The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro: And Other Stories - Hardcover

Paul Theroux’s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

1
This is my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it. Years ago, when
Taormina was a village most travelers avoided in the summer, because of the
heat, I sought it out, to feel the heat. Heat was everything in the
poem "Snake," that D. H. Lawrence wrote in Taormina. Great names and
associations also mattered to me, which was another reason, lingering in the
steep town of old stone and fresh flowers, I stopped by the Palazzo d"Oro,
loving that name too. Beyond the gilded cast-iron faces on the spiked
gateway to the terrace, I saw a handsome couple, a golden-haired woman
and a beaky-faced man, dressed in loose white clothes enjoying a big Italian
lunch. I imagined being seated at that table. I thought, I want your life — the
sort of envious wish I was too young to know was like asking for my undoing.
I always excused my waywardness by saying that I was poor and
so was forced into this or that course of action. The truth was that I enjoyed
taking risks. I should have been ashamed. It was not that I behaved badly,
rather that I was secretive and seldom straight. I was creative in my lies.
Saying I was poor was one of them.
The world knows me as a hero. My paintings are like good deeds,
the pictorial record of my lifetime of travel, the nearest thing to the
pharaonic "profession of sinlessness" — the negative confession: all my
arduous journeys, the discoveries I made my own, the arrivals I turned into
triumphs. At a time when celebrated painters stayed home and splashed
paint or used slide rules, or glued feathers and broken pots to canvases,
painted stripes and circles and whole large monochromes, I was in distant
lands painting portraits of people in their landscapes — ornery people, kind
people, all of them native, none of them posing. I have had my detractors,
professional critics mostly, who carped about the explicitness of my line, my
clear figures, their sideways glances, but I believe that what rankles are my
other figures, the profits I have made. Yet my patrons and collectors have
defied the belittlers and chosen to travel with me through my pictures, my
exotic views, the many series available in signed lithographs, Pictures of
India, Pictures of China, Pictures of Africa — not single pictures but
narratives.
When I am disparaged for painting "accessible" pictures I say that
my strength is storytelling. What I have never said is that the most
resourceful storytellers are the ones who avoid a particular story, the only
story the teller has; the very avoidance of it is the reason for the other, wilder
tales. The source of fantastic narratives is often this secret, the fantasist
using a concealment to hint at the truth, but always skirting the fundamental
story. Or the stories may not be bizarre, but numerous and various, for the
same reason. This is one ritual of creation. As I say, this is my only story.
Such a traveler as I was could easily have found a way to return to
Taormina, but I steered clear of the place, even when I was traveling in Sicily.
I resisted, yet I knew that the time would come, when I was myself turning
sixty. Not old — though everyone else seemed to think so.
At fifty, I had painted a birthday self-portrait of my watchful face,
and the subtle suggestion of the haunted eyes only made people praise it for
seeming beatific. Ten years passed. But sixty was not an occasion for that
sort of self-portrait. I needed to travel, and in the same spirit as before, for in
travel I became someone else — in this case, in my birthday month, the
person I had once been, a boy of twenty-one, in the hot summer of 1962,
when I found myself in Sicily, being rebuffed by a girl I liked, Fabiola, a
principessa. "It means nothing here!"
The title meant something to me, though. I had followed her to
Palermo from Falconara and Urbino — more lovely names — but she was
home in Sicily and it was forbidden in those days for her to be seen with me
unless we were engaged, or nearly so. She had to be my fidanzata, I had to
tell her I loved her, otherwise she was a slut, she said. Maybe she suspected
I was not very serious, just a brash, too young American (Fabiola was twenty-
three) searching for the Italy of Fellini and Antonioni, hungry for experience. I
told her I was an existentialist — it was a popular word in the Italy of 1962 —
because it was a convenient way of avoiding responsibility. I was intense,
impatient, game, and wary of being trapped. These qualities made me a
loner. Fabiola wanted romance, she wanted me to adore her. Love me, was
the appeal in her eyes, love me and I will give you what you want, but to me
love was surrender, love was death. In those days I swore I would not utter
the word.
And then I had my life, forty years more, the ones that matter
most: the years of family and struggle, love and acclaim, but with enough
disillusionment and loss to show there would be worse to come in the
tapering off nearer my death.
In Sicily again, a man of sixty, I retraced my steps, avoided the
good hotels, looked for traces of my earlier self. Palermo was a more
Americanized place these days, and freer — women using cell phones, men
in blue jeans, even the nuns looked somewhat secular in their dowdy
dresses. I called Fabiola, but she was unknown at the only address I had for
her and she was not in the phone book. I prowled and looked for the past and
found very little that related to the frugal boy I had been, moving lightly
through Sicily.
I took the train to Messina, changed for the express to Catania,
got off at Taormina-Giardini, climbed the hill, as I had done many years
before, glad for this chance to test my memory, sketching in my head,
mumbling as I do when I want to remember.
Hotels stand up better than restaurants. The Palazzo d"Oro on the
Via Roma was surrounded by newer and fixed-up places yet it had aged well.
I was relieved to see that I could happily stay there again, to recall the old
days, and do some serious sketching, and write my story — making this visit
a significant occasion, or, more than that, a kind of ceremony, a ritual to
mark the passing of all those years.
Walking by the pool, a new pool, I saw a girl of no more than
seventeen, with short untidy sun-struck hair, sprawled on a striped chaise
longue. She was topless, small breasts with no weight in them. Her legs
were open, her hands behind her head, a Balthus fantasy but only for
seconds, for she crossed her legs, yanked on her knees, rolled over, plucked
at her gold bikini bottom like a sprite, half innocent half wicked, or else just a
bored teenager. I was tormented. Because she did not see me I stared, and
could not take my eyes off her — breasts so small and firm, nipples so pale
they made her seem chaste.
I was led past her by a room boy in a robe and a white skullcap —
Arab, a Moro in the Palazzo d"Oro.
The young sunbathing girl reached for a glass of pink liquid and
drank. I watched her drinking, loving the motion of her neck muscles working
in a pulsating way, her throat filling as she swallowed. I imagined that she
was looking at me over the rim of her glass.

In 1962, on my way from the Via Fontana Vecchia, where Lawrence had lived
and — I guessed — written his lovely poem of sorrow and self-accusation, I
had lingered by the wall of this palazzo. I was struck by the name, the
images of the gilded faces, and, still looking around, the sight of the man and
woman at lunch. I had wanted to stay but had no money for anything except
one of those very dirty places on the road below the town, between the public
beach and the railroad track. I was hot and tired, having traveled third class
on the train, a slow train, and at just this time of year, in the heat.
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.
...