The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  Still, Amedeo had little time to think about Andrea, for his own sons were getting to an age when he needed to find occupations for them.

  He had loved his boys—fiercely, heart-achingly—as small children, but sometimes now he was troubled by the youths they had become. They seemed to belong more to the world beyond the House at the Edge of Night than they did to him and Pina. He had not known bringing up children would be like this, a slow process of losing. The dark Flavio, his middle son, was the most worrying one. He had developed an odd fascination with the fascisti, which had divided him from his mother in recent years. He had insisted on pinning a portrait of il duce above his bed until Pina took it down and shoved it away in a drawer; he practiced Fascist marching songs every evening on his brass trumpet. Now it seemed Flavio was perpetually running about the island in his Avanguardisti knickerbockers and black fez, swarming up mounds and into ditches, firing guns. Outside of the Balilla, Flavio was close as a riccio di mare: dark, sallow, reserved of manner, grave of habit, just as Amedeo himself had been as a young man.

  The bristle-browed Tullio, in contrast, seemed unable to stop talking. Leaning on the veranda, with thick black hair like his mother’s and Amedeo’s great stature, he charmed the girls on their way home from Mass, exchanged cigarettes with the fishermen, won the confidence of the elderly scopa players, and, in short, was admired by everybody. But Amedeo was uneasy at this self-assurance; it seemed a thing too big to be contained by a five-mile island. Tullio spoke incessantly of America, where some cousin of the Rizzus lived and was said to drive a big motorcar and own a refrigerator, having hauled himself spectacularly out of the Depression. It would not be long, Amedeo feared, before Tullio, too, launched himself across the sea. Amedeo, on more than one occasion, had had to extract his eldest son from the bougainvillea, where he had been discovered entangled in the embraces of the eldest Mazzu girl, scandalizing the elderly scopa players, and he rode his bicycle so fast about the island that Pina feared he would come into some fatal collision with il conte’s motorcar.

  The youngest of Amedeo’s sons, Aurelio, did not talk about leaving the island, chiefly because he was still mired in the painful and protracted process of attempting to complete his final years at school. This youngest boy, Amedeo felt, was most completely his. Aurelio would still sometimes sidle up to him demanding to hear the latest story from the red book, still sometimes consent to sit beside his sister on the veranda and tease the cat, Micetto. Aurelio had a good round face and a voice that still occasionally plunged endearingly out of his control. But even he, Amedeo knew, would tire eventually of catching lizards in the scrubland, of diving into the same patch of ocean from the same bank of rocks each summer weekend, of the endless football game in the piazza. Amedeo saw the way his youngest son followed the elder Tullio about, imitating his swagger, copying his greased hair.

  Now he feared, in his heart, that he needed some pretext to keep his restless sons from leaving the island. And so he immersed them in the life of the bar, teaching them how to make coffee and chocolate as Gesuina had taught him almost twenty years ago, keeping them up late at night cooking rice balls and pastries, and enticing them with a modest share of the profits to spend on whatever they wanted: chocolates and football cards and presents for the various neighborhood girls who hung about the veranda on Saturday nights, hoping for a glimpse of “the Esposito boys.” All three walked with a swagger as they imagined American movie stars did, and oiled their hair like the prisoner-poet Mario Vazzo.

  —

  THE TRUTH WAS, Amedeo’s work as the island’s unofficial doctor was becoming all-consuming, and he was glad to have the boys’ help in the bar. In those days, people came to the back of the house to have a tooth pulled or an arm bandaged, and to the front for sweet wine and strong coffee and a game of cards, sometimes both in the course of an afternoon. From the terrace of the bar, recovering patients and other customers could sit under the chaos of vines and sip coffee or liquor while contemplating the bar’s singular position: in one direction, the whole bright and seething expanse of Europe; in the other, the vastness of the sea.

  One day he came upon his daughter weeping on the veranda steps. “What is it, Mariuzza?” he said, covering her in kisses. “Is Micetto sick?”

  “No, no,” she said crossly. “No, Papà.”

  “Then what? Do your legs pain you?”

  “Papà, my legs haven’t pained me in three years.”

  He supposed that was the truth. “Then what is it?”

  Maria-Grazia gave a cross little huff. “Why do you never let me help in the bar? You let Tullio and Flavio and Aurelio help. Why don’t you let me go to the Piccole Italiane like the other girls, and do the marching, and the camping, and the singing? All the boys went to the Balilla. I can sing, Papà. And I can help in the bar and do sums and give customers the right orders much better than Tullio, who’s always got his face stuck in his magazines with pictures of cars, or Aurelio, who barely knows up from down!”

  Reeling a little at this outpouring of discontent, Amedeo said, “But you don’t want to help in the bar, do you? You’re a clever girl—you might go on to become an educated woman. And you don’t want to go to those Fascist Saturdays, do you, and those camps?”

  “My legs are fine!” roared Maria-Grazia. “And everyone else goes to them! I’m the only one on this whole island who doesn’t!”

  With that, she retreated in a rage behind the curtain of the bar. He heard her steps go away from him through the house—still slightly uneven after all those years in braces—and stung with a mixture of exasperation and love.

  Was even Maria-Grazia to become adolescent and recalcitrant? He felt he could not bear that. Later he went to her and, soothing her with pet names and the choicest pastries from the bar counter, agreed to allow her to attend the Piccole Italiane on a trial basis.

  As it turned out, the trial was short. The Piccole Italiane would not have her. Professor Calleja felt she could not keep up with the others, that her weak legs hampered her.

  Racing up the bar steps in a storm of tears, Maria-Grazia shoved away her father’s questions. “I don’t want to hear anything about the Piccole Italiane anymore!” she cried. “I’m going to leave for the mainland and become a nun!”

  It was the poet Mario Vazzo who enticed her out again in the end, serenading her so charmingly that she relented, a little angry with herself, and came back down.

  “I’ll send your mother to talk to that fool of a teacher Calleja,” said Amedeo. “She’ll soon put him right.”

  “I don’t want to hear anything more about it, Papà,” said Maria-Grazia.

  He had intended to speak to Pina about it, but the next day, the newspapers were full of the German führer, il duce’s great friend, and his war in Poland. Though il duce was to dig in his feet and vacillate for another year, it was this war that soon became the only thing anybody could talk about. And it was this war that was to lead Amedeo’s sons, one by one, away from the island.

  V

  Shortly after Tullio’s nineteenth birthday, all the boys of his former school class were sent letters ordering them to the mainland. Here, they were to undergo a medical examination. Tullio returned from this examination with a new city haircut, and possessed of private thoughts that made him quiet and inward looking, though he had never before been a pensive boy. He had been pronounced medically fit, and a few months later a green postcard arrived ordering him to report to the barracks near Siracusa.

  Tullio considered for half a day, lying on his back in the bedroom full of the football medals and tin cars of his boyhood, instructing his brothers not to disturb him. But that night, when his friends congregated on the veranda of the bar to discuss airplanes and machine guns, Italy’s cities and far-off mountains, he was lost. After the bar closed its doors that night, he stood before his mother and father and announced his decision. “I mean to go,” he said. “I’d feel all my life that I’d missed the real thing if I didn’t. And,
anyway, I don’t have a choice, so we’d better all be as cheerful as possible about it.”

  His willingness to go cut Pina to the core, though she had planned from his infancy that he should have a life away from the island. It seemed indecent that he did not weep or struggle, that he waved grinning to them from the fishing boat that bore him away. “All of them will be taken,” she wept. “Why, by Sant’Agata and all the saints, did I ever wish for three sons?”

  Tullio sent them a keepsake photograph of himself in his regimental uniform. He sent them fortnightly letters, in which he alluded only vaguely to his location. They believed from the dust that fell lightly from the pages that it was somewhere hot like their own island, Libya or Abyssinia, not the cold north—and for this at least Pina gave thanks.

  When Flavio received his green postcard, he was already packed, prepared, and performing daily pull-ups and push-ups in his bedroom so as to be “battle ready.” He mailed an eager, unpunctuated letter from the barracks three weeks later, complete with a matching photograph, and that was the last they heard from him.

  On the awful day in 1942 when the youngest, Aurelio, left the island, Amedeo stood at the bar counter without speaking, his hands wide apart, bracing himself by its support the way Maria-Grazia, years ago, had braced herself on the stone sill of the fisherman Pierino’s window—and neither she nor her mother could think of a thing to say.

  Aurelio, in his photograph, looked tearful and a little boyish, with a shaving rash on his neck.

  The boys’ regimental photographs were added to the display along the hall, and sometimes when Maria-Grazia came downstairs softly in the mornings, she found her father standing before them.

  Meanwhile, she overheard her mother and father crying, a thing she had never witnessed before. It woke her in utter disorientation one night. “I should never have encouraged them to leave,” she heard Pina weeping. “I should never have told them about the mainland, about the universities and the cities and the palazzi!”

  And her father: “Who has succeeded in keeping their children? Even the Rizzu boys have been ordered away now, and they had to be dragged off by the recruiting officer. How could we have kept them here?”

  “All the same, amore,” Pina wept, “they won’t come home. I know it—they won’t come home.”

  And now her father’s voice, too, became high, lamenting: “I should never have made that bargain with the saint! I should never have gambled Maria-Grazia’s life against theirs! What have I done, Pina, amore—what have I done?”

  No one could get out of him what he meant by this—not Pina, not his daughter. But it was as though her father knew already that the boys would not come home.

  —

  THE NEWS OF TULLIO’S disappearance arrived by telegram. He had gone missing in Egypt. The news that Aurelio was missing in the same battle came a week later: The two boys, Tullio, the eldest, always leading, and Aurelio, the youngest, always following, had vanished together. The news about their middle boy, Flavio, came three months afterward, though he had vanished at almost the same moment.

  There followed a longer letter in which Amedeo was informed that Flavio had been awarded a medal by il duce, for service against the British in Egypt. This medal his sergeant enclosed, because it was all of Flavio that had been found during the retreat.

  Holding the disc of metal in his hands, Amedeo broke, and so did Pina. With stooped shoulders, he ordered the customers away from the bar and shut its doors. “It will remain closed,” he ordered, “until our Tullio and our Flavio and our Aurelio are found.”

  He retreated to his study at the top of the house, where he polished and repolished Flavio’s medal, as though trying to scrub out the relief of il duce emblazoned on its bronze face. He became once again submerged in stories, with a kind of drugged distraction. Meanwhile, Pina, who had been summoned back to teach a little at the school now that Professor Calleja was fighting at Tripoli, did her duty calmly, but moved through the house as though asleep, too, troubled no longer by anger or passion or fierceness or—in fact—by anything at all. To Maria-Grazia it seemed that she was living now not with her mother but with the ghost of her mother, and with a vague, helpless double of her father who moved about like an old man, shoulders bowed.

  The House at the Edge of Night was locked up. On the mirrors behind the counter, on which the bar’s name was emblazoned in twirling, fanciful script, rust spots began to bloom and lizards crawled, leaving behind them trails of four-fingered prints. The bar, like all things on the island under the influence of sun and dust, returned with alarming speed to its perpetual faded amber, so that seen from a distance it was like the sepia photograph of a building.

  Maria-Grazia finished her growing up in this reverential silence. They were both broken, her mother and her father, and she tended them with gentleness. But inside her a storm was raging. She was not broken: She was almost seventeen and full of tightly wound life, and here she was compressed between the two of them with their grief and their silences, with scarcely room to breathe. She did not want to believe, as they did, that her brothers were not coming home—that Tullio would never again be discovered entangled with some girl behind the bougainvillea, that Flavio would never again trumpet one of his Fascist marching songs. Worst of all, Aurelio, who (though she had never told her parents this, and refused to let herself remember it except very occasionally) had crept to her room in the early hours before his departure and wept, racked with silent fear, in her arms. Aurelio, always her kindest brother, was like her at heart, she knew—he had never wanted to leave the island, had loved its shuttered noons and its roads weighted with heat and silence. For Aurelio, this small world had been enough, and yet he had been sent far away across the sea, to be lost among the deserts of Africa. If she allowed herself to think about it she might, like her parents, simply refuse to inhabit her life any longer. So, for her own survival, she decided not to believe that they were gone.

  The summer after Aurelio left, il conte’s agents had come to the House at the Edge of Night with a written offer to buy the bar. “Why not?” said Amedeo, throwing up his hands.

  “What will Tullio and Flavio and Aurelio do, if we sell the bar while they’re away?” cried Maria-Grazia. “Have some sense, Papà!”

  “The accounts won’t balance,” said Amedeo. “I haven’t the strength to open the place again.”

  Then Maria-Grazia, exhausted with her parents’ weeping, took charge. She had finished school with the highest marks—eights and nines, even tens in arithmetic and Italian. Without opening her prize books (Pirandello, Dante, and a volume of Fascist poetry), she put them away and the next morning occupied herself with the salvaging of the bar. If her mother and father could not take care of the House at the Edge of Night, she would.

  She opened its doors and began trading in a reduced way, staving off the financial ruin that had begun to hang over them like the air of defeat hanging over the whole country. Chasing the lizards away from the mirrors, which they now considered their territory, she saw reflected in the glass the impossibly blue line of the ocean and allowed herself to dream of the day when her brothers would cross it as war heroes with medals on their chests. Then, perhaps, she would be an educated woman, but not yet.

  She could no longer get the cigarettes or matchbooks that once had come from the mainland, the packets of chewing gum or the bottles of liquor. A shipment of arancello had been bombed in the Strait of Messina; the pistachios for the pastries, which came from Sicily, could no longer be bought because the Sicilian peasants, starving under the loss of half their manpower to the war effort, had foraged and eaten them all. At the beginning of the war the wives of Castellamare had hoarded the remaining mainland food: cans of fruit and hot chocolate from Arcangelo’s shop, packets of biscotti, fat salami. Maria-Grazia could no longer get coffee for the bar, and drinking chocolate had long since been out of the question. The baker no longer supplied anything but the hard, rustic bread belonging to the island, and—
when the supply of flour became sporadic—very little of that, and most of it dry and gritty. The island’s pigs grew thin, and the butcher had taken to cutting their ham into petal-like slices in order to sell more for the same price. Everything that could be harvested that summer of 1942 was harvested as usual, but afterward the most desperate peasants went out into the fields as they had in the nineteenth century and gleaned what was left, and others took to roaming the hedges and abandoned orchards, foraging for wild “grandfather” oranges, the warty fruits that had been left on the trees since last year and were sometimes succulent and sometimes dry as sand inside. The peasants also foraged little bundles of “greens,” which were really just weeds and shooting plants, but could be tied up with string and sold in the marketplace. They gathered bucketfuls of the great babbaluci, ground-snails they found under rocks after wet weather. They dug nuts from among the thorny grass of il conte’s uncultivated hunting land.

  By the end of the war, they would all be eating snails and greens. For now, Maria-Grazia instead served approximations of the former glorious pastries; homemade arancello and limoncello, which she bought directly from the island’s elderly widows; and what she christened caffè di guerra: hot water with a dusty trace of coffee. In a faltering way, complaining loudly, people continued to come to the House at the Edge of Night, if only for the company. Maria-Grazia, in the latter years of the war when all the railways were bombed and the ports occupied, would invent fantastical dishes for the customers out of what was left, a homemade limonata utterly without sugar, chicory coffee, bread-and-tomatoes, bread-and-onions, bread-and-greens.