Beautiful Ruins (9 page)

“At one time every town in Italy was surrounded by medieval walls,” Alvis lectured. “To this day, nearly every hilltop in Tuscany rises into gray castle walls. In times of danger, peasants took refuge behind these walls, safe from bandits and armies. In most of Europe, the peasant class disappeared thirty, forty years ago, but not in Italy. Finally, after two wars, houses spill into the flats and river valleys outside the city walls. But as the walls come down, so does Italian culture, Carlo. Italy becomes like any other place, overrun with people looking for ‘the Italian experience.’ ”

“Yes,” Carlo said. “This is what I want to profit from!”

Alvis pointed to the jagged cliffs above and behind them. “But here, on this coast, your walls were made by God—or volcanoes. You can’t tear them down. And you can’t build outside them. This town can never be more than a few barnacles on the rocks. But someday, it could be the last Italian place in all of Italy.”

“Exactly,” Carlo said drunkenly. “Then the tourists will flock here, eh, Roberto?”

It was quiet. Alvis Bender was exactly the age Carlo’s oldest son would have been if he hadn’t gone down in that tumbling box over North Africa. Carlo sighed, his voice thin and weak. “Pardon me. I meant, of course, to say
Alvis
.”

“Yes,” Alvis said, and he patted the older man’s shoulder.

Many times Pasquale went to bed to the sound of his father and Alvis talking, and woke hours later to find them still on the porch, the writer holding forth on some obscure topic (
And thus the sewer is man’s greatest achievement, Carlo, the disposal of shit the apex of all this inventing and fighting and copulating
). But eventually Carlo would turn the conversation back to tourism and ask his one American guest how he might make the Pensione di San Pietro more attractive to Americans.

Alvis Bender indulged these conversations, but usually came around to pleading with Carlo not to change a thing. “This whole coast will be spoiled soon enough. You’ve got something truly magical here, Carlo. Real isolation. And natural beauty.”

“So I will trumpet these things, perhaps with an English name? How would you say
L’albergo numero uno, tranquillo, con una bella vista del villaggio e delle scogliere
?”

“The Number One Quiet Inn with a Most Beautiful View in the Village of Cliffs,” Alvis Bender said. “Nice. Might be a bit long, though. And sentimental.”

Carlo asked what he meant by
sentimentale
.

“Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use ‘beautiful’ to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now—clear and precise. Humble like dreams.”

Carlo Tursi took this advice to heart. And so, in 1960, while Pasquale was away at college, Alvis Bender came for his yearly visit—he strode up the steps to the hotel and he found Carlo bursting with pride, standing before the baffled fishermen and his new hand-lettered English sign:
THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW

“What does it mean?” said one of the fishermen. “Empty whorehouse?”

“Vista adeguata,”
said Carlo, translating for them.

“What kind of idiot says that the view from his hotel is only adequate?” said the fisherman.

“Bravo
, Carlo,” said Alvis. “It’s perfect.”

T
he beautiful American was vomiting. From his dark room Pasquale could hear her retching upstairs. He flipped on the light and pulled his watch off the dresser. It was four in the morning. He dressed quietly and made his way up the dark, narrow stairs. Four steps from the top of the landing he saw her leaning against the bathroom doorway, trying to catch her breath. She wore a thin, white nightgown cut several inches above her knees—her legs so impossibly long and smooth, Pasquale could go no further. She was almost as white as her nightgown.

“I’m sorry, Pasquale,” she said. “I woke you.”

“No, is fine,” he said.

She turned back toward the basin and began to retch again, but there was nothing in her stomach and she doubled over in pain.

Pasquale started up the rest of the stairs but then stopped, remembering how Gualfredo had said Porto Vergogna and the Hotel Adequate View weren’t properly equipped for American tourists. “I am send for the doctor,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I’m okay.” But just then she grabbed her side and slumped to the floor. “Oh.”

Pasquale helped her back to bed and hurried downstairs and outside. The nearest doctor lived three kilometers down the coast, in Portovenere. He was a kindly old gentleman
dottore
, a widower named Merlonghi who spoke fine English and who came to the cliff-side villages once a year to check on the fishermen. Pasquale knew just which fisherman to send for the doctor: Tomasso the Communist, whose wife answered the door and stepped aside. Tomasso pulled on his suspenders and accepted his job with proud formality, removing his cap and saying he wouldn’t let Pasquale down.

Pasquale went back into the hotel, where his Aunt Valeria was sitting with Dee Moray in her room, holding her hair as she bent over a large bowl. The two women looked ridiculous next to each other—Dee Moray with her pale, perfect skin, her shimmery blond hair; Valeria sprouting whiskers from that craggy face, her hair a spool of wire. “She needs to drink water so there is something to spit,” Valeria said. A glass of water sat on the bedside table, next to the pages of Alvis Bender’s book.

Pasquale started to translate what his aunt had said, but Dee Moray seemed to understand the word
acqua
, and she reached for the glass of water and sipped it.

“I’m sorry for all the trouble,” she said.

“What does she say?” Valeria asked.

“She is sorry for the trouble.”

“Tell her that her tiny bedclothes are a whore’s rags,” Valeria said. “This is what she should be sorry for, that she tempts my nephew like a whore.”

“I’m not going to tell her that!”

“Tell the pig-whore to leave, Pasqo.”

“Enough, Zia!”

“God made her sick because He disapproves of cheap whores in tiny bedclothes.”

“Be quiet, crazy old woman.”

Dee Moray had been watching this exchange. “What is she saying?” she asked.

“Um.” Pasquale swallowed. “She is sorry you are sick.”

Valeria stuck out her bottom lip, waiting. “You told the whore what I said?”

“Yes,” Pasquale told his aunt. “I told her.”

The room was quiet. Dee Moray closed her eyes and shook with another wave of nausea, her back bucking as she tried to vomit.

When it had passed, Dee Moray breathed heavily. “Your mother is sweet.”

“She is not my mother,” Pasquale said in English. “She is my aunt. Zia Valeria.”

Valeria watched their faces as they spoke English, and seemed suspicious about hearing her own name. “I hope you’re not going to marry this whore, Pasquale.”

“Zia—”

“Your mother thinks you are going to marry her.”

“Enough, Zia!”

Valeria gently pushed the hair out of the beautiful American’s eyes. “What is the matter with her?”

Pasquale said quietly,
“Cancro
.”

Dee Moray didn’t look up.

Valeria seemed to think about this. She chewed the inside of her cheek. “Oh,” she said finally. “She will be fine. Tell the whore she will be fine.”

“I’m not going to tell her that.”

“Tell her.” Valeria looked at Pasquale seriously. “Tell her that as long as she doesn’t leave Porto Vergogna, she will be fine.”

Pasquale turned to his aunt. “What are you talking about?”

Valeria handed Dee the glass of water again. “No one dies here. Babies and old people, yes, but God has never taken a breeding adult from this village. It’s an old curse on this place—that the whores would lose many babies but would live to old age with their sins. Once you outgrow childhood in Porto Vergogna, you are doomed to live at least forty years. Go on. Tell her.” She tapped the beautiful American’s arm and nodded to her.

Dee Moray had been watching the conversation, understanding none of it, but she could tell the old woman was trying to communicate something important. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Pasquale said. “Talk of witches.”

“What?” Dee Moray said. “Tell me. Please.”

Pasquale sighed. He rubbed his brow. “She say . . . young people do not die in Porto Vergogna . . . no one die young here.” He shrugged and tried to smile away the old woman’s crazy superstition. “Is old story . . .
stregoneria
. . . story of witches.”

Dee Moray turned and looked full into Valeria’s moley, mustachioed face. The old woman nodded and patted Dee’s hand. “If you leave this village you will die a whore’s death, blind and thirsty, scratching at your dry dead birth hole,” Valeria said in Italian.

“Thank you so much,” Dee Moray said in English.

Pasquale felt sick.

Valeria bent and spoke sharply to their guest.
“E smettila di mostrare le gambe al mio nipote, puttana.”
And stop showing your legs to my nephew, you whore.

“You, too,” Dee Moray said, and squeezed Valeria’s hand. “Thank you.”

It was another hour before Tomasso the Communist arrived back at the hotel, his boat lurching into the marina. The other fishermen were already out; the sun was rising. Tomasso helped old Dr. Merlonghi onto the pier. In the
trattoria
, Valeria had prepared a hero’s meal for Tomasso, who once again removed his cap and was quiet with the importance of his job. But he had worked up an appetite and accepted the meal proudly. The old doctor was wearing a wool coat, but no tie. Tufts of gray hair shot from his ears. He followed Pasquale up the stairs and was out of breath by the time they reached Dee Moray’s room on the third floor.

“I’m sorry that I put you to all of this trouble,” she said. “I’m actually feeling better now.”

The doctor’s English was more practiced than Pasquale’s. “It is no trouble seeing a pretty young woman.” He looked down her throat and listened to her heart with his stethoscope. “Pasquale said you have stomach cancer. When were you diagnosed?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“In Rome?”

“Yes.”

“They used an endoscope?”

“A what?”

“It is a new instrument. A tube was pushed down the throat to take a photograph of the cancer, yes?”

“I remember the doctor looked down there with a light.”

The doctor felt her abdomen.

“I’m supposed to go to Switzerland for treatment. Maybe they’re going to do it there, this scope thing. They wanted me to go two days ago, but I came here instead.”

“Why?”

She glanced at Pasquale. “I’m meeting a friend here. He picked this place because it’s quiet. After that, I might go to Switzerland.”

“Might?” The doctor was listening to her chest, poking and prodding. “What is to might? The treatment is in Switzerland, you should go there.”

“My mother died of cancer . . .” She paused and cleared her throat. “I was twelve. Breast cancer. It wasn’t the disease so much as the treatment that was difficult to watch. I’ll never forget. It was . . .” She swallowed and didn’t finish. “They cut out her breasts . . . and she died anyway. My dad always said he wished he’d just taken her home and let her sit on our porch . . . enjoy the sunsets.”

The doctor let his stethoscope fall. He frowned. “Yes, it can make worse the end, treatment for cancers. It is not easy. But every day is better. In the United States are . . . advances. Radiation. Drugs. It is better now than it was with your mother, yes?”

“And the prognosis for stomach cancer? Has that gotten any better?”

He smiled gently. “Who was your doctor in Rome?”

“Dr. Crane. An American. He worked on the film. I guess he’s the best there is.”

“Yes.” Dr. Merlonghi nodded. “He must be.” He put the stethoscope over her stomach and listened. “You went to the doctor complaining of nausea and pain?”

“Yes.”

“Pain here?” He put his hand on her chest and Pasquale flinched with jealousy.

She nodded. “Yes, heartburn.”

“And . . .”

“Lack of appetite. Fatigue. Body aches. Fluid.”

“Yes,” the doctor said.

She glanced at Pasquale. “And some other things.”

“I see,” the doctor said. Then he turned to Pasquale and said in Italian, “Can you wait in the hall a moment, Pasquale?”

He nodded and backed out of the room. Pasquale stood outside in the hallway, on the top step, listening to their hushed voices. A few minutes later, the doctor came out. He looked troubled.

“Is it bad? Is she dying, Doctor?” It would be terrible, Pasquale thought, to have his first American tourist die in the hotel, especially a movie actress. And what if she really was some kind of princess? Then he felt ashamed for having such selfish thoughts. “Should I get her to a bigger city, with proper care?”