The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  A while after this, the mainland newspaper La Stampa, which came to them all the way from Torino, had been full of the murder of a socialist deputy, a Signor Matteotti, and then for a time they couldn’t get hold of that particular newspaper. When it came back into circulation it had nothing more to say about Matteotti after all. Amedeo hadn’t much minded about it at first, because the only newspaper his customers cared about was La Gazzetta dello Sport.

  He remembered these things happening, of course. He remembered that for a while, those who had voted for the fascisti and those who had not had refused to speak to each other, which had made that year’s Sant’Agata festival an awkward matter. When it came time to elect the local mayor, the islanders voted not for il conte or for Arcangelo, but to reopen the nominations to another candidate—an outcome unheard of on Castellamare. Then, not long after, the town council had been disbanded anyway, by order of il duce from Rome. Now there was to be no mayor and no elected representatives, only a single podestà, which made the standoff between the fascisti and the other islanders seem somewhat irrelevant. As the new podestà, il conte, declared in his first address from the steps of the town hall, they were all fascisti now.

  There had been some muted protest. A small party, in the dead of night—fortified by Amedeo’s liquors—had torn down the new Fascist flag and the portrait of il duce’s bald head from the entrance of the town hall. Rizzu’s teenage nephew Bepe and the fisherman Pierino, who had encountered Communism briefly during the war, began to sing “The Internationale” whenever Signor Arcangelo was passing (they did not dare sing it at the count). Then, one night, these two “comunisti” were seized on their way home by two of il conte’s agents, roughly shaken, and forced to drink a pint of castor oil. After that, no one complained about becoming fascisti—at least not in the open. For, as Gesuina said, “We’ve all got to live together after this, you know.”

  “This is northern nonsense,” raged Rizzu over the counter of the bar. (He still worked for il conte occasionally as a porter and night watchman, but his patience with his old employer had worn thin since the ambush of Bepe.) “No one on Castellamare has ever bothered about politics until now. These are Italian matters, not ours.”

  “It will pass in a year or two,” said Gesuina. “If it’s our cursed fortune to be ruled by other people, it might as well be this Duce as the Spaniards or the Greeks or the Bourbons or the Arabs or anyone else who’s had a turn. We’d all better just ignore him and go on with our own affairs.”

  By this logic, the two old people reconciled themselves to the new situation, and for a while things were quiet again in the House at the Edge of Night.

  Then, shortly after Maria-Grazia had started school, il duce imposed himself forcibly on Castellamare.

  News reached the bar early one afternoon that two officials had arrived on the island in a motorboat and had demanded to speak to il conte about the matter of a prison. The prison was not intended for the islanders (for no serious crime had ever been committed on Castellamare), but for prisoners of il duce. Il duce’s prisoners were routinely exiled to such remote outposts, said the officials—to the butterfly-shaped island of Favignana in the west and the smoking volcanoes around Lipari. Castellamare had also been chosen as fitting for this purpose.

  The two officials of il duce were housed in the guest wing of the count’s villa. They drank noisily on his terrace every night. After three days they went away and nothing more was said about the prison. Three months later, a group of workmen from the mainland arrived in a motorboat and began to repair the ruined houses outside the city walls with rocks and tarpaulins (“Work that could have been done by Castellamare men!” said Rizzu). The prison would open at the end of the summer. Eight Fascist militiamen, two carabinieri, and a lieutenant from the mainland would accompany the prisoners to the island, and in anticipation they were leased several of the empty houses belonging to il conte, at a specially reduced rate.

  “We’ve never needed any poliziotti on the island,” said Gesuina, who was now firmly set against the current developments. “Guards! A sharp smack or a talk with a boy’s grandmother has always been more than enough. How will I know if they’re spying on me when I walk about the town, me with my poor eyes?”

  That summer the first of the political prisoners arrived, in a gray ship from Calabria, sporting wild beards that terrified the children. They made the long climb from the port in a single line, chained together so that they had to step as one, like the caterpillars on the stems of the bougainvillea. One or two who trailed at the back had brought their wives and children. These prisoners were installed in the half-repaired houses, and now every night the bugle call of the fascisti could be heard at five o’clock, summoning the prisoners to the rooms where they were shut up until dawn. Il conte had made clear to his tenants and his peasants that the prisoners were not to be approached or spoken with.

  After watching the prisoners march up the hill in chains, Pina went about straight-lipped with anger, and behind closed doors she raged against il duce and his prison and his warlike ranting in the newspapers and the presence on Castellamare of his odious guards. Therefore when the boys Tullio and Flavio, aged nine and eight, came home from school in miniature black shirts, carrying toy guns (the most beautiful toys ever to pass through their hands), she marched them to the schoolteacher Professor Calleja’s house and hurled the guns at him through the kitchen window. “What do you call this?” she demanded.

  “It’s called the Opera Nazionale Balilla,” Professor Calleja tried to explain, shielding his head from the missiles. “It’s a youth organization—a sporting organization—the children are all encouraged to join and become Balillas—not just your boys, Signora Esposito. Just like the Catholic Scouts.”

  “There are to be no Balillas in my house!” raged Pina, ignoring her boys’ wails at the loss of the toy weapons. “There are to be no guns in my house! Didn’t the last war take enough from this island? If my sons want to join the Catholic Scouts with Father Ignazio, they can join the Catholic Scouts!”

  But now the Fascist guards were a constant presence, roaring with their motorboat off the scattering of rocks the fishermen called Morte delle Barche, setting up pickets at street corners, loafing about the town—and little could be said in the open. The guards called at the bar regularly for cigarettes and strong black coffee. Amedeo kept his head low, and occasionally slipped a rice ball or a slice of mozzarella to a prisoner, too.

  But when Pina saw a prisoner loitering miserably in the street (they were given five lire a day to get by, she had heard—less than the day wage of the humblest of il conte’s peasants), she invited him in and offered him bread, pastries, and coffee, seating him at the best table.

  The prisoners were allowed to work, but there had always been exactly enough work on the island for the islanders, and no more. All the same, Pina paid three of them to repair the broken veranda. The men worked slowly, talking about philosophy and art in schoolbook Italian, and put the wooden beams on back to front. The fisherman Pierino raised his eyebrows when he saw the work. “I don’t think much of that,” he said. “It looks like you had il conte do it, or the schoolmaster—one of those clever men who wouldn’t recognize a roof beam or a door lintel if it came up and struck them over the head.”

  “These prisoners are educated men back in their hometowns, Pierino,” Pina said. “One is a journalist from Trieste, the second, Professor Vincio, a university lecturer in the faculty of archaeology at Bologna, and the third, Mario Vazzo, is a published poet.”

  “That explains it,” said Pierino, and offered as a favor to his cousin to put the veranda back the way it should have been free of charge.

  Amedeo began to grow uneasy at all this, for Pina was making them conspicuous among the islanders. But it was hopeless to confront her once an idea took hold. He immersed himself instead in the rearing of his children and hoped all this was merely a passing squall that would strike the island with its first heavy drops and
then move on to vent its fury elsewhere. It was easy enough to distract himself with the boys. In order to get them through their final years of school, they had to be coaxed away from catching lizards in the scrubland or kicking stones around the piazza. Amedeo and Pina tested them on their mathematics and history and French, supervised their studies in the atlas, and read to them from improving works of literature. Catching the boys to perform these ministrations was a task in itself. And then there was his daughter—his most promising child—propelling herself about on her stiff legs, always questioning, always asking: “Papà, why do the lizards hide inside the streetlamps? And what makes the sea go in and out? And why do hairs grow on Gesuina’s chin like an artichoke?” Her legs had to be exercised every evening, and the braces fitted. On cool nights, to build her strength, he took her on slow walks around the city wall to the belvedere, where she hauled herself onto the railing and pointed out to him the patterns of the stars. She was best in her class at school, to Professor Calleja’s irritation, so far ahead of the others that even with the reduction il professore made to her marks (“To stop the girl getting self-important”), he could not prevent her from coming first.

  “You might go to one of the universities on the mainland,” Pina told her daughter. “You might become someone educated, a scientist or a poet.”

  She also encouraged her sons to think in this manner, but with less conviction. Instead, to persuade them of the delights of a proper education, she enticed them with pictures of great bustling squares full of ice cream stands and great rivers of city lights, in her old schoolmistress’s atlas. Yet none of the three boys would have been caught within ten miles of a university, for they loved the waves and the wild scrubland and football games in the piazza, and none of them could endure being shut up in a classroom. Maria-Grazia, however, loved books with a sacred fervor, like a fisherman’s love for the ocean, and her parents privately delighted that they had produced one intellectual child.

  The problem with an intellectual child, though—as Amedeo began to realize in the years that followed—was that she understood things, witnessed things, kept her eyes stubbornly open, as Pina did. And just like Pina, she could not be persuaded to look away.

  III

  In the summer of her ninth year, Maria-Grazia witnessed five things, each of which was to alter her life to come. Indeed, these five events would seem to her afterward so important that until the day she died she would recall them in odd magnification, like scenes viewed under clear water, the sharpest pictures belonging to her childhood. The first thing she witnessed was an argument over a misplaced vote.

  Walking home on that dusty afternoon, Maria-Grazia was consumed with longing for the first weekend’s swimming. The previous summer, her father had taken her down to the ocean at last and taught her to swim like her brothers. Feeling her legs move in the water, without hindrance, she had let out a scream of pure joy. But swimming had ruined the land for her; now it seemed stale and cumbersome to walk on earth at all. She felt that she had been born in the wrong element, like the mermaid girl in her father’s story, for her legs in air felt as heavy as though they were moving through water, her legs in water as weightless as air.

  Limping home after her three brothers from school that afternoon, her legs were tiresome to bear. She had learned to recognize days when the joints of her knees would creak all day and her calves with their metal braces move as heavily as limbs at the bottom of the ocean. Why couldn’t she have been born a sea-dwelling animal?

  Halfway home, her brothers ran ahead and left her. They fled, exulting at their freedom from “that stronzo Professor Calleja” (as Flavio put it). Always her brothers had to be racing, roaring, hitting things. They would be making for the Rizzus’ farm. During the Christmas break from school, her brothers had invented a game with the three youngest Rizzus, a game they called nemici politici, which filled them with wicked joy. In nemici politici the players were first divided into two bands, the fascisti and the comunisti. Then the fascisti, armed with sticks and empty gasoline canisters, had to hound the comunisti, the political enemies, from one end of the island to another, threatening in terms as obscene as possible to beat them with sticks and dose them with pints of castor oil. It was an exhilarating game, sometimes violent, like all her brothers’ pastimes, and it often ended in a black eye or a skinned knee. Then their father was obliged to get his medical equipment out of the Campari liquor case and repair her brothers.

  On these occasions, their mother would become fierce and inquisitive, and Maria-Grazia would retreat with her cat, Micetto, to the courtyard until the fussing was over.

  As her brothers tumbled out of sight into the scrubland, she resumed her painful walk and reached the terrace of the House at the Edge of Night at about one o’clock, just after the church had finished chiming its Ave Maria. Gripping the tendrils of the bougainvillea, she hauled herself to the top of the steps. Here she paused, for she could hear the cat Micetto.

  She propelled herself about between the tables and at last found him, folded up in a loop of the vine. Painfully, she got to her knees. “Come, Micetto,” she called. “Kit, kit, kitty! Micetto, Micettino!”

  Something had badly frightened the cat. When she hauled him out he was stiff tailed and crying like a baby. “Here, Micetto,” she whispered. “There now, Micetto. Calm.”

  Maybe some old witch had kicked him again, she thought, the heat making her irritable. “I told Mamma and Papà to keep you in the courtyard,” she murmured into Micetto’s fur. “It’s not safe for you out here.”

  The cat had his own methods of breaking and entering. Worming himself up the fretwork of the back gate, he had been known to get as far as the latch and pull it back with one paw, so as to gain entry to the kitchen and feast on cold chicken. Once, he had got in at the window of the bar at night and eaten until he was so fat and sated that he fell asleep inside the glass counter, curled up in a plate of salami. But she feared he had a reckless side, like her brothers: He was forever getting into the courtyards of the most cat-despising islanders, where he would be smacked with flyswatters and hit with brooms; he was constantly seeking to fling himself under the wheels of il conte’s motorcar. Maria-Grazia bundled him up in her arms.

  The piazza was quiet. Il conte’s car stood under the single palm tree, ticking in the heat. The only person about was a prisoner, loitering by Gesuina’s house. Could he have kicked the cat? Though her Mamma always said the prisoners were important men, clever men from the north, they frightened her a little. Once, Tullio said that he had seen two of them out on the veranda in the early morning, picking up the cigarette butts the islanders had dropped, blowing on them and putting them in their pockets. Her brothers found this a great joke, but to Maria-Grazia it was not funny, it was awful.

  Climbing the steps had been a difficult process, and it was only when she pushed open the swinging door that she became aware that the bar was full of shouting. At the counter, il conte and the stout grocer Signor Arcangelo were making a scene about something. They were dressed in their black shirts, which her mother always said privately that they put on when they meant to cause trouble.

  “You should have kept the ballot paper you didn’t use!” il conte was shouting. “As proof that your vote was in line with the party! Do you want the fascisti thinking we’re all Bolsheviks here?”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” her father was saying—his voice was raised, too, the back of his neck, which was all she could see of him, mottled with agitation. “I merely went to the ballot box yesterday afternoon at the town hall, cast my vote—such as it was—and came home.”

  “Come along now,” said Arcangelo, soothingly. “Let’s be sensible. I’m sure you kept the ballot paper you didn’t need, Signor Esposito. Just bring it out to show us, and we’ll leave you to carry on your business and say no more about it.”

  “I thought ballots in this country were supposed to be secret,” said her father. “At least in the country, the Italy, in which
I grew up.”

  That was strange, for Maria-Grazia had never thought of her father as belonging to Italy, only to Castellamare.

  From the doorway, her mother, Pina, said, “What’s all this noise?”

  Signor Arcangelo spread his hands. “Signora Esposito,” he said. “It’s all a misunderstanding. I’ve said already to your husband and signor il conte that I think things are getting rather out of hand.”

  Her hands and cheeks a little floury from preparing lunch, Pina advanced. “What’s all this noise?” she said again.

  Arcangelo adopted again his consoling tone. “Il conte and I were the returning officers for yesterday’s election, which means—”

  “I’m aware of what a returning officer does nowadays,” said Pina. “You seem to forget I was a qualified schoolmistress before my marriage, Signor Arcangelo.”

  “Of course. Well, in the line of duty, il conte and I found that certain individuals on this island, regrettably, voted against the list of candidates published by the Fascist Party, putting the white ‘No’ paper into the ballot box instead of the tricolored ‘Sì’ paper.”