Beautiful Ruins (76)

Alvis apologized, said he must have the wrong place. “I’m looking for a woman—” he began.

The skinny bartender didn’t wait for a name. He just pointed to the stairs behind the bar and held out his hand.

“Ah.” Knowing exactly where he was now, Alvis paid the man. As he climbed the stairs, he prayed there was some mistake, that he wouldn’t find her here. At the top was a hallway that opened into a foyer with a couch and two chairs. Sitting on the couch, talking in low voices, were three women in nightgowns. Two of the three were young—girls, really, in short nighties, reading magazines. Neither of them looked familiar.

In the other chair, a faded silk robe over her nightgown, smoking the last of a cigarette, sat Maria.

“Hello,” Alvis said.

Maria didn’t even look up.

One of the younger girls said, in English, “America, yes? You like me, America?”

Alvis ignored the younger girl. “Maria,” he said quietly.

She didn’t look up.

“Maria?”

Finally, she glanced up. She seemed twenty years older, not ten. A thickening had occurred in her arms and there were lines around her mouth and eyes.

“Who’s Maria?” she asked in English.

One of the other girls laughed. “Stop teasing him. Or give him to me.”

With no trace of recognition in her voice, Maria gave Alvis the prices, in English, for various amounts of time. Above her was an awful painting of an iris. Alvis fought the urge to turn it upside down. He bought a half hour.

No stranger to this kind of place, he paid Maria half the agreed-upon price, which she folded and took downstairs to the man behind the bar. Then Alvis followed her down the hall to a small room. Inside, there was nothing but a made bed, a nightstand, a coat rack, and a scratched, foggy mirror. A window looked out on the harbor and the street below. She sat down on the bed, its springs creaking, and began to undress.

“You don’t remember me?” Alvis asked in Italian.

She stopped undressing and sat on the bed, unmoved, no recognition in her eyes.

Alvis began slowly, telling her in Italian how he’d been stationed in Italy during the war, how he’d met her on a deserted road and walked her home one night, how on the day he met her he’d reached a point where he didn’t care if he lived or died, but that after meeting her he had cared again. He said that she’d encouraged him to write a book after the war, to take it seriously, but that he’d gone home to America (“Ricorda—Wisconsin?”) and drank away the last decade. His best friend, he said, had died in the war, leaving behind a wife and a son. Alvis had no one, and he’d come home and wasted all of those years.

She listened patiently and then asked if he wanted to have sex.

He told her that he had gone to Licciana to look for her, and he thought he saw something in her eyes when he said the name of the village—shame, perhaps—because he had been so humbled by what she did for him that night: not the part with her hand, but the way she’d comforted him afterward, held his crying face against her beautiful chest. That was, he said, the most humane thing anyone had ever done for him.

“I’m so sorry,” Alvis said, “that you became this.”

“This?” She startled Alvis by laughing. “I’ve always been this.” She waved at the room around her and said, in a flat Italian, “Friend, I don’t know you. And I don’t know this village you speak of. I’ve always lived in Genoa. I get boys like you sometimes, American boys who were in the war and had their first sex with a girl who looked like me. It’s fine.” She looked patient, but not particularly interested in his story. “But what were you going to do, rescue this Maria? Take her back to America?”

Alvis could think of nothing to say. No, of course he wasn’t going to take her back to America. So what was he going to do? Why was he here?

“You made me happy, choosing me over the younger girls,” the prostitute said, and she reached out for his belt. “But please. Stop calling me Maria.”

As her hands expertly undid his belt, Alvis stared at the woman’s face. It had to be her, didn’t it? And now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure. She did seem older than Maria should. And the thickening he’d attributed to age—could this actually be someone else? Was he confessing to some random whore?

He watched her thick hands unbutton his pants. He felt paralyzed, but he managed to pull himself away. He buttoned his pants and cinched his belt again.

“Would you rather have one of the other girls?” the prostitute asked. “I’ll go get her, but you still have to pay me.”

Alvis took out his wallet, his hands shaking; he pulled out fifty times the price she’d quoted him. He placed the money on the bed. And then he spoke quietly. “I’m sorry I didn’t just walk you home that night.”

She just stared at the money. Then Alvis Bender walked out, feeling as if the last of his life had seeped out in that room. In the front room, the other whores were reading their magazines. They didn’t even look up. Downstairs, he edged past the skinny, grinning bartender, and by the time he burst outside into the sun Alvis felt crazy with thirst. He hurried across the street, toward another bar, thinking, These bars, thank God, they go on forever. It was a relief, that he would never exhaust all the bars in the world. He could come to Italy once a year to work on this book, and even if it took him the rest of his life to finish it and drink himself to death, that was okay. He knew now what his book would be: an artifact, incomplete and misshapen, a shard of some larger meaning. And if his time with Maria was ultimately pointless—a random encounter, a fleeting moment, perhaps even the wrong whore—then so be it.