Beautiful Ruins (35)

She was incredulous. “You’re building a tennis court there?”

“Yes. I make the rocks . . . flat.” He remembered the English word. “Cantilever, yes? Will be very famous, best tennis in Levante, numero uno court rising from the sea.”

“But won’t the tennis balls just . . . fly off the edge?”

He looked from her to the boulders and back, wondering if she knew the game. “No. The players hit the ball.” He held his two hands apart. “On this side and this side.”

“Yeah, but when they miss—”

He just stared at her.

“Have you ever played tennis, Pasquale?”

This was a sore subject, sports. Even though Pasquale was tall for his family, over 1.8 meters, he had played no sports growing up in Porto Vergogna; for a long time this shame was at the front of his insecurities. “I see many pictures,” he said, “and I make measure from a book.”

“When the player on the sea side misses it . . . won’t the balls fly into the sea?”

Pasquale rubbed his jaw and considered it.

She smiled. “Maybe you could put up high fences.”

Pasquale stared out at the sea, imagining it covered with bobbing yellow tennis balls. “Yes,” he said. “A fence . . . yes. Of course.” He was an imbecile.

“I’m sure it will be a wonderful court,” she said, and turned back to the sea.

Pasquale looked at Dee’s sharp profile, the wind snapping her hair. “The man who comes today, you are in love with him?” He was surprised at himself for asking, and when she turned back Pasquale looked down. “I hope . . . is okay I ask this.”

“Oh, of course.” She took a deep breath and blew air out. “Unfortunately, I think I am, yes. But I shouldn’t be. He’s not a good man to fall in love with.”

“And . . . he is in love?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He’s in love with himself, too.”

It took a second to register, but Pasquale was delighted by her joke. “Ah!” he said. “Very funny.”

Another gust riffled Dee’s hair and she held it down against her head. “Pasquale, I read the story I found in my room, by the American writer.”

“The book . . . is good, yes?” Pasquale’s mother had never liked Alvis Bender as much as Pasquale and his father did. If the man was such a brilliant writer, she said, why had he only written one chapter in eight years?

“It’s sad,” Dee said, and she put her hand on her chest. Pasquale couldn’t look away from those lovely fingers splayed out over the tops of Dee Moray’s breasts.

“I am sorry,” he cleared his throat, “you find this sad story in my hotel.”

“Oh, no, it’s very good,” she said. “It has a kind of hopelessness that made me feel less alone in my own hopelessness. Does that make sense?”

Pasquale nodded unsurely.

“The movie I was working on, Cleopatra, it’s about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that’s what every story is about.” She removed her hand from her chest. “Pasquale, have you ever been in love?”

He felt himself flinch. “Yes.”

“What was her name?”

“Amedea,” he said, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d said Amedea out loud; he was amazed at the power it had, that simple name.

“Do you still love her?”

Of all the difficulties of speaking in another language, this one was the worst. “Yes,” Pasquale finally said.

“Why aren’t you with her?”

Pasquale exhaled, surprised at the sharpness at the base of his ribs. He finally just said, “Is not simple, no?”

“No,” she said, and looked out to a tight roll of white clouds just beginning to pearl on the horizon. “It’s not simple.”

“Come. One more thing.” Pasquale moved to the far corner where the bunker met the jagged boulders of the cliff face. He pulled away branches and pushed rocks aside, revealing a narrow, rectangular hole in the concrete roof. He squeezed in and lowered himself down. Halfway into the pillbox, he looked across its roof to see that Dee still hadn’t moved. “Is safe,” Pasquale said. “Is okay. Come.”

He dropped into the bunker, and a moment later Dee Moray squeezed through the narrow hole and dropped in next to him.

It was dark inside, the air a bit stale, and in the corners they had to stoop a bit to avoid hitting their heads on the concrete ceiling. The only light came from the three gun turrets, which, in the early morning, cast distorted rectangles of light on the pillbox floor. “Look,” Pasquale said, and he pulled a matchbox from his pocket, struck a single kitchen match and held it to one of the concrete walls in the back of the bunker.

Dee walked toward the flickering light of the match. The back wall was covered with paintings, five frescoes immaculately painted on the concrete, one after the other, as if it were a crude gallery wall. Pasquale lit another match and handed it to her and she stepped even closer to the wall. The artist had painted what looked like wooden frames around the paintings, too, and even though they had been done on concrete and the paint was faded and cracked, it was clear the artist had real talent. The first was a seascape—the rough coast beneath this very pillbox, the churning waves on the rocks, Porto Vergogna just a cluster of rooftops in the right-hand corner. The next two were official-looking portraits of two very different German soldiers. And finally there were two identical paintings of a single girl. Time and weather had faded the colors to dull versions of some earlier vibrancy, and a stream of water seeping into the bunker had damaged the seascape, while a large crack split one of the soldiers’ portraits and a fissure ran through the corner of the first painting of the girl. But otherwise the art was remarkably well-preserved.