Beautiful Ruins

For eight months after his father’s death, this was the sum of Pasquale Tursi’s life. And if he wasn’t entirely happy, he wasn’t unhappy, either. Rather, he found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.

And perhaps this is where he would have always lived had not the beautiful American arrived on this cool, su

She was impossibly thin, and yet amply curved, the beautiful American. From Pasquale’s vantage in the sea—sun flickering behind her, wind snapping her wheat-blond hair—it was as if she were another species, taller and more ethereal than any woman he’d ever seen. Orenzio offered her a hand, and after a moment of hesitation she took it. He helped her from his boat onto the narrow pier.

“Thank you,” came an uncertain voice from beneath the hat, and then, “Grazie,” the Italian word breathy and unpracticed. She took her first step toward the village, seemed to stagger a moment, and then regained her balance. It was then that she pulled the hat off to get a look at the village, and Pasquale saw her full features and was mildly surprised the beautiful American wasn’t . . . well . . . more beautiful.

Oh, she was striking, certainly, but not in the way he’d expected. First, she was as tall as Pasquale, nearly six feet. And from where he stood, weren’t her features a bit too much for such a narrow face—plunging jawline so pronounced, mouth so full, eyes so round and open that she seemed startled? And could a woman be too thin, so that her curves seemed sudden, alarming? Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her skin was lightly ta

But then she turned directly to him, and the disparate features of her drastic face came together as a single, perfect thing, and Pasquale recalled from his studies how some buildings in Florence could disappoint from various angles and yet always presented well in relief, always photographed well; that the various vantages were made to be composed; and so, too, he thought, some people. Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life—not so much with the woman, whom he didn’t even know, but with the moment.

He dropped the rock he was holding.

She glanced away—right, then left, then right again—as if looking for the rest of the village. Pasquale flushed over what she must be seeing: a dozen or so drab stone houses, some of them abandoned, clinging like barnacles to the cliff seam. Feral cats poked around the small piazza, but otherwise all was quiet, the fishermen out in their boats for the day. Pasquale sensed such disappointment when people hiked in accidentally or arrived by boat through a mistake in cartography or language, people who believed they were being taken to the charming tourist towns of Portovenere or Portofino only to find themselves in the brutto fishing village of Porto Vergogna.

“I’m sorry,” the beautiful American said in English, turning back to Orenzio. “Should I help with the bags? Or is it part of . . . I mean . . . I don’t know what has been paid for and what hasn’t.”

Done with devilish English after that “beach” business, Orenzio merely shrugged. Short, jug-eared, and dull-eyed, he carried himself in a ma

“Should I get my own luggage, then?” the woman asked again, patiently, a little helplessly.

“Bagagli, Orenzio,” Pasquale called to his friend, and then it dawned on Pasquale: this woman was checking into his hotel! Pasquale started wading over to the pier, licking his lips in preparation for speaking unpracticed English. “Please,” he said to the woman, his tongue like a hunk of gristle in his mouth, “I have honor and Orenzio for carry you bag. Go upon Ad-e-quate View Hotel.” The comment appeared to confuse the American, but Pasquale didn’t notice. He wanted to end with a flourish and tried to think of the proper word to call her (Madam?) but he longed for something better. He had never really mastered English, but he’d studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutality of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog. His earliest education in the language had come from the only American to ever stay in the hotel, a writer who came to Italy each spring to chip away at his life’s work—an epic novel about his experiences in World War II. Pasquale tried to imagine what the tall, dashing writer might say to this woman, but he couldn’t think of the right words and he wondered if there was an English equivalent for the Italian staple bella: beautiful. He took a stab: “Please. Come. Beautiful America.”

She stared at him for just a moment—the longest moment of his life to that point—then smiled and looked down demurely. “Thank you. Is this your hotel?”

Pasquale finished sloshing through the water and arrived at the pier. He pulled himself up, shaking the water from his pant legs, and tried to present himself, every bit the dashing hotelier. “Yes. Is my hotel.” Pasquale pointed to the small, hand-lettered sign on the left side of the piazza. “Please.”

“And . . . you have a room reserved for us?”

“Oh yes. Many is room. All is room for you. Yes.”

She looked at the sign, and then at Pasquale again. The warm gust was back and it roused the escaped hairs from her ponytail into streamers around her face. She smiled at the puddle dripping off his thin frame, then looked up into his sea-blue eyes and said, “You have lovely eyes.” Then she replaced the hat on her head and started making her way toward the small piazza and the center of what little town lay before her.

Porto Vergogna had never had un liceo—a high school—and so Pasquale had boated to La Spezia for secondary school. This was where he’d met Orenzio, who became his first real friend. They were tossed together by default: the shy son of the old hotelier and the short, jug-eared wharf boy. Pasquale had even stayed sometimes with Orenzio’s family during the winter weeks, when the passage was difficult. The winter before Pasquale left for Florence, he and Orenzio had invented a game that they played over glasses of Swiss beer. They would sit across from each other at the docks in La Spezia and fire offenses back and forth until they either ran out of words or started repeating themselves, at which point the loser would have to drain the pint before him. Now, as he hoisted the American’s bags, Orenzio leaned over to Pasquale and played a dry version of the game. “What did she say, nut-smeller?”

“She loves my eyes,” Pasquale said, missing his cue.

“Come on, ass-handler,” Orenzio said. “She said nothing like this.”

“No, she did. She is in love with my eyes.”

“You are a liar, Pasqo, and an admirer of boys’ noodles.”

“It is true.”

“That you love boys’ noodles?”

“No. She said that about my eyes.”

“You are a fellater of goats. The woman is a cinema star.”

“I think so, too,” Pasquale said.

“No, stupid, she really is a performer of the cinema. She is with the American company working on the film in Rome.”