The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  While he waited, he allowed himself to be soothed by the drafts through the mat of bougainvillea, lulled by the familiar hiss of the sea. He heard the low murmur in the bar, the familiar music of voices. He heard his father’s voice, his mother’s. His sister again now: “He’s here. He’s standing outside. My brother, back from the war.”

  He heard, unmistakably, his mother’s screams of “Tullio? Aurelio?” Only after calling the names of both the others—and a foreign name that he did not recognize at all—did she say, at last, “Flavio?” Flavio heard this, and knew all at once that he would not be happy again on Castellamare.

  —

  AFTER THE WAR ENDED, many of the young men had returned to the island. Some carried medals bundled up in suitcases; others returned in the ill-fitting civilian clothes of strange countries, smelling of foreign shaving foam and cheap hair oil. Just after Christmas, while the presepe with its life-size figures of the Madonna, the infant Christ, and the stooped San Giuseppe still stood outside the church, il conte had received the news that his son, Andrea, with a shattered knee, was returning from a prison camp in Indiana. At the celebration of the Epifania, his mother, now middle-aged, arrived at the church, leaning on il conte’s arm. Carmela wept before the statue of Sant’Agata, raising her arms and declaring out loud her thanks to the saint. (“For all the world,” said Gesuina, “as if she were a common island woman.”) After that day, Carmela seemed at last to grow old like all the other islanders, her clothes just as tired and inelegant, her face just as worn.

  While Andrea was still imprisoned in America, other islanders had also received letters and telegrams with Red Cross stamps and foreign postmarks, and a wave of boys had returned. But there had never been any letter for Pina and Amedeo. This unexpected return of Flavio jarred the House at the Edge of Night, a shock as great as his disappearance had been.

  In fact, a crumpled Red Cross letter arrived a day or two after Flavio, delivered by Pierino’s son-in-law to the door of the bar. Pina’s cry woke the whole piazza, startled the orioles out of the trees, and brought her husband and daughter diving down the stairs—for she believed, for a moment, that it was news of one of her other boys. Instead, it was merely the missing communication they should have received about Flavio. “We are pleased to inform you,” it read, “that your son Flavio Esposito has made contact with us in anticipation of his release from Langton Priory Prisoner of War Camp, Surrey, England. During his time in Britain he has received treatment for an amputation to the fingers of the right hand and for psychological disturbances sustained during his service in North Africa, at the Addington Park War Hospital, Croydon, and also at the Belmont Prisoner of War Hospital, Sutton. He is recovering well, and in reasonably good spirits though not able to write at present. If you wish to enclose a message for him by return, we should be happy to convey it to him.” The letter was three months old.

  Flavio was not able to say what had happened in the intervening time, and when “psychological disturbances” were mentioned he grew drawn and sullen and refused to say anything at all.

  “Do you think they mistreated him?” wept Pina in the privacy of her bedroom, late that night.

  “The English are good people,” said Amedeo, who had only ever met one Englishman, the soldier Robert. “They will have taken good care of Flavio. And now he’s back home, he’ll recover—you’ll see—good sea air, the family, the familiar faces.”

  But in truth, Flavio seemed to find nothing familiar. After the initial greetings on the veranda of the bar, he had moved away from his mother, as though she were an overaffectionate stranger, and climbed the stairs to his room. Here he had found his portrait of il duce and his brass trumpet gone, a stranger’s razor and shaving foam on the nightstand. Pina had rushed to clear these traces of Robert away, to bring out fresh sheets and haul open the dusty curtains. But Flavio had sat on the edge of the bed, turning over each object on his nightstand as though it were unknown.

  Afterward, Pina was able to put back Flavio’s belongings exactly as he had left them, for in the years after his disappearance and before Robert’s arrival she had wandered and rewandered the rooms of her sons on sleepless nights, examining every tin soldier and school certificate. Only the portrait of il duce was left out of sight, rolled up in a drawer. Flavio’s brass trumpet in its case was placed on the table at the end of the bed, his favorite toy soldiers and football cards on the nightstand. “Mamma, he’s twenty-five now,” said Maria-Grazia, observing this. Amedeo went out and dug up Flavio’s medal from under the palm tree in the courtyard, and put it into his son’s hands. “I can get those earth stains off,” said Amedeo. “I buried it to keep it safe—that’s all.” Flavio said nothing; he merely lay down and went to sleep—a sleep so deep that he did not surface properly for over a week.

  Meanwhile, they crept about the house, as though a wild creature lay dormant in the room above them.

  In the days of Flavio’s slumber, Pina took up position on the veranda of the bar. Though the customers made a tiresome cacophony in her ears, though Maria-Grazia circulated with trays of glasses and attempted to draw her out of her silence, Pina ignored them. She sat at the edge of the veranda with her back firmly turned, watching only the ocean. During these days, looking at her mother’s lonely back, Maria-Grazia began to realize that Pina was close to becoming an old woman. Her rope of hair, which in Maria-Grazia’s mental picture of her mother was still black, had weathered, losing its thick luxuriance. Her shoulders were sloping hillsides, her spine a straight ridge, as though the old Pina were hung on the frame of the young one. There she sat, and waited for her son to wake up and come down to her.

  Maria-Grazia supposed her brother would want the bar back now, and, privately, she began to search the newspapers for prices for a ticket to England—for couldn’t she go and find Robert, and leave the bar in Flavio’s hands? But the prices were so high—a whole month’s profit for the House at the Edge of Night—and even supposing Flavio were up to running the bar, where would she begin in the vastness of that gray country of her imagination to search for Robert? Why hadn’t he instead come back to her?

  Pina went to bed only reluctantly each night, after the bar had been shut up, and each morning she rose again before dawn, splashed her face with cold water, put on her best clothes, and went down to the veranda to wait for her son to wake. Sometimes the cat Micetto, tame at last in his extreme old age, sat just out of her reach, flicking his tail, bearing her company.

  —

  IN THE MIDST OF all this, when everyone was preoccupied with the return of the soldiers, Gesuina’s spirit left her.

  She was sitting in her customary chair in the corner of the bar, by the wireless radio. She died so silently in her sleep, with her hands so neatly folded, that no one noticed immediately that she was gone. The scopa games continued; the dominoes clicked in the drowsy silence; the coffee machine, elderly now, too, hissed. It was only when the girl Concetta went up to Gesuina, tapped her on the knee, and yelled “Hey!” to wake her, that she felt a chill in the old woman’s bones.

  “She didn’t scold me!” wept Concetta. “There’s something badly wrong!”

  Amedeo was called, and knelt down before her. “Signora Gesuina?” he said.

  The old woman made no answer, but her face as it rested seemed composed into a faint smile. The smallest mirror from behind the bar was taken down and held before her open mouth. It remained clear, reflecting only the blue line of the sea.

  —

  WHEN THE ISLAND HEARD the news, its grief was immeasurable. Gesuina was the first person to die on Castellamare since the rash of deaths from the war, and now her departure afforded the islanders a shelter beneath which to mourn all those other more terrible losses. Shops were closed, black armbands dug out of drawers, and those who had wept behind closed doors for other griefs—had pummeled their pillows as though mad, had lain wailing on the floors of their kitchens for days on end, had rubbed their faces with ashes—all those islander
s now went about the streets without shame, mourning in moderation, with wet handkerchiefs and red eyes.

  The old woman, in her tiny coffin, was buried in the cemetery beyond the Mazzus’ vineyard. Here every islander had been buried since the first Greek settlers died. Gesuina was allotted a grave under the cemetery’s single cypress tree, which she would occupy for a twenty-year season before the bleached bones would be gathered, prayed over, and put into a little white alcove in the cemetery wall. Father Ignazio led the procession and sang lamenting Sant’Agata songs. The grief of the island had no bounds. In the blare of sunset with which they buried the old woman, Father Ignazio watched them weep and understood that they wept not for Gesuina but for everything that was changing, everything that was gone. Sometimes grief needed a focus, an object—this the old priest knew. The count attended the funeral, with his wife, and laid a handsome wreath of trumpet vine on Gesuina’s grave. The old woman had delivered into the world almost every islander who now mourned her, even il conte.

  III

  While the whole town was burying Gesuina, Flavio awoke as from a spell. Stirring in his boyhood room, he opened his eyes and felt the great exhaustion of the war ease its weight. His hair was matted, his mouth sour. He had a pain in his bladder from sleeping so long. It was twelve hours since he had last surfaced to make a drowsy stagger to the bathroom. He hauled himself along the corridor and emptied a stream of foamy piss into the toilet bowl. Here he had once jostled with his brothers, rising in the dark before school to shave their baby chins with razors of their Papà’s, to grease their hair with olive oil like the prisoner-poet Mario Vazzo, feeling themselves already too big for the island. He pushed open the bathroom window and stood for a long time looking out.

  Some kind of procession was winding in from the fields. Was it Sant’Agata? But no—he was confused—Sant’Agata’s festival was always in June, and now it was autumn, soon winter. One of those land occupations, probably. He worked his face with the remaining fingertip of his right hand. Still the sense of unreality persisted, as though he were looking at a cinema reel of the island projected on a wall, not the real thing. None of it came to him right. He had felt it from the first moment the fisherman from Siracusa had set him down on the quay, in his English charity clothes with his cardboard suitcase under his arm.

  Flavio returned to bed, lay back on his pillows, and retraced that journey, trying to recognize in it some pang of homecoming. He had climbed the hill slowly, by the path through the prickly pears he had always taken as a boy. His prison-camp belongings rattled in the case with each step: his razor, still rusted with English damp, his English playing cards, his English Bible. He had not known what to do with the Bible. To abandon it seemed sacrilegious; to throw it away was unthinkable. So he had carried it back to Castellamare when he was discharged, where it was to spend the next fifty years gathering dust in the room at the top of the house, its front cover inscribed with his prison-camp address.

  Flavio had not expected a welcoming committee at the town hall. But as he climbed the hill and passed under the peeling archway that marked the entrance to town, he understood that he was to receive no welcome at all. One or two children, half-grown since he had last seen them, glanced up at his approach and fled. He caught sight of the old mayor Arcangelo, who merely ducked out of sight into an alley, with a pained expression as though to communicate to Flavio that it would be impolitic for the two of them, the ex-Fascist and the former star of the Balilla, to speak to each other.

  Then he had stumbled away from the town again, toward the ruined houses—until at last, with a shock, he came upon his sister, a woman with a line down her forehead and no leg braces anymore.

  When she embraced him, the perfume of a grown-up woman had hung around him in the air.

  She had led him to the bar, and Flavio found everything altered, everything strange. His mother was diminished, his father a reedy-voiced old man. He had become confused then under the force of memory. Where were his sister’s leg braces? Where was the kitten? Then he had discovered a stranger’s belongings in his bedroom, the trumpet tarnished, the portrait of il duce gone—and before memory could get a proper hold on him, he plunged into sleep.

  —

  NOW, HE GOT UP. He put on a shirt and trousers from the mothballed interior of his chest of drawers, descended the stairs, took a glass of water. His mother came in and worked off her schoolmistress’s shoes. The others followed: his father, his sister. “What was the procession?” said Flavio. “I saw it from the window.”

  “A death,” said his mother. “Signora Gesuina.”

  Gesuina. The woman had tended him in his youth, had fed him sugared ricotta and peeled figs. He tried to coax forth a few tears, which came at last. His mother approached and rubbed him a little between the shoulder blades. “My Flavio,” she murmured. “My Flavio. You’ve come back to me now, my boy.”

  He let her work a curl free from the front of his head. “What was it like in the camp?” she said. “Did they treat you well, those inglesi?”

  What could he say? That they had given him decent food, of a stodgy, puddingy sort? That they had put a black suit on him, with a gray spot on the back and one on the ankle, to show them where to shoot if he should run away? That they had let him work on a farm, only not at first? At first, he had still been what they considered a Fascist. How could he change his mind all at once? Nevertheless, four of the prisoners, including Flavio, had eventually been allowed to work at a great dark farmhouse surrounded by baying dogs, making the long walk each winter morning through a coppice stiff with ice. At the farmhouse, one Christmas, they had been allowed to sit around the farmer’s table and eat roast goose and little roast potatoes and miniature cabbages with a bitter taste which the inglesi called “sprouts,” laughing when he wrinkled his nose at the overpowering foulness of the things. Should he tell his mother about that? How they had worn coronets of paper for an afternoon, and drunk indigestible English beer? Or the hospital—should he tell her about the hospital? How, in the psychiatric ward when the lights were turned out, you only had to listen to locate each separate bed by its mumbling and groaning, each one an island of weeping in the dark. Which of those things should he select and dust off and bring forth? He was tired; he didn’t know.

  “They treated me well enough,” he said. “Everything was all right.” Still, this insatiable thirst. He downed more water. His mother seized his glass and filled it again, as though desperate to be of use.

  —

  IT WAS ALL HE could do to keep awake in those first days. He told his sister he would take back the management of the bar, but in truth he could barely carry a tray with such a great piece missing out of his right hand, could not now remember how to make the coffee and the pastries. Had he ever known? For Flavio, now, to go about the business of daily life was to only half inhabit the world, for in a deeper chamber of his mind the war was playing and replaying, sapping his energies as though he were still fighting it. It came over him quite suddenly. For example, he would smooth out the sheets on his bed before sleep, and before him instead the desert would ripple, the wind scouring its surface. Or he would raise his hand to shave and see instead a slick of blood—feel again how his guts had curled when he raised that same hand in the dark to find one finger, two fingers, three fingers gone, shot away entirely. The fingers had been unsalvageable (though he had scrabbled in the sand for them with his left hand, turning up only hard stones). They came under fire again; they had to move on. “Vai, vai!” the sergeant screamed. Flavio had hobbled along, doubled over, pressing his bleeding hand to his stomach, the fingers abandoned miles behind them now, trampled by English boots. The pain came only afterward, rolling over him hours later.

  Sometimes, now, he would be behind the bar counter, wiping a glass clean with his good hand while his thumb and his one remaining finger kept it anchored, and he would hear the rattle of machine gun fire and turn, startled, to find beyond the door only the harmless rattle of cicadas,
the blank blue line of the sea.

  He had been told a little about the Englishman Robert Carr. The man had slept in his bed, and—judging by his sister’s sad glances out to sea—also in Maria-Grazia’s. Shortly after reinstating himself in his childhood room, Flavio had found a little pamphlet forgotten under his nightstand, A Soldier’s Guide to Sicily, sea-wrinkled, a single strand of blond hair between the pages. Then the Englishman must have known what Flavio knew: the infernal light of the desert, the charge up a dune’s flank, the roaring, the thunder. The Englishman knew, but he was gone, and from the stories the islanders told about him he had been welcomed as a hero, while Flavio, with his missing fingers and restless eyes, was a person no one seemed to know what to do with anymore.

  —

  ANDREA D’ISANTU RETURNED two weeks after Flavio Esposito. Il conte was determined that his son should receive a welcome more resounding than that afforded to any of the other returned soldiers. He ordered his peasants early to work that morning, in their Sunday clothes, and had them lined up along the avenue of his villa, holding oleander garlands. His wife procured the services of the village band. Their numbers were sadly diminished since the war; several of them lamented this fact, assembling in the bar for a dram of courage before the performance.

  Flavio’s mother urged him to go along with his brass trumpet. “How can I play?” he asked her, as she thrust it at him, “when I’ve got no fingers to play it with?”

  “Play anyway,” she urged him. “Play as well as you can with only your left. You used to play so nicely, Flavio, and you see the band needs more players.”

  As Flavio remembered, she had never much liked his brass trumpet. He went, though, sullenly, some childhood obedience persisting in him. As he stood before il conte’s villa among the elderly musicians, sweating in a borrowed jacket, he saw il conte’s motorcar approach, plowing the dust of the road before it. In the passenger seat rode the returning soldier, still thin as a pine tree, looking neither to the left nor to the right.