Beautiful Ruins (21)

It was quiet. Pasquale thought the book sounded boring. “How does it end?”

For a long time, Alvis Bender stared at his glass of wine. “I don’t know, Pasquale,” he said finally. “How do you think it should end?”

Young Pasquale considered the question. “Well, instead of going back to America during the war, he could go to Germany and try to kill Hitler.”

“Ah,” Alvis Bender said. “Yes. That is exactly what happens, Pasquale. He gets drunk at a party and everyone warns him not to drive, but he makes a giant scene leaving the party and he jumps in his car and accidentally drives over Hitler.”

Pasquale didn’t think it should be an accident, Hitler’s death. It would take all the suspense out. He offered, helpfully, “Or he could shoot him with a machine gun.”

“Even better,” Alvis said. “Our hero makes a huge scene leaving the party. Everyone warns him that he’s too drunk to operate a machine gun. But he insists and he accidentally shoots Hitler.”

When Pasquale thought Bender was making fun of him, he would change the subject. “What is your book called, Alvis?”

“The Smile of Heaven,” he said. “It’s from Shelley.” And he did his best to translate: “The whispering waves were half asleep/the clouds were gone to play/And on the woods, and on the deep/the smile of Heaven lay.”

Pasquale sat for a while, thinking about the poem. Le onde andavano sussurrando—the whispering waves, he knew these. But the title, The Smile of Heaven—Il sorriso del Paradiso—seemed wrong to him. He didn’t think of heaven as a smiling place. If mortal sinners went to Hell and venal sinners like himself went to Purgatory, then Heaven had to be full of no one but saints, priests, nuns, and baptized babies who died before they had a chance to do anything wrong.

“In your book, why does heaven smile?”

“I don’t know.” Bender guzzled the wine and handed Pasquale the empty glass again. “Maybe because someone has finally killed that bastard Hitler.”

Pasquale stood to get more wine. But he began to worry that Bender wasn’t teasing after all. “I don’t think Hitler’s death should be an accident,” Pasquale said.

Alvis smiled wearily at the boy. “Everything is an accident, Pasquale.”

During those years, Pasquale couldn’t recall Alvis ever writing for more than a few hours; sometimes he wondered if the man ever unpacked his typewriter. But he came back year after year, and finally, in 1958, the year Pasquale left for university, he presented Carlo with the first chapter of his novel. Seven years. One chapter.

Pasquale couldn’t understand why Alvis came to Porto Vergogna at all, since he seemed to get so little done. “Of all the places in the world, why do you come here?”

“This coast is a wellspring for writers,” Alvis said. “Petrarch invented the sonnet near here. Byron, James, Lawrence—they all came here to write. Boccaccio invented realism here. Shelley drowned near here, a few kilometers from where his wife invented the horror novel.”

Pasquale didn’t understand what Alvis Bender meant by these writers “inventing.” He thought of inventors as men like Marconi, the great Bolognese who’d invented the wireless. Once the first story was told, what was there to invent?

“Excellent question.” Since losing his college teaching job, Alvis was always looking for opportunities to lecture, and in the sheltered, teenage Pasquale he found a willing audience. “Imagine truth as a chain of great mountains, their tops way up in the clouds. Writers explore these truths, always looking out for new paths up these peaks.”

“So the stories are paths?” Pasquale asked.

“No,” Alvis said. “Stories are bulls. Writers come of age full of vigor, and they feel the need to drive the old stories from the herd. One bull rules the herd awhile but then he loses his vigor and the young bulls take over.”

“Stories are bulls?”

“Nope.” Alvis Bender took a drink. “Stories are nations, empires. They can last as long as ancient Rome or as short as the Third Reich. Story-nations rise and decline. Governments change, trends rise, and they go on conquering their neighbors. Like the Roman Empire, the epic poem stretched for centuries, as far as the world. The novel rose with the British Empire, but wait . . . what is that rising in America? Film?”

Pasquale grinned. “And if I ask if stories are empires, you’ll say—”

“Stories are people. I’m a story, you’re a story . . . your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we’re lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we’re less alone.”

“But you never answered the question,” Pasquale said. “Why you come here.”

Bender pondered the wine in his hand. “A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.”

“That’s only three.”

Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.”

If, in the glow of too much wine, Alvis treated Pasquale like a little brother, Carlo Tursi looked on the American with a similar affection. The two men would sit up drinking late, having parallel conversations, but not exactly listening to each other. As the 1950s unrolled and the ache from the war faded, Carlo began to think like a businessman again, and he shared with Alvis his ideas about bringing tourists to Porto Vergogna—even though Alvis insisted that tourism would ruin the place.