He had a fifty-fifty chance of getting this one right. “Yes?”
She seemed disappointed at his answer. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Something like that always catches up with you. It’s the thing I hate most about myself. My vanity. Maybe that’s why . . .” She didn’t finish the thought. Instead, she took a last drag of her cigarette, dropped the butt to the wooden patio, and ground it with her deck shoe. “You’re very easy to talk to, Pasquale,” she said.
“Yes, I have pleasure talk to you,” he said.
“Me, too. I have pleasure, too.” She eased up off of the railing, wrapped her arms around her shoulders, and looked out at the fishing lights again. With her arms around herself, she grew even taller and thinner. She seemed to be contemplating something. And then she said, quietly, “Did they tell you that I’m sick?”
“Yes. My friend Orenzio, he tell me this.”
“Did he tell you what’s wrong with me?”
“No.”
She touched her belly. “You know the word cancer?”
“Yes.” Unfortunately, he did know this word. Cancro in Italian. He stared at his burning cigarette. “Is fine, no? The doctors. They can . . .”
“I don’t think so,” she answered. “It’s a very bad kind. They say they can, but I think they’re trying to soften the blow for me. I wanted to tell you to explain that I might seem . . . frank. Do you know this word, frank?”
“Sinatra?” Pasquale asked, wondering if this was the man she was waiting for.
She laughed. “No. Well, yes, but it also means . . . direct, honest.”
Honest Sinatra.
“When I found out how bad it was . . . I decided that from now on I was just going to say what I think, that I would stop worrying about being polite or imagining what people thought of me. That’s a big deal for an actress, refusing to live in the eyes of others. It’s nearly impossible. But it’s important that I don’t waste any more time saying what I don’t mean. I hope that’s okay with you.”
“Yes,” Pasquale said, quietly, relieved to see from her reaction that it was the right answer again.
“Good. Then we’ll make a deal, you and me. We’ll do and say exactly what we mean. And to hell with what anyone thinks about it. If we want to smoke, we’ll smoke, if we want to swear, we’ll swear. How does that sound?”
“I like very much,” Pasquale said.
“Good.” Then she leaned down and kissed him on the cheek, and when her lips grazed his stubbly cheek he felt his breath come short and sharp and he found that he was shaking exactly as when Gualfredo had threatened him.
“Good night, Pasquale,” she said. She grabbed the lost pages of Alvis Bender’s novel and started back for the door, but paused to consider the sign: THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW. “How ever did you come up with the name of the hotel?”
Still stricken by that kiss, unsure how to explain the name, Pasquale simply pointed to the manuscript in her hand. “Him.”
She nodded and looked around again at the tiny village, at the rocks and cliffs around them. “Can I ask, Pasquale . . . what it’s like, living here?”
And this time he had no hesitation in coming up with the proper English word. “Lonely,” Pasquale said.
Pasquale’s father, Carlo, came from a long line of restaurateurs in Florence, and he had always assumed that his sons would follow him in the business. But his oldest, the dashing, jet-haired Roberto, dreamed of being a flier, and in the run-up to World War II he had dashed off to join the regia aeronautica. Roberto did indeed get to fly—three times before his rickety Saetta fighter stalled over North Africa and he fell from the sky like a shot bird. Vowing revenge, the Tursis’ other son, Guido, volunteered for the infantry, sending Carlo into a despairing rage: “If you truly want vengeance, forget the British and go kill the mechanic who let your brother fly that rusty bucket of shit.” But Guido was insistent, and he trucked off with the rest of the Eighth Army’s elite expeditionary force, sent by Mussolini as proof that Italy would do its part to help the Nazis invade Russia. （Bunnies off to eat a black bear, Carlo said.）
It was while comforting his wife over Roberto’s death that the forty-one-year-old Carlo had somehow mustered one last, good seed and passed it on to the thirty-nine-year-old Antonia. At first she disbelieved her condition, then assumed it was temporary （she’d been plagued by miscarriages after her first two）。 Then, as her belly ballooned, Antonia saw her wartime pregnancy as a sure sign from God that Guido would survive. She named her blue-eyed bambino miracolo Pasquale, Italian for Passover, to honor this deal with God—that the plague of violence sweeping the world would pass over the rest of her family.