saying as she had said before, “This is meaningless. You will just leave me. I will be so sad!”

That cured me of wanting Fabiola to visit Taormina.

As for me, I was not ready to leave. I had begun to love waking to each hot day in the comfort of the palazzo; I had even begun to enjoy the challenge of the Gräfin, seeing myself as the youth being tested by the lovely Countess and her riddling adviser in the palace; I was enacting the struggle in the folk story. I was the young Wanderer in the woodcut, an evocative figure, black and pivotal, wearing a half-smile and looking jaunty, poised between success and failure.

I did not take her rejection personally. It was for me to solve the riddle, to find a way to make love to her. The oddest part was that I suspected that Fabiola was a virgin — and I could have had her merely by speaking the formula “I love you.” The Gräfin, I gathered, had been married twice, had had many lovers, she constantly alluded to intrigues and liaisons in far-off places — and I could get nowhere with her. But the Gräfin’s obstinacy did not turn me off; it made me calculating and desirous.

Haroun, confused by my lack of progress, was by turns abusive and encouraging.

Abusive: “How can you take my money and do nothing? You are selfish, in love with yourself. You pretend to be one of the elite, but I know you to be a poor American student. Oh, yes, maybe intelligent and you will amount to something, or maybe you will be like this always — taking money to look pretty, and lying to people and misleading them.”

He went on in this vein but I just stared at him. He had a strong Iraqi accent overlaid by certain German mispronunciations. I found it hard to take any abuse seriously when it was spoken in such a heavy, unconvincing accent, since it all sounded faked or approximated.

“I could cut you off today and you would have to depart on a train traveling in the third-class carriage with all those dirty people, those stinking men and thieving boys, and you wouldn’t think so much of yourself then!”

Stinking men and thieving boys were the object of his desire, and so this was a rather ambiguous threat.

I could bring you down, he was saying. But he was wrong, for I had arrived in Taormina with nothing and it made no difference to me if I left the same way. I could not be reduced, for I came from nowhere. I was strengthened by that thought. Having nothing to lose, I felt indestructible.

Haroun was not always so abusive. He could be the opposite, praising, highly pleased.

On one of these occasions we were on the stage of the Teatro Greco, the dramatic outdoor theater, the ancient setting within sight of Etna and the sea. In the purest gold there are many russet shades, among them the pink of the rosiest flesh, which is also the golden pink of sunset flames. From the direction we were facing it would have been easy to mistake the sunset for an eruption of the volcano, and even for the heat of a woman’s glowing body. Clapping his hands he said, “You say she is beautiful. I did not command you to say that, correct? You say her face is like a Madonna — your own word. I am happy! This is very positive. It means you believe it. I did not tell you what to say.”

I liked him in this encouraging mood, because he was so lively and joyous himself — inexplicable to me, but pleasant to hear someone so attached to his friend that he glowed when she was praised.

“You thought these thoughts yourself, from your own heart and brain. It is what I always hope — that people will make up their own minds and go forward.”

I thanked him for understanding me.

“But the Gräfin does not understand,” he said. “You are not so convincing to this wise woman.”

“I’ll try again.”

He said, “People’s lives are much the same. The rich envy the poor. The poor envy the rich. People with great riches are afraid of losing what they have. Famous people fear falling into obscurity. Beautiful women are fearful. Everyone in the world has the same fears.”

Was it the setting, this Greek theater, that inspired this speech? He was strutting on the cracked marble of the ancient stage and striking poses. What he said made no sense to me, and I was on the point of arguing with him when he spoke again.

“Of growing old and ugly. Of dying.”

I almost laughed at this, because I saw those fears as so distant for me here in Taormina, where I seemed just born and almost immortal. I wondered if he and the Gräfin had returned to Taormina to ease their fears.

The Gräfin was inert. Did she know that she was the subject of our strolls around the town, our whispered discussions among the ancient ruins of Taormina? But why should she care? She was above all this, she was powerful, she was resistant. Someone with little or no desire seemed very strong to me. It was hard to influence such a person. The Gräfin's rejection of me was a sign of her strength.

In the second week I saw this wooing of the Gräfin, this ritual courtship, as a battle of wills. I also believed that I was strong — at least wanted to believe it: Haroun had said what I felt deep in my heart. And for all their power, wealthy people always, I thought, had an inner weakness, which was their need to be wealthy, their fear of poverty. I had no such fear. What confused me was that I suspected them to be undeserving — lucky rather than accomplished. That luck had given them privileges, but left them with a fear of losing their luck. They were no better than me, but they were on top. I knew I was anyone’s equal, even the Gräfin’s. But I told myself that I lacked funds.

Even then, dazzled as I was, I felt resentful toward the people of power who had not created their own wealth. They were children of privilege. I consoled myself with the belief that privilege made them weak, and I had proof of it, for my short time in Taormina had weakened me.

The Gräfin was a countess by an accident of fate. She was someone’s daughter, someone’s lover, someone’s ex-wife, just a lucky egg. She had done nothing in her life except be decorative. Her life was devoted to her appearance — being beautiful, nothing else. Yet what seemed shallow, her impossible vanity — her wish to be pretty, nothing else — attracted me. She was completely self-regarding, she existed to be looked at. She was utterly selfish; her narcissism made me desire her.

I wanted, in my passion for her, to discover her weakness and to awaken passion and desire in her. I feared that there might be none, that she was too powerful in other ways for these emotions. So far, I had failed to awaken even mild interest; so far, she had not asked me a single question — did not know who I was or where I came from.

I made no active attempt to woo her now. My one pass at her had been a humiliation for us both. But neither was I submissive. I continued to buy the German newspaper and the other trivial items from Mazzarò, I flunkied for her, watching her closely. I did not volunteer any information, did not allude to anything in my own life, nor did I ask her any questions. I imitated her; I put on a mask of indifference.

My coolness worked, or seemed to. I sometimes found her staring at me, silently quizzing me. But when I turned to meet her gaze she glanced away, pretending not to care.

Late one afternoon in the large crowded Piazzale Nove Aprile, some street urchins, Gypsy children perhaps, began pestering us, asking for money, tugging our clothes — the Gräfin hated to be touched. When I told them to go away, they began making obscene remarks, really vulgar ones, variations of “Go fuck your mother.” I took this to be commonplace obscenity, but then it struck me that they might be commenting on the difference in our ages, the Gräfin’s and mine, for she was noticeably older. That angered me and I chased them away, kicking one of the boys so hard he shouted in pain and called out, saying that I had assaulted him.

“Di chi è la colpa?” a shopkeeper jeered — So whose fault is that?

“Haroun never treats them that way,” the Gräfin said. “I think he’s a bit afraid of them.”

That sounded like praise. We walked some more; still she was inscrutable behind her dark glasses.

“Or maybe he likes them too much.”

Recalling their obscenities, I said, “I hate them.”

She gasped in agreement, a kind of wicked thrill. “Yes.”

So that was a point in my favor, my harrying the ragged children. I earned more points not long after that. The Gräfin was confounded and angered by anything mechanical. She saw such objects as enemies, they made her fearful. Breakdowns, even the chance of one, horrified her. She was very timid in the real world of delays and reverses — things she had no control over, which produced anxiety and discomfort.

We had gone back to Bustano, the olive estate, one day. She said, “Harry says he cannot accompany me, so you must come”—one of her usual graceless invitations. As she had hired a driver, I sat next to him, the Gräfin having the entire back seat to herself. We traveled in silence and I missed Haroun now. I looked for anything familiar: the village of Randazzo, the signs of old earthquake damage, the Mussolini slogan.

At Bustano we were greeted by the owner and some servants. I was not invited into the villa, though the owner (yellow shirt, pale slacks, sunglasses), with gestures of helplessness and fatalism, indicated that if it had been up to him I would have been welcome. I trembled to think what he made of me, in my white slacks and white espadrilles, my striped jersey, my new blue yachting cap. She had bought me the cap on the day of the pestering children.

“The cap now, the yacht later,” she had said, and what she intended as humor sounded like mockery to me.

On the way back to Taormina, at dusk, nowhere near any village, on a mountain road beyond Troina, the car stalled at a stop sign — just faltered, chugged and coughed to a stop, like a death from black lung.

“This is impossible!” The Gräfin was angry. She repeated the sentence, sounding uncertain. She said it again, sounding fearful.

The driver fuddled with the key — the ignition key! — and stamped on the gas and hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. He knew absolutely nothing. He was a villager, he had grown up among animals, not machines. He treated the car as though it was an ox dawdling in its yoke, or a willful shivering dray horse. His Sicilian instinct was to whip and punch the car.

I told the Gräfin this, hoping to impress her, but she was too fearful to listen.

The car had faltered before this. When we had set out from Taormina it had been slow in starting up, and sometimes died while idling. I suspected a weak battery, perhaps a bad connection on the terminal. The engine was good enough. The car was an Alfa-Romeo TI.

“What is your name?”

“Fulvio, sir.”

“Open the hood, Fulvio.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Gräfin said, “What do you know about these things?”

“It's a good car, the Alfa TI. You know what TI stands for?”

“Of course not.”

“Tritolo incluso. Bomb included. Tritolo is TNT.”

That was the joke in Palermo that year, where the Mafiosi were blowing each other up in touring cars like this. The Gräfin did not find this the least bit funny. In fact, she was annoyed by it.

“What can you possibly do?” she said, a sort of belittling challenge.

I said, “It's almost dark. We're not going anywhere. The only other living things here are goats.” I could hear their clinking bells. “What do you think I should do?”

This little speech, so theatrical in its rhetoric and unnecessary detail, served to make her more afraid, which was my intention. But fear also made her nervously bossy, and she began to bully Fulvio in German-accented Italian.

“C’era d’aspettarsela,” he said, meaning, We should have expected this.

I said to the Gräfin, “He doesn't seem to care very much.”

“We must go now to the d'Oro,” she said. “I have had so much to drink. Ich muss mal. I must pass water.”

The idea of relieving herself anywhere except in her suite at the palazzo being out of the question made me smile.

“I have pain here. Ich muss pinkeln,” she said, touching herself unambiguously, and I stopped smiling. “Maybe we need benzina.”

“We've got benzina.” I looked under the hood in the last of the daylight. Although the Alfa was fairly new, the engine was greasy and looked uncared-for. The battery appeared serviceable yet the terminals were gummed up with that bluey-green mold, as lovely and delicate as coral froth, that accumulates on copper wires. I could see that the clamps were loose and sticky with the same froth. This bad connection could have accounted for the faltering start. I easily twisted one terminal and lifted it off, and I guessed that it was overlaid with scum, a sort of metallic spittle.

Flicking the wire onto the terminal produced a strong audible spark. It might be just this simple, I thought. I had dealt with enough cheap old cars to reach this conclusion. A more expensive car would have baffled me, but this was Sicily, and although this was an Alfa-Romeo it held the same battery as a Fiat or an old Ford.

The Gräfin got out, and from her stamping and hand-wringing I could tell that she was bursting for a pee — or a pinkel, as she kept calling it in a little girl’s voice. She berated the driver. I took pleasure in showing her the large greasy engine, of which she knew nothing.

I made an elaborate business of pretending to fuss and fix the engine, tweaking wires, testing wing nuts, tapping the caps on the spark plugs, all the while hoping it was just the battery. Fulvio stood just behind me, sighing, muttering “Mannaggiai morti tui!” —Damn your dead ancestors!

With a broken knife blade I found in a toolbox in the trunk — Fulvio seemed surprised there was a toolbox at all — I scraped the terminals clean, shaving the lead to rid it of scum. I did the same to the clamps.

Fulvio looked hopeful, though it was now fully dark, the goat bells clanking in the deep gully beside the road, the hooves scrabbling on the stony hillside.

The Gräfin said, “What shall we do? It’s all his fault.” She turned to Fulvio and said, “Cretino! Can’t you learn how to fix the car?”

“I am a driver, not a mechanic,” Fulvio said, and made a gesture with his hand and his fingers that can only have meant: This is irrelevant.

“You could try — you could learn,” the Gräfin said.

With another rapid hand gesture, Fulvio said, “If you are born round, you cannot die square.”

“This guy is useless,” I said, laughing at his Sicilian folk wisdom.

“This guy is useless,” she repeated, using my words approvingly. But she was still twitching, needing urgently to pee, clutching her sunglasses as though to ease her need.

“Don't worry. I’ll get you back there. You’ll be fine, Gräfin.”

For the first time, I used her title. She looked at me with a kind of promise, a kind of pleading.

She was now a small girl. I was her father. I scraped away at the terminal for a while longer. Then I tightened the nuts on the clamp — just fuss and delay, for at last I was in control.

“Get out,” I said to Fulvio, a little louder than I should have, but I wanted the Gräfin to hear.

I ostentatiously took the ignition key and sat in the driver’s seat. Seeing the Gräfin beating her feet beside the car, I said, “Sit here,” and indicated the passenger seat. Getting in awkwardly, made fragile by her fullness, she looked more than ever like a little girl.

I turned the key, pumped the gas, got the engine to chug, and then it roared.

“Ai!” The Gräfin clapped. “Hurry.”

“Get in the back seat, Fulvio,” I said.

So we drove back to Taormina sitting side by side, the Gräfin and I, Fulvio muttering “Mannaggia” in the back seat.

The Gräfin said, “I can hold it. Ich muss dringend pinkeln. I need to pass water but I like the feeling. The pressure makes a nice feeling. Hee-hee!”

She was five or six again, a pinkel on her mind, with her daddy in the car on the road heading home, but I was still thinking, What?

“I don’t want to make an accident!”

We were going up the steep hairpin curves of the Via Pirandello to the town. She had never seemed so frail and small and helpless, so lost in the world. Gratitude did not come naturally to her, yet I could sense something like an admission of her dependency in her respectful way of addressing me.

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.”

“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 appetite 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 inconvenient, 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.

The resentment that built up in me during the day — a furious feeling that she seemed deliberately to provoke — I unleashed on her at night as soon as the door to her suite was locked and bolted. The double lock was necessary.

One night, early on in our lovemaking, she was loudly groaning and I was butting her hard with my hips. There was a knock at the door and a voice of worried, querying concern.

“Contessa…”

The Gräfin instantly ceased her pleading moans and through gritted teeth cried, “Via!”— Go away!

And almost without a transition we continued, all her bravado gone, for while outside the room she was an insulting countess, inside she was a cowering peasant girl, kneeling before me and pleading, imploring my hardened cock, holding it with her gloved hands, and caressing it with her lips and tongue with murmurs of satisfaction.

When she wanted something particular, she asked for it obliquely, using the childish method of paradoxical injunction — the way a panting bright-eyed child says, “Better not chase me! Better not tickle me!”

Only the Gräfin's suggestions were much more specific: “Whatever you do, I beg you, don't open the drawer of my dresser and find the dog collar and the leash. If you do, I will have to wear it and you will treat me like a dog and force me to lick you and get me on my hands and knees and take me from behind like a mastiff…”

She scattered rugs and pillows and blankets on the floor to protect her knees, for the Gräfin’s preferred position was on all fours, facing the sofa, near enough to rest her head on it, to howl into the cushions and muffle the cries she knew would startle the palazzo's staff again.

Sometimes she rolled over, the way a dog does to have its belly tickled, only she would raise her legs and, pretending to cover herself, claw at the lacy crotch of her panties and protest insincerely, saying “Nein.”

Licking her, humping her, nuzzling her back, buttock-sniffing like a spaniel, I was the dog — and a fierce one, too, for the way she treated me all day. I was the badly whipped and hectored hound that turned on its mistress, but in this case it was just what she wanted.

I did not naturally resist, I had lost the will, but instead I strayed, I procrastinated, absented myself, became scarce, wandered the side streets of Taormina, and generally avoided her during the day, as though not wanting to be reminded of my obligations. Haroun was never around. I guessed he had found a friend. I was the Gräfin’s companion now.

In that week of resentment, my third in Taormina, I began to avoid her more and more, as I attempted to initiate another life in the town, parallel to the one I led at the Palazzo d'Oro. I became friendly with some of the shopkeepers, knew them by their first names, chitchatted with them about the weather, the local soccer team, a boxing match that was about to take place in Palermo. When I mentioned America they said, “Jack Kennedy!” but were otherwise circumspect. They had guessed that I was a German, and while they were friendly I realized they were being polite, for they disliked Germans. But they made an exception for visitors who stayed in Taormina and spent money and handed out tips and, in the Italian way, said they disliked “the other ones — not these.”

All my clothes were from the men’s boutique on the Viale Nolfi, a small street off the Corso. The Gräfin and Haroun had bought me clothes in the Teutonic style — the pointed shoes, the short sports jacket, the narrow trousers, the turtleneck, the mesh shirt, the silk suit — the sort of stylish clothes an idle, self-conscious German wore on vacation. They were so stylish as to be almost formal: the light suit was easily soiled, the shoes had thin soles and were wrong for the cobblestones of Taormina, the turtleneck was too tight, the trousers too close-fitting. I was a dandy — out of character for me, I felt, but it was her desire, German pride mostly, that I should look rich and respectable, in her fashion. And clothing me was another way of making me hers. I had barely realized how I looked until I tried to talk with Italians, most of whom benignly forgave me for being foppish and prosperous.

Waiters in Taormina, however, loved such people as I seemed, for we lingered, we smoked, we had nothing to do, we spent money and humored them and tipped them. One day at the Mocambo, where I had begun to take refuge from the Gräfin — but I went there mainly because the waiters knew me by name — I was addressed by a young woman in Italian. I took her to be a student, maybe French — she had an accent — definitely a traveler: she was dressed like a hiker and carried a sun-faded bag and a map. She wore a headscarf which in its simplicity gave her a wholesome peasant look that was also chic. As she spoke, a waiter wandered over to listen.

“Scusi, signore, cerchiamo una pernione qui non più caro,” she said. She was looking for a place to stay that was not too expensive.

“Benvenuto, signorina. Vieni a casa mia. C’è libero,” the waiter, Mario, said, urging her to come to his house because it was free.

“Nothing is free,” she said in English, and was so assertive and indignant Mario walked away laughing.

I said, “But everything is expensive in Taormina. How long are you planning to stay?”

She said, “I want to see the Teatro Greco. The Duomo. Lawrence's house.”

I said, “Lawrence lived in the Via Fontana Vecchia. 'A snake came to my water-trough / On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, / To drink there…'”

“I like how he seemed ‘a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,’” she said. “By the way, your English is excellent.”

“It sure oughtta be.”

She laughed and said, “Where in the States are you from?”

“Long story.”

“I’m at Wellesley, but I am from New York.”

“City?”

“Upstate.”

“I just graduated from Amherst.”

“I know lots of Amherst guys,” she said, and sat down and named a few, names I recognized but none I knew well. “How long have you been in Taormina?”

“A few weeks.” I did not want to admit that it was almost four, because I felt I had been so idle. “I came to see the Lawrence house too.”

“I love that poem.”

“English major?”

“Art history. I've been living in Florence — junior year abroad program. I’m just traveling. I thought I would look around here and then go to Siracusa.”

“I’ve been meaning to go there.”

“Two weeks here and you haven’t got there yet! What’s the attraction in Taormina?”

“Long story,” I said. “La dolce vita. ”

She said, “Men are so lucky. If I just hang around an Italian town looking at buildings for my project, everyone takes me for a whore. That waiter was pretty typical. That’s why I have to keep on the move.”

“Maybe I could come with you to Siracusa.”

“That’s just what they say!”

“I mean, to protect you — to run interference.”

“Maybe we can talk about it,” she said nicely.

She took off her sunglasses, seeming to peel them in one motion from her eyes, which were gray, and she took off her headscarf and shook the dust from it as her hair tumbled to her shoulders. Her hair was streaked by the sunlight and she was slim and a bit damp from her exertion: she had been walking.

I loved her looks and her air of spontaneity and self-reliance, but just as much I loved the fact that we spoke the same language. I had gotten so used to talking with waiters in Italian and with the Gräfin and Haroun in basic English — slowly and always finishing my sentences — that I had almost forgotten the pleasure and directness of talking with another American. Meeting this woman was like meeting my sister — someone from my own family — and I was reminded of who I really was.

She said, “I thought you might be a German. Those shoes. That jacket. It’s the look. Fashion is one of my interests. Usually I can spot an American a mile off. You had me fooled. I think that’s pretty good.”

The Gräfin and Haroun had turned me into a German. I liked the concealment even if I was not keen on the identity.

“I’ve got some German friends here.”

“Italians can’t stand the Tedeschi.”

She spoke knowingly, sure of herself, which irritated me, because although it was true that Italians disliked Germans, they didn’t hate them, they were too self-possessed to hate anyone — they were guided by village prejudices and village wisdom. Instead of telling her this I asked her what her name was — it was Myra Messersmith — and bought her a cup of coffee.

“Gilford Mariner. Please call me Gil.”

And we talked in that familiar, self-conscious way of isolated Americans abroad. It was not until I began to talk, unburdening myself, that I realized how many complaints I had. We swapped grievances, another habit of American expatriates, complained about the irregular hours of bars and banks and shops, the uncertainty of museum hours, the watchfulness of men, the nosiness of women, the way Italians littered their landscape, the loudness of motor scooters, the tiny cars, the long meals, the irritable bus conductors, the slowness of service, the persecution of animals, the adoration of babies, the tedium of Sundays, the peculiarities of academic life, the pedantry of teachers, the smugness of priests.

“People with a simple BA degree call themselves dottore.”

“Priests leer at my boobs and imply that they can personally get me into Heaven.”

“Everyone smokes — even me!”

So we talked and compared notes and it seemed we agreed on most things.

She said after a while, “How much does your hotel cost?”

Her question took me by surprise and embarrassed me. I didn’t have an answer. I said, stalling, “It depends on how long you stay.”

“I’d like to stay a few days and then maybe we could go to Siracusa.”

“It's really not far. We could get there in a few hours — maybe a day trip from here.”

Already we were talking as though we were going together. It excited me to think that I would be leaving Taormina with this pretty girl who already was such pleasant company, a comforting prospect that eased my mind.

“I don't blame you for staying here. It’s so beautiful. I guess that’s Etna.”

The shapely volcano emitted a trickle of smoke that rose in a ragged vertical rope, like a dark vine climbing into the windless air.

“That thing could blow at any moment.”

Myra laughed and clutched her throat and said, “I love melodrama. Oh, right, I can see the red-hot lava pouring down the side and endangering our lives.”

“I’d lead you to safety — into the catacombs of the Duomo.”

“That sounds exciting, Gil.”

This confident teasing was a sort of flirting and already I was saying “we.” She liked me, I could tell; she didn’t fear me. She was glad to have met me, she would test me a little more, and I would pass, and we would become traveling companions, cozier than ever, rubbing along through Sicily.

While I was talking to Myra Messersmith this way, needling her gently, she became interested in something behind me and stopped listening to me. Her eyes were fixed on a moving object and she seemed to grow warier, her face darkening a bit, almost alarmed, and then she jerked her head back, startled. At that instant I felt a sharp poke against my shoulder and the harsh whisper, “Come wiz me.”

“What was that all about?” Myra said.

I had turned to see the Gräfin walking away.

“Long story.” The Gräfin had never come to the Mocambo before.

“That's the third time you’ve said that.”

“Everything’s a long story to me. I’m an existentialist.”

But Myra did not smile. She was thinking hard. Women know other women, because unlike men they are not beguiled by appearances: they know exactly what lies behind any feminine surface. Myra’s alertness, the single woman’s scrutiny, something new to me, amazed me with its accuracy in processing details and giving them significance — finding clues, searching for dangers, all in aid, I guessed, of choosing a mate. Men were casual, women so cautious. Even from this swift glimpse of the Gräfin, Myra knew me much better.

“Her heels are amazing. What’s with those gloves? The hat’s Chanel, and so is the dress. I bet she gets her hair done every day. The dress is raw silk — you can tell by the way it drapes. Did you see the gold threads? That’s real gold. It’s from Thailand.”

I took Myra’s interest for curiosity, a way of telling me that she understood fashion; and I was startled to see her rising from the café table. There was a cloud on her face, a sort of resignation and quiet anger that might have been rueful. I saw that in that moment of witnessing the Gräfin poke me, Myra had written me off as someone she could not rely on. She had summed up the situation before I said a word.

“I’m going to Siracusa.”

“Why?” I said, sounding lame.

“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.”

7

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?”

“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.

8

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.”

“Look, I never asked you for money,” I said. But she was right: she had given me a lot of cash.

“You don't know what will happen to you,” she said, “but I know. You are ambitious, certainly.”

I said, “Staying at this hotel in Taormina, doing nothing for a whole month, doesn’t seem very ambitious to me.”

“It is the height of ambition,” she said, laughing at what she took to be my self-deception. “In the future you will be well known, maybe famous. You will travel. You will accumulate wealth. You will have many admirers. What I am saying is that you will succeed brilliantly in whatever you choose to do. I can see this”—she began to falter and frown—“I can see it clearly.”

A note of cynicism entered her prophecy. She had become somewhat sour and seemed to resent me in advance, to dislike me for the man she said I would become. She had begun to envy the success she predicted for me, seeing me as unworthy of it.

“You will work hard, of course. But other people will work much harder and not achieve your success. Still, you will want to be expert about everything — you will be preoccupied with your life and your struggle.”

I was laughing softly and insincerely at the portrait she was painting of my future self, this odd conflicted public figure.

“But you will never talk about me, or how you fucked a sixty-year-old woman, who told your fortune and then rejected you.”

That stopped me; already I was self-conscious and silent.

“You will not know me until forty years pass,” she said. “By then I will have been dead a long time.”

From that moment I was powerless, in her power. It was as though she had given birth to me and was abandoning me to the world; and she could see what I could not.

She said, “If this were a novel, it would demand a tragic ending. I would kill myself, or you would do something foolish. But it isn’t a novel. Life goes on. Yes, I am humiliated, but I have a life, and the will to live it is very strong. I am a stranger to you. You will not know me until you are my age.”

That was our last night together. I left her and went to my own room and slept as though in a haunted house, woken repeatedly by violent and mocking dreams that I could not remember. The Gräfin looked rested when I saw her in the morning. She was walking on the terrace with the old lame man I had seen from time to time in Taormina, who sometimes conversed with the Gräfin in German. They were holding an animated conversation today; at least the old man was smiling — limping, and grinning each time he limped.

“He’s happy,” I said to the Gräfin.

“Happy to be going home at last,” the old man said, surprising me by speaking English. I was abashed that I had not addressed him directly. It had not occurred to me that he could speak English.

“No more of Taormina,” the Gräfin said.

She was wearing another white dress and her wide-brimmed white hat, but even so, I could see her face plainly and she looked the same as always. I had expected her to seem much older. Perhaps the man’s seeming so decrepit made her appear girlish and spry in comparison. But no: she was a beauty, she had no age, though last night in the dark she had seemed very old. She ignored me but was attentive to the man, who had kissed her slowly on each cheek and was limping away, saluting behind him — not looking — as he left.

“Is he all right?”

“He was a soldier. He was injured in the war. Passchendaele.”

“The First World War!”

“He was an officer.”

“I can see it in his posture,” I said. “The Kaiser came here to Taormina with the royal party in 1905. Do you remember that?”

“How would I remember that? I was four.”

“Where were you then?”

A look of stubbornness surfaced on her face, hardening her eyes, stiffening her lips. “I was a little animal then, like all children.”

To help her I said, “I have the idea that you grew up in a magnificent castle.”

“I don’t remember,” the Gräfin said.

Her expression gave nothing away: her face was like marble — as lovely, as pale, as hard, as cold. I wanted to know more. The enduring mystery for me was her real identity. Who was she, where had she come from?

“What is there to remember?”

Didn’t remember her childhood? I said, “Taormina was Kesselring’s headquarters during the Second World War.”

“Yes. Lots of Germans here then.”

“Tell me about Hitler.”

“Always the American question,” the Gräfin said. She lifted her hat so that I could see her face better and she stared at me with her blue eyes and said, “He was a monster, with little education, but he had some greatness.”

“You met him?”

“On a formal occasion. I was married to an officer,” she said. Then eagerly, with a kind of passion, she said, “The Führer had beautiful hands. A woman's hands. No one will ever tell you that. When I saw them I looked at my own hands. So that gives you some idea.”

“Tell me more. Where did you live?”

“So many places. But in the war, in Berlin.” She sighed and said, “I hate having conversations. Especially this one.” Her face was still smooth impassive marble. “Your planes bombed my city.

“We never talked about these things before,” I said. “You know so much.”

“Of course,” she said. “Because I have lived.”

She walked away in the direction the old man had taken.

I spent the day packing, knowing that I was going to leave — this time not to Siracusa but more directly homeward, to start my life.

The next time I saw her — I was leaving the Palazzo d’Oro, Haroun was bidding me goodbye — the Gräfin’s back was turned. She was a stranger once more, just another German in Taormina, talking intimately to the old German soldier.

“Who is he?”

Haroun said, “He is the Graf, of course.”

9

I had just come to that last episode of revelation and was writing, “And this, my only story,” when the bare-breasted girl wearing only a shiny gold bikini bottom moved toward me, obliquely, like a cat, and stood between me and the sun without casting a shadow, for it was noon. She said, “So you’re a writer.”

All this time, on my return to Taormina, as I had been writing this story by the pool, the young girl was watching me, and her nipples too seemed to stare, goggling pop-eyed at me. When I looked at her she smiled. At a certain age, sixty for sure, it is impossible for a man to tell whether a young woman's friendliness is flirting. She flutters her eyelashes, she twitches her bum. Is this sexual frankness or is she just being sweet to me? If you don't know, you're old; and if you accept that such warmth is not sexual, you are too old.

So you’re a writer. I knew at once that she was simple. It was not a question but a strangely phrased demand, because English was not her usual language. I was woken from my meditation and in a self-conscious reflex I denied it, as though I had been doing something wicked.

That made her laugh — there was simplicity in her laugh as well. The sun was so bright I could not see her properly through the glare. She was a black blob hovering in front of me, bare tits and swinging hair — Slavic, not Italian, blond, small head, small chin, vaguely Asiatic eyes and cheeks, fox-faced. I had seen her all week with a deeply tanned man I took to be her husband.

“You are writing. You must be a writer.” A very simple soul, trying to initiate a conversation.

The novelty of my clipboard, my big pad, my leather folder of loose sheets, so much scribbling did not interest her. It was a talking point, a way of introducing herself.

“I have been watching you.”

And I had been watching her. Now and then in this story, at a loss for an image, I had used her. I had borrowed one of her gowns. I had used her see-through crocheted dress. Her wide-brimmed hat. Her tight bikini bottom had supplied me with a certain quality of gold. I had used the curve of her hip to describe the Gräfin's; the damp ringlets, the hint of weight in the rounded underside of her breasts, the hollow of her inner thighs. I had sketched these in this narrative. And her neck: I had closely watched her holding a glass to her lips and drinking, loving the way she swallowed, the way her neck muscles tensed, the beautiful pulsing throat, like a snake swallowing a frog.

She had chosen an awkward moment to interrupt me. I was not sure whether my memory was exhausted and I was faltering — my pen poised above the pad as I thought, And then—

And then the young bare-breasted girl blocked the sun and eclipsed my story.

“I wish I could write. My life has been incredible.”

“Have a seat,” I said.

I turned the pages over so that she would not see my handwriting, as I usually hid my pad from people who tried to peer at my sketching. And I told myself that I could not go any further today — or perhaps at all. What was left? Glimpses of myself on the road. The train to Messina. The night train to Palermo. A third-class berth next to seven Lebanese men on a Greek liner. The cold ocean crossing to New York. And then forty years more: my life.

“What do you do then, for a job?”

“I am a painter.”

“You can paint me.”

Her lovely body rose and arched and seemed to present itself to me. She knew she was beautiful, that her breasts looked edible. She had tiny hands and feet, a child’s fingers, and sun-brightened down on her back, a little pelt of gold fuzz on her lower spine.

“You are American.”

“Yes.”

“I would love to go to America.”

She reached into her cloth shoulder bag and showed me a CD player and a disk: Gloria Estefan.

“Where are you from?”

“Ex-Yugoslavia,” she said. “I came here with a friend. You have seen him? He had to leave. Business.” She shook her hair to fix it. “I like Taormina. Not many Italians. Where in America you live? New York? I know lots of people there.”

Everything she said sounded like either a lie or a half-truth. She didn't seem to care whether I believed her. And she hardly listened to me, as though she assumed I might be lying to her too, for when I said, “I live part-time in New York. I have a studio in—” she interrupted.

“New York is incredible,” she said. “You know Belgrade?”

“No.”

“Incredible energy. But your planes, they bomb my city.”

What she said shocked me — I had written those same words earlier that day. She took my bewilderment for sympathy.

“All the bridges, they break them. Because of Milosevic.”

“What do you think of him?”

“A strong man and maybe a monster,” she said, and smiled. “I like strong men.”

Her cell phone sounded, played two bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which she killed by flipping open the receiver. She peered at the caller's number, then turned to me again.

“I see you all the time alone.” She had forgotten Milosevic and the bombing. “I think to myself, He is writing a long love letter to his wife.”

“No wife.”

“Girlfriend, maybe.”

“No girlfriend,” I said. “Only you.”

She liked that, an eagerness charged her body. “Yes. I your girlfriend. Nice.” She touched my leg, grazed it with her small fingers. “You paint picture of me in New York City.”

“Or here.”

The waiter in the Moroccan robes who always avoided me, seeing me at work, now approached and asked if we would like to drink anything.

“I drink grappa,” she said with a kind of bravado to the boy.

“That's rocket fuel,” I said when her grappa was brought with my glass of wine.

“What do you mean?”

I explained the lame joke, and we toasted each other, and only then did I remember to ask her name.

“Silvina,” she said, and drank the grappa in two swallows.

Because I was so distracted by her neck I did not look into her eyes for a moment, but when I did I saw they were watery and drowned-looking, she was already tipsy, she did not say anything, just smiled, looked at my shoes, my watch, my briefcase.

“You travel all over, I think,” she said, inventing my life in her mind, imagining — what? “Like a bird. Free.”

“An old bird,” I said, to test her reaction.

“Not old,” Silvina said, still looking me over, as though wishing to drink me and make herself drunker. “You like your life.”

“Yes.”

“I want your life.”

I was at a loss for words, and had to remind myself that this was the young girl I had seen all week and not spoken to. Had she really just said those words to me?

“Another grappa,” she said to the attentive waiter.

“How about dinner?” I said. “We could go to the Timeo.”

Silvina did not reply until the waiter returned with her glass of grappa. She sipped at it, then tossed it down her throat, gagging slightly from its stinging fire.

“Timeo is the most expensive in Taormina. For the two of us, maybe three hundred American dollars.”

“Maybe.”

Her eyes were weakly gleaming, glazed with grappa, as she said, “So we go there and eat, and we come back here, and you will say, 'Please fuck me.'”

I tried not to seem astonished.

She was not smiling when she added, “So maybe just give me the three hundred and you can fuck me now.”

I felt a sort of discouraged relief, as when an appalling secret is revealed, a person is caught in a lie. And my mind went back to my story, to the Gräfin, her dignity, her recklessness, and at last her coldness.

“Maybe we can discuss it,” I said. I put my papers away, packed my notes, my pad, my pen, hefted my briefcase, and started away. Silvina followed me to my room.

“You want a massage?” she said, tweaking the bows on her bikini bottom and letting the tiny garment drop to the floor, the gold bikini bottom that had mimicked and masked the black patch of pubic hair. She picked it up like a monkey seizing a big leaf, with a movement of her foot and a scissoring of two toes.

I had no desire, and yet I wanted her to stay. I felt nothing, I felt sixty. But I knew, as the Gräfin knew, that she would do anything I suggested, anything at all. This knowledge, the anything, made me reticent.

“Let me make a picture of you.”

The last of the daylight slipped across her body as she sidled next to the window, the golden and pink sunset, as though a fire was burning on the sea, blazing on her skin.

I sketched her slowly. I loved her small head and straight legs, her boyish buttocks. The sunset gilded her expression, made it ambiguous, something like a scowl. She touched herself between her legs. “You are arousing me.”

“You are my model. You must not move.”

“Not done yet?” she said a moment later. “This takes longer than sex!”

“That’s the fun of it,” I said, sketching her sneering lips.

“It will cost you more.”

“Money, money,” I said, and I thought: Hungry little whorelet.

“I need the money,” she said. “Not now, but when I am old I will need it.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Buy what I want.”

“Maybe come back here to Taormina when you’re sixty and find a man,” I said, glad that she had relaxed, because the sketch was not done.

“First marry a rich man. Live my life. Then, afterwards, come here and find a young man. A Stallone. Give him money,” she said. She reflected on this. “Nothing is wrong with buying sex. It is a tragedy if you want it and have no money to buy it.”

I said, “You don’t need my life. You’ll be all right. You are willing to take risks.”

I talked, I sketched. She was too impatient to be useful, but that did not matter anymore. I knew who she was: my picture was precise.

She still believed that she was pleasing me. I spared her the truth. That I knew she was repelled by me and I by her. That she would never remember this. That I knew she was eager to get away. Nor did I want her to stay. I too needed to leave Taormina and would never go back.

At last my sketch was done. Silvina took the money and peered at the picture, frowning.

“It is all wrong,” she said. “Why you give me a hat? Why you make my hands with gloves? Why you dress me with this horrible old dress? You are laughing at me. And you make me look like an animal.”

“Like a Gräfin,” I said. “A contessa.”

“A monkey.”

She tucked the money into the front of her bikini, where it made another bulge. When she left my room, a whore in a hurry, I knew everything, and especially that the Gräfin had spared me her past. Long ago, I thought that in knowing the secret of the Gräfin’s age I would be stronger than she. But the secret was elsewhere. It was about being a stranger and having no past, the sense of shame that impels people to succeed. She had come from nowhere, which was why she had seen me so clearly, as I had seen Silvina. At sixty, I now knew, you have no secrets, nor does anyone else.