Beautiful Ruins

“Yes,” he said, but he was thinking about what Michael Deane had said—It’s not simple—and about Dee Moray vanishing from the train station in La Spezia that morning. Days earlier, when they had gone for a hike, Pasquale had pointed out to her the trails from the cliffs toward Portovenere and La Spezia. Now he imagined her walking away from La Spezia, looking up into those hills.

“I am going for a walk, Alvis,” he said.

Alvis nodded and reached for his wine.

Pasquale walked out the front door, letting the screen bang behind him. He turned and walked past Lugo’s house, saw the hero’s wife, Bettina, staring out the front door at him. He said nothing to her, but climbed the trail out of the village, tiny rocks bounding down the cliffs as he stepped. He moved quickly up the old donkey path, above the string marking his stupid te

Pasquale wound through the olive groves as he worked his way up the cliff face behind Porto Vergogna, pulled himself up at the orange grove. Finally, he crested the ledge, walked down the next crease, and made his way up. After a few minutes of walking, Pasquale climbed over the line of boulders and came upon the old pillbox bunker—and saw at once that he’d been right. She had hiked from La Spezia. The branches and stones had been moved to reveal the opening that he’d covered back up the day they left here.

With the wind seeming to flick at him, Pasquale stepped across the split rock onto the concrete roof and lowered himself into the pillbox.

It was brighter outside than it had been the last time, and later in the day, so more light shone through the three little turret windows; yet it still took a moment for Pasquale’s eyes to adjust. Then he saw her. She was sitting in the corner of the pillbox, against the stone wall, curled up, her jacket wrapped around her shoulders and legs. She looked so frail in the shadows of the concrete dome—so different from the ethereal creature who had arrived in his town just days earlier.

“How did you know I was here?” she asked.

“I did not,” he said. “I just hope.”

He sat next to her, on the wall opposite the paintings. After a moment, Dee leaned against his shoulder. Pasquale slid his arm around her, pulled her even closer, her face against his chest. When they’d been here before, it had been the morning—indirect sunlight came in through the gun turret windows onto the floor. But now, in the late-afternoon light, the sun had shifted and its direct light climbed the wall until it landed directly on the paintings before them, three narrow rectangles of sunlight illuminating the faded colors of the portraits.

“I was going to walk all the way back to your hotel,” she said. “I was just waiting for the light to fall on the paintings this way.”

“Is nice,” he said.

“At first, it seemed like the saddest thing to me,” she said, “that no one would ever see these paintings. But then I got to thinking: What if you tried to take this wall and put it in a gallery somewhere? It would simply be five faded paintings in a gallery. And that’s when I realized: perhaps they’re only so remarkable because they’re here.”

“Yes,” he said again. “I think so.”

They sat quietly, as the day deepened, sunlight from the turrets slowly edging up the wall of paintings. Pasquale’s eyes felt heavy and he thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

On the pillbox wall, one of the rectangles of sunlight beamed across the face of the second portrait of the young woman, and it was as if she’d turned her head, ever so slightly, to regard the other lovely blonde, the real one, sitting curled with the young Italian man. It was something Pasquale had noticed before in the late afternoons, the way the moving sunlight had the power to change the paintings, almost animating them.

“Do you really think he saw her again?” Dee whispered. “The painter?”

Pasquale had wondered that very thing: whether the artist ever made it back to Germany, to the girl in the portraits. He knew from the fishermen’s stories that most of the German soldiers had been abandoned here, to be captured or killed by Americans as they swept up the countryside. He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.

“Yes,” Pasquale said. “I think.”

“And they got married?” Dee said.

Pasquale could see it all laid out before him. “Yes.”

“Did they have children?”

“Un bambino,” Pasquale said—a boy. He surprised himself by saying this, and his chest ached the way his belly sometimes did after a big meal; it was all just too much.

“You told me the other night that you would have crawled from Rome to see me.” Dee squeezed Pasquale’s arm. “That was the loveliest thing to say.”

“Yes.” It’s not simple—

She settled into his shoulder again. The light from the pillbox turrets was moving up the wall and was almost done with the paintings, just a single rectangle on the upper corner of the last of the girl’s portrait—the sun nearly done for the day with its gallery show. She looked up at him. “You really think the painter made it back to see her?”

“Oh, yes,” Pasquale said, his voice hoarse with feeling.

“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking—how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe—Pasquale Tursi said, only, “Yes.”

It was late in the afternoon when they got back to the village and Pasquale introduced Dee Moray to Alvis Bender. Alvis was reading on the patio of the Hotel Adequate View and he leaped to his feet, his book falling back onto his chair. Dee and Alvis shook hands awkwardly, the usually talkative Bender seeming tongue-tied—perhaps by her beauty, perhaps by the strange events of the day.

“So nice to meet you,” she said. “I hope you will understand if I excuse myself to take a nap. I’ve had a long walk and I’m terribly exhausted.”

“No, of course,” Alvis said, and only then did he think to remove his hat, which he held at his chest.

And then Dee co

He looked at the ground, embarrassed by the very word. “Oh, no—not a real author.”

“You certainly are,” she said. “I liked your book very much.”

“Thank you,” Alvis Bender said, and he flushed in a way that Pasquale had never seen before, had never imagined from the tall, sophisticated American. “I mean . . . it’s not finished, obviously. There’s more to tell.”

“Of course.”

Alvis glanced over at Pasquale, then back at the pretty actress. He laughed. “Although, truth be told, that’s most of what I’ve been able to write.”

She smiled warmly, and said, “Well . . . maybe that’s all there is. If so, I think it’s wonderful.” And with that she excused herself again and disappeared inside the hotel.

Pasquale and Alvis Bender stood on the patio next to each other and stared at the closed hotel door.

“Jesus. That’s Burton’s girl?” Alvis asked. “Not what I expected.”

“No,” was all Pasquale could say.

Valeria was back in the little kitchen, cooking. Pasquale stood by while she finished another pot of soup. When it was done, Pasquale took a bowl of it to Dee’s room, but she was already asleep. He looked down on her, making sure she was breathing. Then he left the soup on her nightstand and went back out into the trattoria, where Alvis Bender was eating some of Valeria’s soup and staring out the window.

“This place has gone crazy, Pasquale. The whole world has flooded in.”