Beautiful Ruins (91)

“Yes.” It’s not simple—

She settled into his shoulder again. The light from the pillbox turrets was moving up the wall and was almost done with the paintings, just a single rectangle on the upper corner of the last of the girl’s portrait—the sun nearly done for the day with its gallery show. She looked up at him. “You really think the painter made it back to see her?”

“Oh, yes,” Pasquale said, his voice hoarse with feeling.

“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking—how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe—Pasquale Tursi said, only, “Yes.”

It was late in the afternoon when they got back to the village and Pasquale introduced Dee Moray to Alvis Bender. Alvis was reading on the patio of the Hotel Adequate View and he leaped to his feet, his book falling back onto his chair. Dee and Alvis shook hands awkwardly, the usually talkative Bender seeming tongue-tied—perhaps by her beauty, perhaps by the strange events of the day.

“So nice to meet you,” she said. “I hope you will understand if I excuse myself to take a nap. I’ve had a long walk and I’m terribly exhausted.”

“No, of course,” Alvis said, and only then did he think to remove his hat, which he held at his chest.

And then Dee connected the name. “Oh, Mr. Bender,” she said, turning back. “The author?”

He looked at the ground, embarrassed by the very word. “Oh, no—not a real author.”

“You certainly are,” she said. “I liked your book very much.”

“Thank you,” Alvis Bender said, and he flushed in a way that Pasquale had never seen before, had never imagined from the tall, sophisticated American. “I mean . . . it’s not finished, obviously. There’s more to tell.”

“Of course.”

Alvis glanced over at Pasquale, then back at the pretty actress. He laughed. “Although, truth be told, that’s most of what I’ve been able to write.”

She smiled warmly, and said, “Well . . . maybe that’s all there is. If so, I think it’s wonderful.” And with that she excused herself again and disappeared inside the hotel.

Pasquale and Alvis Bender stood on the patio next to each other and stared at the closed hotel door.

“Jesus. That’s Burton’s girl?” Alvis asked. “Not what I expected.”

“No,” was all Pasquale could say.

Valeria was back in the little kitchen, cooking. Pasquale stood by while she finished another pot of soup. When it was done, Pasquale took a bowl of it to Dee’s room, but she was already asleep. He looked down on her, making sure she was breathing. Then he left the soup on her nightstand and went back out into the trattoria, where Alvis Bender was eating some of Valeria’s soup and staring out the window.

“This place has gone crazy, Pasquale. The whole world has flooded in.”

Pasquale felt too tired to speak, and he walked past Alvis and to the door, looking out at the greenish sea. Down at the shore, the fishermen were finishing their work for the day—smoking and laughing as they hung their nets and washed down their boats.

Pasquale pushed open the door, stepped onto the wooden patio, and smoked. The fishermen came up the hill one at a time with what was left of their catches, and each one waved or nodded. Tomasso the Elder approached with a string of small fish and told Pasquale he’d saved some anchovies from his sale to the tourist restaurants. Did he think Valeria would want them? Yes, Pasquale said. Tomasso went inside and came out a few minutes later without his fish.

Alvis Bender was right. Someone had opened the taps and the world was pouring in. Pasquale had wanted this sleepy town to wake up, and now . . . look at it.

Perhaps that’s why he wasn’t even particularly surprised when, a few minutes later, he heard the sound of another boat motor and Gualfredo’s ten-meter churned into the cove—this time without Orenzio at the wheel but with Gualfredo piloting it, the brute Pelle at his side.

Pasquale thought he might bite through his own jaw. This was a final indignity, the last thing he could bear. And in his confusion, in his grief, Gualfredo suddenly seemed like some awful thorn in his side. He opened the screen door, went inside, and grabbed his mother’s old cane from the coatrack. Alvis Bender looked up from his wine, asked, “What is it, Pasquale?” But Pasquale didn’t answer, just turned around and went outside, walking purposefully down the steep strada toward the two men, who were climbing out of the boat, the cobblestones falling away as Pasquale marched with purpose, clouds racing through the violet overhead—last sunlight strobing the shoreline, waves drumming on smooth rocks.

The men were out of the boat, coming up the path, Gualfredo smiling: “Three nights the American woman stayed here when she was supposed to be at my hotel, Pasquale. You owe me for those nights.”

Still forty meters apart, with the fading sun right behind them now, Pasquale couldn’t make out the looks on the men’s faces, just their silhouettes. He said nothing, simply walked, his mind roiling with images of Richard Burton and Michael Deane, of his aunt poisoning his mother, of Amedea and his baby, of his failed tennis court, of his flinching before Gualfredo last time, of the truth revealed about himself: his core weakness as a man.