Beautiful Ruins (34)

She followed Pasquale on the easy part, a series of switchbacks up and down the pitched hills. Where they met the sea, the cliffs had been carved by shore break, but here, on top, the terrain was friendlier. Still, a few times, Dee and Pasquale had to reach for scraggly trees and vines to descend the steep hills and climb the sharp creases. At the crest of a rocky knob, Dee paused at the remnants of a stone foundation, Roman ruins rounded by weather and wind until they looked like old teeth.

“What was this?” she asked, pushing brush away from the smoothed stone.

Pasquale shrugged. For a thousand years, armies used these points to look out over the sea; there were so many ruins up here Pasquale hardly noticed them anymore. Sometimes the rubble of these old garrisons gave him a dull sadness. To think that this was all that was left of an empire; what mark could a man like him ever leave? A beach? A cliff-side tennis court?

“Come,” he said, “is a little more only.”

They walked another fifty meters and Pasquale pointed out where the hillside trail started down the cliffs into Portovenere, still more than a kilometer away. Then, taking Dee by the hand, Pasquale left the trail and scrambled over some boulders, pushed through brush—and they emerged on a point with a stunning view of the coastline in both directions. Dee gasped. “Come,” Pasquale said again, and he lowered himself onto a rocky shelf. After a brief hesitation, Dee followed, and they came to what he had wanted to show her—a small concrete dome the same color as the rocks and boulders around it. Only its uniformity and the three long, rectangular machine-gun turret windows gave it away as man-made: a machine-gun pillbox bunker left over from World War II.

Pasquale helped her climb on top of it, the wind dancing in her hair. “This was from the war?” she asked.

“Yes,” Pasquale said. “Everywhere still is the war. Was to see ships.”

“And was there fighting here?”

“No.” Pasquale waved at the cliffs behind them. “Too . . .” He frowned. He wanted to say lonely again, but that wasn’t quite right. “Isolato?” he asked in Italian.

“Isolated?”

“Sì, yes.” Pasquale smiled. “Only war here is boys play shoot at boats.” The concrete for the pillbox had been poured into the boulders behind it, so that it wasn’t visible from above and it looked like just another stone from below. Jutting from the brow of the cliff, the bunker had three open horizontal windows—inside was a machine-gun nest with a 280-degree view on the jagged cove of Porto Vergogna to the northwest, and beyond that, the rocky shoreline and the less drastic cliffs behind Riomaggiore, the last village of the Cinque Terre. To the south the mountains receded to the village of Portovenere, and beyond that Palmaria Island. On both sides the sea foamed on the rocky points, and the steep cliffs rose into green bursts of raggedy pine, clusters of fruit trees, and the furrowed beginnings of the Cinque Terre vineyards. Pasquale’s father used to say that ancient people believed this coast was the end of the flat world.

“It’s wonderful,” she said, standing atop the abandoned pillbox.

Pasquale was pleased that she liked it. “Is good place to think, yes?”

She smiled back at him. “And what do you think about up here, Pasquale?”

Such an odd question; what does anyone think about anywhere? When he was a kid he’d imagine the rest of the world up here. Now, mostly, he thought about his first love, Amedea, whom he’d left behind in Florence; he replayed their last day together, and wondered if there was something else he could’ve said. But occasionally, his thoughts up here were of a different order, thoughts about time and his place in the world—big, quiet thoughts, difficult to speak of in Italian, let alone English. And yet he wanted to try. “I think . . . all people in the world . . . and I am one only, yes?” Pasquale said. “And sometimes I see the moon here . . . yes, is for everyone . . . all people look at one moon. Yes? Here, Firenze, America. For all people, all time, same moon, yes?” He saw lovely Amedea, staring at the moon from the narrow window of her family’s house in Florence. “Sometimes, this same moon, it is good. But sometimes . . . more sad. Yes?”

She stared at him a moment, as it registered. “Yes,” she said finally. “I think so, too.” She reached over and squeezed his hand.

He felt drained from trying to speak English, but pleased to have communicated something abstract and personal after two days of How is room? and More soap?

Dee looked up the coast; Pasquale knew she was watching for Orenzio’s boat and he assured her they would be able to see it from up here. She sat, curled up on her knees, staring to the northeast, where the soil was better than in rocky Porto Vergogna and the gradual cliffs were seamed with parallel rows of grapevines.

Pasquale pointed back down toward his village. “Do you see this rock? I am build a tennis court there.”

She looked perplexed. “Where?”

“There.” They had climbed and gone half a kilometer to the south, and so he could just make out the cluster of boulders beyond the village. “Will be primo tennis.”

“Wait. You’re putting a tennis court . . . on the cliffs?”

“For make my hotel destinazione primaria, yes? Very luxury.”

“I guess I don’t see where you’re going to fit a tennis court.”

He leaned in closer and extended his arm, and she pressed her cheek against his shoulder to look straight down his arm past his pointing finger, to make sure she was seeing the right place. There was a jolt of electricity in his shoulder, where her cheek touched him, and Pasquale’s breath fell short again. He’d assumed that his romantic education, courtesy of Amedea, had done away with the old nervousness he used to feel around girls, but here he was, shaking like a child.