“Pina’s a clever woman,” said the priest, watching her go. “I baptized her, taught her her catechism. Too educated for this island, and for her husband—damned pity—but I can’t persuade il professore to give up his job and let her take it. She’d do much better than he does, for the man’s a terrible bore.”
The old man Rizzu, who had reappeared for Pina’s story, crowed again in delight. “Father Ignazio loves scandal,” he said. “He’s almost always causing it. He’s the most unconventional priest we’ve had.”
The priest seemed gratified at this, and swallowed his glass of arancello at one gulp.
A disturbance began to send its waves through the crowd at this moment—a kind of collective thrill. “Il conte,” said Rizzu. “Here he is at last.”
“Ah,” said Father Ignazio. “Another man for whom I have very little patience. Excuse me, dottore—I must make my escape.”
Il conte, an ample man in a velvet jacket, came in sight beneath the statue of the saint. Amedeo was disconcerted at the way he worked the crowd, drawing attention and favor. Some of the islanders bowed and shook his hand; others brought forward gifts—a plate of aubergines, a bottle of wine, a live chicken in a wooden cage—which the count accepted before depositing them in the hands of his retinue. The scene did not seem to startle anyone else—though Amedeo noted that not everybody approached the count, or extended their hands in greeting.
The count, at last, came to rest before them. The priest had fled; Rizzu bobbed and bowed at one side of the table. Amedeo, gathering that it was expected, got to his feet, too.
The count said, “You, I understand, are the new doctor. I am Andrea d’Isantu, conte.”
Amedeo made a hasty introduction of himself. “Piacere,” said the count, without pleasure. “This is my wife, Carmela.”
A young woman with a bored aspect came out of the crowd. Her black hair was curled; she wore a hat with an upright feather of the style fashionable in Paris and London, at odds with the decades-old Sunday best of the other islanders. “Carmela,” said the count, waving a hand in the woman’s direction. “Bring coffee and spirits. Bring wine. Something small to eat, a pastry or an arancino.”
Having spoken these words, the count drew out a chair, deposited himself in it, and fell into a calculated, brooding silence. “So,” he said at last. “When did you arrive? Who met you at the quay?”
“About nine o’clock,” said Amedeo. “And no one met me—I made my own way. But I’ve been introduced to Signor Arcangelo, and one or two of the town council—Professor Vella and Father Ignazio.”
“You’re a city man, aren’t you? A northern man? And what are you doing on this rock at the edge of the civilized world? Fleeing something, I suppose.” The count gave a great bark of laughter.
Amedeo did not know how to answer this, except to say that he had been seeking a post as a medico condotto the whole length of the country, and had found one here.
“Well, I hope you’ll make a living. Where do they come from, your family? Esposito—that’s an odd sort of name.”
“I have no family, except a foster father,” said the doctor. He spoke clearly, for the fact did not usually shame him, though under the count’s interrogation and the continuing heat of the piazza he had begun to sweat a little. He ran a finger around the stiff collar of his shirt.
“A man with no family?” said the count. “A man out of nowhere—an orphan?”
“I was brought up in the care of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Firenze, a foundling hospital. One of the best,” pride compelled him to add.
“Ah—I thought so by the name. Esposito. Abandoned.”
Carmela reappeared, Rizzu and his brother in her wake, bearing trays with gold-rimmed cups, a saucer with a fantail of pastries and an unopened bottle of arancello. “The very best,” Rizzu murmured, hovering about the count’s chair.
“Carmela, pour the liquor.” Again, the count did not look at his wife. She merely nodded, served the spirits to her husband, then seated herself at a little distance, with respectfully folded hands.
“We’ve ice cream and proper liquors at the villa, shipped in from Palermo.” The count gave a mock sigh. “You’ll find us a primitive people otherwise, I’m afraid, dottore. No proper electric light, no libraries. The sea air rots the books. An illiterate people, too—there’s only myself who can read, and the priest, and the schoolmaster, and the grocer Arcangelo in his way. And Carmela, I suppose, though one never thinks of her as literate, somehow, with her fashion periodicals and French novels. Ha! I hope that foundling hospital brought you up with simple tastes, for this island would be a trial to any civilized man.”
“The main mark of a civilized society,” said Amedeo, who had only just formed the opinion, “I believe, is the employment of a doctor.”
At this the beautiful Carmela—to Amedeo’s consternation—let out a great shout of laughter. The count stirred his coffee and ripped apart a pastry. He attacked it with great bites, swallowed, wiped the crumbs from his mouth. “The employment of a doctor has never been prudent on this island,” he said. “The new mayor and the council have got that all wrong. It’s an expense we can’t afford. I certainly hope you’ll make a living here, but times are difficult and you may not last the year, I’m sorry to say.”
A silence descended on the table. Amedeo met the eyes of Carmela, and was discomposed. She leaned forward a little. “You must join us at the villa for dinner,” she said, her face lit with suppressed mischief. “You and my husband will find a good deal to say to each other.”
“That’s certainly kind of you, but I’ll have very little time to spare once I take up my duties.”
“Well, well—in that case, perhaps you’ll survive,” said the count. “At least you’ve brought no wife with you, or children—and with only yourself to maintain, and no time for social diversions, perhaps you’ll do well enough, in a scraping, bachelor sort of way. It’d be no life for me, but perhaps you can manage it. How convenient to be a foundling, a man without wife or children, a man utterly unencumbered in the world!” Here he glanced at Carmela, who was still much amused.
“What about you, signor il conte?” said Amedeo. “Do you and la contessa have very many children?” For some instinct told him they were childless, and he hoped, unkindly, to needle.
The count, though, merely shook his head. “My wife is barren.” Carmela bowed her head, and Amedeo could see the color spread across her neck at being publicly shamed in this way. By one stroke, the count had defeated her and silenced the doctor, and he began now to take his leave. He seized a final pastry, upended the last of his coffee into his mouth, and held out his hand again to Amedeo. “I hope you’ll make a living here,” he said.
“I certainly intend to,” said Amedeo.
As il conte receded into the crush of islanders, Amedeo heard a melancholy sniff and, turning, found Father Ignazio at his shoulder. “There,” he said. “You’ve survived your first encounter with il conte. From now on, everything is an improvement.”
“I feel a little sorry for Carmela,” said Amedeo.
“Yes,” said Father Ignazio. “We all feel a little sorry for her.”
—
DAWN CAME EARLIER THAN EXPECTED, with a gray brightening, and still the festival continued. Amedeo, too drunk to trust his feet and wishing very much to go to bed, sat between the priest and Rizzu while the whirling music grew ever more frenzied, the dancing ever more disordered. The card players were immersed in a round of scopa that seemed to have gone on for hours. Each time a winning player swept his cards from the table, the yells grew more raucous, the insults more good-naturedly extravagant. At the last round, Rizzu’s tiny brother had leapt from his seat in triumph, holding his cards aloft, overturning a jug of limoncello. Meanwhile, among the dancers, a young man in the waistcoat and black jacket of a peasant was making a series of perilous leaps around the circle. Then all at once the dancers broke apart, the cards were gathered, and there was a great commo
tion in the square. “Damn—it’s time for the flowers already!” said Father Ignazio, and rose from his chair. “As always I forget!” Weaving with surprising agility in and out of the crowd, he stopped before the statue of the saint. A group of young men hoisted it into the air. On all sides, shutters were banging open.
“What are they doing?” said Amedeo—but Rizzu, too, was gone. Amedeo found himself alone on the terrace of the bar.
The priest intoned a prayer. Then all at once a great unfurling took place, like some natural phenomenon, a wondrous rain of petals. From every upper window, women hurled basketfuls of oleander and bougainvillea, plumbago and trumpet honeysuckle, until the air was full of flowers. Children screamed and cavorted; the organetti and guitars took up a hymn; the saint’s statue was borne swaying above the crowd; and in the confusion the flowers continued to whirl, thickening the air.
Out of nowhere, a thought came to him of the fine photograph it would make. He searched his suitcase and assembled the folding camera. He set it on the table and made his first picture, a grainy, underexposed shot of the bar, the piazza, the rain of flowers.
He developed the image weeks later, in the makeshift darkroom he established in the back of his closet at the schoolmaster’s house (a useful hiding place, too, from the lectures of il professore). The flowers were just white streaks against gray, but nevertheless the clarity of the image startled him, a beautiful thing. It was the first photograph he had ever taken. Among the faces of the crowd he could make out the strangers of that night who were to become the daily figures of his life: Rizzu and his brother arm in arm before the bar, its lights blazing like caught stars; Father Ignazio beneath the statue; the dark shadow of il conte; Pina Vella at an upstairs window; and—aloof at the edge of the crowd—the beautiful Carmela.
Later, he would come to see this photograph as portentous, for within it, like the stories hidden in Rita Fiducci’s pack of cards, were concealed the signs of his whole life to come.
—
BEYOND THE ISLAND’S SHORES, the world that year of 1914 was undergoing a long, slow heave toward war. Amedeo didn’t realize it at first. The news of the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo, which happened a few hours after that miraculous rain of flowers, took thirteen days to reach Castellamare—and meanwhile the island was so bright and alive that it seemed to him now the only real world. Yet it could not be denied that Amedeo was a foreigner here. As out of place as the giant in one of his tales, he was so tall that he was concussed several times merely going in and out of his patients’ houses. The beds on the island were too short for a man his size; they had been made for the peasants of the nineteenth century, and he was obliged to push two of them together and sleep sideways until a special one could be built. (Years later, a special coffin would also have to be made to accommodate his height of almost seven feet—for he would remain, to the last, the very tallest man on Castellamare.) So he did not immediately fit, but still he felt himself, in some obscure, important way, to belong. For instance, when he woke at noon the day after the festival of Sant’Agata, he found that someone had carried his forgotten trunk of medical instruments up the hill and deposited it outside his door. Father Ignazio, from the first morning, sought him out to discuss the news from the continent—“You’re a thinking man, Esposito, you’ll have opinions.” The elderly Rizzu brothers waylaid him on his morning rounds and plied him with coffee and rice balls. Within a month, his opinion was sought by the widows of the Committee of Sant’Agata (though he was not a religious man, and had scandalized them the first Sunday by not attending Mass) about the particular colors of thread to be ordered for a new banner dedicated to the saint. After he successfully extracted a sea urchin’s spines from the foot of the fisherman Pierino, the Fishermen’s Guild invited him to the tonnara for the ceremonial presentation of a tuna.
And there were a thousand petty town battles on which one must take sides (for already he had been persuaded onto the town council in an advisory capacity); there were several cases of typhus; eight babies due or imminent. When Italy entered the war, he was on his way to inspect the swamp to see whether it could be drained in order to reduce the risk of malaria, and somehow the swamp and the malaria seemed of more import than the declaration of war, this war here on Castellamare against pestilence and stagnant water a thing more worth fighting. The island seemed a separate country to him, not a part of the Italy in which he had passed his solitary youth.
On Sunday afternoons Father Ignazio taught him to swim, plunging ahead of him into the waves in a black woolen bathing suit. On the terrace of il professore’s house each evening, once the schoolmaster had fallen drunkenly asleep, Pina Vella told him every story belonging to the island.
“A small place like this is an oppression,” warned Father Ignazio. “You don’t feel it yet, but you’ll come to feel it. Everyone who visits without having been born here thinks it delightfully rustic. I thought so, too, myself. But anyone born on Castellamare will fight by any means possible to get off the island, and one day you’ll be the same. It hit me about the tenth year.”
But Amedeo, who had always felt himself to be weightless, at risk of floating off from the earth altogether, now welcomed the solid heft of the place, the narrowness of its borders. He was amused at the way his patients knew all his business an hour before he did; he was unperturbed when the widows watched him from the wooden chairs outside their houses with narrowed, appraising eyes; he found comfort in the fact that it was possible, from the window of any of his patients’ houses, to look upon the same blue line of the sea. The island was five miles long, and in his daily rounds he walked all over the face of it. He discovered the hollows where wild goats slept at noon, and disturbed the nests of lizards in the ruined houses outside town, so that they ran like water up the walls. Sitting outside old Rizzu’s bar, he made a map of the island on a scrap of blotting paper, the old man nodding approvingly, pointing out flaws.
At the beginning of the spring, he sent a letter to his foster father with an invitation to drink limoncello with him at the House at the Edge of Night—for there really was a terrace with bougainvillea, he wrote eagerly, exactly as the elderly doctor had foretold.
But when summer came again, he did not sit with his foster father under the cool vines. Instead, a telegram ordered him away to the north.
IV
He was sent to the trenches at Trentino.
Shorn away from the island, two things became vital to him: the photograph of Sant’Agata’s Day and his book of stories. Some of his fellow medical officers had brought their folding cameras with them, against regulations. He had left his own on the island, knowing there would be nothing he wanted to record. All he wanted was the existing picture, with which he would navigate his way home. He pinned it to the inside of his cap, to protect it from the mud. Always it was mud, and when it wasn’t mud, ice, and when it wasn’t ice, water, and when it wasn’t water, gas and fog. It seemed a world composed of elements, where men were divided into their component pieces, men frothed, men screamed. At the surgical school of Santa Maria Nuova, he had received no training in how to put men back together.
In the inside pocket of his battledress, he kept his book of stories. The gold fleur-de-lis on the cover wore away; the leather became dull. But stories, he found, like the photograph, bore witness to the truth that there was another world than this. Chiefly, his duty was to remind his patients of this fact when nothing else could be done. To a shell-shocked captain in a mud-splattered field hospital, or a gassed infantry officer recovering his sight, he could merely ask about the man’s home, his infancy, his family, and a spark would burn behind the eyes of his patient, a change would come upon him: Hesitantly, words would emerge, the patient’s particular story unfurling by degrees, filling the space between them, a shared light against the dark.
He did not record these stories. He did not want to remember them. But sometimes no words came from the patient’s mouth, and then he would tell his own stories
instead, fanciful stories from his book of tales, stories that had evolved over centuries in the mouths of the poor, calculated to take one far from the gray world: the story of the girl who became a tree, became a bird; the story of the two brothers who met and did not know each other; the story of the tale-telling parrot. Across the whole region, he became known as “the story-collecting doctor of the field hospital in Treviso.”
Occasionally, he told his patients about the island. Always the tale that burned in his own mind was the account he told himself of surviving this war and getting back to Castellamare. By the time it was over, Castellamare had become the only place he still believed in. Everything else had fallen behind the gray veil the war had interposed.
—
HE HAD A GREAT wish to see his foster father. As the war progressed and regressed, subjects had emerged that could no longer be spoken of between them, great gulfs in their experience that threatened to make them enemies. “Perhaps because you are a foundling,” the elderly doctor had written, “you lack the natural patriotic feeling of your comrades, and this war is more difficult for you to bear.”
“Perhaps because I am a foundling,” wrote Amedeo, “I see its falsities more clearly.”
He had received no letters from the elderly doctor for more than a year. Now, on the preprinted army postcards he wrote simply, “Love, Amedeo.” The war ended, and still he was detained. There were troops with influenza, villagers with influenza. More variations of that same dying he had witnessed in the trenches: dying of the young and the healthy as well as the old and the weak, with swollen surprised faces and white-filmed eyes. It was 1919 by the time he got free, and he was forty-four years old. Riding the crowded train south to Florence, through villages empty and shuttered, he was seized with a feeling of waste so profound he could taste it, like a rot in his mouth. Still, he would see his foster father, he would return to Castellamare, and life would begin again in some form or another.
The House at the Edge of Night Page 4