Beautiful Ruins

Pasquale gri

“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 I

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 told 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.”