Beautiful Ruins

Pasquale bent in close. “How do you know this?”

“He just looks like an artist. And he’s staring at us. He must’ve looked in a mirror as he painted his own face.”

Dee turned, took a few steps, and looked out the gun turret, to the sea below. Then she turned back to the paintings. “It’s amazing, Pasquale. Thank you.” She covered her mouth, as if about to cry, and then she turned to him. “Imagine being this artist, creating masterpieces up here . . . that no one will ever see. I think it’s kind of sad.”

She returned to the painted wall. Pasquale lit another match, handed it to her, and she made her way down the wall again . . . the roiling sea on the rocks, the two soldiers, and finally two paintings of the girl—sitting three-quarters sideways, painted from the waist up, two classic portraits. Dee paused over these last paintings. Pasquale had always assumed the two portraits of the girl were identical, but Dee said, “Look. This one wasn’t quite right. He corrected it. From a photograph, I’ll bet.” Pasquale stepped in beside her. Dee pointed. “In this one, her nose is a little too angled and her eyes dip.” Yes, Pasquale could see, she was right.

“He must have loved her very much,” she said.

She turned, and in the flickering match light Pasquale thought she might have tears in her eyes.

“Do you think he made it home to see her?”

They were close enough to kiss. “Yes,” Pasquale whispered. “He see her again.”

Stooped over in the tight pillbox, Dee blew out the match, stepped forward, and hugged him. In the dark, she whispered, “God, I hope so.”

At four in the morning, Pasquale was still thinking about the moment in the dark bunker. Should he have kissed her? He had kissed only one other woman in his life, Amedea, and technically she had kissed him first. He might have tried, if not for the humiliation he still felt about the te

That night, the man Dee Moray was waiting for didn’t come, and Pasquale felt somehow responsible, as if his little wish that the man would drown had been upgraded to a prayer and had come true. Dee Moray had retreated to her room at dusk and in the early morning had gotten violently ill again, and could only get out of bed to vomit. When there was nothing left in her stomach, tears rolled from her eyes and her back arched and she sniffed and slumped to the floor. She didn’t want Pasquale to see her retch, and so he sat in the hallway and reached his hand around the corner, through the doorway, to hold her hand. Pasquale could hear his aunt stirring downstairs.

Dee took a long breath. “Tell me a story, Pasquale. What happened when the painter returned to the woman?”

“They marry and have fifty children.”

“Fifty?”

“Maybe six. He become a famous painter and every time he paint a woman, he paint her.”

Dee Moray vomited again, and when she could speak, said, “He’s not coming, is he?” It was odd and intimate, their hands co

“He is coming,” Pasquale told her.

She whispered: “How do you know, Pasquale?”

“I know.”

“But how?”

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the English, whispering back around the corner, “Because if you wait for me . . . I crawl on my knees from Rome to see you.”

She squeezed his hand and retched again.

The man didn’t come that day, either. And as much as he wanted to keep Dee Moray for himself, Pasquale began to get angry. What kind of man sent a sick woman to a remote fishing village and then left her there? He thought of going to La Spezia and using a phone to call the Grand Hotel, but he wanted to look this bastard in his cold eye.

“I go to Rome today,” he told her.

“No, Pasquale. It’s okay. I can just go on to Switzerland when I feel better. Maybe he left word for me there.”

“I must go to Rome anyway,” he lied. “I find this Michael Deane and tell him you wait here.”

She stared off for a moment and then smiled. “Thank you, Pasquale.”

He gave precise instructions to Valeria for the care of the American: Let her sleep and don’t make her eat anything she doesn’t want to eat and don’t lecture her about her skimpy nightclothes. If she gets sick, send for Dr. Merlonghi. Then he peeked in on his mother, who lay awake waiting for him.

“I’ll be back tomorrow, Mamma,” he said.

“It will be good for you,” she said, “to have children with such a tall, healthy woman with such breasts.”

He asked Tomasso the Communist to motor him to La Spezia, so he could take a train to Florence, then on to Rome to scream at Michael Deane, this awful man who would abandon an ailing woman this way.

“I should go to Rome with you,” Tomasso said as they cut across a light chop and made their way south. Tomasso’s little outboard motor chugged in the water and whined when it came out as he piloted from the back, squinting along the shoreline while Pasquale crouched in front. “These American movie people, they are pigs.”

Pasquale agreed. “To send a woman off and then forget about her . . .”

“They mock true art,” Tomasso said. “They take the full sorrow of life and make a circus of fat men falling into cream pies. They should leave the Italians alone to make films, but instead their stupidity spreads like a whore’s disease among sailors. Commedia all’italiana! Bah.”

“I like the American Westerns,” Pasquale said. “I like the cowboys.”

“Bah,” Tomasso said again.

Pasquale had been thinking about something else. “Tomasso, Valeria says that no one dies in Porto Vergogna except babies and old people. She says the American won’t die as long as she stays here.”

“Pasquale—”

“No, I know, Tomasso, it’s just old witch talk. But I can’t think of a single person who has died young here.”

Tomasso adjusted his cap as he thought. “How old was your father?”

“Sixty-three,” Pasquale said.

“That’s young to me,” Tomasso said.

They motored toward La Spezia, weaving among the big ca

“Have you ever played te

“Certainly I’ve watched it.”

“Do the players miss the ball often?”

“The better players don’t miss so much, but every point ends with someone missing, or hitting it into the net or over the line. There’s no way to avoid it.”

On the train, Pasquale was still thinking about te