Beautiful Ruins Read online

  It was while comforting his wife over Roberto’s death that the forty-one-year-old Carlo had somehow mustered one last, good seed and passed it on to the thirty-nine-year-old Antonia. At first she disbelieved her condition, then assumed it was temporary (she’d been plagued by miscarriages after her first two). Then, as her belly ballooned, Antonia saw her wartime pregnancy as a sure sign from God that Guido would survive. She named her blue-eyed bambino miracolo Pasquale, Italian for Passover, to honor this deal with God—that the plague of violence sweeping the world would pass over the rest of her family.

  But Guido died, too, shot through the throat in the icy meat-fields outside Stalingrad in the winter of ’42. His parents, now ruined by grief, wanted only to hide from the world, and to protect their miracle boy from such insanity. So Carlo sold his stake in the family business to some cousins and bought the tiny Pensione di San Pietro in the most remote place he could find, Porto Vergogna. And there they hid from the world.

  Thankfully, the Tursis had saved most of the money from selling their Florence holdings, because the hotel did very little business. Confused Italians and other Europeans occasionally wandered in, and the little three-top trattoria was a gathering place for the dwindling fishing families of Porto Vergogna, but months could pass between real guests. Then, in the spring of 1952, a water taxi drifted into the cove, and from it stepped a tall, neatly handsome young American with a narrow mustache and slicked brown hair. The man clearly had been drinking, and smoked a thin cigar as he stepped onto the pier with his one suitcase and a portable typewriter. He looked around at the village, scratched his head, and said, in surprisingly fluid Italian, “Qualcuno sembra aver rubato la tua città”—Someone seems to have stolen your town. He introduced himself to the Tursis as “Alvis Bender, scrittore fallito ma ubriacone di successo”—failed writer but successful drunk—and proceeded to hold court on the porch for six hours, drinking wine and talking about politics and history and, finally, about the book he wasn’t writing.

  Pasquale was eleven, and other than the occasional trip to see family in Florence, all he knew of the world came from books. To meet an actual author was unbelievable. He’d lived entirely in the shelter of his parents in this tiny village, and he was enthralled by the towering, laughing American, who seemed to have been everywhere, to know everything. Pasquale sat at the writer’s feet and asked him questions. “What’s America like? What is the best kind of automobile? What’s it like in an airplane?” And one day: “What is your book about?”

  Alvis Bender handed the boy his wineglass. “Fill this up and I’ll tell you.”

  When Pasquale returned with more wine, Alvis reclined and stroked his thin mustache. “My book is about how the whole of human history and advancement has brought us only to the realization that death is life’s point, its profound purpose.”

  Pasquale had heard Alvis make such speeches to his father. “No,” he said. “What’s it about? What happens?”

  “Right. Market demands a story.” Alvis took another drink of wine. “Okay then. Well, my book is about an American who fights in Italy during the war, loses his best friend, and falls out of love with life. The man returns to America, where he hopes to teach English and write a book about his disillusionment. But he only drinks and broods and chases women. He can’t write. Perhaps it is his guilt over being alive while his friend died. And guilt is sometimes a kind of envy—his friend left a young son, and when the man goes to visit his friend’s son, afterward, he longs to be a noble memory, too, rather than the obscene wreck that he’s become. The man loses his teaching job and goes back to his family business, selling cars. He drinks and broods and chases women. He decides the only way he’s ever going to write his book and ease his sorrow is to go back to Italy, the place that holds the secret to his sadness, but a place that escapes his powers of description when he isn’t there—a dream he can’t quite recall. So for two weeks every year, the man goes to Italy to work on his book. But here’s the thing, Pasquale—and you can’t tell anyone this part, because it’s the secret twist—even in Italy, he doesn’t really write his book. He drinks. He broods. He chases women. And he talks to a smart boy in a tiny village about the novel he will never write.”

  It was quiet. Pasquale thought the book sounded boring. “How does it end?”

  For a long time, Alvis Bender stared at his glass of wine. “I don’t know, Pasquale,” he said finally. “How do you think it should end?”

  Young Pasquale considered the question. “Well, instead of going back to America during the war, he could go to Germany and try to kill Hitler.”

  “Ah,” Alvis Bender said. “Yes. That is exactly what happens, Pasquale. He gets drunk at a party and everyone warns him not to drive, but he makes a giant scene leaving the party and he jumps in his car and accidentally drives over Hitler.”

  Pasquale didn’t think it should be an accident, Hitler’s death. It would take all the suspense out. He offered, helpfully, “Or he could shoot him with a machine gun.”

  “Even better,” Alvis said. “Our hero makes a huge scene leaving the party. Everyone warns him that he’s too drunk to operate a machine gun. But he insists and he accidentally shoots Hitler.”

  When Pasquale thought Bender was making fun of him, he would change the subject. “What is your book called, Alvis?”

  “The Smile of Heaven,” he said. “It’s from Shelley.” And he did his best to translate: “The whispering waves were half asleep/the clouds were gone to play/And on the woods, and on the deep/the smile of Heaven lay.”

  Pasquale sat for a while, thinking about the poem. Le onde andavano sussurrando—the whispering waves, he knew these. But the title, The Smile of Heaven—Il sorriso del Paradiso—seemed wrong to him. He didn’t think of heaven as a smiling place. If mortal sinners went to Hell and venal sinners like himself went to Purgatory, then Heaven had to be full of no one but saints, priests, nuns, and baptized babies who died before they had a chance to do anything wrong.

  “In your book, why does heaven smile?”

  “I don’t know.” Bender guzzled the wine and handed Pasquale the empty glass again. “Maybe because someone has finally killed that bastard Hitler.”

  Pasquale stood to get more wine. But he began to worry that Bender wasn’t teasing after all. “I don’t think Hitler’s death should be an accident,” Pasquale said.

  Alvis smiled wearily at the boy. “Everything is an accident, Pasquale.”

  During those years, Pasquale couldn’t recall Alvis ever writing for more than a few hours; sometimes he wondered if the man ever unpacked his typewriter. But he came back year after year, and finally, in 1958, the year Pasquale left for university, he presented Carlo with the first chapter of his novel. Seven years. One chapter.

  Pasquale couldn’t understand why Alvis came to Porto Vergogna at all, since he seemed to get so little done. “Of all the places in the world, why do you come here?”

  “This coast is a wellspring for writers,” Alvis said. “Petrarch invented the sonnet near here. Byron, James, Lawrence—they all came here to write. Boccaccio invented realism here. Shelley drowned near here, a few kilometers from where his wife invented the horror novel.”

  Pasquale didn’t understand what Alvis Bender meant by these writers “inventing.” He thought of inventors as men like Marconi, the great Bolognese who’d invented the wireless. Once the first story was told, what was there to invent?

  “Excellent question.” Since losing his college teaching job, Alvis was always looking for opportunities to lecture, and in the sheltered, teenage Pasquale he found a willing audience. “Imagine truth as a chain of great mountains, their tops way up in the clouds. Writers explore these truths, always looking out for new paths up these peaks.”

  “So the stories are paths?” Pasquale asked.

  “No,” Alvis said. “Stories are bulls. Writers come of age full of vigor, and they feel the need to drive the old stories from the herd. One bull rules the herd awhile but
then he loses his vigor and the young bulls take over.”

  “Stories are bulls?”

  “Nope.” Alvis Bender took a drink. “Stories are nations, empires. They can last as long as ancient Rome or as short as the Third Reich. Story-nations rise and decline. Governments change, trends rise, and they go on conquering their neighbors. Like the Roman Empire, the epic poem stretched for centuries, as far as the world. The novel rose with the British Empire, but wait . . . what is that rising in America? Film?”

  Pasquale grinned. “And if I ask if stories are empires, you’ll say—”

  “Stories are people. I’m a story, you’re a story . . . your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we’re lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we’re less alone.”

  “But you never answered the question,” Pasquale said. “Why you come here.”

  Bender pondered the wine in his hand. “A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.”

  “That’s only three.”

  Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.”

  If, in the glow of too much wine, Alvis treated Pasquale like a little brother, Carlo Tursi looked on the American with a similar affection. The two men would sit up drinking late, having parallel conversations, but not exactly listening to each other. As the 1950s unrolled and the ache from the war faded, Carlo began to think like a businessman again, and he shared with Alvis his ideas about bringing tourists to Porto Vergogna—even though Alvis insisted that tourism would ruin the place.

  “At one time every town in Italy was surrounded by medieval walls,” Alvis lectured. “To this day, nearly every hilltop in Tuscany rises into gray castle walls. In times of danger, peasants took refuge behind these walls, safe from bandits and armies. In most of Europe, the peasant class disappeared thirty, forty years ago, but not in Italy. Finally, after two wars, houses spill into the flats and river valleys outside the city walls. But as the walls come down, so does Italian culture, Carlo. Italy becomes like any other place, overrun with people looking for ‘the Italian experience.’ ”

  “Yes,” Carlo said. “This is what I want to profit from!”

  Alvis pointed to the jagged cliffs above and behind them. “But here, on this coast, your walls were made by God—or volcanoes. You can’t tear them down. And you can’t build outside them. This town can never be more than a few barnacles on the rocks. But someday, it could be the last Italian place in all of Italy.”

  “Exactly,” Carlo said drunkenly. “Then the tourists will flock here, eh, Roberto?”

  It was quiet. Alvis Bender was exactly the age Carlo’s oldest son would have been if he hadn’t gone down in that tumbling box over North Africa. Carlo sighed, his voice thin and weak. “Pardon me. I meant, of course, to say Alvis.”

  “Yes,” Alvis said, and he patted the older man’s shoulder.

  Many times Pasquale went to bed to the sound of his father and Alvis talking, and woke hours later to find them still on the porch, the writer holding forth on some obscure topic (And thus the sewer is man’s greatest achievement, Carlo, the disposal of shit the apex of all this inventing and fighting and copulating). But eventually Carlo would turn the conversation back to tourism and ask his one American guest how he might make the Pensione di San Pietro more attractive to Americans.

  Alvis Bender indulged these conversations, but usually came around to pleading with Carlo not to change a thing. “This whole coast will be spoiled soon enough. You’ve got something truly magical here, Carlo. Real isolation. And natural beauty.”

  “So I will trumpet these things, perhaps with an English name? How would you say L’albergo numero uno, tranquillo, con una bella vista del villaggio e delle scogliere?”

  “The Number One Quiet Inn with a Most Beautiful View in the Village of Cliffs,” Alvis Bender said. “Nice. Might be a bit long, though. And sentimental.”

  Carlo asked what he meant by sentimentale.

  “Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use ‘beautiful’ to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now—clear and precise. Humble like dreams.”

  Carlo Tursi took this advice to heart. And so, in 1960, while Pasquale was away at college, Alvis Bender came for his yearly visit—he strode up the steps to the hotel and he found Carlo bursting with pride, standing before the baffled fishermen and his new hand-lettered English sign: THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW

  “What does it mean?” said one of the fishermen. “Empty whorehouse?”

  “Vista adeguata,” said Carlo, translating for them.

  “What kind of idiot says that the view from his hotel is only adequate?” said the fisherman.

  “Bravo, Carlo,” said Alvis. “It’s perfect.”

  The beautiful American was vomiting. From his dark room Pasquale could hear her retching upstairs. He flipped on the light and pulled his watch off the dresser. It was four in the morning. He dressed quietly and made his way up the dark, narrow stairs. Four steps from the top of the landing he saw her leaning against the bathroom doorway, trying to catch her breath. She wore a thin, white nightgown cut several inches above her knees—her legs so impossibly long and smooth, Pasquale could go no further. She was almost as white as her nightgown.

  “I’m sorry, Pasquale,” she said. “I woke you.”

  “No, is fine,” he said.

  She turned back toward the basin and began to retch again, but there was nothing in her stomach and she doubled over in pain.

  Pasquale started up the rest of the stairs but then stopped, remembering how Gualfredo had said Porto Vergogna and the Hotel Adequate View weren’t properly equipped for American tourists. “I am send for the doctor,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “I’m okay.” But just then she grabbed her side and slumped to the floor. “Oh.”

  Pasquale helped her back to bed and hurried downstairs and outside. The nearest doctor lived three kilometers down the coast, in Portovenere. He was a kindly old gentleman dottore, a widower named Merlonghi who spoke fine English and who came to the cliff-side villages once a year to check on the fishermen. Pasquale knew just which fisherman to send for the doctor: Tomasso the Communist, whose wife answered the door and stepped aside. Tomasso pulled on his suspenders and accepted his job with proud formality, removing his cap and saying he wouldn’t let Pasquale down.

  Pasquale went back into the hotel, where his Aunt Valeria was sitting with Dee Moray in her room, holding her hair as she bent over a large bowl. The two women looked ridiculous next to each other—Dee Moray with her pale, perfect skin, her shimmery blond hair; Valeria sprouting whiskers from that craggy face, her hair a spool of wire. “She needs to drink water so there is something to spit,” Valeria said. A glass of water sat on the bedside table, next to the pages of Alvis Bender’s book.

  Pasquale started to translate what his aunt had said, but Dee Moray seemed to understand the word acqua, and she reached for the glass of water and sipped it.

  “I’m sorry for all the trouble,” she said.

  “What does she say?” Valeria asked.

  “She is sorry for the trouble.”

  “Tell her that her tiny bedclothes are a whore’s rags,” Valeria said. “This is what she should be sorry for, that she tempts my nephew like a whore.”

  “I’m not going to tell her that!”

  “Tell the pig-whore to leave, Pasqo.”

  “Enough, Zia!”

  “God made her sick because He disapproves of cheap whores in tiny bedclothes.”

  “Be quiet, crazy old woman.”

  Dee Moray had been watching this exchange. “What is she saying?” she asked.

  “Um.” Pasquale swallowed. “She is sorry you are sick.”

  Valeria stuck out her bottom lip, waiting. “You to
ld the whore what I said?”

  “Yes,” Pasquale told his aunt. “I told her.”

  The room was quiet. Dee Moray closed her eyes and shook with another wave of nausea, her back bucking as she tried to vomit.

  When it had passed, Dee Moray breathed heavily. “Your mother is sweet.”

  “She is not my mother,” Pasquale said in English. “She is my aunt. Zia Valeria.”

  Valeria watched their faces as they spoke English, and seemed suspicious about hearing her own name. “I hope you’re not going to marry this whore, Pasquale.”

  “Zia—”

  “Your mother thinks you are going to marry her.”

  “Enough, Zia!”

  Valeria gently pushed the hair out of the beautiful American’s eyes. “What is the matter with her?”

  Pasquale said quietly, “Cancro.”

  Dee Moray didn’t look up.

  Valeria seemed to think about this. She chewed the inside of her cheek. “Oh,” she said finally. “She will be fine. Tell the whore she will be fine.”

  “I’m not going to tell her that.”

  “Tell her.” Valeria looked at Pasquale seriously. “Tell her that as long as she doesn’t leave Porto Vergogna, she will be fine.”

  Pasquale turned to his aunt. “What are you talking about?”

  Valeria handed Dee the glass of water again. “No one dies here. Babies and old people, yes, but God has never taken a breeding adult from this village. It’s an old curse on this place—that the whores would lose many babies but would live to old age with their sins. Once you outgrow childhood in Porto Vergogna, you are doomed to live at least forty years. Go on. Tell her.” She tapped the beautiful American’s arm and nodded to her.