The Stranger At The Palazzo D'Oro - Plot & Excerpts
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.
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