Beautiful Ruins (13 page)

“Later, the sun, it come through these windows.” Pasquale pointed to the machine-gun slots in the pillbox wall. “Make these paint . . . it seem alive. The girl, she is
molto bella
, yes?”

Dee stared, open-mouthed. “Oh, yes.” Her match went out and Pasquale lit another. He put a hand on Dee’s shoulder and pointed to the two paintings in the center, the portraits of the two soldiers. “The fishermen say two German soldiers live here in the war, for guard the sea, yes? One, he paint this wall.”

She stepped in closer to look at the soldiers’ portraits—one a young, chinless boy with his head cocked proudly, looking off to the side, tunic buttoned to his chin; the other a few years older, shirt open, staring straight out from the wall—and even with the paint faded on the concrete, an unmistakable wistful look on his face. “This one was the painter,” she said quietly.

Pasquale bent in close. “How do you know this?”

“He just looks like an artist. And he’s staring at us. He must’ve looked in a mirror as he painted his own face.”

Dee turned, took a few steps, and looked out the gun turret, to the sea below. Then she turned back to the paintings. “It’s amazing, Pasquale. Thank you.” She covered her mouth, as if about to cry, and then she turned to him. “Imagine being this artist, creating masterpieces up here . . . that no one will ever see. I think it’s kind of sad.”

She returned to the painted wall. Pasquale lit another match, handed it to her, and she made her way down the wall again . . . the roiling sea on the rocks, the two soldiers, and finally two paintings of the girl—sitting three-quarters sideways, painted from the waist up, two classic portraits. Dee paused over these last paintings. Pasquale had always assumed the two portraits of the girl were identical, but Dee said, “Look. This one wasn’t quite right. He corrected it. From a photograph, I’ll bet.” Pasquale stepped in beside her. Dee pointed. “In this one, her nose is a little too angled and her eyes dip.” Yes, Pasquale could see, she was right.

“He must have loved her very much,” she said.

She turned, and in the flickering match light Pasquale thought she might have tears in her eyes.

“Do you think he made it home to see her?”

They were close enough to kiss. “Yes,” Pasquale whispered. “He see her again.”

Stooped over in the tight pillbox, Dee blew out the match, stepped forward, and hugged him. In the dark, she whispered, “God, I hope so.”

A
t four in the morning, Pasquale was still thinking about the moment in the dark bunker. Should he have kissed her? He had kissed only one other woman in his life, Amedea, and technically she had kissed him first. He might have tried, if not for the humiliation he still felt about the tennis court. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that the balls would fly off the cliff? Maybe because in the pictures he’d seen there were no photos of the balls getting past the players. Still, he felt foolish. He had imagined tennis as something purely aesthetic; he hadn’t wanted a tennis court, he’d wanted a painting of a tennis court. Obviously, without a fence, the players themselves could run right off the court and fall over the cliff into the sea. Dee Moray was right. A high fence could be erected easily enough. And yet he knew that a high fence would ruin the vision he’d always had, of a flat court hovering over the sea, rising from the cliff-side boulders, a perfect cantilevered shelf covered with players in white clothes, women sipping drinks under parasols. If they were behind fences, you wouldn’t see them from the approaching boats. Chain fences would be better, but would cloud the players’ view of the sea and would be ugly, like a prison. Who wanted a
brutto
tennis court?

That night, the man Dee Moray was waiting for didn’t come, and Pasquale felt somehow responsible, as if his little wish that the man would drown had been upgraded to a prayer and had come true. Dee Moray had retreated to her room at dusk and in the early morning had gotten violently ill again, and could only get out of bed to vomit. When there was nothing left in her stomach, tears rolled from her eyes and her back arched and she sniffed and slumped to the floor. She didn’t want Pasquale to see her retch, and so he sat in the hallway and reached his hand around the corner, through the doorway, to hold her hand. Pasquale could hear his aunt stirring downstairs.

Dee took a long breath. “Tell me a story, Pasquale. What happened when the painter returned to the woman?”

“They marry and have fifty children.”

“Fifty?”

“Maybe six. He become a famous painter and every time he paint a woman, he paint her.”

Dee Moray vomited again, and when she could speak, said, “He’s not coming, is he?” It was odd and intimate, their hands connected, their heads in different rooms. They could talk. They could hold hands. But they couldn’t see each other’s faces.

“He is coming,” Pasquale told her.

She whispered: “How do you know, Pasquale?”

“I know.”

“But how?”

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the English, whispering back around the corner, “Because if you wait for me . . . I crawl on my knees from Rome to see you.”

She squeezed his hand and retched again.

The man didn’t come that day, either. And as much as he wanted to keep Dee Moray for himself, Pasquale began to get angry. What kind of man sent a sick woman to a remote fishing village and then left her there? He thought of going to La Spezia and using a phone to call the Grand Hotel, but he wanted to look this bastard in his cold eye.

“I go to Rome today,” he told her.

“No, Pasquale. It’s okay. I can just go on to Switzerland when I feel better. Maybe he left word for me there.”

“I must go to Rome anyway,” he lied. “I find this Michael Deane and tell him you wait here.”

She stared off for a moment and then smiled. “Thank you, Pasquale.”

He gave precise instructions to Valeria for the care of the American: Let her sleep and don’t make her eat anything she doesn’t want to eat and don’t lecture her about her skimpy nightclothes. If she gets sick, send for Dr. Merlonghi. Then he peeked in on his mother, who lay awake waiting for him.

“I’ll be back tomorrow, Mamma,” he said.

“It will be good for you,” she said, “to have children with such a tall, healthy woman with such breasts.”

He asked Tomasso the Communist to motor him to La Spezia, so he could take a train to Florence, then on to Rome to scream at Michael Deane, this awful man who would abandon an ailing woman this way.

“I should go to Rome with you,” Tomasso said as they cut across a light chop and made their way south. Tomasso’s little outboard motor chugged in the water and whined when it came out as he piloted from the back, squinting along the shoreline while Pasquale crouched in front. “These American movie people, they are pigs.”

Pasquale agreed. “To send a woman off and then forget about her . . .”

“They mock true art,” Tomasso said. “They take the full sorrow of life and make a circus of fat men falling into cream pies. They should leave the Italians alone to make films, but instead their stupidity spreads like a whore’s disease among sailors.
Commedia all’italiana!
Bah.”

“I like the American Westerns,” Pasquale said. “I like the cowboys.”

“Bah,” Tomasso said again.

Pasquale had been thinking about something else. “Tomasso, Valeria says that no one dies in Porto Vergogna except babies and old people. She says the American won’t die as long as she stays here.”

“Pasquale—”

“No, I know, Tomasso, it’s just old witch talk. But I can’t think of a single person who has died young here.”

Tomasso adjusted his cap as he thought. “How old was your father?”

“Sixty-three,” Pasquale said.

“That’s young to me,” Tomasso said.

They motored toward La Spezia, weaving among the big canning ships in the bay.

“Have you ever played tennis, Tomasso?” Pasquale asked. He knew Tomasso had been held for a while in a prison camp near Milan during the war and had been exposed to many things.

“Certainly I’ve watched it.”

“Do the players miss the ball often?”

“The better players don’t miss so much, but every point ends with someone missing, or hitting it into the net or over the line. There’s no way to avoid it.”

O
n the train, Pasquale was still thinking about tennis. Every point ended with someone missing; it seemed both cruel and, in some way, true to life. It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used. For instance, when he had asked Dee Moray if the man she loved felt the same way, she had answered quickly that yes, the man loved himself as well. It was such a delightful joke and his pride in understanding it in English had felt so strangely significant. He just wanted to keep repeating the little exchange in his head. And talking about the paintings in the pillbox . . . it was thrilling to see what she imagined—the lonesome young soldier with the photograph of the girl.

In his train car, two young women were sitting next to each other, reading two copies of the same movie magazine, leaning into each other, and chattering about the stories they read. Every few minutes one of them would glance up at him and smile. The rest of the time they read their magazines together; one would point to a picture of a movie star in the magazine and the other would comment on her.
Brigitte Bardot?
She is beautiful now but she will be fat.
They spoke loudly, perhaps to be heard over the sound of the train.

Pasquale looked up from his cigarette and surprised himself by asking the women, “Is there anything in there about an actress named Dee Moray?”

The women had been trying to get his attention for an hour. Now they looked at each other and then the taller one answered, “Is she British?”

“American. She is in Italy making the film
Cleopatra
. I don’t think she is a big star, but I wondered if there was anything in the magazines about her.”

“She is in
Cleopatra
?” the shorter woman asked, and then flipped through her magazine until she found a picture of a stunningly beautiful dark-haired woman—certainly more attractive than Dee Moray—which she held up for Pasquale to see. “With Elizabeth Taylor?” The headline beneath Elizabeth Taylor’s photo promised details of the “Shocking American Scandal!”

“She broke up the marriage between Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds,” confided the taller woman.

“So sad. Debbie Reynolds,” said the other girl. “She has two babies.”

“Yes, and now Elizabeth Taylor is leaving Eddie Fisher, too. She and the British actor Richard Burton are having an affair.”

“Poor Eddie Fisher.”

“Poor Richard Burton, I think. She is a monster.”

“Eddie Fisher flew to Rome to try to win her back.”

“His wife has two babies! It’s shameful.”

Pasquale was amazed at how much these women knew about the movie people. It was as if they were talking about their own family, not some American and British movie actors they’d never met. The women were bouncing back and forth, chattering about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton now. Pasquale wished he’d gone on ignoring them. Had he honestly expected them to know Dee Moray? She’d told Pasquale that
Cleopatra
was her first film; how would these women have heard of her?

“That Richard Burton is a hound. I would not even give him a second look.”

“Yes, you would.”

She smiled at Pasquale. “Yes, I would.”

The women cackled.

“Elizabeth Taylor has been married four times already!” the taller woman said to Pasquale, who would’ve jumped off the train to get out of this conversation. They went back and forth like a tennis match in which neither player missed.

“Richard Burton’s been married, too,” the other woman said.

“She is a snake.”

“A beautiful snake.”

“Her actions make her common. Men see through such things.”

“Men see only her eyes.”

“Men see tits. She is common!”

“She can’t be common with those eyes . . .”

“It is scandalous! They act like children, these Americans.”

Pasquale pretended to have a coughing fit. “Excuse me,” he said. He stood and left the chattering car, coughing, pausing to glance out the window. They were nearing the station at Lucca and he caught a glimpse of the brick-and-marble Duomo. Pasquale wondered if, when the train got to Florence, he would have enough time before his transfer to take a walk.

I
n Florence, Pasquale lit a cigarette and leaned on the wrought-iron fence in the piazza Massimo d’Azeglio, down the street and across from Amedea’s house. They would have just finished dinner. This was when Amedea’s father liked the whole family to go for a walk—Bruno, his wife, and his six beautiful daughters (unless he’d married one off in the ten months that Pasquale had been away from Florence) moving in a cluster down the street, once around the piazza and then back to their house. Bruno took great pride in parading his girls, like horses at auction, Pasquale always thought, the old man’s big bald head tilted back, that deep, serious frown on his face.