Beautiful Ruins (102)
Alvis Bender was standing on the patio, smoking his pipe. Pasquale patted his American friend on the arm and started down the path to the pier, to where Tomasso the Communist was waiting for him. Tomasso dropped his cigarette and ground it into the rock. “You look good, Pasquale. Your mother would be proud.”
Pasquale climbed in the fish-gut-stained boat and sat in the bow, his knees together like a schoolboy at a desk. He was unable to stop his eyes from sweeping the front of the hotel, where Dee Moray had just stepped onto the porch and was standing next to Alvis Bender. She shielded the sun from her eyes and looked down on him curiously.
Again, Pasquale felt the separate pulls of his mind and body—and right then, he honestly didn’t know which way it would go. Would he stay in the boat? Or would he run up the path to the hotel and take her in his arms? And what would she do if he did? There was nothing explicit between them, nothing more than that slightly open door. And yet . . . what could be more alluring?
In that moment, Pasquale Tursi finally felt wrenched in two. His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.
“Please,” Pasquale rasped to Tomasso. “Go.”
The old fisherman tugged on the pull-start, but the motor didn’t catch. And Dee Moray called from the hotel patio. “Pasquale! Where are you going?”
“Please,” Pasquale whispered to Tomasso, his legs shaking now.
Finally, the motor caught. Tomasso sat down in back, took the tiller, and started puttering them away from the pier, out of the cove. On the patio, Dee Moray turned to Alvis Bender for an explanation. Alvis must have told her that Pasquale’s mother had died, because her hand went to her mouth.
And Pasquale forced himself to look away then. It was like prying a magnet off steel, but he did it: turned forward in the boat, closed his eyes, still seeing her standing there in his memory. He shook with the strain of not looking back until they rounded the breakwater into the open sea and Pasquale exhaled, his head falling to his chest.
“You are a strange young man,” Tomasso the Communist said.
In La Spezia, Pasquale thanked his old friend and watched Tomasso steer his little fishing boat away from the harbor, back toward the channel between Portovenere and Isola Palmaria.
Then he went to the little chapel near the cemetery, where the priest was waiting, his thin hair run with comb lines. Two old funeral-attending women and a feral-looking altar boy were on hand for the occasion, the chapel dark, moldy, and empty, candlelit. The requiem mass seemed to have nothing to do with his mother, and Pasquale was momentarily shocked when he heard her name in the priest’s Latin drone (Antonia, requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine). Right, he thought, she’s gone, and in that realization he broke down. After the funeral, the priest agreed to say a prayer for Pasquale’s aunt, and to say the trigesimo in a few weeks, and Pasquale paid the man again. The priest raised his hand to bless him, but Pasquale had already turned to go.
Exhausted, Pasquale went to the train station to check on Dee Moray’s luggage. It was waiting for her. Pasquale paid the agent and told him she would be coming for her bags the next day. Then he arranged for a water taxi to collect Dee Moray and Alvis Bender. And he bought himself a train ticket to Florence.
Pasquale settled into his seat and went right to sleep, jerking awake as the train pulled into the Florence station. He got a room three blocks from the piazza Massimo d’Azeglio, took a bath, and dressed again in his suit. In the dusky last light of that endless day, Pasquale stood smoking in the shade of the trees across the courtyard until he saw Amedea’s family return from their evening walk, strung out like a family of quail.
And when beautiful Amedea lifted Bruno from the stroller, Pasquale thought again of his mother on the beach that day—her fear that, when she was gone, Pasquale wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap between what he wanted and what was right. He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.
Pasquale waited until the Montelupos disappeared inside their house. Then he ground his cigarette into the gravel, crossed the piazza, and stepped up to the huge black door. He rang the bell.
There were footfalls on the other side and then Amedea’s father answered, his thick, bald head tilted back, fierce eyes taking in Pasquale as if he were surveying an unacceptable meal in a café. Behind her father, Amedea’s sister Donata saw Pasquale, and covered her mouth with her hand. She turned and squealed up the stairs: “Amedea!” Bruno looked back at his daughter and then sternly again at Pasquale, who carefully removed his hat.
“Yes?” asked Bruno Montelupo. “What is it?”
Behind her father, on the stairs, lithe, lovely Amedea appeared, shaking her head slightly, as if still trying to dissuade him . . . but Pasquale also thought he saw, beneath the hand that covered her mouth, a smile.
“Sir,” he said, “I am Pasquale Tursi of Porto Vergogna. I am here to ask for the hand of your daughter, Amedea.” He cleared his throat. “I am here for my son.”
20
The Infinite Blaze
Recently
Sandpoint, Idaho
Debra wakes in the dark, on the back deck of her cabin, on the tree side, where she likes to watch the stars. The air is cool, sky clear, pinpricks of light fierce tonight. Insistent. They don’t twinkle, they burn. The front deck of the cabin overlooks the mountain-rimmed glacial lake, and this is the view that causes most visitors to gasp. But she doesn’t like the front deck as much at night, when light from the docks, the boats, and the other cabins compete for attention. She prefers it back here, in the shade of the house, in a tight, round clearing of pine and fir trees, where it’s just her and the sky, where she can see for fifty trillion miles, for a billion years. She’d never really been a sky-watcher until she married Alvis, who liked to drive into the Cascades and look for clear spots away from the light pollution. He considered it a shame when people couldn’t grasp the infinite—a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.