Beautiful Ruins (75)

The proprietor of the hotel, Carlo Tursi, was a sweet, thoughtful man who had left Florence and moved to the tiny village after losing his two older sons in the war. He was honored to have an American writer stay in his pensione, and he promised that his son, Pasquale, would be quiet during the day so Alvis could work. And so it was that in the tiny top-floor room, with the gentle wash of waves on the rocks below, Alvis Bender finally unpacked his portable Royal. He put the typewriter on the nightstand beneath the shuttered window. He stared at it. He slipped a sheet of paper in, cranked it through. He put his hands on the keys. He rubbed their smooth-pebbled surfaces, the lightly raised letters. And an hour passed. He went downstairs for some wine and found Carlo sitting on the patio.

“How is the writing?” Carlo asked solemnly.

“Actually, I’m having some trouble,” Alvis admitted.

“With which part?” Carlo asked.

“The beginning.”

Carlo considered this. “Perhaps you could write first the ending.”

Alvis thought about the upside-down painting he’d seen near Strettoia. Yes, of course. The ending first. He laughed.

Thinking the American was laughing at his suggestion, Carlo apologized for being “stupido.”

No, no, Alvis said, it was a brilliant suggestion. He’d been talking and thinking about this book for so long—it was as if it already existed, as if he’d already written it in some way, as if it was just out there, in the air, and all he had to do was find a place to tap into the story, like a stream flowing by. Why not start at the end? He ran back upstairs and typed these words: “Then spring came and with it the end of my war.”

Alvis stared at his one sentence, so odd and fragmented, so perfect. Then he wrote another sentence and another, and soon he had a page, at which point he ran down the stairs and had a glass of wine with his muse, the serious, bespectacled Carlo Tursi. This would be his reward and his rhythm: type a page, drink a glass of wine with Carlo. After two weeks of this, he had twelve pages. He was surprised to discover that he was telling the story of a girl he’d met near the end of the war, a girl who had given him a quick hand job. He hadn’t planned to even include that story in his book—since it was apropos of nothing—but suddenly it seemed like the only story that mattered.

On his last day in Porto Vergogna, Alvis packed up his few pages and his little Royal and said good-bye to the Tursi family, promising to return next year to work, to spend two weeks each year in the little village until his book was done, even if it took the rest of his life.

Then he had one of the fishermen take him to La Spezia, where he caught a bus to Licciana, the girl’s hometown. He watched out the window of the bus, looking for the place where he’d met her, for the barn and the stand of trees, but nothing looked the same and he couldn’t get his bearings. The village itself was twice as big as it had been during the war, the crumbly old rock buildings replaced by wood and stone structures. Alvis went to a trattoria and gave the proprietor Maria’s last name. The man knew the family. He’d gone to school with Maria’s brother, Marco, who had fought for the Fascists and was tortured for his efforts, hung by his feet in the town square and bled like a butchered cow. The man didn’t know what had become of Maria, but her younger sister, Nina, had married a local boy and lived in the village still. Alvis got directions to Nina’s home, a one-story stone house in a clearing below the old rock walls of the village, in a new neighborhood that was spreading down the hill. He knocked. The door opened a crack and a black-haired woman stuck her face out the window next to the door and asked what he wanted.

Alvis explained that he’d known her sister in the war. “Anna?” the girl asked.

“No, Maria,” Alvis said.

“Oh,” she said, somewhat darkly. After a moment, she invited him into the well-kept living room. “Maria is married to a doctor, living in Genoa.”

Alvis asked if she might have an address for Maria.

Nina’s face hardened. “She doesn’t need another old boyfriend from the war coming back. She is finally happy. Why do you want to make trouble?”

Alvis insisted he didn’t want to make any trouble.

“Maria had a hard time in the war. Leave her be. Please.” And then one of Nina’s children called for her and she went to the kitchen to check on him.

There was a telephone in the living room, and like a lot of people who had only recently gotten a telephone, Maria’s sister kept it in a prominent place, on a table covered with figures of saints. Beneath the phone was an address book.

Alvis reached over, opened the book to the M section, and there it was: the name Maria. No last name. No phone number. Just a street number in Genoa. Alvis memorized the address and closed the book, thanked Nina for her time, and left.

That afternoon, he took a train to Genoa.

The address turned out to be near the harbor. Alvis worried that he’d gotten it wrong; this did not appear to be the neighborhood of a doctor and his wife.

The buildings were brick and stone, built one on top of the other, their heights like a musical scale descending gradually to the harbor. The ground floors were filled with cheap cafés and taverns that catered to fishermen, while above were flop apartments and simple hotels. Maria’s street number led to a tavern, a rotted-wood rat-hole of a place with warped tables and a ragged old rug. A rail-thin, smiling barman sat behind the counter, serving fishermen in droopy caps bent over chipped glasses of amber.