The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro Read online

  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.”