Beautiful Ruins

by Jess Walter

The rest of the name, Vergogna, meant shame, and was a remnant from the founding of the village in the seventeenth century as a place for sailors and fishers to find women of . . . a certain moral and commercial flexibility.

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.

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

They met in Tucson, where she worked at Cup of Heaven, the coffee shop where Shane went to write every morning. He fell for, in order: her legs, her laugh, and the way she idealized writers and was willing to support his work. For her part—she said at the end—she fell mostly for his bullshit.

Pasquale cleared his throat. “I am sorry for you disturb. You eat antipasti and a soap, yes?” “Soap?” Pasquale felt angry that he hadn’t talked his aunt out of making the ciuppin. “Yes. Is a soap. With fish and vino. A fish soap?”

“This coast is a wellspring for writers,” Alvis said. “Petrarch invented the sonnet near here. Byron, James, Lawrence—they all came here to write. Boccaccio invented realism here. Shelley drowned near here, a few kilometers from where his wife invented the horror novel.”

“Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use ‘beautiful’ to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now—clear and precise. Humble like dreams.”

Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn’t the same thing as living. There you go.

the words of the prophet Mamet, Act as if . . . Go with it. Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.

he was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents—by their mothers especially—raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.

Men like you never had to fight, so you have no fight in you, she said. Men like you grow up flaccid and weak, she said. Men like you are milk-fed veal.

What could he say that he hadn’t said, what higher ground could he possibly scramble to? This time, if I promise to never get high-drunk-cheat-steal, can I please come home? He’d probably said that, too, or would, in a week, or a month, or whenever this thing came back, and it would come back—the need to matter, to be big, to get higher. To get high. And why shouldn’t it come back? What else was there? Failures and unknowns. Then Pat laughed. He laughed because he saw this phone call was just another shit show in a long line of them, like the rest of his shit show life, like the shit show intervention of Lydia and his mom, which he’d hated so much because they didn’t really mean it; they didn’t understand that the whole fucking thing was meaningless unless you were truly prepared to cut the person loose.

To my father I was The Traitor. To his name and his plans for me: Study abroad. Law school. Practice at HIS firm. Follow HIS footsteps. HIS life. Instead I lived mine.

There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant—sail for Asia and stumble on America—and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

Émile Zola: I am here to live out loud.

“Sometimes,” she said, “what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”

In that moment, Pasquale Tursi finally felt wrenched in two. His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.

He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.

“Perché ci hai messo così tanto tempo?” What took you so long?

“Mi dispiace. Avevo qualcosa di importante da fare.” I’m sorry. There was something important I had to do.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. —Milan Kundera

I was living in dreams when I met you. And when I met the man you loved, I saw my own weakness in him. Such irony, how could I be a man worthy of your love when I had walked away from my own child? That is why I went back. And it was the best thing I ever did.