Beautiful Ruins (26 page)

Alvis didn’t think he had battle fatigue—he’d barely seen combat—so much as
life
fatigue. He supposed it could be some kind of postwar existential funk, but the thing eating him felt smaller than that: he just no longer saw the point of things. He especially couldn’t see the angle in working hard, or in doing the right thing. After all, look where that had got Richards. Meanwhile, he’d survived to come back to Wisconsin and—what? Teach sentence diagramming to morons? Sell Bel Airs to dentists?

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.”

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.

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.