The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro Read Free Page B

American.”
    I was convinced now that he was a man of calculation.
This can be our secret
and
We usually have a drink on the terrace at seven.
I was glad I saw this conspiratorial gleam in his eye, for it made me wary enough to listen for meanings and look for motives.
    I joined them. Gräfin—a name I first heard as “Griffin”—still showed no interest in me. She sipped her wine, she might have been a little drunk—the way drunks can seem to concentrate hard when they are just tipsy and slow, with a glazed furrow-browed stare. I studied her smooth cheeks. She was German, he was not. She looked like a ruined and resurrected queen—someone who had suffered an illness that had left a mark on her beauty, not disfiguring it but somehow fixing it, aging it.
    We talked. Haroun asked me questions which, I felt sure, were intended to impress Gräfin, or any listener—sort of interviewed me in a friendly appreciative way, to show me at my best, to establish that I had been an art teacher at the selective school inside the ducal palace at Urbino, that I was traveling alone through Sicily, that I was never without my sketchbook, which was a visual diary of my trip, that I was knowledgeable about artists and books—“Raphael was born in Urbino, he says.”
    â€œI know that,” Gräfin said. She always spoke with a lifted chin, into the distance, never faced the listener, never faced the speaker for that matter. “I prefer Tiziano.”
    â€œWould that be Titian?”
    She didn’t answer. “I have one, like so, not large.” But her slender measuring hands made it seem large. “However, yes, it is a Tiziano.”
    â€œYou bought it yourself?”
    â€œIt has been in my family.”
    â€œAnd your Dürer,” Haroun said.
    â€œMany Dürer,” Gräfin said.
    â€œI’d hate to think what those would have cost,” I said, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them for their vulgarity.
    â€œNot much,” Gräfin said. She was addressing a large glazed salver hooked to the brick wall of the terrace. “Very little,
in
fact. Just pennies.”
    â€œHow is that possible?”
    â€œWe bought them from the artist.”
    I saw Albrecht Dürer putting some dark tarnished pfennigs into a leather coin purse and touching his forelock in gratitude as he handed over a sheaf of etchings to one of Gräfin’s big patronizing ancestors.
    Gräfin had a brusque uninterested way of speaking—but saying something like
We bought them from the artist
was a put-down she relished. She never asked questions. She seemed impossible, spoiled, egotistical, yet strong; in a word, she was the embodiment of my notion of wealth. I did not dislike her, I was fascinated by her pale skin and soft flesh in this sunny place, by her full breasts and pinched doll’s face and bleached hair and plump disapproving lips, even by her posture—always facing away from me. I saw her as incurious and something of a challenge.
    â€œI am hungry,” she said to Haroun. “Will you call the boy?”
    This was also interesting, the fact that she spoke to him in English when I was present. When they were alone, I was sure they spoke German. The English was for my benefit—I didn’t speak a word of German. But why this unusual politeness, or at least deference, to me?
    Haroun snapped his fingers. The waiter appeared with two menus. Gräfin opened hers and studied it.
    Holding his menu open but looking at me, Haroun said, “Have you seen the olive groves?”
    I said no, feeling that it was expected of me, to give him a chance to describe them.
    â€œThey are quite magnificent,” he said, as I had expected. “We are driving out tomorrow to look at one near Sperlinga. You know Sperlinga? No? Perhaps you would like to accompany us?”
    â€œMorning or afternoon?” I didn’t care one way or the