The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  —

  AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, a meeting was called in the town hall to present the findings of the archaeological team. The hall was as crowded as the church during the Sant’Agata Mass, for everyone wanted to hear what was to be said about the curse of weeping. Though no one had heard the weeping in their lifetime, all knew of someone—an aunt’s aunt or a cousin’s cousin—who had heard it, who had solemnly sworn to the truth of its existence, who had suffered madness or disturbed sleep because of it. Perhaps these foreigners could illuminate the mystery.

  Amedeo sat with his red notebook open before him, ready to record the story. Rizzu occupied, eagerly, the first seat of the front row. The meeting had to be delayed by an hour because more people kept arriving: the fishermen in their tweed trousers and oily white vests, the shopkeepers in white aprons, the peasants, with faces set like death masks from the dust of the fields. Bepe had suspended his ferry service especially to attend, but was still twenty-five minutes late. Agata-the-fisherwoman followed him, still in her greasy slacks and man’s borsalino. Still more people kept coming. The girl Concetta, who had got away from her father and mother, ran, straggle haired, along the rows of benches to squeeze herself in beside Maria-Grazia. Two widows of the Sant’Agata Committee, who had claimed to be scandalized by the excavations and all this talk of the curse of weeping, attempted nevertheless to slip in unobserved. The members of the town council arrived together, self-important, led by Arcangelo. Still the islanders kept coming, until there were no more benches left and some shuffling had to take place, some ejecting of the young to make space for the old, some jostling for position.

  This disregard for time and appointment troubled the northerners. Eventually, the doors were shut and a woman archaeologist stood up to speak, sweating, a German with a frizz of gray hair and bare freckled arms. She spoke; Professor Vincio translated.

  “The caves by the sea,” the islanders were told, “are catacombs, a necropolis of over a hundred tombs. The smallest were for families, with between two and seven bodies in each. The three larger ones were originally…how shall I put it?…rock-cut dwellings, we believe, later also used to house human remains. The earliest date from prehistoric times, the larger ones to the time of the Byzantine Empire. There are also a small number of natural caves, but the majority of the site is a man-made necropolis. And it’s a great discovery, an important discovery,” Professor Vincio added, “just as I first suspected. Apart from the site at Pantalica, this is the only example of such a necropolis that we know of in the Mediterranean. We’ve found several objects that will be displayed in important museums in Milano and Roma, which we hope will attract other scholars—and visitors to your island, too, of course.”

  Here the German archaeologist gave a gracious little nod. Her assistant, gloved, came forward and held up first a rusted knife, then a pin so oxidized it was like some barnacled thing from the bottom of the sea, and a few fragments of glass. The islanders beheld them as though they were the relics of the saint. At last, Bepe said, “How many visitors will come?” and at the same time Rizzu spoke: “But what about the curse of weeping?”

  “To answer the first question,” said Professor Vincio, “we can’t yet say how important the site is. But once we present our second, more detailed, paper at a conference in Heidelberg in November, I expect at least a year of further excavation, with a larger team.”

  Another voice echoed Rizzu’s, more strident—Agata-the-fisherwoman: “What about the curse of weeping?”

  The professor glanced at the German archaeologist, but with a little nod of her gray frizz she deferred back to him. The professor got to his feet and wetted his lips with a methodical circle of the tongue. “We believe we’ve satisfactorily solved that mystery,” he said. “The rock out of which the caves are formed is permeable, porous.” The faces turned up to him remained respectfully blank. In his formal Italian, the professor groped for words that would make sense to these islanders, for he spoke no dialect except his own Bolognese. “Water runs through it,” he continued. “Air passes through. When I first entered the caves, I felt a draft. That’s an odd thing, a draft underground.”

  Now, at last, a collective murmur of recognition. Yes, everyone who had entered the caves had felt the strange draft, and that word was the same in their language.

  “Being so close to the sea, the rock in that region of the island was already eroded before the tombs were built,” said Professor Vincio. “Worn away. Which is the reason for the natural part of the necropolis. The Byzantine islanders must have excavated the man-made chambers. But the rock has worn away further in the many centuries since, so that now there are tunnels and fissures connecting the burial chambers. Countless tiny openings. You’ll notice by the fact that even if you go deep into the caves, you can feel drafts, breathe fresh air. Isn’t that right?”

  Here, some nodded. But the islanders had always assumed this phenomenon was part of the caves’ natural air of miracle. “When the wind blows at a certain angle,” continued the professor, “a curious phenomenon occurs. The wind is funneled through these narrow chambers and it causes an odd howling sound. We’ve heard it, too, on several occasions. Possibly the phenomenon was already known to the prehistoric islanders, and that was the reason they chose the site for their burials. A fitting place for mourning.”

  “But what about the houses?” said someone else. “All the rock of the island makes that weeping sound, when you dig it up and build with it. Everyone knows that.”

  But here, doubt interposed itself. A couple of the islanders expressed murmurs of dissent. “I don’t know,” spoke up Mazzu. “We extended the farm in ’38, and I don’t remember any sound of weeping then from any of the rock we used.”

  “What about signor il dottore’s house?” spoke up Agata-the-fisherwoman. “That house carried on the weeping long after everyone else’s. Who’s heard it? There must be someone here?”

  But no one spoke up. Some had been told of the sound of weeping emanating from the House at the Edge of Night in times of trouble, others thought they had faintly heard it, on stormy nights leaving the old bar when it had belonged to Rizzu’s brother, but no one could solemnly attest to having heard the weeping stones.

  “There’s one other unusual fact about the caves,” said Professor Vincio. “We believe that the islanders buried there died not one by one over the years but all at once, within a matter of months or years, not centuries. The burials seem to be oddly uniform, and the bodies were all put in at once—at least, there’s no sign of any reopening of the chambers to admit more bodies as one would expect in such a necropolis. The one at Pantalica, say. In the larger caves, from the position of the bodies that haven’t been disturbed, we can see that they’ve been put in quickly all at once, suggesting some crisis on the island, probably a plague. Perhaps some tragedy took place here. It’s natural that the islanders would start to believe after that that their island was a sad place, a melancholy place, even cursed. That’s probably the origin of the tale.”

  The islanders looked helplessly to il dottore, that great gatherer of folktales, but found him nodding in agreement with everything the professor had said.

  In the days after the report of the archaeologists’ findings, bitter disagreement seethed on Castellamare. To those who had always believed in the curse of weeping, the archaeologists’ flat, unmythical explanation was a personal offense. “There’s more to it than they say,” Rizzu insisted. “There’s more to it. I can’t deny I’m disappointed. Catacombs. Chambers. What kind of talk is that? The curse of weeping isn’t just some trick of the wind. It isn’t just a matter of air funneled through holes, like a great big fart!”

  “What difference does it make?” said Concetta from behind the counter of the bar, spooning hot chocolate into cups beside Maria-Grazia. “I’ve never been frightened of those silly caves, and if they can bring visitors here to stare at old bits of glass and rusty pins and pay us for it, then I for one am glad there’s no curse of
weeping anymore.” For already the bar was making good money from the feeding of archaeologists and the entertaining of visitors—enough to make the down payment on an ice cream machine very soon. And, secretly, Maria-Grazia still saved a few lire a week in the empty bottle behind her bed.

  Bepe inclined to the same view as Concetta. “I’m glad, too,” he said. “A curse of weeping’s no good for tourism, is it? It’s just as well there’s none anymore.”

  “There is a curse of weeping,” said Rizzu ferociously. “There is a curse of weeping. Just because they say there isn’t, doesn’t mean anything—those foreigners with their big Italian words and their toothpicks and scrubbing brushes!”

  “It’s still a beautiful story,” said Amedeo, “whether or not it’s strictly speaking true.” Which made Rizzu huff crossly and spill his coffee.

  Indeed, though Signor Rizzu, already past ninety, was to live in perfect health for another four or five years, he never overcame his disappointment. He remained personally offended to the very last by the solving of the mystery of the caves.

  V

  That summer of the archaeologists, Flavio became more haunted, more ghost-riven, more determined than ever to leave. “I’ll be bound by these shores no longer,” he muttered as he went about his daily work, and Pina wept to hear him speak so, for all the world sounding as though he had resolved to die. Now Maria-Grazia found herself fierce with indignation at the injustices that had been done to her brother.

  On the morning after the meeting in the town hall, he had come home wild-eyed and shuddering, with prickly pear buds stuck all over him like the statue of a martyr. He would not say who had flung them, or who it was who gave him a black eye the following day, or ripped the seat of his trousers open with a fishhook on the road up from the sea the day after. But Maria-Grazia, bathing his face, soothing his wounded skin with calamine lotion, became as fierce as her mother, Pina. “Someone’s trying to drive him from this island,” she said. “Someone’s trying to drive him mad. I mean to find out who.”

  For the ghost of Pierino had been seen again since the festival, digging in the earth with its green translucent hands.

  The day after the meeting in the town hall, the bar remained closed. When Flavio woke up, at a quarter to five in the afternoon, Maria-Grazia summoned him to the kitchen. Dismissing the others—for her mother was too apt to weep when it came to matters of Flavio’s sickness, her father to shuffle and mumble—she sat her brother before her at the great table and commanded him to tell her the truth about the beating of Pierino.

  Flavio sat with both elbows on the table, his head suspended between his hands, and a great shadow came over him. Undeterred, Maria-Grazia shook the melanzane in their colander, making them sweat, and waited for his story to emerge in its own time. The evening breathed its coolness in at the window. On the Terazzus’ farm, the German shepherd barked once, twice, three times. “I never did anything,” said Flavio at last. “Mamma and Papà think I’m mad. I’m not. I’ve seen him, too, the green ghost. I saw him down at the caves by the sea, walking with lobsters in a trap, covered in green motorboat oil. Even he thinks I did it. But I never did anything.”

  “Tell me, caro,” said Maria-Grazia.

  Flavio brooded for several minutes, gazing into the depths of the tiles between his feet. Then he said, “I was sent home early from the Balilla meeting that night. You remember. I had that cough.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “We were supposed to go on a special night exercise. We weren’t to tell anybody about it. Then Professor Calleja said I wasn’t to take part in the night exercise after all. So I left, in a bad mood because I wasn’t to be included. I came home the long way, by the prickly pears. You know the goat path, through the scrub grass—”

  “Sì, sì.”

  “That’s all I have to tell you. Professor Calleja dismissed me at half past nine; I came home; I met no one. Next thing, they were accusing me of beating Pierino, saying I’d been dismissed at nine o’clock and had the time to go and get a horsewhip and follow Pierino home and beat him. All of which was lies.”

  Maria-Grazia abandoned the aubergines. Rubbing the salt from her hands, she gripped Flavio by both shoulders. “So tell the truth,” she said. “Tell the island. You had no part in it—you must tell everyone so.”

  “Who would believe me, in a town as full as this one of spies and gossips? No, there’s no point telling. They’ve all made up their minds about me.”

  Flavio gave a great gravelly cough, which brought something up from deep in his chest that he spat, precisely, out the kitchen window.

  Maria-Grazia decided to pay a visit to Arcangelo.

  The grocer’s was a little cavern off the main street, cool and wood smelling, whose varnished shelves and counters had not been altered since the nineteenth century. Maria-Grazia stood before the bulk of Signor Arcangelo and moved her eyes over the boxed pasta and tinned vegetables and mainland wine in bottles, the tins of anchovies and the great legs of dusty prosciutto that hung like clubs about his head, the cheeses that sweated upon the counter, each enthroned upon its square of greased paper. At last, summoning her courage, she said, “Signor Arcangelo, what do you know about the beating of Pierino?”

  Then the grocer, incoherent with rage, rose up like a sea monster from behind the counter and drove her from his shop. “I’ve nothing to say about it to you Espositos!” he roared, as she fled down the street. “You’re lucky I don’t take off my belt and beat you, puttana troia!”

  With Professor Calleja she had no more luck, for as soon as she approached the old schoolmaster, where he sat on a wooden chair before his house, he retreated into the dark and banged all his shutters closed.

  Meanwhile, the customers in the bar had heard what she was up to, and were indignant. “What does the girl mean, dragging up that Fascist past?” asked the elderly scopa players. “Pierino’s dead, and these things had better be left to rest,” coaxed the fishermen who had once been his comrades. And some of the customers were so incensed at what the widow Valeria called “that Esposito girl’s poking and prying” that they staged a temporary boycott of the place. Only the ferryman Bepe seemed to agree with her. “Someone’s got to bring it to light,” he muttered over the counter. “If you don’t manage it, Signorina Maria-Grazia, I’ll do it myself. He was my friend, and someone killed him, and it’s time the truth came out and the guilty were punished. Why else is his ghost hanging about? I agree with you.”

  —

  THE FIRST PERSON TO break silence was the girl Santa Maria, Pierino’s youngest daughter. Now twenty-eight and a widow, she beckoned Maria-Grazia from behind her apron, terrified, one Sunday morning after Mass. “I hear you’ve been going around asking about what happened to my Papà,” she murmured, drawing Maria-Grazia up the steps of her house, shepherding her between the pots of overgrown basil. “I’ve something to tell you—a little at least. Perhaps it’ll help—who knows?”

  In the parlor, much faded, where the widows had once prayed for Maria-Grazia’s soul, the old fisherman’s chair still stood in a corner, the velvet worn bare in the heart shape of his behind—for he had never left it, besides when he slept, except on the particular Tuesday morning on which he had decided at last to die. Santa Maria sent her mother Agata-the-baker’s-daughter downstairs for a stale cassata cake, which the old woman served to Maria-Grazia with solemnity. The house was empty now. The misfortune of Pierino had driven his elder children away in the years after the war, to America and to England, Switzerland, and Germany, until Santa Maria was the only one who remained—and now her husband was gone, too, lost at sea, leaving the family childless altogether. The house no longer billowed with the washed linen of the fisherman’s great family, and the widows of the Sant’Agata Committee, finding Agata’s parlor too gloomy even for their somber tastes, had taken their meetings elsewhere. Pina visited occasionally, with gifts from the bar, for Pierino had been a relative. Otherwise, the cool of the parlor was undisturbed.


  “Signorina Esposito, I remember that night of my Papà’s injury very well,” said Santa Maria.

  At this direct mention of her poor husband’s beating, Agata-the-baker’s-daughter was overcome, and buried her face in her skirt. “Go downstairs, Mamma,” said Santa Maria. “I’ve important things to discuss with Signorina Esposito.”

  The old woman obeyed. Santa Maria leaned forward and said in a whisper, “I don’t believe it was your brother at all.”

  Relief made Maria-Grazia giddy. “Then you don’t—you don’t think Flavio is guilty—”

  “I’m sure he isn’t.”

  Maria-Grazia attempted to swallow the cassata, but found it cleaved to the dry roof of her mouth. “Go on,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

  “We were in the kitchen that night,” said Santa Maria, “my mother and I—we were plucking a chicken, salting the melanzane for the next day while we waited for Papà to come home. Also my eldest brother Marco, who’d been out fishing with him. Marco said Papà would be home late. They’d taken a big tuna—Papà was down at the tonnara, celebrating, as he always used to. Though he was no drunkard,” she added. “God rest his soul.”

  Again, Maria-Grazia tried to swallow but found herself choked.

  “Anyway,” continued Santa Maria, “we heard an odd scrabbling at the door. It was late—nine or ten—and my mother thought the noise was stray dogs making trouble. She went upstairs to fetch the carpet beater. She was always afraid they’d bring the rabies after my Zio Nunziato on the mainland got bit and died in ’09. But it wasn’t stray dogs—it was poor Papà, struggling to get up, scrabbling about the walls. We opened the door and in he fell. They’d beaten his chest with something. I don’t know—a stick, a belt. And we heard them fleeing—big footsteps, at least one of them a grown man.”