Beautiful Ruins (74)

On his better days he imagined that he could channel this malaise into the book he was writing—except that he wasn’t actually writing a book. Oh, he talked about the book he was writing, but the pages never came. And the more he talked about the book he wasn’t writing, the harder it actually became to write. The first sentence bedeviled him. He had an idea that his war book would be an antiwar book; that he would focus on the drudgery of soldiering and his book would feature only a single battle, the nine-second firefight at Strettoia in which his company had lost two men; that the entire thing would be about the boredom leading up to those nine seconds; that in those nine seconds the protagonist would die, and then the book would go on anyway, with another, more minor character. This structure seemed to him to capture the randomness of what he’d experienced. All the World War II books and movies were so damned earnest and solemn, Audie Murphy stories of bravery. His own callow view, he felt, fit more with books about the first world war: Hemingway’s stoic detachment, Dos Passos’s ironic tragedies, Céline’s absurd black-hearted satires.

Then, one day, as he was trying to coax a woman he’d just met into sleeping with him, he happened to mention that he was writing a book, and she became intrigued. “About what?” she asked. “It’s about the war,” he answered. “Korea?” she asked, innocently enough, and Alvis realized just how pathetic he’d become.

His old friend Richards was right: they’d gone ahead and started another war before Alvis had finished with the last one. And just thinking about his dead friend made Alvis properly ashamed of how he’d wasted the last eight years.

The next day, Alvis marched into the showroom and announced to his father that he needed some time off. He was returning to Italy; he was finally going to write his book about the war. His father wasn’t happy, but he made Alvis a deal: he could take three months off, as long as he came back to run the new Pontiac dealership in Kenosha when he was through. Alvis quickly agreed.

And so he went to Italy. From Venice to Florence, from Naples to Rome, he traveled, drank, smoked, and contemplated, and everywhere he went he packed his portable Royal—without ever removing it from the case. Instead, he’d check into a hotel and go straight to the bar. Everywhere he went, people wanted to buy a returning GI a drink, and everywhere he went, Alvis wanted to accept. He told himself he was doing research, but except for an unproductive trip to Strettoia, the site of his tiny firefight, most of his research involved drinking and trying to seduce Italian girls.

In Strettoia, he woke terribly hung over and went for a walk, looking for the clearing where his old unit had gotten into the firefight. There, he came across a landscape painter doing a sketch of an old barn. But the young man was drawing the barn upside down. Alvis thought maybe there was something wrong with the man, some sort of brain damage, and yet there was a quality to his work that drew Alvis in, a disorientation that seemed familiar.

“The eye sees everything upside down,” the artist explained, “and then the brain automatically reverses it. I’m just trying to put it back the way the mind sees it.”

Alvis stared into the drawing for a long time. He even thought about buying it, but he realized that if he hung it this way, upside down, people would just turn it over. This, he decided, was also the problem with the book he hoped to write. He could never write a standard war book; what he had to say about the war could only be told upside down, and then people would probably just miss the point and try to turn it right side up again.

That night, in La Spezia, he bought a drink for an old partisan, a man with horrible burn scars on his face. The man kissed Alvis’s cheeks and smacked his back and called him “comrade” and “amico!” He told Alvis the story of how he’d gotten those burns: his partisan unit had been sleeping in a haystack in the hills when, without warning, a German patrol used a flamethrower to roust them. He was the only one to escape alive. Alvis was so moved by the man’s story that he bought him several rounds of drinks, and they saluted each other and wept over friends they had lost. Finally, Alvis asked the man if he could use his story in the book he was writing. This caused the Italian to begin weeping. It was all a lie, the Italian confessed; there had been no partisan unit, no flamethrower, no Germans. The man had been working on a car two years earlier when the engine had suddenly caught fire.

Moved by the man’s confession, Alvis Bender drunkenly forgave his new friend. After all, he was a fraud, too; he’d talked about writing a book for ten years and hadn’t written a single word. The two drunken liars hugged and cried, and stayed up all night confessing their weak hearts.

In the morning, a dreadfully hungover Alvis Bender sat staring at the port of La Spezia. He only had two weeks left of the three months his father had given him to “figure this shit out.” He grabbed his suitcase and his portable typewriter, trudged down to the pier, and started negotiating a boat ride to Portovenere, but the pilot misheard his slurred Italian. Two hours later, the boat bumped into a rocky promontory in a closet-size cove, where he laid eyes on a runt of a town, maybe a dozen houses in all, clinging to the rocky cliffs, surrounding a single sad business, a little pensione and trattoria named, like everything on that coast, for St. Peter. There were a handful of fishermen tending nets in little skiffs and the owner of the empty hotel sat on his patio reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe, while his handsome, azure-eyed son sat daydreaming on a nearby rock. “What is this place?” Alvis Bender asked, and the pilot said, “This is Porto Vergogna.” Port of Shame. Wasn’t that where he’d wanted to go? And Alvis Bender could think of no better place for himself and said, “Yes, of course.”