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.