The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  One day when Amedeo was immersed in the business of fixing up the bar, scraping the spiderwebby filth from the ceiling, Carmela passed, pushing her new baby carriage.

  Amedeo hung motionless on his ladder. As he watched, the baby squalled. Carmela lifted it from the carriage to comfort it and Amedeo saw a little scrunched hand, a smear of black hair, a face pale and distorted with weeping.

  The child looked to him like a sallow, ill-favored thing. He thought with pride of his own Tullio, who sucked lustily and had already put on four pounds. Amedeo found it difficult to think of Carmela without cursing her. He was glad when she passed out of sight.

  He and Pina and Tullio were existing almost entirely on the charity of their neighbors. Amedeo—who had never sawn a plank or nailed a floorboard in his life until the purchase of the House at the Edge of Night—did everything alone. Sometimes when he ascended the ladder he felt a little weakness in his head, a mild dizziness. He gave the best of the food to Pina, so that she and the child should lack no strength. Once, as she served the soup, she had rested one hand on the back of his neck and his whole skin prickled with gratitude. It had never happened since, but it gave him his third reason to hope. Surely when the bar was finished she would begin to forgive him.

  With a few lire borrowed from his friends, he ordered supplies from the mainland—coffee, ingredients for the pastries and rice balls, a few boxes of cigarettes. As soon as the business began to make money, he would order more. He contracted the fisherman Pierino, as a favor to Pina, to bring parcels fortnightly on his boat, promising to pay him when the bar broke even. When the first supplies arrived, he was discouraged at how few and sparse they looked. He worked in the kitchen until three that night, making plates of the rice balls and tiny pastries. As a boy, his hands had been too clumsy for the watchmaker’s shop, but they had extracted bullets from the entrails of wounded soldiers, delivered premature babies no bigger than his palm; he made them work for him now.

  On a windblown day in March 1921, the House at the Edge of Night opened for business.

  A king’s daughter was to wed a rich sea captain, who had claimed her as his prize after rescuing her from a sea monster. But the real rescuer had been the cabin boy, whom the wicked captain had thrown overboard, and now the king’s daughter wept and wept. For she had promised to marry the cabin boy, and given him a ring, and now he was gone, drowned in the ocean.

  —

  “ON THE DAY OF the wedding, the mariners in port saw a man emerge from the water. He was covered from head to foot with seaweed, and out of his pockets and the holes in his clothes swam fish and shrimps. He climbed out of the water and went ambling through the city streets, with seaweed draping his head and body and dragging along behind him. At that very moment the wedding procession was moving through the street and came face-to-face with the man wreathed in seaweed. Everyone stopped. ‘Who is this?’ asked the king. ‘Seize him!’ The guards came up, but the man wreathed in seaweed raised a hand and the diamond on his finger sparkled in the sunlight.

  ‘My daughter’s ring!’ exclaimed the king.

  ‘Yes,’ said the daughter, ‘this man was my rescuer and will be my bridegroom.’

  The man from the sea told his story. And, green though he was with seaweed, he took his place beside the bride clad in white and was joined to her in matrimony.”

  —

  A LIGURIAN STORY, first told to me by the widow Gesuina, whose cousin once lived in the Cinque Terre. By virtue of her telling and retelling it, there are now many versions on the island, though the story is incomplete, and Signora Gesuina could remember neither the beginning nor the ending. This fragment I took, with Gesuina’s permission, from Signor Calvino’s book of folk stories published in 1956.

  I

  In the bar’s second month, Carmela had come to the door with her baby in her arms. Amedeo, glancing up from the counter, became aware of her with a shock like a sudden gust of wind. He had almost forgotten her appearance, yet there she stood, il conte’s beautiful wife, his former lover, the shape of her like water poured into a vase. The bar’s half-dozen customers turned in their seats and stared. “I’m here to speak to Signor Esposito,” said Carmela.

  Amedeo felt the eyes of the whole place on him. But Pina placed a hand on his shoulder, jogging the fat Tullio on the other hip. “Signora la contessa,” said Pina, “he—we—have nothing to say to you.”

  Carmela laughed—the same laugh, full of insult, bewitching, that had greeted him on his first night on the island. “Let him decide that, signora,” she said.

  But Pina stepped forward, bearing Tullio before her. Carmela reached for the sickly Andrea and heaved him in front of her, too, as though in protection, and Tullio, catching the other baby’s eye, smiled a great wet smile.

  “You are not to visit this bar again,” said Pina. “Not you, or your husband, or your son. Haven’t you made enough trouble on this island?”

  Carmela sought Amedeo’s eyes, but he turned away from her and studied the blue line of the ocean, painfully aware of the hot noise of the blood in his ears. Carmela left at last. As she crossed the piazza he allowed himself to look at her, and through the glass she seemed at once an ordinary-sized, unremarkable person, struggling with her heeled shoes on the cobbles, balancing the baby. Pina, hauling Tullio higher on her hip, said, “We won’t see any d’Isantu in this bar again, as God and Sant’Agata are my witnesses.”

  Nearly half a year after its opening, the bar began to break even—and that same summer, Pina at last invited Amedeo back to her bed in the stone room beside the courtyard. “Let’s talk no more about Carmela d’Isantu,” said Pina. Amedeo wholeheartedly agreed. He felt that from now on he would do anything Pina asked of him.

  By the end of that year, very few of the customers in the bar spoke about Carmela any longer within Amedeo’s hearing. Pina, a woman who always kept her word, had two more sons in quick succession, which she named after her uncles—Flavio and Aurelio. By the time the last was born, the affair with Carmela was no longer talked about on the island. “For this island has a heart again with the House at the Edge of Night open,” said Gesuina. “And that’s the truth of it.”

  Pina had produced her three boys with remarkable efficiency, all of them within the space of four years, and now she devoted herself to their upbringing. Years later, when Amedeo tried to remember that time, he found that the boys were all mixed together in his mind, a jumble of grasping fingers and warm, milk-smelling hair. He spent long hours at his post behind the counter, soothed by the clicking of glasses and dominoes, the scent of bougainvillea, the rattle of lire in the cash register. In those years, he began to believe that he lived now a better life than he ever had as a medico condotto. When he saw the young doctor, Vitale, trudge past the window with thinning hair and worn trouser knees, he tried to repress his satisfaction.

  Though Amedeo was banned from practicing medicine, still there were those who called on him for help, arriving shiftily by the courtyard door or leaning over the counter of the bar to make their whispered requests: “Signor il dottore, my Gisella is still suffering with her arthritis”; “Signor il dottore, that young Dottor Vitale hasn’t set my niece’s collarbone properly after she fell from that high ladder—I’m sure of it, it’s clicking in and out of place when she tries to wash the dishes—will you take a look?” And some of the islanders, like the Mazzu and Dacosta families, openly mistrusted the new doctor’s judgment and came to the bar to obtain Amedeo’s opinion on every cough and fever. These islanders still referred to Amedeo quite openly as signor il dottore, calling Dottor Vitale only il ragazzo nuovo, the new boy.

  This presented a dilemma. The man was qualified, Amedeo assumed, but he lacked a certain gravity, and he had almost no experience—he had never splinted a man’s broken femur in a waterlogged trench by candlelight, or delivered a baby on a straw-covered floor. And when in doubt—Signor Mazzu had told Amedeo this with the deepest disgust, leaning over the counter to hiss the ac
cusation as though reporting some scandal or infidelity—when in doubt, the young doctor pulled great books out of his attaché case and consulted them! Books! Dottor Esposito had never needed to carry a great book about with him!

  “Yes, but I consulted books,” said Amedeo. “And medical periodicals, and all kinds of written matter.”

  “But not in front of your patients! How is anybody to trust him? Books—there’s something indecent about it!”

  Eventually Amedeo resolved the matter by dispensing advice for free with coffee and pastries, over the counter of the bar, or—for more serious cases—within the cool dark of his study at the top of the house, packing away his medical instruments afterward in an old Campari liquor case to avoid suspicion. Since he was paid principally in vegetables and eggs and the occasional live chicken, he reasoned with himself that to continue to advise the islanders like this was not the same as practicing medicine. For the purposes of conscience he was now merely a bartender—and if he offered the occasional benefit of his advice, he was certainly not the first in the history of bartenders to do so.

  In those years, they began to live more comfortably. The house was still crumbling, but now he had the money to turn the current a little, to fix new hinges to the shutters and paint over the damp patch in the corner of the boys’ room that had previously kept him awake whenever they coughed or sighed. Pina’s relative Pierino, who worked as a fisherman when there were fish to be caught, and the rest of the time as whatever anyone in the town would hire him for, cleared the weeds from the veranda and repaved it with old tiles salvaged from the kitchens of the ruined houses outside the town walls. These tiles, red and deeply mottled, seemed to possess maps of the world beneath their surfaces. They pleased Amedeo, and he had Pierino install them in the washroom of the old house, too, which would eventually, he hoped, be converted into a modern bathroom with the hot and cold running water to which Pina aspired. Amedeo trained the bougainvillea and it bloomed profusely, so that each time the swinging door of the bar opened or closed, the rush of hot air that entered carried its perfume.

  When Tullio was four, Flavio a fat toddler, and Aurelio still an infant, Pina fell pregnant again.

  This child was different. Amedeo had not seen Pina suffer with any of her pregnancies the way she did during this one. For the first time she began to be flattened, oppressed by it. Her ankles swelled so that she hobbled; her hands were arthritic and stiff; she no longer ate properly, only in small mouthfuls from the plates of the boys. She fell accidentally asleep across the bed on hot afternoons, so that shrieks and roars would summon him at a run from the bar to some distant part of the house where the boys, left to their own devices, were making joyous war. Then he would have to prize apart Flavio and Tullio, or retrieve the bawling Aurelio from beneath the laundry basket where the others had stuffed him, or pick cicadas from their hair.

  Clearly this was not a state of affairs that could continue.

  “We must do something about the children,” he told Pina one night. “They can’t carry on this way.” But Pina was languid and dreamlike; in her sickness, she did not seem aware that the boys were beginning to run wild. Still beautiful, her face had an insubstantial quality now that made him afraid to look at her. Always, before, she had been as solid as a Greek statue.

  Eventually, Gesuina agreed to help Pina mind the babies, and Rizzu agreed to help Amedeo in the bar. “Not for the money,” said Gesuina. “Out of love. But the money I’ll accept, too.” She was almost completely blind now, but resourceful, and she found her way about. She could lull Aurelio to sleep in minutes, croaking island songs over his cradle. If the two elder boys fought, she would creep up behind them and floor them with an alarming roar of “Basta, ragazzi!” After Gesuina had done this four or five times, they stopped fighting altogether. Then, once she had the boys under control, Gesuina became kind, and plied them with sugared ricotta and fresh figs she peeled with her own hands.

  So between them, Gesuina and Pina kept the boys in some kind of order and Rizzu and Amedeo kept the bar open, and the pregnancy progressed into the autumn. Because Pina craved the dust from the ground and the twigs of the orioles’ nests that fell from the poplars into the courtyard, Gesuina predicted that this child would be a girl: “Odd cravings,” she reasoned, “always mean a female child.” The old woman had her own kind of logic that could not be argued with, and they began to refer to the child as “she.”

  Amedeo planned that his fourth child would be delivered in the hospital in Siracusa. His medical equipment was outdated and some had had to be thrown away due to rust; he had not opened a medical periodical since 1921. Plainly, he could not deliver a child. He had delivered two of his boys, but this was a responsibility he felt he could not bear for a third time.

  “When the baby is due, we’ll go in Pierino’s boat to the mainland,” he said, as he lay beside Pina early in November, brushing out her ropes of black hair, caressing her aching shoulders, while the first winter storm troubled the windows. “I’ll take you there and you can stay there until the baby is born.”

  It was all arranged: Rizzu had a cousin on the mainland at whose farmhouse Pina could stay, and the farmer’s wife would be paid twenty lire a day to act as Pina’s nurse. When the time came, the farmer and his wife would take her to the hospital in a neighbor’s motorcar.

  But when he explained this plan to her, Pina would not agree. “Is it Gesuina’s superstition?” said Amedeo. “It’s quite safe to have a baby in the hospital, you know. You mustn’t listen to what the old women say. Gesuina’s never been in a modern hospital in her life, and she’s frightened of the electric lights and the doctors in white coats and the smell of disinfectant—that’s all.”

  “It’s not that,” said Pina. “I don’t mind about the hospital. No, it’s just a sense I have.”

  He knew better than to laugh at these notions of Pina’s. Hadn’t she predicted the births of Aurelio and Flavio—two more boys, she had said, and then perhaps a girl? “I know that my baby will be born here on the island, like her brothers,” said Pina. “She’ll come at her own time, before we’re ready. I know that for certain.”

  Pina was right, as it turned out. The baby came suddenly, in a rush of water and blood, eight weeks too soon.

  —

  THE FIRST THING HE HEARD of it was Pina screaming, “Ai-ee, ai-ee!”

  They had installed a curtain between the bar and the kitchen during the chaotic early days of her pregnancy, so that he could listen for sounds of strife among the boys. Now Gesuina came hobbling through it. “Where are you, dottore?” she said.

  “Here,” he said. “Here.”

  “You’d better shut up the bar at once and go to poor Pina.”

  The customers began an excited clamor. But Gesuina banged a steel pan against the counter, tipped the domino players off their chairs, and ejected them into the rainy piazza, closing the blinds firmly against their curious eyes.

  In the kitchen, Pina was standing in a pool of water, gripping her stomach with both hands. “Amore?” he said, taking hold of her, but she shook him free. She began to roam the house. All he could do was follow her. Up and down the stairs, through the kitchen, into the bar and then out again, leaving a trail of blood wherever she went. This he followed, desperately questioning: “When did the pains start, amore? And for how long? And how severe? And are they the same as with Tullio, and Flavio, and Aurelio, or different this time? Tell me, amore. You’re frightening me—you’re frightening the boys.”

  Indeed, the toddler Flavio had hauled himself up by the kitchen doorframe, watching with big eyes. Somewhere in a back room, Aurelio shrieked for attention, utterly forgotten.

  “It’s too soon,” Pina wept. “She’s coming too soon. I have to stop the labor pains or she’ll die. She’s supposed to come in February and it’s barely December now.”

  But Amedeo could see quite plainly that there was no stopping this baby. “Lie down, amore,” he said. “Try to push. There’s nothi
ng to be done now but to deliver the child.”

  Gesuina nodded. “Breathe,” she exhorted. “Push. Breathe, cara. Push.”

  “No!” wailed Pina. “I won’t push! I mustn’t—I can’t!”

  “I’ll fetch the statue of Sant’Agata!” cried Gesuina, and went shuffling off into the hall.

  But before they could do anything more for her, Pina collapsed with a great heave under the domino table. Amedeo put out his hands and delivered the child.

  “She’s breathing!” he said. “Pina, she’s breathing.”

  “Look how small she is,” Pina wept. “How small. How weak. Amedeo, she won’t live and it will break my heart!”

  “She’ll live,” he said fiercely, as he rubbed the child dry. “She’ll live.”

  Still, something in him clenched in fear when he examined the baby properly. He saw how lightly veined her head was, how pink and translucent the barrel of her chest. He had delivered very few children this tiny, and nearly all of them had been stillborn. In the hospital in Siracusa, he admonished himself, they would have known what to do. It was no good now—how could this child make the sea crossing, in winter, in Pierino’s fishing boat? She would live or die here on the island; that was certain.

  “What about a name?” he said, as he opened his shirt and pressed the trembling child against his chest, the only warmth he could think of to offer her in that moment of confusion.

  “I can’t name her,” wept Pina. “I can’t look at her. Not yet; not if she isn’t going to live.”

  —

  NOTHING HAD PREPARED HIM for this fourth child. The baby was too weak to suck at Pina’s breast. She had to be fed instead from Aurelio’s silver christening spoon in tiny droplets. Pina could not stop crying, as though all the strength in her had broken. He closed the bar and took charge of the child himself, for now he found his world had narrowed, until the only thing in it was his daughter. He carried the baby about in the crook of his arm and at nights sat awake beside her cradle, under which he placed an old warming pan full of almost-extinguished coals—for the child had been born into the rain-blown island winter, and every draft seemed designed to kill her. The baby barely cried. Her head was still veined and her ears bruised from the shock of her delivery. On these nights when neither of them slept, he told the baby every story he knew.