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.