Patience in Cape Verde

Stefan almost had me that warm afternoon in the summer pavilion of the Eisler country house in the Vienna Woods. We had played two sets of tennis, stripped down to our shorts in the unusual August heat on the mountainside above Vienna, and I knew by the way he looked at me that he wanted me. And, truth be told, I think I wanted him as well. I'd always had those urgings, but I had never given in to them.

Stefan had been an exchange student at my southern U.S. university in my sophomore year. We had struck up a friendship, and I had come back with him to Austria during a hiatus in my studies at the end of that school term. I wanted to be a writer, and I knew that the broadening experience of a European interlude would help me in that. Taking up Stefan's offer to stay with his family had been ideal. They were quite wealthy, they came from a titled family, and they traveled all over the region and had been good enough to take me with them.

Their son, Stefan, had been quite a hit at my somewhat provincial university. He was so sophisticated and so worldly, and it didn't hurt that he was achingly handsome. Solid Germanic stock. Blond and blue eyed, sturdy build and well-muscled. He was the star of our soccer team and had taken us to a conference championship for the first time in the school's history.

He perhaps was a little too urbane for the university community, though, and he had been invited not to return for our junior year. Our sleepy southern town was sexually repressed, and Stefan was sexual and sensual to the nth degree, and openly bisexual to boot. The rumor was that he'd fucked a good two-thirds of the soccer team, and that part of the reason for their success was that they were so besotted with Stefan to a man that they went into superhuman overdrive in their games so as not to let him down.

Stefan had propositioned me as well several times in that year, pursuing me relentlessly, trying to wear my resolve down, but I was too strong for him. I knew my inclinations were dangerously close to what he wanted, but I had come from the small southern town the university was located in and I planned to remain there to take over a business that had been in my family since before the Civil War. I couldn't afford to indulge what Stefan had to offer. I would marry a cheerleader coed from one of the other prominent families in town and live in a southern colonial mansion on a golf course at the edge of town and raise my allotted three and a half children and one dog and two cats.

Still, Stefan was not the type to give up, and I was fully on guard for there having been an ulterior motive for his invitation to me to summer with his family. I hadn't been totally cold to him. He had been raised on his family's Italian estate, and he was naturally expressive with his hands. I had let him become friendly with his hands—and I had thoroughly enjoyed his occasional attentions in that vein—but I had not come anywhere close to succumbing to his expressed desires for something more between us. He quite well knew what my limitations were and why I had set them.

After the tennis game, Stefan and I had dove into the pool, in our tennis shorts, to cool off, and I'd left him there, swimming vigorous laps and retired to the summer pavilion down near the small lake and dozed off on a chaise lounge.

I awoke with Stefan's full lips on mine. This was farther than I'd ever let him go before, and he had caught me completely by surprise, and I had in fact been dreaming of someone very like him, so I was slow to draw away—in fact, I was holding up my end of the kiss. He was leaning over me, droplets falling off his hard, heaving chest onto mine, and he'd run a hand under the waistband of my shorts and was fisting my cock.

"No, Stefan," I exclaimed. "Too far . . . I don't want . . ."

"Don't tell me you don't want it, Jackson," Stefan retorted in a low, guttural voice. "Your dick tells me that you want it." He began to stroke me, and my cock did, in fact, belie my interest. "Just let me jack you off. You're driving me crazy."

"Not what you want, Stefan. You can't have what you want. You don't want to just use your hand on me. You've been very clear in what you want. And I've been equally clear that it won't happen. That it can't happen. I've been . . ."

"Just a hand job," Stefan wheedled. "That's enough. No more than that."

His lips returned to mine, not wanting to hear me say no, and he continued to stroke me inside my shorts. I struggled against him, but not for long. I didn't answer him, but my body answered for me. It started to relax, and I emitted a little moan through his searching kiss. He pulled away from my lips and gave me a radiant smile of victory and moved his lips to one of my nipples as he unzipped my shorts and pulled my dick out.

I was panting and moaning as his lips moved down over my belly.

"No, no," I whimpered. "Just the hand . . . ohhhhhh." He'd swallowed my cock. And it felt so good. I'd stop him. In a minute or two.

But then I felt the pad of a finger at the rim of my channel, and that galvanized me into full defensive mode.

"No, Stefan. That's enough. That's way more than enough." I struggled out of his grip and launched myself from the chaise lounge. I stood there, trembling, as I zipped up my shorts.

"You want me; you know you do. I want to fuck you and you want that too," Stefan said in a hoarse voice belabored by heavy breathing.

"No, it's not going to happen, Stefan," I responded, making my voice as cold and as unemotional as possible. "I'll leave tomorrow, if necessary. But this isn't going any further."

"You are a tease," Stefan spat back. "You can't be as strong willed as you pretend. You wanted me just now; there's no question of that."

He had more to say, but I didn't hear it; I had turned and was moving up toward the house.

Neither of us mentioned the incident again—and nothing was said about my leaving early—but Stefan was cool and on the edge of being dismissive of me henceforth. I'm sure that I was the first person, male or female, who had ever turned him down. He continued to be friendly to me in front of his family, but there was an iciness in the air that even they could not miss. I decided I'd need to try to make some other arrangements for my European sojourn at the earliest possibility. Stefan wouldn't be returning to my university, so it could end here. And with luck, the yearning that I had for what he was offering would die here forever as well.

Less than a week later, Stefan told me that he'd been invited to attend a night of the Wagnerian opera festival down in the Volksopera in Vienna and asked me if I'd like to accompany him.

I jumped at the chance, tickets to the Volksopera being very hard to come by.

The patron who had extended the offer to Stefan turned out to be an international financier by the name of Klaus Gehler, who had a very good permanent box at the theater.

Gehler, a distinguished-looking Austrian not much short of sixty in age, was an excellent conversationalist. He also was an extraordinarily handsome and well-kept man of military bearing and close-cropped steel-gray hair.

During the first interval of the opera, he turned to me and fixed mesmerizing pale-blue eyes on me and floored me in a rich, smooth baritone voice, "Our friend Stefan here says that you are looking for a broader experience of Europe, Mr. Taylor. Perhaps I have a proposition for you."

I was looking for a change? I hadn't said anything directly to Stefan about that at all; nor had he broached the subject with me. I felt the anger rising inside me, but I held it in. I obviously was in the presence of a highly unusual man. He exuded power and strength—and elegance and refinement. I felt I was way out of my league here. But if Stefan wanted to brush me off, I certainly wouldn't give him the satisfaction of stepping on my tongue in the presence of Gehler.

"Yes, I was looking into some travel options," I said. "I came to Europe for the summer break to gather experiences for my writing exercises. The Eislers have graciously shown me many of the major cities, but I would like to get a deeper feel for the countryside while I'm here."

"A writer?" Gehler said. "Yes, I do believe Stefan told me that as well. That would fit perfectly. I write too, but something entirely more dull, I'm afraid. In my business I have to keep up a constant and voluminous correspondence. And my secretary, Frans, has had to go off on a family medical emergency. So, I am bereft and just about to leave for my retreat. It would work out marvelously if you could take on the role of my temporary secretary. Just for a month or six weeks. I would promise not to overtax you—to let you gain considerable experience and have time to write up your own notes. How would that sound to you, Mr. Taylor?"

* * * *

I would perhaps not have been quite so enthusiastic at accepting Klaus Gehler's invitation for a temporary appointment if I had known that his retreat was on a remote island of the Cape Verde chain, off the coast of east Africa and well within the tropical zone. I already felt isolation creeping around me as we motored from Gehler's larger yacht in a launch to the small island of Brava, which was only accessible by launches.

It was just the two of us, Gehler and me, in the launch other than the silent Spaniard who had seemed to have been in charge of the crew of the larger yacht. He was dark to the point of swarthy, with jet-black curly hair in profusion on his chest, arms, and legs in addition to his head. He was perhaps something around thirty and what I would call sinewy. Not hulking, but tall and so muscle hard that the veins popped out on the surface of his arms and torso because they had no fat to travel through. He had large, strong, long-fingered hands. He was brown as a berry and moved in the rigging of the yacht with the grace and dexterity of a monkey. He must have been a brawler, because he had perpetual bruises and stripe marks on his torso and arms and legs. The other crew members seemed anxious to stay clear of him, although there was no question that they jumped when he said to jump.

My feeling of gathering isolation wasn't helped as we neared the coastline of the small island and I saw Gehler's red-tile-roofed native stone villa hovering over the top of a cliff. There seemed to be only a narrow pathway through lush semitropical foliage rising and cutting back here and there from the pier to the top of the cliff. Gehler had told me that he came here whenever he felt the need to be entirely cut off from the world, and the immediate impression I got of the locale supported this completely. There was no other sign of habitation as I scanned the island upon our approach.

"Leave the luggage, Jack," Gehler said when the launch had been lashed to the pier and we'd scrambled up on the dock. "Estaban will bring it up."

I felt that the vines, large-leafed plants, and trees were grabbing at me as we mounted the pathway, which I found strange, as the Cape Verdes were, I thought, semiarid. I remarked as much to Gehler.

"Ah, we have Miguel and his now-deceased father to thank for that. Miguel is my gardener. I originally had my retreat in Bermuda until it got entirely too crowded, and when I moved down to here, I brought Miguel and his father with me. They are Portuguese. The gardeners of Bermuda are Portuguese, you know. We also brought the Bermudan techniques for gathering runoff water, and Miguel and his father created this paradise of vegetation similar to what I enjoyed on Bermuda. Don't you find it intoxicating?"

I just murmured a response that could be taken either way, because my immediate reaction was that it was stifling and a bit intimidating, but upon further thought, I guessed that intoxicating was just as good a term for it.

We brushed by Miguel near the first terrace. He was fighting with a stand of bamboo that threatened to obstruct the view of the ocean from that terrace. He was stripped to the waist of quite skimpy shorts. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five, which came as a shock to me. To have helped established plantings of this maturity in an unforgiving environment, he must have come here to work when he was a child. He was dark skinned, although not as dark as Estaban was, probably mostly from the constant exposure to the sun, and he was rather small in stature, but heavy with muscle in keeping with the hard work he had to do, which must have redoubled since his father had died. I wondered if he was the only gardener now. The estate obviously was large. Of course the landscaping, apparently on purpose, was wild and unruly on the ocean side of the house. But I could see around the side of the house toward the landward side, where there was a more park like setting short of what appeared to be high stone walls surrounding the grounds on all sides except for the seaside cliff front. The walls didn't help me with my feeling of confinement.

The villa was in a rectangle, the longer side toward the sea, and it was built around an interior courtyard, complete with stone flooring and a pond with a fountain and the ever-present overflow of big-leafed plants and exotic-colored flowers. Hibiscus, bougainvillea, lipstick plant, hydrangeas, and banana trees predominated. The lounge area took up the ground floor of the side facing the sea, with Gehler's study and a small office he assigned to me above. The opposite wing, opening out onto the more formal, lawned park area had an open loggia with arched doorways on the ground floor and two bedrooms, each with bath, above. A hallway stretched across this section facing the inner courtyard, and a balcony ran the full length of this wing on both sides. The short wing to the west had a kitchen and storerooms on the ground floor, with a large dining room above with a bank of arched windows cut in the stone walls on each side. At the west corner, where the lounge was located on the seaward wing and the kitchen on the west wing, was located a breakfast room and staircase on the first floor, and a servant's room on the second. There were staircases and servants rooms in the other three corner sections as well. There were two more bedrooms with connecting bath on the second floor of the east wing. I was not shown what was on the ground floor of that wing. The sturdy wooden door to that was shut tight and had a padlock on it, and all of the windows were heavily shuttered.

What appeared to be the only house servant, a small, yet nicely formed African with black curly hair and features that showed some mix with European stock, barefoot and wearing only an orange-red sarong skirt tucked at his waist, had met us at one of the French doors from the upper terrace into the lounge and had followed Gehler and me around as Klaus acclimated me to the house. Klaus told me the houseboy's name was Jolo, and he just lowered his eyes in supplication, without sound, when I was introduced to him. He appeared to be hardly more than a boy, although Klaus told me that he had had him for several years. In the kitchen, we found a hulking German of coarse features and heavy musculature, perhaps in his forties, who Gehler introduced as Gerhardt, the cook and general housekeeper. Gerhardt leered at me in a manner that made me quite uncomfortable, and I was pleased when we moved on, climbing the stairs to the principle bedroom wing facing the landward side park area.

Gehler said that I would have the second bedroom in this wing, right next to his. Both bedrooms had two pair of double French doors giving access to the common balcony on the landward side of the villa. Gehler told me that it would be wise to leave the French doors open at night to catch whatever breeze could be captured at this time of year. He said the thick stone walls helped keep the villa relatively cool, but that, of course, there was no such thing as central air conditioning on the remote Brava island.

Remote indeed. I felt the remoteness. And all there was in the way of servants to take care of this estate were the cook, the gardener, and Estaban, as the general handyman when Gehler was in residence. I was particularly struck that there was no evidence of any women in residence. It struck me then that Gehler's secretary was male—and even his temporary secretary—me—was a man.

Gehler left me to think my increasingly disturbing thoughts and to watch Jolo unpack my suitcases and occasionally give me a shy, appraising look. He really was a well-formed young man, although it still was difficult to think of him as a man.

The first evening went uneventfully. Estaban and Jolo served us in the dining room, with me at one end of a table capable of seating eighteen and Gehler at the other end. Gehler was in good form with his conversation, making every effort to put me at my ease and to give me a brief history of Cape Verde and of this small island of Brava. After dinner, we sat in the lounge and had coffee and cognac, and Gehler puffed on a cigar, and then he gave me a couple of hours of dictation of business letters that indicated that his business interest were far, wide, and highly lucrative—and involved some of the major leaders of European countries.

Then, declaring he was tired from the sea crossing to the Cape Verdes from where we had taken ship, at Marseilles, Gehler said that he was going to retire. There didn't seem to be any question that I was retiring too. Gehler had that sort of ingrained power and authority. He spoke and all of those around him served.

I didn't resent his presumption, because I was probably more exhausted than he was. He still looked fresh and vigorous. He exuded power and vitality and, I had to admit, a sensuality that I found alluring despite myself. He was an uncommonly handsome man, and extraordinarily fine of figure, especially for his stated age.

I showered, padded out of the bathroom, a towel tucked around my waist, opened the French doors as I was advised to do, and, dropping the towel at the side of the bed, sank onto the silk-sheet covered kingside bed, under mosquito netting, and fell into a deep sleep.

I don't know how long I'd been semiconscious and aware of the sounds wafting in through the French doors, but when I was fully conscious, I realized I was listening to the sound of full-throttle sexual taking from somewhere beyond the French doors. I was shocked to find that I had my hard cock in my fist and that I had come. I rose quickly, in embarrassment, closed both of the French doors and went to the bathroom and cleaned myself off and collapsed back in the bed, my sleep for the rest of the night fretful and filled with feelings of concern and guilt. For hours I devised ways of saying that I must leave the island immediately, but dawn arrived with no inkling of how I could politely do that without revealing what I had heard.

The next morning Gehler was chipper and moved energetically around his study, dictating to me and being more effusive and jovial than I had seen him in the short time we had traveled together from Vienna to the Cape Verdes. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and I was impressed at how well defined his musculature was and how well he V'd down to a thin waist at his age. Even at leisure, he wore his clothes elegantly, like a model for an expensive men's store. I had no doubt that his clothes had come from such a store.

He made no mention of whatever had happened during the night—if I heard it from my open French doors, surely he did as well, as he was in the room adjacent to mine. And I made no mention of it as well.

The next two days went uneventfully, with him somehow getting me to talk about myself and my hopes and ambitions without him revealing much about himself at all. But he was a brilliant man, well conversant with the politics and economics of the world, obviously earning his position in the world of finance honestly. And all the while there was the sense about him of a commanding general, holding the lives of all of his soldiers in his hands. Certainly that was how the three servants responded to him.