Beautiful Ruins (20)
“Good night, Pasquale,” she said. She grabbed the lost pages of Alvis Bender’s novel and started back for the door, but paused to consider the sign: THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW. “How ever did you come up with the name of the hotel?”
Still stricken by that kiss, unsure how to explain the name, Pasquale simply pointed to the manuscript in her hand. “Him.”
She nodded and looked around again at the tiny village, at the rocks and cliffs around them. “Can I ask, Pasquale . . . what it’s like, living here?”
And this time he had no hesitation in coming up with the proper English word. “Lonely,” Pasquale said.
Pasquale’s father, Carlo, came from a long line of restaurateurs in Florence, and he had always assumed that his sons would follow him in the business. But his oldest, the dashing, jet-haired Roberto, dreamed of being a flier, and in the run-up to World War II he had dashed off to join the regia aeronautica. Roberto did indeed get to fly—three times before his rickety Saetta fighter stalled over North Africa and he fell from the sky like a shot bird. Vowing revenge, the Tursis’ other son, Guido, volunteered for the infantry, sending Carlo into a despairing rage: “If you truly want vengeance, forget the British and go kill the mechanic who let your brother fly that rusty bucket of shit.” But Guido was insistent, and he trucked off with the rest of the Eighth Army’s elite expeditionary force, sent by Mussolini as proof that Italy would do its part to help the Nazis invade Russia. (Bunnies off to eat a black bear, Carlo said.)
It was while comforting his wife over Roberto’s death that the forty-one-year-old Carlo had somehow mustered one last, good seed and passed it on to the thirty-nine-year-old Antonia. At first she disbelieved her condition, then assumed it was temporary (she’d been plagued by miscarriages after her first two). Then, as her belly ballooned, Antonia saw her wartime pregnancy as a sure sign from God that Guido would survive. She named her blue-eyed bambino miracolo Pasquale, Italian for Passover, to honor this deal with God—that the plague of violence sweeping the world would pass over the rest of her family.
But Guido died, too, shot through the throat in the icy meat-fields outside Stalingrad in the winter of ’42. His parents, now ruined by grief, wanted only to hide from the world, and to protect their miracle boy from such insanity. So Carlo sold his stake in the family business to some cousins and bought the tiny Pensione di San Pietro in the most remote place he could find, Porto Vergogna. And there they hid from the world.
Thankfully, the Tursis had saved most of the money from selling their Florence holdings, because the hotel did very little business. Confused Italians and other Europeans occasionally wandered in, and the little three-top trattoria was a gathering place for the dwindling fishing families of Porto Vergogna, but months could pass between real guests. Then, in the spring of 1952, a water taxi drifted into the cove, and from it stepped a tall, neatly handsome young American with a narrow mustache and slicked brown hair. The man clearly had been drinking, and smoked a thin cigar as he stepped onto the pier with his one suitcase and a portable typewriter. He looked around at the village, scratched his head, and said, in surprisingly fluid Italian, “Qualcuno sembra aver rubato la tua città”—Someone seems to have stolen your town. He introduced himself to the Tursis as “Alvis Bender, scrittore fallito ma ubriacone di successo”—failed writer but successful drunk—and proceeded to hold court on the porch for six hours, drinking wine and talking about politics and history and, finally, about the book he wasn’t writing.
Pasquale was eleven, and other than the occasional trip to see family in Florence, all he knew of the world came from books. To meet an actual author was unbelievable. He’d lived entirely in the shelter of his parents in this tiny village, and he was enthralled by the towering, laughing American, who seemed to have been everywhere, to know everything. Pasquale sat at the writer’s feet and asked him questions. “What’s America like? What is the best kind of automobile? What’s it like in an airplane?” And one day: “What is your book about?”
Alvis Bender handed the boy his wineglass. “Fill this up and I’ll tell you.”
When Pasquale returned with more wine, Alvis reclined and stroked his thin mustache. “My book is about how the whole of human history and advancement has brought us only to the realization that death is life’s point, its profound purpose.”
Pasquale had heard Alvis make such speeches to his father. “No,” he said. “What’s it about? What happens?”
“Right. Market demands a story.” Alvis took another drink of wine. “Okay then. Well, my book is about an American who fights in Italy during the war, loses his best friend, and falls out of love with life. The man returns to America, where he hopes to teach English and write a book about his disillusionment. But he only drinks and broods and chases women. He can’t write. Perhaps it is his guilt over being alive while his friend died. And guilt is sometimes a kind of envy—his friend left a young son, and when the man goes to visit his friend’s son, afterward, he longs to be a noble memory, too, rather than the obscene wreck that he’s become. The man loses his teaching job and goes back to his family business, selling cars. He drinks and broods and chases women. He decides the only way he’s ever going to write his book and ease his sorrow is to go back to Italy, the place that holds the secret to his sadness, but a place that escapes his powers of description when he isn’t there—a dream he can’t quite recall. So for two weeks every year, the man goes to Italy to work on his book. But here’s the thing, Pasquale—and you can’t tell anyone this part, because it’s the secret twist—even in Italy, he doesn’t really write his book. He drinks. He broods. He chases women. And he talks to a smart boy in a tiny village about the novel he will never write.”