“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.”