Beautiful Ruins (15)

Pasquale was horrified to find that, for dinner, his aunt Valeria was making her signature ciuppin, a soup of rockfish, tomatoes, white wine, and olive oil. “You expect me to take your rotten fish-head stew to an American cinema star?”

“She can leave if she doesn’t like it,” Valeria said. So, at dusk, with the fishermen pulling their boats up into the cove below, Pasquale clicked up the narrow staircase built into the rock wall. He knocked lightly on the third-floor door.

“Yes?” the American called through the door. He heard the bedsprings creak.

Pasquale cleared his throat. “I am sorry for you disturb. You eat antipasti and a soap, yes?”

“Soap?”

Pasquale felt angry that he hadn’t talked his aunt out of making the ciuppin. “Yes. Is a soap. With fish and vino. A fish soap?”

“Oh, soup. No. No, thank you. I don’t think I can eat anything just yet,” she said, her voice muffled through the door. “I don’t feel well enough.”

“Yes,” he said. “I see.”

He descended the stairs, saying the word soup over and over in his mind. He ate the American’s dinner in his own room on the second floor. The ciuppin was pretty good. He still got his father’s newspapers by mail-boat once a week, and although he didn’t study them the way his father had, Pasquale flipped through them, looking for news about the American production of Cleopatra. But he found nothing.

Later, he heard clumping around in the trattoria and came out, but he knew it wouldn’t be Dee Moray; she did not appear to be a clumper. Instead, both tables were full of local fishermen hoping to get a look at the glorious American, their hats on the tables, dirty hair plastered and combed tight to their skulls. Valeria was serving them soup, but the fishermen were really just waiting to talk to Pasquale, since they’d been out in their boats when the American arrived.

“I hear she is two and a half meters tall,” said Lugo the Promiscuous War Hero, famous for the dubious claim that he had killed at least one soldier from every major participant in the European theater of World War II. “She is a giant.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Pasquale said as he filled their glasses with wine.

“What is the shape of her breasts?” asked Lugo seriously. “Are they round giants or alert peaks?”

“Let me tell you about American women,” said Tomasso the Elder, whose cousin had married an American, making him an expert on American women, along with everything else. “American women cook only one meal a week, but before they marry they perform fellatio. So, as with all life, there is good and there is bad.”

“You should eat from a trough like pigs!” Valeria spat from the kitchen.

“Marry me, Valeria!” Tomasso the Elder called back. “I am too old for sex and my hearing will soon be gone. We are made for each other.”

The fisherman that Pasquale liked best, thoughtful Tomasso the Communist, was chewing on his pipe. He removed it now to weigh in on the subject. He considered himself something of a film buff and was a fan of Italian neorealism and therefore dismissive of American movies, which he blamed for sparking the dreadful commedia all’italiana movement, the antic farces that had replaced the serious existential cinema of the late 1950s. “Listen, Lugo,” he said, “if she is an American actress, it means she wears a corset in cowboy films and has talent only for screaming.”

“Fine. Let’s see those big breasts fill with air when she screams,” Lugo said.

“Maybe she will lie naked on Pasquale’s beach tomorrow,” said Tomasso the Elder, “and we can see for ourselves her giant breasts.”

For three hundred years, the fishermen in town had come from a small pool of young men who’d grown up here, fathers handing over their skiffs and eventually their houses to favored sons, usually the eldest, who married the daughters of other fishermen up and down the coast, sometimes bringing them back to Porto Vergogna. Children moved away, but the villaggio always maintained a kind of equilibrium and the twenty or so houses stayed full. But after the war, when fishing, like everything else, had become an industry, the family fishermen couldn’t compete with the big seiners motoring out of Genoa every week. The restaurants would still buy from a few old fishermen, because tourists liked to see the old men bring in their catches, but this was like working in an amusement park: it wasn’t real fishing, and there was no future in it. An entire generation of Porto Vergogna boys had to leave to find work, to La Spezia and Genoa and even farther for jobs in factories and canneries and in the trades. No longer did the favored son want the fishing boat; already six of the houses were empty, boarded, or brought down; more were sure to follow. In February, Tomasso the Communist’s last daughter, the unfortunately cross-eyed Illena, had married a young teacher and moved away to La Spezia, Tomasso sulking for days afterward. And on one of those cool spring mornings, as Pasquale watched the old fishermen scuff and grumble to their boats, it dawned on him: he was the only person under forty left in the whole town.

Pasquale left the fishermen in the trattoria to go see his mother, who was in one of her dark periods and had refused to leave her bed for two weeks. When he opened the door, he could see her staring at the ceiling, her wiry gray hair stuck to the pillow behind her, arms crossed over her chest, mouth in the placid death face that she liked to rehearse. “You should get up, Mamma. Come out and eat with us.”