She would sit with one finger in her mouth, looking cross, and although her sucking on this gloved finger was also erotic to me, it was just another way for her to express her impatience.
“He is a doctor! How can a doctor be sick?”
Haroun remained in his room all this time. I was certain he was faking his stomach upset, but he was resolute in sticking to his story. I told the Gräfin that he was probably improving and that we would see him any day now.
“He doesn’t care about me,” she said.
“He does,” I said. “And I do too.”
She frowned, looking insulted and intruded upon.
“How do you feel?”
“Not well,” she said, still sounding insulted. As though it was none of my business. She was eating chocolate, kissing dabs of it from her lacy fingertips — and it all looked like fellating foreplay to my eager eyes.
“Maybe I can help.”
She raised her head and looked at me as if I had just dropped from the sky. She said, “What could you do?”
Even though she was wearing sunglasses I could tell from the curl of her lips that she was scowling.
“Anything you suggest.”
She went a bit limp just then, indicating a pause with her whole body, and her silence roused me. I was standing next to her, my tense cock level with her face. Still she did not say anything. Could she smell my desire?
She looked away and said in a little-girl voice, “Haroun brings me presents. You don't bring me presents. You don't care.”
I was not insulted. I was fascinated: I fantasized that she was a small girl urging me to corrupt her. I was willing, the thought would not leave me, and I was now pretty sure that she knew what she was doing to me.
The next day, dipping into the stash of money she had given me, I bought her a bunch of flowers from the flower seller — another pretty girl — at her stall on the Corso.
“They will die unless they are put into water,” the Gräfin said.
But she was pleased, I could tell, the little girl’s satisfaction was as expressive as the little girl’s tyranny. In the following days I brought her a pot of honey, a lump of dense amber, a chunk of lapis lazuli, a length of lace (the black intricate sort that matched her gloves and panties), a small nervous bird in a wicker cage the shape of an onion. I used the money she had given me, for there was always a wad of lire left over, but so twisted from the way she crumpled and handled it, the notes had taken on the appearance of a leafy vegetable — wilted kale, dying lettuce.
By now Haroun had emerged from his seclusion, frowning and clutching his stomach. “This is bad. When I have such an illness of the bowels it is like giving birth”—he made a face and grunted with pain—“to monsters.” Then he seemed to forget his ailment and he said, “You are succeeding?”
“Of course.”
The higher pitch in my voice was my inability to disguise my forcing a reply. Yet, even though I felt I was getting nowhere, it amused me to think that my efforts to woo this difficult woman were my bread and butter. Always I saw myself in a complex picture — these days it was like a full-page woodcut from a book of folktales.
The next day the Gray Dwarf went to the Wanderer’s room and beckoned to him, and conducted him to a stone tablet on which was inscribed the task that had to be performed if the palace was to be released from enchantment.
I was the Wanderer of the tale, dressed in my newly bought tunic, on the parapet of the palace, perplexed because the task I had been given was to woo the Countess, who looked haughty framed in the boudoir window of her palatial tower; and if I failed, I would be banished from the palace. This was not fanciful, it was the literal truth, for I was a young wanderer, she was a countess, and the Palazzo d’Oro had once been the palace of a principessa.
If he did not succeed, he would be banished forever.
Haroun vanished again, groaning, and on the night of his disappearance, the Gräfin said she was hungry, which was her oblique way of telling me that I would be joining her at dinner. We drank wine together in silence on the terrace. As usual, I sat fantasizing, imagining myself licking her cleavage, fondling her, and in one mood dominating her and in another being her sex slave as she led me naked to her bedroom, ordering me around like a dog. I was tipsy when the food was served and I flirted with her, none of it verbal but rather a sort of overfamiliar manner of gesturing and facial expressions, behaving like a much loved and trusted waiter, which seemed the only relationship that worked with her.
She was wearing the dress I liked the most, the white crocheted one, all loops and holes and peekaboo, loose on her slender figure, her shoulder bare, her long collar affording glimpses of her breasts, which slipped against her dress as she leaned and moved, and now and then a nipple would catch and gape through a loop. Something sparkled in her hair, a small tiara, and tight around her neck was a ribbon of black velvet stitched with pearls, which she wore like a dog collar. She had applied her reddest lipstick, with a gleaming redness that made her lips swell, and in the candlelight of the Palazzo d’Oro she was beautiful to me, just like the vision of the Countess in the folktale that I was illustrating in my mind.
I desired her, I ravished her with my eyes, I gaped and I swallowed. But even as I was staring at her in this way, enjoying a fantasy of her sitting on me, demanding that I lick her, she began complaining about Haroun, and a hard and ugly expression surfaced on her features, defined by shadows.
I said, to divert her, “How about joining the natives in the passeggiata?”
On Saturday nights, the locals in Taormina paraded, chattering, along the Corso from the church of Santa Caterina down to the Duomo: men with men, women with women, children playing, groups of boys eyeing groups of girls. It was like a tribal rite, and sometimes foreign visitors like us, couples usually, tagged along for the fun, for it was a great noisy pleasurable parade.
“What a vulgar idea,” the Gräfin said. “I would never do that.”
“But I would protect you.” I was still a little drunk.
She touched her fingers to her nose. She sniffed. She said, “I will go to my room.”
This sounded like an invitation. I walked with her to the second floor, loving each step, following slightly behind her, anticipating what was to come, wishing with all my heart that I could cup her buttocks in my hands. I imagined that I could feel the heat of her body, the warmth of her bare skin, through the perforations in her crocheted dress.
At her room, she opened the door; in a distant second room I saw her bed, a frilly coverlet, some fur slippers. She turned briefly and said, “Good night.”
I was tall enough to be able to look down into the collar of her dress and see each of her breasts, swinging slightly as she turned and then trembling as though eager to be touched.
I leaned and put my face near hers, to kiss her. Swiftly, she pushed me with her hands and made as if to bat me on my head. I jerked backward, noticing that she had exposed her breasts even more in that lunging motion.
“What do you think you are doing?” she said through gritted teeth.
Although she had only grazed me, I reacted as though I had been slapped in the face. I was so embarrassed I was off balance. I tried to explain. She rejected me, rejected my explanation. She entered her room — fled into it — and shut the door hard.