Beautiful Ruins

He felt drained from trying to speak English, but pleased to have communicated something abstract and personal after two days of How is room? and More soap?

Dee looked up the coast; Pasquale knew she was watching for Orenzio’s boat and he assured her they would be able to see it from up here. She sat, curled up on her knees, staring to the northeast, where the soil was better than in rocky Porto Vergogna and the gradual cliffs were seamed with parallel rows of grapevines.

Pasquale pointed back down toward his village. “Do you see this rock? I am build a te

She looked perplexed. “Where?”

“There.” They had climbed and gone half a kilometer to the south, and so he could just make out the cluster of boulders beyond the village. “Will be primo te

“Wait. You’re putting a te

“For make my hotel destinazione primaria, yes? Very luxury.”

“I guess I don’t see where you’re going to fit a te

He leaned in closer and extended his arm, and she pressed her cheek against his shoulder to look straight down his arm past his pointing finger, to make sure she was seeing the right place. There was a jolt of electricity in his shoulder, where her cheek touched him, and Pasquale’s breath fell short again. He’d assumed that his romantic education, courtesy of Amedea, had done away with the old nervousness he used to feel around girls, but here he was, shaking like a child.

She was incredulous. “You’re building a te

“Yes. I make the rocks . . . flat.” He remembered the English word. “Cantilever, yes? Will be very famous, best te

“But won’t the te

He looked from her to the boulders and back, wondering if she knew the game. “No. The players hit the ball.” He held his two hands apart. “On this side and this side.”

“Yeah, but when they miss—”

He just stared at her.

“Have you ever played te

This was a sore subject, sports. Even though Pasquale was tall for his family, over 1.8 meters, he had played no sports growing up in Porto Vergogna; for a long time this shame was at the front of his insecurities. “I see many pictures,” he said, “and I make measure from a book.”

“When the player on the sea side misses it . . . won’t the balls fly into the sea?”

Pasquale rubbed his jaw and considered it.

She smiled. “Maybe you could put up high fences.”

Pasquale stared out at the sea, imagining it covered with bobbing yellow te

“I’m sure it will be a wonderful court,” she said, and turned back to the sea.

Pasquale looked at Dee’s sharp profile, the wind snapping her hair. “The man who comes today, you are in love with him?” He was surprised at himself for asking, and when she turned back Pasquale looked down. “I hope . . . is okay I ask this.”

“Oh, of course.” She took a deep breath and blew air out. “Unfortunately, I think I am, yes. But I shouldn’t be. He’s not a good man to fall in love with.”

“And . . . he is in love?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He’s in love with himself, too.”

It took a second to register, but Pasquale was delighted by her joke. “Ah!” he said. “Very fu

Another gust riffled Dee’s hair and she held it down against her head. “Pasquale, I read the story I found in my room, by the American writer.”

“The book . . . is good, yes?” Pasquale’s mother had never liked Alvis Bender as much as Pasquale and his father did. If the man was such a brilliant writer, she said, why had he only written one chapter in eight years?

“It’s sad,” Dee said, and she put her hand on her chest. Pasquale couldn’t look away from those lovely fingers splayed out over the tops of Dee Moray’s breasts.

“I am sorry,” he cleared his throat, “you find this sad story in my hotel.”

“Oh, no, it’s very good,” she said. “It has a kind of hopelessness that made me feel less alone in my own hopelessness. Does that make sense?”

Pasquale nodded unsurely.

“The movie I was working on, Cleopatra, it’s about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that’s what every story is about.” She removed her hand from her chest. “Pasquale, have you ever been in love?”

He felt himself flinch. “Yes.”

“What was her name?”

“Amedea,” he said, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d said Amedea out loud; he was amazed at the power it had, that simple name.

“Do you still love her?”

Of all the difficulties of speaking in another language, this one was the worst. “Yes,” Pasquale finally said.

“Why aren’t you with her?”

Pasquale exhaled, surprised at the sharpness at the base of his ribs. He finally just said, “Is not simple, no?”

“No,” she said, and looked out to a tight roll of white clouds just begi

“Come. One more thing.” Pasquale moved to the far corner where the bunker met the jagged boulders of the cliff face. He pulled away branches and pushed rocks aside, revealing a narrow, rectangular hole in the concrete roof. He squeezed in and lowered himself down. Halfway into the pillbox, he looked across its roof to see that Dee still hadn’t moved. “Is safe,” Pasquale said. “Is okay. Come.”

He dropped into the bunker, and a moment later Dee Moray squeezed through the narrow hole and dropped in next to him.

It was dark inside, the air a bit stale, and in the corners they had to stoop a bit to avoid hitting their heads on the concrete ceiling. The only light came from the three gun turrets, which, in the early morning, cast distorted rectangles of light on the pillbox floor. “Look,” Pasquale said, and he pulled a matchbox from his pocket, struck a single kitchen match and held it to one of the concrete walls in the back of the bunker.

Dee walked toward the flickering light of the match. The back wall was covered with paintings, five frescoes immaculately painted on the concrete, one after the other, as if it were a crude gallery wall. Pasquale lit another match and handed it to her and she stepped even closer to the wall. The artist had painted what looked like wooden frames around the paintings, too, and even though they had been done on concrete and the paint was faded and cracked, it was clear the artist had real talent. The first was a seascape—the rough coast beneath this very pillbox, the churning waves on the rocks, Porto Vergogna just a cluster of rooftops in the right-hand corner. The next two were official-looking portraits of two very different German soldiers. And finally there were two identical paintings of a single girl. Time and weather had faded the colors to dull versions of some earlier vibrancy, and a stream of water seeping into the bunker had damaged the seascape, while a large crack split one of the soldiers’ portraits and a fissure ran through the corner of the first painting of the girl. But otherwise the art was remarkably well-preserved.

“Later, the sun, it come through these windows.” Pasquale pointed to the machine-gun slots in the pillbox wall. “Make these paint . . . it seem alive. The girl, she is molto bella, yes?”

Dee stared, open-mouthed. “Oh, yes.” Her match went out and Pasquale lit another. He put a hand on Dee’s shoulder and pointed to the two paintings in the center, the portraits of the two soldiers. “The fishermen say two German soldiers live here in the war, for guard the sea, yes? One, he paint this wall.”

She stepped in closer to look at the soldiers’ portraits—one a young, chinless boy with his head cocked proudly, looking off to the side, tunic buttoned to his chin; the other a few years older, shirt open, staring straight out from the wall—and even with the paint faded on the concrete, an unmistakable wistful look on his face. “This one was the painter,” she said quietly.