The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  “Face down this shame,” counseled il conte. “And deal with Concetta once she comes home.”

  But Concetta had other ideas. Now, kneeling beside Maria-Grazia with Sergio held prisoner by the scruff in one hand, Giuseppino squalling in the other, she said, “It’s this business with my father I want to talk to you about.”

  “Yes, cara. Tell me.”

  Always, Maria-Grazia had loved the girl. Now Concetta, embarrassed and anxious for once in her life, proceeded with a little clearing of the throat: “I need work if I’m to keep myself and my old Zia Onofria. But who’ll employ me after this disagreement with my father? People aren’t fools. They know he’s a great friend of il conte.”

  “Work?” said Maria-Grazia. “What about school?”

  Concetta straightened herself. “I left school last summer. I’ll be eighteen.”

  Eighteen. She had utterly missed the growing up of the child. Guilt burned at Maria-Grazia when she considered the beatings she had failed to notice, the odd marks she had always dismissed as belonging to the girl’s wild adventures among the scrub grass and prickly pears. “I’d like to work here in the bar,” said Concetta. “Couldn’t you employ me?”

  Now Maria-Grazia understood the matter. “Go on.”

  Concetta continued, all in a rush, “You need help—you’ve just said so yourself, you and Signor Robert—and I love the bar and I know how it works. I know how to make the coffee and the chocolate and do the accounts. Or I could take care of Sergio and Giuseppino. I’d be like Gesuina was, looking after you and your brothers when you were babies, except I’m not a hundred and twenty years old and blind like she was, God rest her soul.”

  Maria-Grazia knew it would be a comfort to have the girl about every day, as she often had been as a child.

  “Please, Maria-Grazia. Say yes. See how well I cleaned Sergio’s ass just now—”

  “That one’s Giuseppino.”

  “It doesn’t matter—I’ll learn which one’s which. Please say yes, Maria-Grazia.”

  “Yes,” said Maria-Grazia, and Robert said, “Of course, Concetta, you must work here. If Maria-Grazia agrees, you can begin at once.”

  The following Monday, in a new black apron commissioned especially from the tailor Pasqualina to fit Concetta’s small waist, in her one good dress pressed and sprinkled with lavender water, her cheeks gleaming with pride and a little anxiety, Concetta moved between the tables of the House at the Edge of Night for the first time in her official capacity as assistant to the bar. She heaved plates above her head with newfound grace, and listened to the tourists’ orders with respectfully folded hands. “A miracle,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Concetta tamed by you Espositos, when everyone else had given up hope.”

  Meanwhile, Arcangelo went about with a face like bad weather, knowing he was shamed in everybody’s eyes.

  —

  WITH CONCETTA IN THE HOUSE, things began to proceed more calmly. She learned to startle the boys with a cry of “Basta!” just like Gesuina, and occupied them for hours in wild games of her own devising, until they were so exhausted that they forgot to be enemies. Proudly, she pushed them about town in their matching baby carriages, which Robert had yoked together with a broom handle so as to be able to propel both at once while keeping the boys separated—for even the sight of the other boy sharing his baby carriage filled each child with rage. Meanwhile, the bar had never been better tended, for Concetta had grown up in and out of the place, and she could carry a tray of drinks in one hand, heave the bawling Sergio in the other, and still remember an order of twelve pastries for Maria-Grazia behind the counter. More important, she loved the House at the Edge of Night. Maria-Grazia, looking back, didn’t know how they had ever run the bar without her. Now, on every night on which she and Robert were able to sleep soundly, or retreat to their little room with the palm trees at the window and become again, for a few hours, the careless lovers they had been during the war, she offered the saint a silent prayer of thanks for the girl.

  Concetta’s father was seldom seen behind the counter of his shop any longer, leaving the running of it to his son Filippo. He spent his days in a vacant patch of earth beside the old Arab tonnara, where the young builder-fishermen ’Ncilino and Tonino had been employed to dig. “A new house,” speculated Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Why, the man’s so shamed by the gossip about his daughter that he’s decided to leave the town altogether.”

  “A second shop,” said others. For it was well known that Arcangelo’s business had done well since the arrival of the tourists, better even than the House at the Edge of Night.

  On clear nights that summer, the sound of sawing could be heard rising from the patch of earth by the harbor, as Tonino and ’Ncilino worked late, raising the beams.

  The day before Sant’Agata’s festival, workmen from the mainland arrived in a boat and unloaded crate after crate. These Arcangelo ushered inside the building, chasing away anyone who stopped to look in. The last object to arrive was a long wooden box shaped like a coffin. The foreign workmen could be heard drilling until the early hours. While the women of the island bent among the damp hedgerows to gather petals of bougainvillea and oleander, preparing their baskets for the rain of flowers, something ignited briefly and glowed purple in the darkness, an infernal, miraculous fire.

  By morning, it was clear what sort of work Arcangelo had been engaged in. A neon sign, the island’s first, beamed from the front of the new building, making the children and the elderly alike stop and gaze up, enthralled by its liquid fire. The building had a new red roof and a curlicued balcony. Its cement terrace had been swept clean and fitted with a dozen tables. Inside, refrigerators hummed and a wireless radio broadcast English voices; a new ice cream machine glimmered in the gloom like a reliquary. The neon sign, American-style, proclaimed the building’s title: “Arcangelo’s Beach Bar.”

  —

  MARIA-GRAZIA ONLY BECAME AWARE of this new development when, opening early before the Sant’Agata Mass, she found their own bar empty. Usually the islanders would queue on the terrace to take a glass of arancello or limonata before church, in honor of the saint’s day. But now, gone were the elderly scopa players, gone were the fishermen with their cigarettes behind their ears and the shopkeepers who usually hung about to read the morning newspapers. The bar breathed the quiet noise of the surf. Robert, carrying a baby on each hip, appeared at the curtain.

  “What’s happened?” he said. “Has somebody died?”

  “I don’t know, caro.”

  A little preoccupied, he leaned over to kiss the side of her hair. “You mustn’t worry,” she said. “I’m sure there’s some reason.”

  But he was still anxious. Handing her Giuseppino to nurse and setting Sergio down between the empty tables where he was now learning to stagger about, he kept her company a little while in the bar.

  Agata-the-fisherwoman and Bepe arrived half an hour later. “There’s something you’d better see,” said Agata. Grimly, she led the Espositos—Maria-Grazia, Robert with the baby carriage, Concetta, who had just arrived, Pina, and Amedeo—along the path through the prickly pears. From behind a cactus, Maria-Grazia made out Arcangelo’s neon sign and a crowd of people milling about on the concrete veranda; she heard the blare of music and the clink of glasses. Concetta burst into furious tears. “Damn my stronzo of a father—he’s trying to ruin the House at the Edge of Night!”

  Yet by evening, the House at the Edge of Night was once again occupied. Shamefacedly, the usual customers crept back by ones and twos, to take up their usual positions. The dancing on the veranda was only a little thinner than usual. “You should have seen the price Signor Arcangelo was charging for coffee,” muttered Signora Valeria. “It’s a wonder any of us were taken in.”

  But some had remained at the new beach bar. When Maria-Grazia and Robert walked out to the belvedere sometime near dawn, she made out figures dancing there, too, down by the black ocean, in the blaze of neon light.

  “The twent
y-eighth of June, 1955,” noted Amedeo in his red book that morning, feeling himself to be recording an omen, “opening of Arcangelo’s Beach Bar.”

  —

  THIS OPENING OF A RIVAL business was a challenge that the Espositos felt must be answered. “We must have an ice cream machine of our own,” said Amedeo. It was duly ordered, paid for with the stacks of foreign currency that now stuffed the cashbox of the House at the Edge of Night. For the archaeological remains still brought visitors. Visitors took possession of the veranda of the bar from morning until night: visitors with pale foreigners’ legs; visitors who lunged alarmingly at the children with the blinking eyes of their cameras; who sat out in the sun even at noon; who wore specially purchased summer clothes, indecently rucked-up beige shorts and white socks and great flopping hats, as though they were exploring Africa. These visitors, who came really for the archaeological excavations, might now prove to be a kind of salvation, for without them how would an island five miles long support two bars?

  A catalog of neon signs was brought from the mainland and pored over. “Everything he does, we must do,” said Amedeo. But Pina quietly disagreed. “This is the real bar, the old one,” she said. “People will come here all the same.”

  Maria-Grazia concurred with Pina, and no neon sign was purchased to adorn the front of the House at the Edge of Night. But from then on, whenever business was a little depleted, or archaeologists thin on the ground, or when some other misfortune struck the House at the Edge of Night, it was only a matter of minutes before someone would raise their eyes to heaven and fix the muttered blame on Signor Arcangelo. It became a familiar game between Maria-Grazia and Robert in those early years of their marriage. Lying awake at night, fretting over a troublesome tooth of Giuseppino’s, or a fever of Sergio’s, or a bad month’s figures in the accounts book, Maria-Grazia would murmur, provoking her husband to reluctant laughter, “It’s all the fault of that Arcangelo and his beach bar.”

  II

  Sergio and Giuseppino had been born in the very flourishing of the island’s prosperity. As they grew up, Maria-Grazia marveled at the life they inhabited. To her sons, the caves by the sea had never been anything other than an archaeological site with a little shed at the entrance, in which Salvatore Mazzu sat and sold tickets. They did not remember a time before Bepe’s ferry or a time when the island had possessed only a single motorcar, and they would not believe that the Greek amphitheater had once been a cobbly field, occupied only by goats (for il conte had dug it up and put his own fence around it and his own little ticket booth manned by Santino Arcangelo, determined to profit in his own way from the new popularity of Castellamare). To Sergio and Giuseppino, the House at the Edge of Night had always been a place where foreigners took tea on the veranda and snapped photographs. And to Maria-Grazia, too, the island seemed once again a place heady with possibility. It was Robert who had cured her of her restlessness, in the end. Robert to whom no happiness was greater than to plunge into the ocean with their sons on Sunday afternoons, to lie folded in the curve of her waist on hot nights, listening to the palm trees breathe beyond the window, to sit on the veranda after the day’s work was finished and, totaling the figures in the accounts book, lay before her all kinds of glittering speculations. His hopes were touchingly modest. “The boys might go to the mainland high school,” he told her on such nights, “and you might make this bar an air-conditioned place, with a television, better than Arcangelo’s.”

  For in those years of modernization, Castellamare had gained many foreign curiosities, including a television. The ferryman Bepe, who had earned so much money out of his new ferry, the bar’s elderly customers muttered disapprovingly, that he couldn’t think of anything sensible to spend it on, had purchased it in an electrical shop in Siracusa. He bore it across the ocean in a box wedged in with newspaper, as though it were some archaeological relic. Workmen from the mainland installed an aerial on the top of his blue house behind the church, and now the islanders gathered in Bepe’s mother’s old parlor with its velvet curtains, its sorrowful figurines of the saints, to watch black-and-white foreigners roll precariously from the top to the bottom of the screen and report the news. (“I thought they’d speak our dialect,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, disappointed. “At least some of them.”)

  On Bepe’s television, Sergio and Giuseppino, hunched between their parents’ knees, saw the state funeral of the American president Signor Kennedy. They were promised that when the foreigners who launched rockets into space, the russi and the americani, succeeded in walking on the moon, that would be broadcast, too. Maria-Grazia marveled that on the same island where she had picked up snails and ground chicory for tea, in the same place where Robert had been washed up, fevered, lacking penicillin, her sons would watch men catapulted into space. But seeing the outside world only through Bepe’s television and the pages of the newspapers, she struggled not to picture every other part of the world except Castellamare in black-and-white.

  The bar now had the latest ice cream machine and refrigerators that hummed coolly and gathered condensation. Sometimes the tourists would open the cabinets and stand before them in relief a while, seeking the cold of their native north. Meanwhile, Bepe replaced his little motorboat with a great flat-bottomed modern ferry, the Santa Maria del Mare, capable of carrying five cars.

  The islanders’ hopes swelled like heat mirages—became immoderate and soaring. “Perhaps we’ll have nightclubs, like in Paris,” speculated the young fishermen in the corner of the House at the Edge of Night. “A whole row of bars, not just two old-fashioned ones full of domino players. A proper store with new clothes from Milano.” For it was hard to be content any longer with the usual clothes, ordered in brown paper from the mainland or bought from the widow Valeria’s hardware store, where the same faded underpants and socks and funeral trousers had been known to hang in the window for decades at a time.

  What the island got, eventually, was a savings bank.

  No one could remember there ever having been a bank on Castellamare. Though the Arcangelo family had been known to lend their neighbors the money to repair a roof or buy a fishing net, though the ancestors of Pierino had once run a kind of racket whereby they lent ships and nets to fishermen whose boats had gone down, taking half of the fish in return and none of the risk, though the cousins of the Mazzu family, now deceased, had hired out suits for funerals at ten lire an hour, profiting from the protracted wakes of the nineteenth century to make the values of the suits back twenty times over—though the island had known all these manifestations of capitalism in its past, a bank was a very different matter. “There’s no need for all that,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Haven’t we always managed?” For always, the islanders had kept the takings from their businesses in metal cashboxes, seldom padlocked, and under the mattresses of their beds. It was as common to be paid in tuna or in oil as it was to receive actual money, and this system had always kept the island’s population housed and fed. (“Unlike those americani during their Depression,” observed Agata-the-fisherwoman darkly.) But now there was to be a bank, a building with gleaming glass and gold door handles, fashioned from the remains of Gesuina’s house in the piazza, facing the House at the Edge of Night a little challengingly across the expanse of dust and sun.

  It had all started with the death of il conte. Amedeo’s old enemy had died quietly in the spring of 1964, without ceremony, behind the wheel of his ancient motorcar. It took eight men and three donkeys to haul the car out of the ditch into which it had plunged after his death, but the body of il conte was intact, without a scar. He seemed, to all appearances, to have merely fallen asleep at the wheel.

  He was buried with honor, surrounded by white-gloved pallbearers from the mainland, other former duces and contes from that passing world into which he had been born. His old doctor friend read the eulogy. Carmela, tearless, in her ancient funeral veil, stood alone at the head of the grave.

  Then, too late for the funeral, Andrea d’Isantu came hom
e. Maria-Grazia did not see him that first day, for he arrived after nightfall and shut himself away in the villa with his mother. But the customers in the bar reported that he now wore a glossy suit and glasses without rims, like a foreigner. Il conte’s last elderly peasants had presented to him at the quay the signet ring belonging to his father, but there had been some disagreement, some shouting about the ghost of Pierino. Carmela had clung on her son’s arm. The estate—what was left of it—would pass to him now. Carmela rejoiced so openly at the church the next morning for the return of her son—“my boy…my handsome boy…praise be to Sant’Agata and all the saints”—that it was embarrassing to hear her, said the widows of the Sant’Agata Committee, so soon after her husband’s death.

  “He means to stay,” muttered the builder Tonino to the crowd at the bar. “He’s paid me and ’Ncilino to fix up half his empty houses. We’ve so much money now we’re going to replace our toolboxes and buy a new set of ladders.”

  Maria-Grazia could not have said why this made her uneasy or why, when Robert asked, “What’s all this talk about il conte’s son coming home?” she did not know how to reply. Her husband knew that the count’s boy had once loved her. It did not trouble him. Why, then, did she fear Andrea’s return?

  Soon the builders working on Andrea’s houses were obliged to hire half the out-of-work laborers on the island. And by the end of the summer Tonino and ’Ncilino could buy not just the toolboxes and the ladders but the van to keep them in and three acres of land on which to park it. For il conte’s son had returned to the island a rich man, and with grand plans for its future.

  The bank, with its whitewashed windows and a sun-yellow and ocean-blue sign shrouded in a sheet, was treated with suspicious interest. The day before the Sant’Agata festival, while nobody yet knew what the new building was, Andrea d’Isantu announced a grand opening. Frightened to stand before the islanders (or so the elderly scopa players claimed), he sent his mother instead to do the honors. Carmela stood at the door before the islanders, in her faded aubergine suit, and cut in half a pale blue ribbon. The land agent Santino and his father Arcangelo rushed forward to drag down the dust sheet from the sign and expose its lettering: “Castellamare Savings and Loan Company.” “You’ve all begun to profit from the interest of tourists in our beloved island,” announced Carmela, mimicking il conte’s strident style of oratory. “Now you’ll have a safe place to invest your new riches, and if you want to replace your old houses with new ones, well, come to us and we’ll see about lending you the money for that, too.”