I found it hard to get her attention. That morning, pleased by my announcing that I would be staying, Haroun began to devise ways of giving me access to the Gräfin. To me, his ruses were transparent; but she was so bored and inattentive she did not seem to suspect a thing. At the beginning Haroun developed a stomach upset; later that morning he disclosed his infirmity in a solemn, self-mocking way.
“Africa is taking its revenge upon my entrails.”
“What are you talking about?” the Gräfin demanded, without seeming to care about Haroun's reply.
Another obvious trait of very rich European aristocrats was their literal-mindedness, I felt: you didn’t become wealthy by being witty and alliterative, or hyperbolic like Haroun. He was the Gräfin's retainer, a sort of lap dog and flunky, roles I was rehearsing for myself.
“Africa?” I said.
“Africa comincia a Napoli,” he said.
“What revenge?” the Gräfin asked.
“The Visigoths came here, as you know, and they engaged in systematic plunder, raping and pillaging. And I am being blamed for these misfortunes.”
“How can that be so? You are Arab.”
Haroun's toothy smile was a keen expression of pain. But gallantly he said, “Not an Arab, my dear, but a Christian. Chaldean. From Baghdad. We spoke English at home. My father was a distinguished merchant. He had powerful friends.”
“You are not white. You are semitisch. Arab-speaking.”
“You are speaking English, dear Gräfin, but are you an Englishwoman?”
She said to me, “He makes me tired with his arguments, but he is my doctor, so I must listen.”
“I am a witch doctor,” Haroun said.
“Idiot!” the Gräfin said. She hated this sort of facetiousness.
Haroun said sadly, “I am not well.”
The Gräfin gave him a querying stare, as though he was a clock face showing the wrong time.
“What will I do now?” she said, twisting her gloved hands in impatience. “This cannot be so.”
“I will take some medicine.”
“You really are saying you are sick?” The Gräfin was indignant. “How can the doctor be sick?”
Tapping his tummy through his shirt buttons, Haroun said, “I shall improve very soon.”
“What about today?”
Still, she clung to him. Hearing this exchange, I got a distinct sense of witnessing a father and daughter at odds — an indulgent father, a spoiled daughter. This did not put me off or intimidate me, nor did it diminish the desire I had for her. If she had been highly intelligent and subtle, I would have been more wary, but her diabolical girlishness was something I felt I could deal with. Besides, her air of spiteful superiority was like a goad to me; I found something stimulating in it, a kind of spirit. I saw the Countess on a stallion, galloping through gold shafts of light, smacking the big excited beast with a riding crop and digging her heels into his sweaty flanks.
“I must go to my room,” Haroun said.
“You cannot leave me alone.”
“Gräfin, you are not alone.”
All this time they were speaking English for my benefit in this stilted way, yet the Gräfin refused to acknowledge my presence. When they were alone — I knew this from my approaches to their terrace table — they spoke German.
“Would you be so kind?” Haroun said to me. “The Gräfin will need some things from the town. A particular shop near the station.”
“Mazzarò?”
“Yes, down there.”
“What things?”
The Gräfin behaved as though the question was inappropriate. She pouted and looked annoyed. In her role of little helpless girl she refused to make things easier by naming the things she wanted.
“Cosmetics, newspapers, some chocolate, a fruit drink, bottled.”
“Maybe the hotel could send someone.”
“You see?” the Gräfin said to Haroun. “He does not want to help.”
“I do want to help,” I said.
“The boys at the hotel are careless. They hold the chocolate all wrong. They melt it in their hot hands. How can I eat it?”
Whatever else I did, I would not bring the Countess melted chocolate.
Haroun said, “You will assist?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll go right away. But I will need a list. I mean, what kind of fruit drink?”
Haroun took out a prescription pad and wrote the shopping list on it while the Gräfin looked away, seemingly preoccupied — with what? I could not imagine what was in this woman’s mind. She was like another species: I did not discern a single thing we had in common. The paradox was that this sense of difference made me desire her, but not in a way I had ever felt toward a woman. Though I did not fully formulate the thought at the time, I wanted to dominate her, and I saw that our difference gave me an advantage. It was true that I knew nothing of aristocracy, but I was astute enough to understand that she knew absolutely nothing of me or my background. I also guessed that her wealth had made her complacent and unsuspicious — Haroun ran all her errands, like this one he was foisting onto me.
The shopping list, which I came to see as a young girl's ritual list, was very specific: mascara, a copy of today’s Bild Zeitung, a large bar of Toblerone (“no nuts”), and Orangina — three small bottles. She believed that the Orangina served at the Palazzo d’Oro was adulterated: her general belief was that Italians were cheats and dolts. She said that she liked Taormina because it was not popular with Italians.
I was given a string bag and directions to the lower town, Mazzarò, at the seaside — twenty minutes down, forty minutes up. I enjoyed the walk, for it reminded me of my freedom, reminded me especially that there was an adjacent world to the one in which I lived more or less like a house pet, with the same advantages and disadvantages: I was well fed and well housed but I had a master and a mistress jerking at my leash.
“This should cover it,” Haroun said, handing me a sheaf of new, inky ten-thousand-lire notes. The Gräfin turned away as she always did when someone produced money, or a bill to pay.
I loved walking down the Via Pirandello into Mazzarò, by the shore below the cliffs of Taormina. The settlement was hardly more than a village and still inhabited by many fishermen. I drank an espresso at the local cafe, exchanged pleasantries with the owner, caught the eye of the pretty girl wiping the tables, and then set off to do the Gräfin’s shopping, a task so simple as to seem unnecessary — but perhaps I was being tested? I didn’t care. The weather was perfect, late August, and the life I had begun to live there was a variation of much of what I had seen in Italian movies.
In those black-and-white neo-realist movies, a solitary fellow, bright but hard up, encounters some bored wealthy people on the shores of the Mediterranean and is ambiguously adopted — the hitchhiker, the chance meeting, the stranger at the party, the wanderer. What seemed like random and apparently meaningless events were full of tension and complexity and were part of a larger design, which, as the movie advanced, became apparent. The arrangement was not American — it was European, dissolute, heavily textured, unmistakably vicious, with shocking plot twists — Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Rossellini. The films featured hot days, long nights, strangers, whispers, risks, excesses, and they were all tantalizingly vague. Even then I thought of these years as the era of the chance encounter. The foreign hitchhiker was picked up by the wealthy jaded Italians and from that moment his life was changed.
I had been rehearsing this sort of meeting ever since arriving in Italy. And here at last I had been chosen to play the part and was living it. I told myself: Sometimes life is like that — you fantasize so intensely that when the opportunity presents itself you know exactly what to do, repeating moves you have practiced in your head.