Free The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro by Paul Theroux Page A

rapist—despising her as I spread her legs, and in my hatred and humiliation, on top at last. Not sex at all but penetrating her roughly, using my prick like a weapon in a vicious attack. Now I could not kiss her without enjoying a resentful fantasy of biting her, tearing at her lips with my teeth.
    I tried to calm myself. I was almost fainting with frustration. She was pressed against me and, as I was preparing myself for rejection, I felt myself losing control.
    She moved away from me, and though there was no direct light I could see by the glow from the town and the luminosity of the moon and stars that she was pouring champagne into glasses that made the rising wine into music, a note increasing in pitch as the liquid filled the narrow flutes.
    In that somber starry light her lips were black, her skin was greenish, her golden hair was blue. She was a specter handing me a wine glass and still she wore her lace gloves. I drank and touched her hand and was surprised by the warmth of the lace, how her flesh had heated her gloves, and when I reached to touch her breasts I was surprised by the way in which her body had heated her silk chemise, her gown, her sleeves.
    After all this she was still clothed. That had added to my sense of ambiguity—so strange, all those clothes in the semidarkness of her suite. I wondered if she was serious and sexual, and when I put my hands on her breasts and held their softness, the stems of her nipples hardening against my thumbs, I felt that she was on the point of rejecting me.
    So I could not disguise my hostility. I gripped her tighter, and roughly, like snatching the arm of an unruly child, like a furious parent intending the gesture to hurt as well as restrain. I did this almost unconsciously, unaware of how angry I was until my fingers sank into the flesh of her upper arm where I fingered helpless softness, no muscle at all, finding the weak woman beneath the skin. Something in that softness roused me—I had never touched more appealing skin or such yielding flesh. It seemed to me so tender that I could eat it, chew on her edible arm—I felt like biting her, or at the very least holding on as though grasping a piece of delicious meat. I could not stop myself. I was on the verge of gathering her whole slim body tightly in my hand and raising her to my mouth—all my frustration and arousal concentrated in this one gesture, this revealing touch. As I had snatched her arm, I had become a rapist, an animal, a cannibal.
    Did she smell this bloodthirstiness on me? She took a step forward and kissed me. I was surprised but not calmed—surprised because she was fiercer than me. She chewed softly on my lips, and still I held on, remembering again how she had rejected me before, saying no and holding my erection. I felt sure this might end that way too, that I would be sent off, sobbing with lust.
    I pushed her away, my hand against her face, my palm jammed against her big wet mouth—and she kissed my hand, licked it like a frantic puppy, and as she struggled to clutch at me I tried to keep her back, to give myself space to slap her.
    To show her that I was in control, I held her off with one hand and took an insolent sip of champagne with the other.
    The struggle was mute: she said nothing, only sighed. I was afraid of startling the hotel staff: I said nothing. But when I relaxed my grip a little she went a bit limp and was less amorous, and so I grasped her more tightly and began to understand that my rough handling of her aroused her.
    It was not in my nature to be rough. My experience until then had been with willing and eager girls. But this was a complex woman and she had made me angry. Of course I did not hit her—I couldn’t—but I was furiously aroused with a kind of passion that was as urgent and blind as anger. The moonlit room and the shadows and her clothes maddened me more.
    I fumbled and found her breasts again, loving the weight of them, loving