Oh, she was striking, certainly, but not in the way he’d expected. First, she was as tall as Pasquale, nearly six feet. And from where he stood, weren’t her features a bit too much for such a narrow face—plunging jawline so pronounced, mouth so full, eyes so round and open that she seemed startled? And could a woman be too thin, so that her curves seemed sudden, alarming? Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her skin was lightly tanned, drawn tight over features that were somehow at once too sharp and too soft—nose too delicate for such a chin, for such high cheeks, for those big dark eyes. No, he thought, while she was striking, this was no great beauty.
But then she turned directly to him, and the disparate features of her drastic face came together as a single, perfect thing, and Pasquale recalled from his studies how some buildings in Florence could disappoint from various angles and yet always presented well in relief, always photographed well; that the various vantages were made to be composed; and so, too, he thought, some people. Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life—not so much with the woman, whom he didn’t even know, but with the moment.
He dropped the rock he was holding.
She glanced away—right, then left, then right again—as if looking for the rest of the village. Pasquale flushed over what she must be seeing: a dozen or so drab stone houses, some of them abandoned, clinging like barnacles to the cliff seam. Feral cats poked around the small piazza, but otherwise all was quiet, the fishermen out in their boats for the day. Pasquale sensed such disappointment when people hiked in accidentally or arrived by boat through a mistake in cartography or language, people who believed they were being taken to the charming tourist towns of Portovenere or Portofino only to find themselves in the brutto fishing village of Porto Vergogna.
“I’m sorry,” the beautiful American said in English, turning back to Orenzio. “Should I help with the bags? Or is it part of . . . I mean . . . I don’t know what has been paid for and what hasn’t.”
Done with devilish English after that “beach” business, Orenzio merely shrugged. Short, jug-eared, and dull-eyed, he carried himself in a manner that often suggested brain damage to tourists, who were so impressed by this slack-eyed simpleton’s ability to operate a motorboat that they tipped him lavishly. Orenzio, in turn, surmised that the duller he behaved, and the less English he mastered, the more he would be paid. So he stared and blinked stupidly.
“Should I get my own luggage, then?” the woman asked again, patiently, a little helplessly.
“Bagagli, Orenzio,” Pasquale called to his friend, and then it dawned on Pasquale: this woman was checking into his hotel! Pasquale started wading over to the pier, licking his lips in preparation for speaking unpracticed English. “Please,” he said to the woman, his tongue like a hunk of gristle in his mouth, “I have honor and Orenzio for carry you bag. Go upon Ad-e-quate View Hotel.” The comment appeared to confuse the American, but Pasquale didn’t notice. He wanted to end with a flourish and tried to think of the proper word to call her （Madam?） but he longed for something better. He had never really mastered English, but he’d studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutality of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog. His earliest education in the language had come from the only American to ever stay in the hotel, a writer who came to Italy each spring to chip away at his life’s work—an epic novel about his experiences in World War II. Pasquale tried to imagine what the tall, dashing writer might say to this woman, but he couldn’t think of the right words and he wondered if there was an English equivalent for the Italian staple bella: beautiful. He took a stab: “Please. Come. Beautiful America.”
She stared at him for just a moment—the longest moment of his life to that point—then smiled and looked down demurely. “Thank you. Is this your hotel?”
Pasquale finished sloshing through the water and arrived at the pier. He pulled himself up, shaking the water from his pant legs, and tried to present himself, every bit the dashing hotelier. “Yes. Is my hotel.” Pasquale pointed to the small, hand-lettered sign on the left side of the piazza. “Please.”
“And . . . you have a room reserved for us?”
“Oh yes. Many is room. All is room for you. Yes.”
She looked at the sign, and then at Pasquale again. The warm gust was back and it roused the escaped hairs from her ponytail into streamers around her face. She smiled at the puddle dripping off his thin frame, then looked up into his sea-blue eyes and said, “You have lovely eyes.” Then she replaced the hat on her head and started making her way toward the small piazza and the center of what little town lay before her.