She listened patiently and then asked if he wanted to have sex.
He told her that he had gone to Licciana to look for her, and he thought he saw something in her eyes when he said the name of the village—shame, perhaps—because he had been so humbled by what she did for him that night: not the part with her hand, but the way she’d comforted him afterward, held his crying face against her beautiful chest. That was, he said, the most humane thing anyone had ever done for him.
“I’m so sorry,” Alvis said, “that you became this.”
“This?” She startled Alvis by laughing. “I’ve always been this.” She waved at the room around her and said, in a flat Italian, “Friend, I don’t know you. And I don’t know this village you speak of. I’ve always lived in Genoa. I get boys like you sometimes, American boys who were in the war and had their first sex with a girl who looked like me. It’s fine.” She looked patient, but not particularly interested in his story. “But what were you going to do, rescue this Maria? Take her back to America?”
Alvis could think of nothing to say. No, of course he wasn’t going to take her back to America. So what was he going to do? Why was he here?
“You made me happy, choosing me over the younger girls,” the prostitute said, and she reached out for his belt. “But please. Stop calling me Maria.”
As her hands expertly undid his belt, Alvis stared at the woman’s face. It had to be her, didn’t it? And now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure. She did seem older than Maria should. And the thickening he’d attributed to age—could this actually be someone else? Was he confessing to some random whore?
He watched her thick hands unbutton his pants. He felt paralyzed, but he managed to pull himself away. He buttoned his pants and cinched his belt again.
“Would you rather have one of the other girls?” the prostitute asked. “I’ll go get her, but you still have to pay me.”
Alvis took out his wallet, his hands shaking; he pulled out fifty times the price she’d quoted him. He placed the money on the bed. And then he spoke quietly. “I’m sorry I didn’t just walk you home that night.”
She just stared at the money. Then Alvis Bender walked out, feeling as if the last of his life had seeped out in that room. In the front room, the other whores were reading their magazines. They didn’t even look up. Downstairs, he edged past the skinny, grinning bartender, and by the time he burst outside into the sun Alvis felt crazy with thirst. He hurried across the street, toward another bar, thinking, These bars, thank God, they go on forever. It was a relief, that he would never exhaust all the bars in the world. He could come to Italy once a year to work on this book, and even if it took him the rest of his life to finish it and drink himself to death, that was okay. He knew now what his book would be: an artifact, incomplete and misshapen, a shard of some larger meaning. And if his time with Maria was ultimately pointless—a random encounter, a fleeting moment, perhaps even the wrong whore—then so be it.
In the street, a truck veered around him and he was jolted out of his thoughts long enough to look back over his shoulder, up at the brothel he had just left. There, in the second-story window, stood Maria—at least that’s what he would tell himself—leaning against the glass, watching him, her robe open a little, her fingers stroking the place between her breasts where he had once pressed his face and sobbed. She stared at him a second longer, and then she backed away from the window and was gone.
After that burst of prolific writing, Alvis Bender never made much more progress on his novel when he came to Italy. Instead, he’d cat around Rome or Milan or Venice for a week or two, drinking and chasing women, then come and spend a few days in the quiet of Porto Vergogna. He’d rework that first chapter, rewrite it, reorder things, take a word or two out, put a new sentence in—but nothing came of his book. And yet it always restored him in some way, reading and gently reworking his one good chapter, and seeing his old friend Carlo Tursi, his wife, Antonia, and their sea-eyed son, Pasquale. But now—to find both Carlo and Antonia dead like this, to find Pasquale a full-grown man . . . Alvis wasn’t sure what to think. He had heard of couples dying in short order like this, the grief just too much for the survivor to bear. But it was hard to get his mind around: a year earlier, Carlo and Antonia had both seemed healthy. And now they were gone?
“When did this happen?” he asked Pasquale.
“My father died last spring, my mother three nights ago,” Pasquale said. “Her funeral mass is tomorrow.”