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?