The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  “Sì,” admitted Maria-Grazia. “I could.”

  Carmela gripped both her hands. It was a smooth grip, uncalloused as a child’s, the kind of grip achieved only through a lifetime spent in white gloves. Then she was gone, so that Maria-Grazia, light-headed, watching her recede across the piazza, believed for a moment that she had only dreamed the encounter. The piazza was calm again. The palm tree’s shadow moved listlessly across the tiles of the veranda, marking time like a sundial’s needle. The lizards crept out from the cracks in the houses to seek the day’s sun.

  But Maria-Grazia found herself raging in a whisper as she went about the early morning business of igniting the coffee machine, rolling the blinds up, arranging the chairs. What claim did this Carmela have on her? Was she, Maria-Grazia, to become the repository of everybody’s secrets? What was it they wanted from her, they with their shames furled within them, their guilty eyes, piling upon her these troubles that had occurred before she was born?

  And yet the thought of Andrea sleepless, tormented, pained her as the fear for Robert once had. Did this mean love, or only pity? She could not love Andrea the way she had loved Robert. She knew that to be the truth; she had used up all her capacity for that kind of adoration. And yet Robert was gone and Andrea was here, and was sick with love for her. No one else had ever paid her that honor. For Totò and for the widower Dacosta she had been merely a potential wife, replaceable. Perhaps Robert had long since replaced her, too, with some English girl, some sweetheart from before the war. Not Andrea d’Isantu.

  A tenderness persisted in her when she thought of his shattered leg, recollecting the shame of her own weak ankles, her own limping gait. And hadn’t they really been companions since their youth, when she considered it: she and il conte’s son, both friendless, united by the same dark intensity, the same solitude, the same studious hunch and high marks? Four years behind him in school, she had felt herself always to be following in his wake, for when she outstripped her own companions, Andrea’s grades were the ones drawn out of the teacher’s cupboard for comparison. Professor Calleja would murmur, “Now, Esposito, let’s see how d’Isantu fared in this exam.” The schoolmaster had kept a running average of her marks alongside Andrea’s. By his final year, her average had outstripped his. When Andrea was informed, he had merely smiled a little, inclining his head. She had seen this at the time as ungenerous. Why hadn’t he consented to shake her hand? But might it not have instead been a kind of deference, the same deference with which he had tremblingly presented her the flower?

  At the end of the summer she would give her answer. Until then, she would do her best to drive both of them, the Englishman and il conte’s son, utterly from her mind.

  —

  EVEN THE ISLAND WAS UNSETTLED, dissatisfied, in those days. It had once been a volcano. Though the islanders knew this, the volcano had lain quiet so long that they often forgot. And then sometimes it behaved oddly, smoldering with faint recollections of its past. Once or twice a decade a hole in the ground would open, releasing a jet of smoke, singeing a vine, or turning a mountain goat to a black heap of bones. At other times, warm water would well under the rocks at the edge of the ocean, moved by invisible currents. Then, if you plunged your head under the surface, you could trace a line of bubbles escaping from some chasm in the island’s side. But these things were expected. The island, after all, was known to be a place of miracles.

  The volcano had never erupted; its crater lay somewhere under il conte’s villa. But it did shift itself sometimes, sending out shocks and tremors. Nineteen forty-nine was one of those years. The ceiling of the House at the Edge of Night opened with new cracks that January. By March, it was possible to lie on the floor of the bar and hear a sound like groaning coming up from the earth. This Concetta reported with delight, stretched flat as a sea star on the tiles, hissing at everyone to be quiet so she could listen. “An earthquake’s coming, Maria-Grazia!” she announced. “An earthquake’s coming!”

  The child still had a disconcerting appetite for chaos and violence. “Sant’Agata preserve us from any earthquake,” Rizzu admonished her. “I’m too old for that.” And he attempted to terrify Concetta with fantastical tales of the former earthquakes, when all the houses had been floored except the House at the Edge of Night and old Mazzu’s farm and il conte’s villa, when great tidal waves off Sicily had assaulted the shores of the island, like the tale of Noah and his sons, and the islanders had fled to higher ground.

  Concetta refused to be terrified. “Imagine!” she cried, eyes lit. “Everything gone! My father’s stupid shop and all of it gone!”

  Maria-Grazia was up on a ladder painting the front of the bar when she felt the first real shudder. A sideways tugging, like a fishing boat going aground. Descending, panic stifling her so that she could not have cried out if she wanted to, she collided with her brother. “Gesù!” said Flavio. “Gesù Dio!” He was barefoot, still in his nightshirt, as he ran across the square. “Flavio!” she called. “Come back!”

  The earth subsided; the island once again lay calm. She pursued her brother across the piazza and cornered him in the shade of Gesuina’s empty house. He cowered, on his knees. A crowd had gathered. “Flavio,” she said. “It’s safe. The earthquake has passed over.”

  Flavio, turned in on himself, shook his head and keened. He rubbed and rubbed at the stumps of his right hand. When she got up close and looked in his eyes, she could see that they were filmed like the elderly Gesuina’s had been: Before him was not the sunlit piazza or the House at the Edge of Night but some desert place. It took her a long time to persuade him to take her hand.

  As she led him back to the bar, shivering, clutching his flapping nightshirt to him like a girl caught in a high wind, someone let out a jeer. But a spirit of defiance had come over her now since the gossip over Andrea; she hauled Flavio along behind her without lowering her head. “Come on,” she said. “It’s not everyone who fought as bravely as you, Flavio.”

  After that day, the gossip about the island was that the Esposito boy had without a doubt come back from the war damaged in the head—but no one would hear anything said about Maria-Grazia.

  —

  AS THE TREMORS PERSISTED, the island was afflicted with a religious fervor. It gripped Flavio worst of all. No one noticed until the Sant’Agata bric-a-brac from beside the bar’s front door, to which none of them had paid much attention for a quarter of a century, began to go missing. First the holy water, then the rosaries, and at last even the great gruesome statue of the saint with bleeding heart. The statue was spirited away one night in April, leaving behind only a dust-free circle on the hall table to mark its passing. Pina, searching the house, unearthed the relics under a cloth in a corner of Flavio’s bedroom, between two blackened candles. At nights Maria-Grazia heard him in his room below hers, mumbling prayers. Soon he began to absent himself from the bar for long periods, and could be found following Father Ignazio about the church, hounding him with earnest questions.

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” said the priest, when Amedeo apologized. “Sant’Agata knows I’ve always liked your children, Amedeo—though I’m afraid I can’t teach Flavio anything very orthodox. I’ve forgotten most of it myself!” The priest set Flavio to work polishing the great brass crucifix behind the altar, a chore Father Ignazio had never relished. But Flavio applied himself with solemn devotion each morning, bending reverently over the tin of brass polish with the old shirt rag the priest had given him, pausing to look into the face of the metal Cristo on his cross and murmur private appeals.

  Every lunchtime, Maria-Grazia would shut up the bar and walk to the church to retrieve Flavio—otherwise, he would have forgotten to eat. During these walks he harangued her without pause on the miracles of the saint, beginning and ending midsentence, as though the words were merely an eruption of his own disordered thoughts: “…and that’s the thing about Sant’Agata, you see, the mystery, that no one knows who she was, perhaps a poor peasant girl, or a farmer�
�s daughter, and yet she saw visions, true visions…” He had joined the Committee of Sant’Agata, sitting primly on Saturday afternoons in the widows’ parlors with their dark wood and rose-scented handkerchiefs, discussing the candles to be ordered for the saint’s festival, or the new kneeling cushions to be sewn for the Madonna Chapel. Among the boys who had once been his friends, now fishermen and laborers and shopkeepers, Maria-Grazia knew that Flavio was a laughingstock. “Leaving his sister to run the bar while he prays to Sant’Agata,” she had heard, “shutting himself up in secret with those old women.” Flavio sat alone now at the table under the palm tree—fasting, he drank only a little lemon water, sucking his teeth.

  “It’s a guilty conscience,” someone muttered. “It’s the ghost of Pierino haunting him.”

  For Flavio was still blamed by many for the beating of the fisherman. In those first earthquake-racked days, old Pierino had died. Though in the end he had reached a decent age, he had never recovered his speech, never gone out again in his boat, and several people swore they had seen the old man since his passing, kneeling beside his headstone in the cemetery, trying to dig himself back into the grave.

  Now Flavio seemed to be retreating deeper and deeper inside himself, narrowing to a point. But sometimes, on their journeys home from the church, he would take hold absently of Maria-Grazia’s forearm as they walked, and she let herself believe that he was getting better. And yet he had begun to be preoccupied with escaping the island. “I’ll leave this place,” he told her once, clear-eyed. “I’ll go back to England. Even if some of them treated me like a dog, they treated me better there than I’m treated here, among my own people.”

  And Flavio, it emerged, had seen the ghost of Pierino, too. “He’s green—transparent,” he muttered. “He wants me gone. I’ll leave this place. I’ll take flight.” What he meant by this, he would not say. But when Pina heard his muttered pronouncements, she wept, believing that her son meant by it some spirit world, some heaven. “I’ll be bound by these shores no longer,” muttered Flavio cryptically, waxing the statue of Sant’Agata until it shone.

  —

  WHEN THE ISLAND SETTLED after that first tremor, a small miracle came to light.

  Il conte’s peasants, coaxed and bullied by Bepe, still tended the rocky southern field they had occupied two years before. Wheat had come up during the second year, the green blades scorched at the edges, starved of nutrition. This the peasants harvested, daringly keeping everything for themselves rather than delivering a quarter to il conte. A second crop had come up. Now it was time to thin it. As they marched up to the fields, no organetto now and fewer in number, glancing at il conte’s villa as they rounded the bend in the road, Bepe exhorted them from his elevated position on the back of his uncle’s donkey, trotting it back and forth along their ranks as though commanding an army. “March forth, comrades,” he urged. “The land is ours.”

  But the land, when they got to it, had shifted, altered. A great eruption had occurred at its center, and something was attempting to surface. The seedlings lay scattered, uprooted, already burned dry in the sun. Young Agato made the sign of the cross. “A warning!” he cried.

  “No,” said Bepe. “A natural phenomenon. We must investigate it further.”

  But this phenomenon, whatever it was, was not natural. Digging in the sandy earth, throwing aside rocks, the peasants brought to light, by slow degrees, a wall of stone. Not a wall, no (as they dug further): a kind of seat or enclosure. It curved in a semicircle. Its touch was cold. When they went running for mattocks and spades and dug deeper, they unearthed a second ledge, and another beneath it, narrowing toward the bottom of a bowl like the stripes on a shell. “Look here!” cried Agato, digging a short way off. “An altar.”

  The islanders drew back a little at this hint of heathenism and human sacrifice, but Bepe seized upon the corner Agato had unearthed and scraped bravely with his mattock. “It’s not an altar,” he announced. “It’s a stage. This is a theater, I’m sure of it. Greek, or Roman. I saw them on the mainland postcards when I visited my city cousin, little ones like this and great big ones the size of a football stadium.”

  Shrewdly, Mazzu said, “This might be worth something.”

  “Il conte doesn’t know anything about it,” observed Bepe, “and it’s our land by rights now.”

  The peasants stood around the ghost of the amphitheater, holding this knowledge before them like the image of the saint.

  —

  BEPE CAME FURTIVELY TO the bar that night, clutching his organetto. “I need to speak to signor il dottore,” he told Maria-Grazia. “Urgent business. Very important.”

  “Are you here to play?”

  “No, no,” cried Bepe. “This organetto is merely a cover. Fetch your father.”

  Maria-Grazia summoned her Papà. She heard Bepe muttering at him behind the curtain of the bar: “We must find an archaeologist to come and tell us how much it’s worth. This could be a good thing for the island, an important thing, only we need an educated man to explain it to us. It could bring wealth to Castellamare. Lire and lire.”

  “And will you be redistributing the wealth fairly?” Her father’s voice, a little teasingly. “Or will you be forming a vanguard party to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat first?”

  “Both, both,” said Bepe, in earnest. “But I need your help. You’re an educated man, signor il dottore—educated enough, anyway. You must know an archaeologist we can ask. Back in Firenze or Roma, or wherever it is you come from.”

  But Amedeo knew no archaeologist. Neither did Father Ignazio, whom Bepe cornered on his entry into the bar that night and ushered mysteriously behind the curtain. “I’ve been on this island as long as you have,” said the priest. “I don’t know anyone in the outside world any longer. I’ve become one of you, for my sins.”

  The one person on the island who knew an archaeologist, to everyone’s surprise, was Pina. “But we all know him,” she said. “Have you forgotten? Professor Vincio.”

  “Who?” Bepe was brusque, expecting some joke.

  “Oh, you were only a boy then, Bepe—you won’t remember. Professor Vincio, the archaeologist from Bologna. He was a prisoner of war here. He repaired the veranda of our bar.”

  “That idiota who put the beams on back to front?” said Bepe. “Signor Pierino had to fix it afterward, I remember.”

  “Professor Vincio was an important archaeologist. He worked in Cyprus before the war, digging up early cities. He told me once that he dug up a woman and her child, skeletons in gold jewelry, perfectly preserved. An awful, wondrous thing, digging up the past like that. A thing you should respect, young Bepe. Why, anything might come to light. I don’t know what’s become of him now.”

  “We’ll write to him,” counseled the priest. “Care of the University of Bologna. And see if he’s still living and whether, God and Sant’Agata willing, he can come and take a look at this ruin you’ve found. Say nothing about it to il conte, Bepe—not until we know more.”

  The priest wrote a letter that night, and Bepe delivered it to the mainland. The amphitheater was buried again with mattocks and hoes, covered over with tarpaulins. All that month, the islanders held their secret close, going about with a thrill of expectation in their hearts while the island thrummed beneath their feet.

  —

  NO ONE RECOGNIZED PROFESSOR VINCIO. He arrived at the untidy end of spring, with white hair and a distinguished umbrella and an assistant to carry his bags. The archaeologist chartered Rizzu’s donkey cart. But, as they climbed the hill, he bade Rizzu halt outside the walls of the town. Here he climbed down and stood for a long time before the former prison camp, which had returned to its old mess of scrub grass and thistle, haunted by lizards, bearing no trace of the past. At the House at the Edge of Night, he embraced both Pina and Amedeo with tears in his eyes.

  Shortly after the archaeologist’s arrival, il conte, who had somehow got wind of the appearance of an important city man in their mi
dst, interposed himself. Sweeping into the piazza in his motorcar, he greeted the professor with one raised hand as though they were old friends. “Signor Vincio, allow me to extend a welcome,” he called, from the car window. “I have a proposition for you.” The archaeologist must stay at the villa, he insisted, where things were more comfortable. And he would dine daily at il conte’s expense.

  Professor Vincio said that he had already been installed quite comfortably at the House at the Edge of Night.

  “Very well,” bristled il conte. “Then come for dinner.”

  “No,” said Professor Vincio. “Thank you. I remember my time on this island well, signor il conte.”

  Il conte, crushed and enraged, drew his head back into the motorcar and drove away.

  The following morning, at dawn, the peasants escorted Professor Vincio to the buried amphitheater. The elderly professor got down on his hands and knees and began sweeping up the dust with a fine brush. Occasionally, he paused to cut away a piece of grass or soil, or to point something out to his assistant. The assistant carried a wooden crate like that in which the islanders transported chickens. Out of the crate came strange objects: something like a pasta colander, a set of toothpicks, a scrubbing brush.

  Some of the islanders were indignant at this, suspecting ridicule. But Professor Vincio continued his scraping. “Is that all he’s going to do?” burst out the boy Agato at last, unable to hold his disappointment. When it became clear that it was, the islanders drifted away.

  Meanwhile, il conte had heard about the excavations. The next morning, when the little party from the House at the Edge of Night arrived at the site, escorting the archaeologist, il conte’s two land agents were waiting for them. Between them stood Andrea d’Isantu. “This land is private property,” he said. “No one’s to enter or leave it without my father’s permission.”

  “I certainly mean to,” said Professor Vincio, in that calm city way he had of speaking as everybody’s equal. “We’ve excavations to do.”