Alvis explained that he’d known her sister in the war. “Anna?” the girl asked.
“No, Maria,” Alvis said.
“Oh,” she said, somewhat darkly. After a moment, she invited him into the well-kept living room. “Maria is married to a doctor, living in Genoa.”
Alvis asked if she might have an address for Maria.
Nina’s face hardened. “She doesn’t need another old boyfriend from the war coming back. She is finally happy. Why do you want to make trouble?”
Alvis insisted he didn’t want to make any trouble.
“Maria had a hard time in the war. Leave her be. Please.” And then one of Nina’s children called for her and she went to the kitchen to check on him.
There was a telephone in the living room, and like a lot of people who had only recently gotten a telephone, Maria’s sister kept it in a prominent place, on a table covered with figures of saints. Beneath the phone was an address book.
Alvis reached over, opened the book to the M section, and there it was: the name Maria. No last name. No phone number. Just a street number in Genoa. Alvis memorized the address and closed the book, thanked Nina for her time, and left.
That afternoon, he took a train to Genoa.
The address turned out to be near the harbor. Alvis worried that he’d gotten it wrong; this did not appear to be the neighborhood of a doctor and his wife.
The buildings were brick and stone, built one on top of the other, their heights like a musical scale descending gradually to the harbor. The ground floors were filled with cheap cafés and taverns that catered to fishermen, while above were flop apartments and simple hotels. Maria’s street number led to a tavern, a rotted-wood rat-hole of a place with warped tables and a ragged old rug. A rail-thin, smiling barman sat behind the counter, serving fishermen in droopy caps bent over chipped glasses of amber.
Alvis apologized, said he must have the wrong place. “I’m looking for a woman—” he began.
The skinny bartender didn’t wait for a name. He just pointed to the stairs behind the bar and held out his hand.
“Ah.” Knowing exactly where he was now, Alvis paid the man. As he climbed the stairs, he prayed there was some mistake, that he wouldn’t find her here. At the top was a hallway that opened into a foyer with a couch and two chairs. Sitting on the couch, talking in low voices, were three women in nightgowns. Two of the three were young—girls, really, in short nighties, reading magazines. Neither of them looked familiar.
In the other chair, a faded silk robe over her nightgown, smoking the last of a cigarette, sat Maria.
“Hello,” Alvis said.
Maria didn’t even look up.
One of the younger girls said, in English, “America, yes? You like me, America?”
Alvis ignored the younger girl. “Maria,” he said quietly.
She didn’t look up.
“Maria?”
Finally, she glanced up. She seemed twenty years older, not ten. A thickening had occurred in her arms and there were lines around her mouth and eyes.
“Who’s Maria?” she asked in English.
One of the other girls laughed. “Stop teasing him. Or give him to me.”
With no trace of recognition in her voice, Maria gave Alvis the prices, in English, for various amounts of time. Above her was an awful painting of an iris. Alvis fought the urge to turn it upside down. He bought a half hour.
No stranger to this kind of place, he paid Maria half the agreed-upon price, which she folded and took downstairs to the man behind the bar. Then Alvis followed her down the hall to a small room. Inside, there was nothing but a made bed, a nightstand, a coat rack, and a scratched, foggy mirror. A window looked out on the harbor and the street below. She sat down on the bed, its springs creaking, and began to undress.
“You don’t remember me?” Alvis asked in Italian.
She stopped undressing and sat on the bed, unmoved, no recognition in her eyes.
Alvis began slowly, telling her in Italian how he’d been stationed in Italy during the war, how he’d met her on a deserted road and walked her home one night, how on the day he met her he’d reached a point where he didn’t care if he lived or died, but that after meeting her he had cared again. He said that she’d encouraged him to write a book after the war, to take it seriously, but that he’d gone home to America （“Ricorda—Wisconsin?”） and drank away the last decade. His best friend, he said, had died in the war, leaving behind a wife and a son. Alvis had no one, and he’d come home and wasted all of those years.