Beautiful Ruins

by Jess Walter

  The most painful thing about Saundra’s milk-fed-veal rant (as he’s begun to think of it) was not the truth of it, which was undeniable. Yeah, she was right; he could see that. The awful thing is that he didn’t see it before. As Saundra said with incredulity, I think you really believe your shit. And he did. He really believed his own shit. And now, after she’d blown it all up . . . he really didn’t.

  For the first few months of their divorce, Shane felt empty and alone in his humiliation. Without his old belief in his slow-brewing talents, Shane was rudderless, adrift, and he sank into the depths of depression.

  Which is why—he realizes now—he’s got to make the most of this second chance, to go out and prove that ACT wasn’t simply a motto or a tattoo, a childish delusion, but the truth. He is not milk-fed veal. He is a bull, a man on the come, a winner.

  Shane takes a deep breath in the studio bungalow offices of Michael Deane Productions, looks from Claire Silver to Michael Deane and back, and with all the old, Mamet-inspired confidence he can muster, says: “I came here to pitch a movie. And I’m not translating another word until you hear it.”

  6

  The Cave Paintings

  April 1962

  Porto Vergogna, Italy

  The narrow trail was etched into the cliff face like bunting on the side of a wedding cake, a series of switchbacks zigzagging the steep ledge behind the village. Pasquale stepped carefully along the old goat path and continually looked back to make sure Dee was behind him. Near the top, the trail had been washed out by this year’s heavy winter rains and Pasquale reached back for Dee’s warm hand as the path gave way to bare rock. At the last switchback, an unlikely orange grove had been planted on the cliff side—six gnarled trees, three on each side, tied to the rocks with wire to keep them from blowing over the side. “Is a little more only,” Pasquale said.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and they made their way along the last stretch of trail, the lip of the cliff just over their heads now, Porto Vergogna peeking out from the rocks sixty vertical meters beneath them.

  “You feel bad? Stop or go?” Pasquale asked over his shoulder. He was becoming accustomed to speaking English again.

  “No, let’s keep going. It’s nice to be out walking.”

  Finally, they crested the cliff and stood on the ledge above the village, the drop-off right at their feet—wind ripe, sea pulsing, foam curling on the rocks below.

  Dee stood near the edge, so frail that Pasquale had the urge to grab her, to keep her from being blown away by the wind. “It’s gorgeous, Pasquale,” she said. The sky was hazy-clear beneath a smear of faint cloud, washed-out blue against the darker sea.

  On top of the cliffs, trails spiderwebbed the hills. He pointed up one trail to the northwest, up the coast. “This way, Cinque Terre.” Then he pointed east, behind them, over the hills toward the bay. “This way, Spezia.” Finally, he turned to the south and showed her the trail they were going to take; it carved the hills for another kilometer before dipping back into the craggy, unpopulated valley along the shoreline. “Portovenere this way. Is easy at first, then difficult. Only for goats is trail from Venere.”

  She followed Pasquale on the easy part, a series of switchbacks up and down the pitched hills. Where they met the sea, the cliffs had been carved by shore break, but here, on top, the terrain was friendlier. Still, a few times, Dee and Pasquale had to reach for scraggly trees and vines to descend the steep hills and climb the sharp creases. At the crest of a rocky knob, Dee paused at the remnants of a stone foundation, Roman ruins rounded by weather and wind until they looked like old teeth.

  “What was this?” she asked, pushing brush away from the smoothed stone.

  Pasquale shrugged. For a thousand years, armies used these points to look out over the sea; there were so many ruins up here Pasquale hardly noticed them anymore. Sometimes the rubble of these old garrisons gave him a dull sadness. To think that this was all that was left of an empire; what mark could a man like him ever leave? A beach? A cliff-side tennis court?

  “Come,” he said, “is a little more only.”

  They walked another fifty meters and Pasquale pointed out where the hillside trail started down the cliffs into Portovenere, still more than a kilometer away. Then, taking Dee by the hand, Pasquale left the trail and scrambled over some boulders, pushed through brush—and they emerged on a point with a stunning view of the coastline in both directions. Dee gasped. “Come,” Pasquale said again, and he lowered himself onto a rocky shelf. After a brief hesitation, Dee followed, and they came to what he had wanted to show her—a small concrete dome the same color as the rocks and boulders around it. Only its uniformity and the three long, rectangular machine-gun turret windows gave it away as man-made: a machine-gun pillbox bunker left over from World War II.

  Pasquale helped her climb on top of it, the wind dancing in her hair. “This was from the war?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Pasquale said. “Everywhere still is the war. Was to see ships.”

  “And was there fighting here?”

  “No.” Pasquale waved at the cliffs behind them. “Too . . .” He frowned. He wanted to say lonely again, but that wasn’t quite right. “Isolato?” he asked in Italian.

  “Isolated?”

  “Sì, yes.” Pasquale smiled. “Only war here is boys play shoot at boats.” The concrete for the pillbox had been poured into the boulders behind it, so that it wasn’t visible from above and it looked like just another stone from below. Jutting from the brow of the cliff, the bunker had three open horizontal windows—inside was a machine-gun nest with a 280-degree view on the jagged cove of Porto Vergogna to the northwest, and beyond that, the rocky shoreline and the less drastic cliffs behind Riomaggiore, the last village of the Cinque Terre. To the south the mountains receded to the village of Portovenere, and beyond that Palmaria Island. On both sides the sea foamed on the rocky points, and the steep cliffs rose into green bursts of raggedy pine, clusters of fruit trees, and the furrowed beginnings of the Cinque Terre vineyards. Pasquale’s father used to say that ancient people believed this coast was the end of the flat world.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said, standing atop the abandoned pillbox.

  Pasquale was pleased that she liked it. “Is good place to think, yes?”

  She smiled back at him. “And what do you think about up here, Pasquale?”

  Such an odd question; what does anyone think about anywhere? When he was a kid he’d imagine the rest of the world up here. Now, mostly, he thought about his first love, Amedea, whom he’d left behind in Florence; he replayed their last day together, and wondered if there was something else he could’ve said. But occasionally, his thoughts up here were of a different order, thoughts about time and his place in the world—big, quiet thoughts, difficult to speak of in Italian, let alone English. And yet he wanted to try. “I think . . . all people in the world . . . and I am one only, yes?” Pasquale said. “And sometimes I see the moon here . . . yes, is for everyone . . . all people look at one moon. Yes? Here, Firenze, America. For all people, all time, same moon, yes?” He saw lovely Amedea, staring at the moon from the narrow window of her family’s house in Florence. “Sometimes, this same moon, it is good. But sometimes . . . more sad. Yes?”

  She stared at him a moment, as it registered. “Yes,” she said finally. “I think so, too.” She reached over and squeezed his hand.

  He felt drained from trying to speak English, but pleased to have communicated something abstract and personal after two days of How is room? and More soap?

  Dee looked up the coast; Pasquale knew she was watching for Orenzio’s boat and he assured her they would be able to see it from up here. She sat, curled up on her knees, staring to the northeast, where the soil was better than in rocky Porto Vergogna and the gradual cliffs were seamed with parallel rows of grapevines.

  Pasquale pointed back down toward his village. “Do you see this rock? I am build a tennis court there.”

  She looked perplexe
d. “Where?”

  “There.” They had climbed and gone half a kilometer to the south, and so he could just make out the cluster of boulders beyond the village. “Will be primo tennis.”

  “Wait. You’re putting a tennis court . . . on the cliffs?”

  “For make my hotel destinazione primaria, yes? Very luxury.”

  “I guess I don’t see where you’re going to fit a tennis court.”

  He leaned in closer and extended his arm, and she pressed her cheek against his shoulder to look straight down his arm past his pointing finger, to make sure she was seeing the right place. There was a jolt of electricity in his shoulder, where her cheek touched him, and Pasquale’s breath fell short again. He’d assumed that his romantic education, courtesy of Amedea, had done away with the old nervousness he used to feel around girls, but here he was, shaking like a child.

  She was incredulous. “You’re building a tennis court there?”

  “Yes. I make the rocks . . . flat.” He remembered the English word. “Cantilever, yes? Will be very famous, best tennis in Levante, numero uno court rising from the sea.”

  “But won’t the tennis balls just . . . fly off the edge?”

  He looked from her to the boulders and back, wondering if she knew the game. “No. The players hit the ball.” He held his two hands apart. “On this side and this side.”

  “Yeah, but when they miss—”

  He just stared at her.

  “Have you ever played tennis, Pasquale?”

  This was a sore subject, sports. Even though Pasquale was tall for his family, over 1.8 meters, he had played no sports growing up in Porto Vergogna; for a long time this shame was at the front of his insecurities. “I see many pictures,” he said, “and I make measure from a book.”

  “When the player on the sea side misses it . . . won’t the balls fly into the sea?”

  Pasquale rubbed his jaw and considered it.

  She smiled. “Maybe you could put up high fences.”

  Pasquale stared out at the sea, imagining it covered with bobbing yellow tennis balls. “Yes,” he said. “A fence . . . yes. Of course.” He was an imbecile.

  “I’m sure it will be a wonderful court,” she said, and turned back to the sea.

  Pasquale looked at Dee’s sharp profile, the wind snapping her hair. “The man who comes today, you are in love with him?” He was surprised at himself for asking, and when she turned back Pasquale looked down. “I hope . . . is okay I ask this.”

  “Oh, of course.” She took a deep breath and blew air out. “Unfortunately, I think I am, yes. But I shouldn’t be. He’s not a good man to fall in love with.”

  “And . . . he is in love?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He’s in love with himself, too.”

  It took a second to register, but Pasquale was delighted by her joke. “Ah!” he said. “Very funny.”

  Another gust riffled Dee’s hair and she held it down against her head. “Pasquale, I read the story I found in my room, by the American writer.”

  “The book . . . is good, yes?” Pasquale’s mother had never liked Alvis Bender as much as Pasquale and his father did. If the man was such a brilliant writer, she said, why had he only written one chapter in eight years?

  “It’s sad,” Dee said, and she put her hand on her chest. Pasquale couldn’t look away from those lovely fingers splayed out over the tops of Dee Moray’s breasts.

  “I am sorry,” he cleared his throat, “you find this sad story in my hotel.”

  “Oh, no, it’s very good,” she said. “It has a kind of hopelessness that made me feel less alone in my own hopelessness. Does that make sense?”

  Pasquale nodded unsurely.

  “The movie I was working on, Cleopatra, it’s about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that’s what every story is about.” She removed her hand from her chest. “Pasquale, have you ever been in love?”

  He felt himself flinch. “Yes.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Amedea,” he said, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d said Amedea out loud; he was amazed at the power it had, that simple name.

  “Do you still love her?”

  Of all the difficulties of speaking in another language, this one was the worst. “Yes,” Pasquale finally said.

  “Why aren’t you with her?”

  Pasquale exhaled, surprised at the sharpness at the base of his ribs. He finally just said, “Is not simple, no?”

  “No,” she said, and looked out to a tight roll of white clouds just beginning to pearl on the horizon. “It’s not simple.”

  “Come. One more thing.” Pasquale moved to the far corner where the bunker met the jagged boulders of the cliff face. He pulled away branches and pushed rocks aside, revealing a narrow, rectangular hole in the concrete roof. He squeezed in and lowered himself down. Halfway into the pillbox, he looked across its roof to see that Dee still hadn’t moved. “Is safe,” Pasquale said. “Is okay. Come.”

  He dropped into the bunker, and a moment later Dee Moray squeezed through the narrow hole and dropped in next to him.

  It was dark inside, the air a bit stale, and in the corners they had to stoop a bit to avoid hitting their heads on the concrete ceiling. The only light came from the three gun turrets, which, in the early morning, cast distorted rectangles of light on the pillbox floor. “Look,” Pasquale said, and he pulled a matchbox from his pocket, struck a single kitchen match and held it to one of the concrete walls in the back of the bunker.

  Dee walked toward the flickering light of the match. The back wall was covered with paintings, five frescoes immaculately painted on the concrete, one after the other, as if it were a crude gallery wall. Pasquale lit another match and handed it to her and she stepped even closer to the wall. The artist had painted what looked like wooden frames around the paintings, too, and even though they had been done on concrete and the paint was faded and cracked, it was clear the artist had real talent. The first was a seascape—the rough coast beneath this very pillbox, the churning waves on the rocks, Porto Vergogna just a cluster of rooftops in the right-hand corner. The next two were official-looking portraits of two very different German soldiers. And finally there were two identical paintings of a single girl. Time and weather had faded the colors to dull versions of some earlier vibrancy, and a stream of water seeping into the bunker had damaged the seascape, while a large crack split one of the soldiers’ portraits and a fissure ran through the corner of the first painting of the girl. But otherwise the art was remarkably well-preserved.

  “Later, the sun, it come through these windows.” Pasquale pointed to the machine-gun slots in the pillbox wall. “Make these paint . . . it seem alive. The girl, she is molto bella, yes?”

  Dee stared, open-mouthed. “Oh, yes.” Her match went out and Pasquale lit another. He put a hand on Dee’s shoulder and pointed to the two paintings in the center, the portraits of the two soldiers. “The fishermen say two German soldiers live here in the war, for guard the sea, yes? One, he paint this wall.”

  She stepped in closer to look at the soldiers’ portraits—one a young, chinless boy with his head cocked proudly, looking off to the side, tunic buttoned to his chin; the other a few years older, shirt open, staring straight out from the wall—and even with the paint faded on the concrete, an unmistakable wistful look on his face. “This one was the painter,” she said quietly.

  Pasquale bent in close. “How do you know this?”

  “He just looks like an artist. And he’s staring at us. He must’ve looked in a mirror as he painted his own face.”

  Dee turned, took a few steps, and looked out the gun turret, to the sea below. Then she turned back to the paintings. “It’s amazing, Pasquale. Thank you.” She covered her mouth, as if about to cry, and then she turned to him. “Imagine being this artist, creating masterpieces up here . . . that no one will ever see. I think it’s kind of sad.”

  She returned to the painted wall. Pasquale
lit another match, handed it to her, and she made her way down the wall again . . . the roiling sea on the rocks, the two soldiers, and finally two paintings of the girl—sitting three-quarters sideways, painted from the waist up, two classic portraits. Dee paused over these last paintings. Pasquale had always assumed the two portraits of the girl were identical, but Dee said, “Look. This one wasn’t quite right. He corrected it. From a photograph, I’ll bet.” Pasquale stepped in beside her. Dee pointed. “In this one, her nose is a little too angled and her eyes dip.” Yes, Pasquale could see, she was right.

  “He must have loved her very much,” she said.

  She turned, and in the flickering match light Pasquale thought she might have tears in her eyes.

  “Do you think he made it home to see her?”

  They were close enough to kiss. “Yes,” Pasquale whispered. “He see her again.”

  Stooped over in the tight pillbox, Dee blew out the match, stepped forward, and hugged him. In the dark, she whispered, “God, I hope so.”

  At four in the morning, Pasquale was still thinking about the moment in the dark bunker. Should he have kissed her? He had kissed only one other woman in his life, Amedea, and technically she had kissed him first. He might have tried, if not for the humiliation he still felt about the tennis court. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that the balls would fly off the cliff? Maybe because in the pictures he’d seen there were no photos of the balls getting past the players. Still, he felt foolish. He had imagined tennis as something purely aesthetic; he hadn’t wanted a tennis court, he’d wanted a painting of a tennis court. Obviously, without a fence, the players themselves could run right off the court and fall over the cliff into the sea. Dee Moray was right. A high fence could be erected easily enough. And yet he knew that a high fence would ruin the vision he’d always had, of a flat court hovering over the sea, rising from the cliff-side boulders, a perfect cantilevered shelf covered with players in white clothes, women sipping drinks under parasols. If they were behind fences, you wouldn’t see them from the approaching boats. Chain fences would be better, but would cloud the players’ view of the sea and would be ugly, like a prison. Who wanted a brutto tennis court?