“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?”