Beautiful Ruins (27 page)

No stranger to this kind of place, he paid Maria half the agreed-upon price, which she folded and took downstairs to the man behind the bar. Then Alvis followed her down the hall to a small room. Inside, there was nothing but a made bed, a nightstand, a coat rack, and a scratched, foggy mirror. A window looked out on the harbor and the street below. She sat down on the bed, its springs creaking, and began to undress.

“You don’t remember me?” Alvis asked in Italian.

She stopped undressing and sat on the bed, unmoved, no recognition in her eyes.

Alvis began slowly, telling her in Italian how he’d been stationed in Italy during the war, how he’d met her on a deserted road and walked her home one night, how on the day he met her he’d reached a point where he didn’t care if he lived or died, but that after meeting her he had cared again. He said that she’d encouraged him to write a book after the war, to take it seriously, but that he’d gone home to America (
“Ricorda—Wisconsin?”
) and drank away the last decade. His best friend, he said, had died in the war, leaving behind a wife and a son. Alvis had no one, and he’d come home and wasted all of those years.

She listened patiently and then asked if he wanted to have sex.

He told her that he had gone to Licciana to look for her, and he thought he saw something in her eyes when he said the name of the village—shame, perhaps—because he had been so humbled by what she did for him that night: not the part with her hand, but the way she’d comforted him afterward, held his crying face against her beautiful chest. That was, he said, the most humane thing anyone had ever done for him.

“I’m so sorry,” Alvis said, “that you became this.”

“This?” She startled Alvis by laughing. “I’ve always been this.” She waved at the room around her and said, in a flat Italian, “Friend, I don’t know you. And I don’t know this village you speak of. I’ve always lived in Genoa. I get boys like you sometimes, American boys who were in the war and had their first sex with a girl who looked like me. It’s fine.” She looked patient, but not particularly interested in his story. “But what were you going to do, rescue this Maria? Take her back to America?”

Alvis could think of nothing to say. No, of course he wasn’t going to take her back to America. So what
was
he going to do? Why was he here?

“You made me happy, choosing me over the younger girls,” the prostitute said, and she reached out for his belt. “But please. Stop calling me Maria.”

As her hands expertly undid his belt, Alvis stared at the woman’s face. It had to be her, didn’t it? And now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure. She did seem older than Maria should. And the thickening he’d attributed to age—could this actually be someone else? Was he confessing to some random whore?

He watched her thick hands unbutton his pants. He felt paralyzed, but he managed to pull himself away. He buttoned his pants and cinched his belt again.

“Would you rather have one of the other girls?” the prostitute asked. “I’ll go get her, but you still have to pay me.”

Alvis took out his wallet, his hands shaking; he pulled out fifty times the price she’d quoted him. He placed the money on the bed. And then he spoke quietly. “I’m sorry I didn’t just walk you home that night.”

She just stared at the money. Then Alvis Bender walked out, feeling as if the last of his life had seeped out in that room. In the front room, the other whores were reading their magazines. They didn’t even look up. Downstairs, he edged past the skinny, grinning bartender, and by the time he burst outside into the sun Alvis felt crazy with thirst. He hurried across the street, toward another bar, thinking, These bars, thank God, they go on forever. It was a relief, that he would never exhaust all the bars in the world. He could come to Italy once a year to work on this book, and even if it took him the rest of his life to finish it and drink himself to death, that was okay. He knew now what his book would be: an artifact, incomplete and misshapen, a shard of some larger meaning. And if his time with Maria was ultimately pointless—a random encounter, a fleeting moment, perhaps even the wrong whore—then so be it.

In the street, a truck veered around him and he was jolted out of his thoughts long enough to look back over his shoulder, up at the brothel he had just left. There, in the second-story window, stood Maria—at least that’s what he would tell himself—leaning against the glass, watching him, her robe open a little, her fingers stroking the place between her breasts where he had once pressed his face and sobbed. She stared at him a second longer, and then she backed away from the window and was gone.

A
fter that burst of prolific writing, Alvis Bender never made much more progress on his novel when he came to Italy. Instead, he’d cat around Rome or Milan or Venice for a week or two, drinking and chasing women, then come and spend a few days in the quiet of Porto Vergogna. He’d rework that first chapter, rewrite it, reorder things, take a word or two out, put a new sentence in—but nothing came of his book. And yet it always restored him in some way, reading and gently reworking his one good chapter, and seeing his old friend Carlo Tursi, his wife, Antonia, and their sea-eyed son, Pasquale. But now—to find both Carlo and Antonia dead like this, to find Pasquale a full-grown man . . . Alvis wasn’t sure what to think. He had heard of couples dying in short order like this, the grief just too much for the survivor to bear. But it was hard to get his mind around: a year earlier, Carlo and Antonia had both seemed healthy. And now they were gone?

“When did this happen?” he asked Pasquale.

“My father died last spring, my mother three nights ago,” Pasquale said. “Her funeral mass is tomorrow.”

Alvis kept searching Pasquale’s face. He’d been away at school the last few springs when Alvis had come. He couldn’t believe this was little Pasquale, grown into this . . . this man. Even in his grief, Pasquale had the same strange calm about him that he’d had as a boy, those blue eyes steady in their easy assessment of the world. They sat on the patio in the cool morning, Alvis Bender’s portable typewriter and suitcase at his feet where Pasquale had once sat. “I’m so sorry, Pasquale,” he said. “I can go find a hotel up the coast if you want to be alone.”

Pasquale looked up at him. Even though Alvis’s Italian was usually pretty clear, the words were taking a moment to register for Pasquale, almost as if they had to be translated. “No. I would like you to stay.” He poured them each another glass of wine, and slid Alvis’s glass to him.

“Grazie,”
Alvis said.

They drank their glasses of wine quietly, Pasquale staring at the table.

“It’s fairly common, couples passing one after the other that way,” said Alvis, whose knowledge sometimes seemed to Pasquale suspiciously broad. “To die of . . .” He tried to think of the Italian word for grief.
“Dolore.”

“No.” Pasquale looked up slowly again. “My aunt killed her.”

Alvis wasn’t certain he’d heard right. “Your aunt?”

“Yes.”

“Why would she do that, Pasquale?” Alvis asked.

Pasquale rubbed his face. “She wanted me to go marry the American actress.”

Alvis thought Pasquale might be insane with grief. “What actress?”

Pasquale sleepily handed over the photo of Dee Moray. Alvis took his reading glasses from his pocket, stared at the photo, then looked up. He said flatly, “Your mother wanted you to marry Elizabeth Taylor?”

“No. The other one,” Pasquale said, switching to English, as if such things could only be believed in that language. “She come to the hotel, three days. She make a mistake to come here.” He shrugged.

In the eight years Alvis Bender had been coming to Porto Vergogna, he’d seen only three other guests at the hotel, certainly no Americans, and certainly no beautiful actresses, no friends of Elizabeth Taylor. “She’s beautiful,” Alvis said. “Pasquale, where is your Aunt Valeria now?”

“I don’t know. She ran into the hills.” Pasquale filled their wineglasses again. He looked up at his old family friend, at his sharp features and thin mustache, fanning himself with his fedora. “Alvis,” Pasquale said, “is it okay if we do not talk?”

“Of course, Pasquale,” Alvis said. They quietly drank their wine. And in the quiet, the waves lapped at the cliffs below and a light, salty mist rose in the air, as both men stared out at the sea.

“She read your book,” Pasquale said after a while.

Alvis cocked his head, wondering if he’d heard right. “What did you say?”

“Dee. The American.” He pointed to the blond woman in the photo. “She read your book. She said it was sad, but also very good. She liked it very much.”

“Really?” Alvis asked in English. Then, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Again, it was quiet except for the sea on the rocks, like someone shuffling cards. “I don’t suppose she said . . . anything else?” Alvis Bender asked after a time, once again in Italian.

Pasquale said he wasn’t sure what Alvis meant.

“Concerning my chapter,” he said. “Did the actress say anything else?”

Pasquale said he couldn’t think of anything if she had.

Alvis finished his wine and said he was going up to his room, Pasquale asking if Alvis wouldn’t mind staying in a second-floor room. The actress had stayed on the third floor, he said, and he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it. Pasquale felt funny lying, but he simply wasn’t ready for someone else in that room yet, even Alvis.

“Of course,” Alvis said, and he went upstairs to put his things in his room, still smiling at the thought of a beautiful woman reading his book.

And so Pasquale was sitting at the table alone when he heard the high rumble of a larger boat motor and looked up just in time to see a speedboat he didn’t recognize round the breakwater into Porto Vergogna’s tiny cove. The pilot had come too quickly into the cove and the boat rose indignantly and settled in the backsplash of its own chop. There were three men in the boat, and as the boat rumbled up to the pier he could see them clearly: a man in a black cap piloting the boat, and behind him, sitting together in back, the snake Michael Deane and the drunk Richard Burton.

Pasquale made no move to go down to the water. The black-capped pilot tied to the wooden bollard and then Michael Deane and Richard Burton climbed out of the boat, stepped onto the pier, and began making their way up the narrow trail to the hotel.

Richard Burton seemed to have sobered up, and was impeccably dressed in a wool suit coat, cuffs of his shirtsleeves peeking out, no tie.

“There’s my old friend,” Richard Burton called to Pasquale as he climbed toward the village. “I don’t suppose Dee’s returned here, sport?”

Michael Deane was a few steps behind Burton, taking measure of the place.

Pasquale looked behind him, at the sad cluster of his father’s village, trying to see it through the American’s eyes. The small block-and-stucco houses must look as exhausted as he felt—as if, after three hundred years, they might yet lose their grip on the cliffs and tumble into the sea.

“No,” Pasquale said. He remained seated, but as both men reached the patio, Pasquale glared up at Michael Deane, who took a half step back.

“So . . . you haven’t seen Dee?” Michael Deane asked.

“No,” Pasquale said again.

“See, I told you,” Michael Deane said to Richard Burton. “Now let’s go to Rome. She’ll turn up there. Or maybe she’ll go on to Switzerland after all.”

Richard Burton ran his hand through his hair, turned, and pointed to the wine bottle on the patio table. “Do you mind terribly, sport?”

Behind him, Michael Deane flinched, but Richard Burton grabbed the bottle, shook it, and showed Deane that it was empty. “Outrageous fortune,” he said, and rubbed his mouth as if he were dying of thirst.

“Inside is more wine,” Pasquale said, “in the kitchen.”

“Bloody decent of you, Pat,” Richard Burton said, patting Pasquale on the shoulder and walking past him into the hotel.

When he was gone, Michael Deane shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. “Dick thought she might have come back here.”

“You lose her?” Pasquale asked.

“I suppose that’s one way to put it.” Michael Deane frowned, as if considering whether or not to say any more. “She was supposed to go on to Switzerland, but it looks like she never got on the train.” Michael Deane rubbed his temple. “If she does come back here, could you contact me?”

Pasquale said nothing.

“Look,” Michael Deane said. “This is all very complicated. You only see this one girl and I’ll admit: it’s been rough business for her. But there are other people involved, other responsibilities and considerations. Marriages, careers . . . it’s not simple.”

Pasquale flinched, recalling when he’d said the same thing to Dee Moray about his relationship with Amedea:
It’s not simple.

Michael Deane cleared his throat. “I didn’t come here to explain myself. I came here so you could pass on a message if you see her. Tell her I know she’s angry. But I also know exactly what she wants. You tell her that.
Michael Deane knows what you want.
And I’m the man who can help her get it.” He reached into his jacket and produced another envelope, which he extended to Pasquale. “There’s an Italian phrase I’ve grown fond of in the last few weeks:
con molta discrezione
.”