Beautiful Ruins

Pasquale left the fishermen in the trattoria to go see his mother, who was in one of her dark periods and had refused to leave her bed for two weeks. When he opened the door, he could see her staring at the ceiling, her wiry gray hair stuck to the pillow behind her, arms crossed over her chest, mouth in the placid death face that she liked to rehearse. “You should get up, Mamma. Come out and eat with us.”

“Not today, Pasqo,” she rasped. “Today I hope to die.” She took a deep breath and opened one eye. “Valeria tells me there is an American in the hotel.”

“Yes, Mamma.” He checked her bedsores but his aunt had already powdered them.

“A woman?”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“Then your father’s Americans have finally arrived.” She glanced over at the dark window. “He said they would come and here they are. You should marry this woman and go to America to make a proper te

“No, Mamma. You know I wouldn’t—”

“Leave before this place kills you like it killed your father.”

“I would never leave you.”

“Don’t worry about me. I will die soon enough and go to be with your father and with your poor brothers.”

“You’re not dying,” Pasquale said.

“I am already dead inside,” she said. “You should push me out into the sea and drown me like that old sick cat of yours.”

Pasquale straightened. “You said my cat ran away. While I was at university.”

She shot him a glance from the corner of her eye. “It is a saying.”

“No. It’s not a saying. There is no saying such as that. Did you and Papa drown my cat while I was in Florence?”

“I’m sick, Pasqo! Why do you torment me?”

Pasquale went back to his room. That night he heard footsteps on the third floor as the American went to the bathroom, but the next morning she still hadn’t emerged from her room, so he went about his work on the beach. When he returned to the hotel for lunch, his Aunt Valeria said that Dee Moray had come down for an espresso, a piece of torta, and an orange.

“What did she say?” Pasquale asked.

“How would I know? That awful language. Like someone choking on a bone.”

Pasquale crept up the stairs and listened at her door, but Dee Moray was quiet.

He went back outside and down to his beach, but it was hard to tell if the currents had taken any more sand away. He climbed up past the hotel onto the boulders where he’d staked out his te

He had just lit a cigarette to think about it when he saw Orenzio’s mahogany boat round the point up the coast near Vernazza. He watched it angle away from the chop along the shoreline, and he held his breath as it passed Riomaggiore. As it got closer he could see there were two people besides Orenzio in the boat. Were these more Americans coming to his hotel? It was almost too much to hope for. Of course, the boat was likely going past him, to lovely Portovenere, or around the point into La Spezia. But then the boat slowed and curled into his narrow cove.

Pasquale began climbing down from his te

Gualfredo was all jowls, bald, with a huge brush mustache. The other man, the giant, appeared to be carved from granite. In the boat, Orenzio looked down, as if he couldn’t bear to meet Pasquale’s eyes.

As Pasquale approached, Gualfredo put his hands out. “So it’s true. Carlo Tursi’s son returns a man to tend the whore’s crack.”

Pasquale nodded grimly and formally. “Good day, Signor Gualfredo.” He’d never seen the bastard Gualfredo in Porto Vergogna before, but the man’s story was well known on the coast: his mother had carried on a long affair with a wealthy Milan banker, and to buy her silence the man had given her petty-criminal son interest in hotels in Portovenere, Chiavari, and Monterosso al Mare.

Gualfredo smiled. “You have an American actress in your old whorehouse?”

“Yes,” Pasquale said. “We sometimes have American guests.”

Gualfredo frowned, his mustache seeming to weigh down his face and his trunk of a neck. He looked over at Orenzio, who pretended to be checking the boat motor. “I told Orenzio there must be a mistake. This woman was surely meant to be at my hotel in Portovenere. But he claims that she really wanted to come to this . . .” He looked around. “Village.”

“Yes,” Pasquale said, “she prefers the quiet.”

Gualfredo stepped in closer. “This is not some Swiss farmer on holiday, Pasquale. These Americans expect a level of service you can’t provide. Especially the American cinema people. Listen to me: I’ve been doing this a long time. It would be regrettable if you were to give the Levante a bad reputation.”

“We are taking care of her,” Pasquale said.

“Then you won’t mind if I talk to her, to make sure there wasn’t some mistake.”

“You can’t,” Pasquale said, too quickly. “She’s sleeping now.”

Gualfredo looked back at Orenzio in the boat and then returned his dead eyes to Pasquale. “Or perhaps you are keeping me from her because she has been tricked by two old friends who took advantage of a woman’s poor Italian to convince her to come to Porto Vergogna rather than Portovenere, as she intended.”

Orenzio opened his mouth to object but Pasquale beat him to it. “Of course not. Look, you’re welcome to come back later when she is not resting and ask her anything you like, but I won’t let you disturb her now. She’s sick.”

A smile pushed at the ends of Gualfredo’s mustache and he gestured at the giant beside him. “Do you know Signor Pelle, of the tourism guild?”

“No.” Pasquale tried to meet the big man’s eyes but they were tiny pinpoints in the fleshy face. His silver suit coat strained beneath his bulk.

“For a small yearly fee and a reasonable tax, the tourism guild provides benefits for all the legitimate hotels—transportation, advertising, political representation . . .”

“Sicurezza,” added Signor Pelle in a bullfrog voice.

“Ah yes, thank you, Signor Pelle. Security,” said Gualfredo, half of his shrub mustache rising in a smirk. “Protection.”

Pasquale knew better than to ask, Protection from what? Clearly, Signor Pelle provided protection from Signor Pelle.

“My father never said anything about this tax,” Pasquale said, and he got a quick glance of warning from Orenzio. It was something Pasquale was trying to figure out, endemic to doing business in Italy, determining which of the countless shakedowns and corruptions were necessary to pay and which could safely be ignored.

Gualfredo smiled. “Oh, your father paid. A yearly fee and also a small per-night foreign guest fee . . . which we haven’t always collected because, frankly, we didn’t think there were any foreign guests in the whore’s crack.” He shrugged. “Ten percent. It’s nothing. Most hotels pass the tax on to their guests.”

Pasquale cleared his throat. “And if I don’t pay?”

This time, Gualfredo did not smile. Orenzio glanced up at Pasquale, another grim look of warning on his face. Pasquale crossed his arms to keep them from shaking. “If you can provide some documentation of this tax, then I will pay it.”