Beautiful Ruins (32 page)

He jumped away, and she smiled as she watched Alvis walk to his car.

She felt better, but she was still puzzled about why Ron had angered her so much. Was it just because he was a horny prick? Or was there something familiar and cutting in what he’d said—
the love of your life
? Maybe not. But it didn’t have to be like that, did it? Couldn’t you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn’t love be gentler, smaller, quieter, not quite all-consuming? Was that what Ron made her feel—guilt (
You use people
), perhaps over the suggestion that, at a tough point in her life, she’d traded on her looks for an older man’s love, for some security and a brand-new Corvair, given up on love for her own reflection in his lovesick eyes? Maybe she
was
Maggie. This started the crying again.

She followed the Biscayne, mesmerized by the blinking taillights. Denny Street was nearly empty. She really hated Alvis’s car; it was such an old person’s sedan. He could take any Chevy off the lot and he chose a Biscayne? At the next red light she pulled up alongside him, rolled her window down. He leaned across the seat and rolled the passenger window down.

“You really need a new car,” she said. “Why don’t you get another Corvette?”

“Can’t.” He shrugged. “I’ve got a kid now.”

“Kids don’t like Corvettes?”

“Kids love Corvettes.” He waved his hand behind him, like a magician, or a girl in a showroom. “But there’s no backseat.”

“We can put him on the roof.”

“We’re gonna put five kids on the roof?”

“Are we having five?”

“Did I forget to talk to you about that?”

She laughed, and felt the urge to . . . what, apologize? Or just to tell him, for the thousandth time—perhaps reassuring herself—that she loved him?

Alvis put a cigarette in his mouth and capped it with the car lighter, his face lit by the yellow glow. “No more picking on my car,” he said. Then he winked one of his bleary brown eyes, stepped on the gas and brake at the same time, the big motor yowling, tires beginning to chirp and spit yellow smoke, and he timed it perfectly, so that just as the light in front of them changed green, he popped the brake and the car seemed to leap forward. And, in Debra Bender’s memory, the noise would always precede what happened: the Biscayne firing into the intersection just as an old black pickup truck—headlights off, gunned at the last minute by another drunk trying to make a late-amber light—streaked in from the left, thundered, then crumpled Alvis’s car door, T-boned the Biscayne, and drove it through the intersection, an endless screech of steel and glass, Debra screaming at the same terrible pitch, her anguished cry lingering long after the tangled cars came to rest against the faraway curb.

17

The Battle for Porto Vergogna

April 1962

Porto Vergogna, Italy

P
asquale watched Richard Burton and Michael Deane scurry toward their rented speedboat, his Aunt Valeria chasing them, screaming and pointing her crooked finger: “Murderers! Assassins!” Pasquale stood uneasily. The world was fractured, broken in so many ways that Pasquale could barely conceive of which shard to reach for: his father and mother both gone now, Amedea and his son in Florence, his aunt screaming at the cinema people. The pieces of his broken life lay on the ground before him like a mirror that had always stared back, but which had now broken to reveal the life behind it.

Valeria was wading into the water, cursing and crying, spittle on her old gray lips, when Pasquale reached her. The boat had backed away from the pier. Pasquale took his aunt by her thin, bony shoulders. “No, Zia. Let them go. It’s okay.” Michael Deane was staring back at him from the boat—but Richard Burton was staring straight ahead, rubbing the neck of the wine bottle between his palms as they made their way toward the breakwater. Behind them, the fishermen’s wives watched quietly. Did they know what Valeria had done? She fell back into Pasquale’s arms, weeping. They stood on the shore together and watched the speedboat putter around the point, its nose rising proudly as the pilot gunned it, and the boat roared, rose, and sped away.

Pasquale helped Valeria back to the hotel and put her in her room, where she lay in her bed weeping and muttering. “I did a terrible thing,” she said.

“No,” Pasquale said. And even though Valeria
had
done a terrible thing, the worst sin imaginable, Pasquale knew what his mother would want him to say—and so he said it: “You were kind to help her.”

Valeria looked up in his eyes, nodded, and looked away. Pasquale tried to feel his mother’s presence, but the hotel felt emptied of her, emptied of everything. He left his aunt in her room. Back in the
trattoria
, Alvis Bender was sitting at a wrought-iron table, staring out the window, an open bottle of wine in front of him. He looked up. “Is your aunt okay?”

“Yes,” he said, but he was thinking about what Michael Deane had said—
It’s not simple
—and about Dee Moray vanishing from the train station in La Spezia that morning. Days earlier, when they had gone for a hike, Pasquale had pointed out to her the trails from the cliffs toward Portovenere and La Spezia. Now he imagined her walking away from La Spezia, looking up into those hills.

“I am going for a walk, Alvis,” he said.

Alvis nodded and reached for his wine.

Pasquale walked out the front door, letting the screen bang behind him. He turned and walked past Lugo’s house, saw the hero’s wife, Bettina, staring out the front door at him. He said nothing to her, but climbed the trail out of the village, tiny rocks bounding down the cliffs as he stepped. He moved quickly up the old donkey path, above the string marking his stupid tennis court, which blew around the boulders below him.

Pasquale wound through the olive groves as he worked his way up the cliff face behind Porto Vergogna, pulled himself up at the orange grove. Finally, he crested the ledge, walked down the next crease, and made his way up. After a few minutes of walking, Pasquale climbed over the line of boulders and came upon the old pillbox bunker—and saw at once that he’d been right. She had hiked from La Spezia. The branches and stones had been moved to reveal the opening that he’d covered back up the day they left here.

With the wind seeming to flick at him, Pasquale stepped across the split rock onto the concrete roof and lowered himself into the pillbox.

It was brighter outside than it had been the last time, and later in the day, so more light shone through the three little turret windows; yet it still took a moment for Pasquale’s eyes to adjust. Then he saw her. She was sitting in the corner of the pillbox, against the stone wall, curled up, her jacket wrapped around her shoulders and legs. She looked so frail in the shadows of the concrete dome—so different from the ethereal creature who had arrived in his town just days earlier.

“How did you know I was here?” she asked.

“I did not,” he said. “I just hope.”

He sat next to her, on the wall opposite the paintings. After a moment, Dee leaned against his shoulder. Pasquale slid his arm around her, pulled her even closer, her face against his chest. When they’d been here before, it had been the morning—indirect sunlight came in through the gun turret windows onto the floor. But now, in the late-afternoon light, the sun had shifted and its direct light climbed the wall until it landed directly on the paintings before them, three narrow rectangles of sunlight illuminating the faded colors of the portraits.

“I was going to walk all the way back to your hotel,” she said. “I was just waiting for the light to fall on the paintings this way.”

“Is nice,” he said.

“At first, it seemed like the saddest thing to me,” she said, “that no one would ever see these paintings. But then I got to thinking: What if you tried to take this wall and put it in a gallery somewhere? It would simply be five faded paintings in a gallery. And that’s when I realized: perhaps they’re only so remarkable because they’re here.”

“Yes,” he said again. “I think so.”

They sat quietly, as the day deepened, sunlight from the turrets slowly edging up the wall of paintings. Pasquale’s eyes felt heavy and he thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

On the pillbox wall, one of the rectangles of sunlight beamed across the face of the second portrait of the young woman, and it was as if she’d turned her head, ever so slightly, to regard the other lovely blonde, the real one, sitting curled with the young Italian man. It was something Pasquale had noticed before in the late afternoons, the way the moving sunlight had the power to change the paintings, almost animating them.

“Do you really think he saw her again?” Dee whispered. “The painter?”

Pasquale had wondered that very thing: whether the artist ever made it back to Germany, to the girl in the portraits. He knew from the fishermen’s stories that most of the German soldiers had been abandoned here, to be captured or killed by Americans as they swept up the countryside. He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.

“Yes,” Pasquale said. “I think.”

“And they got married?” Dee said.

Pasquale could see it all laid out before him. “Yes.”

“Did they have children?”

“Un bambino,”
Pasquale said—a boy. He surprised himself by saying this, and his chest ached the way his belly sometimes did after a big meal; it was all just too much.

“You told me the other night that you would have crawled from Rome to see me.” Dee squeezed Pasquale’s arm. “That was the loveliest thing to say.”

“Yes.”
It’s not simple—

She settled into his shoulder again. The light from the pillbox turrets was moving up the wall and was almost done with the paintings, just a single rectangle on the upper corner of the last of the girl’s portrait—the sun nearly done for the day with its gallery show. She looked up at him. “You really think the painter made it back to see her?”

“Oh, yes,” Pasquale said, his voice hoarse with feeling.

“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking—how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe—Pasquale Tursi said, only, “Yes.”

I
t was late in the afternoon when they got back to the village and Pasquale introduced Dee Moray to Alvis Bender. Alvis was reading on the patio of the Hotel Adequate View and he leaped to his feet, his book falling back onto his chair. Dee and Alvis shook hands awkwardly, the usually talkative Bender seeming tongue-tied—perhaps by her beauty, perhaps by the strange events of the day.

“So nice to meet you,” she said. “I hope you will understand if I excuse myself to take a nap. I’ve had a long walk and I’m terribly exhausted.”

“No, of course,” Alvis said, and only then did he think to remove his hat, which he held at his chest.

And then Dee connected the name. “Oh, Mr. Bender,” she said, turning back. “The author?”

He looked at the ground, embarrassed by the very word. “Oh, no—not a real author.”

“You certainly are,” she said. “I liked your book very much.”

“Thank you,” Alvis Bender said, and he flushed in a way that Pasquale had never seen before, had never imagined from the tall, sophisticated American. “I mean . . . it’s not finished, obviously. There’s more to tell.”

“Of course.”

Alvis glanced over at Pasquale, then back at the pretty actress. He laughed. “Although, truth be told, that’s most of what I’ve been able to write.”

She smiled warmly, and said, “Well . . . maybe that’s all there is. If so, I think it’s wonderful.” And with that she excused herself again and disappeared inside the hotel.

Pasquale and Alvis Bender stood on the patio next to each other and stared at the closed hotel door.

“Jesus. That’s Burton’s girl?” Alvis asked. “Not what I expected.”

“No,” was all Pasquale could say.

Valeria was back in the little kitchen, cooking. Pasquale stood by while she finished another pot of soup. When it was done, Pasquale took a bowl of it to Dee’s room, but she was already asleep. He looked down on her, making sure she was breathing. Then he left the soup on her nightstand and went back out into the
trattoria
, where Alvis Bender was eating some of Valeria’s soup and staring out the window.

“This place has gone crazy, Pasquale. The whole world has flooded in.”

Pasquale felt too tired to speak, and he walked past Alvis and to the door, looking out at the greenish sea. Down at the shore, the fishermen were finishing their work for the day—smoking and laughing as they hung their nets and washed down their boats.

Pasquale pushed open the door, stepped onto the wooden patio, and smoked. The fishermen came up the hill one at a time with what was left of their catches, and each one waved or nodded. Tomasso the Elder approached with a string of small fish and told Pasquale he’d saved some anchovies from his sale to the tourist restaurants. Did he think Valeria would want them? Yes, Pasquale said. Tomasso went inside and came out a few minutes later without his fish.

Alvis Bender was right. Someone had opened the taps and the world was pouring in. Pasquale had wanted this sleepy town to wake up, and now . . . look at it.

Perhaps that’s why he wasn’t even particularly surprised when, a few minutes later, he heard the sound of another boat motor and Gualfredo’s ten-meter churned into the cove—this time without Orenzio at the wheel but with Gualfredo piloting it, the brute Pelle at his side.

Pasquale thought he might bite through his own jaw. This was a final indignity, the last thing he could bear. And in his confusion, in his grief, Gualfredo suddenly seemed like some awful thorn in his side. He opened the screen door, went inside, and grabbed his mother’s old cane from the coatrack. Alvis Bender looked up from his wine, asked, “What is it, Pasquale?” But Pasquale didn’t answer, just turned around and went outside, walking purposefully down the steep
strada
toward the two men, who were climbing out of the boat, the cobblestones falling away as Pasquale marched with purpose, clouds racing through the violet overhead—last sunlight strobing the shoreline, waves drumming on smooth rocks.

The men were out of the boat, coming up the path, Gualfredo smiling: “Three nights the American woman stayed here when she was supposed to be at my hotel, Pasquale. You owe me for those nights.”

Still forty meters apart, with the fading sun right behind them now, Pasquale couldn’t make out the looks on the men’s faces, just their silhouettes. He said nothing, simply walked, his mind roiling with images of Richard Burton and Michael Deane, of his aunt poisoning his mother, of Amedea and his baby, of his failed tennis court, of his flinching before Gualfredo last time, of the truth revealed about himself: his core weakness as a man.

“The Brit skipped out on his bar bill,” Gualfredo said, now twenty meters away. “You might as well pay me for that, too.”

“No,” Pasquale said simply.

“No?” Gualfredo asked.

Behind him, he heard Alvis Bender come out onto the patio. “Everything okay down there, Pasquale?”

Gualfredo looked up at the hotel. “And you have another American guest? What are you running here, Tursi? I’m going to have to double the tax.”

Pasquale reached them just at the point where the trailhead met the edge of the piazza, where the dirt of the shore blended into the first cobblestone
strada
. Gualfredo was opening his mouth to say something else, but before he could, Pasquale swung the cane. It cracked against the bull neck of the brute Pelle, who apparently wasn’t expecting this, perhaps because of Pasquale’s sheepish demeanor the last time. The big man lurched to the side and fell in the dirt like a cut tree, Pasquale lifting the cane to swing it again . . . but finding it broken off against the big man’s neck. He threw the handle aside and went after Gualfredo with his fists.