Beautiful Ruins (36)

“Later, the sun, it come through these windows.” Pasquale pointed to the machine-gun slots in the pillbox wall. “Make these paint . . . it seem alive. The girl, she is molto bella, yes?”

Dee stared, open-mouthed. “Oh, yes.” Her match went out and Pasquale lit another. He put a hand on Dee’s shoulder and pointed to the two paintings in the center, the portraits of the two soldiers. “The fishermen say two German soldiers live here in the war, for guard the sea, yes? One, he paint this wall.”

She stepped in closer to look at the soldiers’ portraits—one a young, chinless boy with his head cocked proudly, looking off to the side, tunic buttoned to his chin; the other a few years older, shirt open, staring straight out from the wall—and even with the paint faded on the concrete, an unmistakable wistful look on his face. “This one was the painter,” she said quietly.

Pasquale bent in close. “How do you know this?”

“He just looks like an artist. And he’s staring at us. He must’ve looked in a mirror as he painted his own face.”

Dee turned, took a few steps, and looked out the gun turret, to the sea below. Then she turned back to the paintings. “It’s amazing, Pasquale. Thank you.” She covered her mouth, as if about to cry, and then she turned to him. “Imagine being this artist, creating masterpieces up here . . . that no one will ever see. I think it’s kind of sad.”

She returned to the painted wall. Pasquale lit another match, handed it to her, and she made her way down the wall again . . . the roiling sea on the rocks, the two soldiers, and finally two paintings of the girl—sitting three-quarters sideways, painted from the waist up, two classic portraits. Dee paused over these last paintings. Pasquale had always assumed the two portraits of the girl were identical, but Dee said, “Look. This one wasn’t quite right. He corrected it. From a photograph, I’ll bet.” Pasquale stepped in beside her. Dee pointed. “In this one, her nose is a little too angled and her eyes dip.” Yes, Pasquale could see, she was right.

“He must have loved her very much,” she said.

She turned, and in the flickering match light Pasquale thought she might have tears in her eyes.

“Do you think he made it home to see her?”

They were close enough to kiss. “Yes,” Pasquale whispered. “He see her again.”

Stooped over in the tight pillbox, Dee blew out the match, stepped forward, and hugged him. In the dark, she whispered, “God, I hope so.”

At four in the morning, Pasquale was still thinking about the moment in the dark bunker. Should he have kissed her? He had kissed only one other woman in his life, Amedea, and technically she had kissed him first. He might have tried, if not for the humiliation he still felt about the tennis court. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that the balls would fly off the cliff? Maybe because in the pictures he’d seen there were no photos of the balls getting past the players. Still, he felt foolish. He had imagined tennis as something purely aesthetic; he hadn’t wanted a tennis court, he’d wanted a painting of a tennis court. Obviously, without a fence, the players themselves could run right off the court and fall over the cliff into the sea. Dee Moray was right. A high fence could be erected easily enough. And yet he knew that a high fence would ruin the vision he’d always had, of a flat court hovering over the sea, rising from the cliff-side boulders, a perfect cantilevered shelf covered with players in white clothes, women sipping drinks under parasols. If they were behind fences, you wouldn’t see them from the approaching boats. Chain fences would be better, but would cloud the players’ view of the sea and would be ugly, like a prison. Who wanted a brutto tennis court?

That night, the man Dee Moray was waiting for didn’t come, and Pasquale felt somehow responsible, as if his little wish that the man would drown had been upgraded to a prayer and had come true. Dee Moray had retreated to her room at dusk and in the early morning had gotten violently ill again, and could only get out of bed to vomit. When there was nothing left in her stomach, tears rolled from her eyes and her back arched and she sniffed and slumped to the floor. She didn’t want Pasquale to see her retch, and so he sat in the hallway and reached his hand around the corner, through the doorway, to hold her hand. Pasquale could hear his aunt stirring downstairs.

Dee took a long breath. “Tell me a story, Pasquale. What happened when the painter returned to the woman?”

“They marry and have fifty children.”

“Fifty?”

“Maybe six. He become a famous painter and every time he paint a woman, he paint her.”

Dee Moray vomited again, and when she could speak, said, “He’s not coming, is he?” It was odd and intimate, their hands connected, their heads in different rooms. They could talk. They could hold hands. But they couldn’t see each other’s faces.

“He is coming,” Pasquale told her.

She whispered: “How do you know, Pasquale?”

“I know.”

“But how?”

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the English, whispering back around the corner, “Because if you wait for me . . . I crawl on my knees from Rome to see you.”

She squeezed his hand and retched again.

The man didn’t come that day, either. And as much as he wanted to keep Dee Moray for himself, Pasquale began to get angry. What kind of man sent a sick woman to a remote fishing village and then left her there? He thought of going to La Spezia and using a phone to call the Grand Hotel, but he wanted to look this bastard in his cold eye.