“The tourists don’t like to pay less than they expect. You’ve seen them yourself—the ones you get on your veranda, the archaeological ones who come to see the caves. You’ve seen the tips they give you—paying thirty lire for a coffee and leaving you eighty on top of that. You charge less than they expect, they think you’re giving them inferior coffee. Or else that you’re living in poverty, like some goatherder from before the war, and either way it makes them uncomfortable, Mariuzza.”
“We couldn’t charge two different prices,” Maria-Grazia said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
Arcangelo with his two price lists did a steady trade.
III
It was true, as Amedeo had judged, that Robert possessed the patience of Sant’Agata. This became evident in the early years of the boys’ growing up. For Robert, who had lived three years in a military prison, who had waited five to return to the island, and another four to be Maria-Grazia’s husband, evidently had something steely in him that could not be broken by a little childhood bickering. When his sons fought, he would listen in calm to each outpouring of discontent, arbitrate and mete out punishment, and remain composed throughout, as unbending as the schoolmistress Pina Vella had been before the disputes of her pupils. After such tiresome afternoons, he still had the capacity to seize his wife in an embrace behind the counter, or hum island songs as he went about straightening the tables, while Maria-Grazia felt herself worn thin just by listening to them.
Perhaps Robert’s patience was the difficulty. Perhaps if he had been less tolerant of the boys’ warring, perhaps if it had made him more miserable, they might have behaved better. But then again, they might have been much worse.
Meanwhile, Amedeo found himself seized by a kind of fever at the way his grandsons goaded each other, having forgotten the cruel battles that had once been waged between his own three boys in the courtyard and corridors of the House at the Edge of Night. He loved Sergio and Giuseppino more fiercely than he had loved any of his own children, except perhaps Maria-Grazia, and yet they had a far greater capacity to drive him to exasperation.
By four years old, Sergio could often be found puzzling over the pages of his grandfather’s book of stories. His brother, still only three, had begun to decipher the words. To make them equal, Amedeo read the stories aloud to both of them on the veranda of the bar, plying them with ice cream and tales in equal measure. Sergio listened, his eyes on the horizon, spooning ice cream thoughtfully into his mouth and—occasionally—down his front. Giuseppino, meanwhile, swung his legs against the chair, refusing to sit still. He swung and swung until he kicked his brother and the storytelling dissolved in yells of rage. Yet when Amedeo questioned Giuseppino about the stories afterward, he would remember every one and could recount them at length: “And that was the one about the parrot—and he flew in at the window—and he told the girl about ten white horses with ten black-armored riders who were riding off to war—”
“That Giuseppino’s an intelligent boy,” said Amedeo.
“They both are,” said Maria-Grazia fiercely. “Both of them just the same.” Then he saw that he had hurt her maternal feelings, and attempted to change direction: “Sì, sì. Of course, both of my grandsons are intelligent. I didn’t mean that.”
But wasn’t this part of the problem, this treating them both exactly alike? For the two boys seemed oddly separate at times, as though they were brothers by accident rather than blood.
From the time they started school, Sergio had been praised as a great scholar, and it was true that he achieved the higher marks. Amedeo knew this because he had scrupulously recorded every victory and milestone of each boy’s life from the beginning: “Sergio now 65 cm in length,” he would write in his red notebook, with satisfaction, marking the date, or “Giuseppino first solid food: a pea and a spoon of mashed carciofo.” Then later, when school began: “Sergio 7 in arithmetic test (addition and subtraction)”; “Sergio appointed class pencil monitor 1961–62”; “Giuseppino awarded sports day running prize.” In all their endeavors except those of a sporting kind, Sergio emerged the victor. But it was Giuseppino, a formidable athlete like his father, who gave the impression of intelligence, who seemed to take everything in from behind eyes languidly half-closed, as though, if he went to the trouble, he could outstrip them all.
—
WHEN THE BOYS MADE their First Communion, Amedeo presented them—half-jokingly, half in earnest—with a children’s picture book which retold the Sicilian story of The Two Brothers, ordered from the bookstore in Siracusa and wrapped in red paper.
Sergio and Giuseppino loved the tale, as Amedeo had known they would. True, they dwelt more upon the parts about the sea serpent and the witch than on the miraculous reconciliation, which was the part with which Amedeo had hoped to capture their attention and instruct them on the futility of their tiresome quarreling. But he believed that this understanding would come. “The hero of the story is the younger brother,” maintained Giuseppino. “He was the one who showed mercy to the fish and he was the one who saved the day.” And, “No!” cried Sergio. “Wasn’t it the older brother who won the princess in the first place?”
When each boy had listened to his grandfather reading the story, an urge came on him to possess the book exclusively. They fought over it, tugged it, and eventually tore the pages clean in two. Too late, Amedeo was sorry that he had given them only one copy to share. He ordered two matching replacements, but the damage had been done, and now both boys wanted the original, the one with their grandfather’s looped schoolroom handwriting inside the cover: “To Sergio and Giuseppino on the occasion of your First Communion, with love, Grandfather Amedeo.”
This incident of the book was only one example of the way that, somehow, they all managed to get it wrong again and again, this matter of raising the two boys.
And yet, some of the time—mostly under the influence of their father—the boys were calm, and Amedeo wondered what he was getting so agitated about. Pina was inclined to agree. “What’s a little childhood fighting?” she said. “I trust Mariuzza and Robert to manage them right.”
Like the villagers in the story, the islanders of Castellamare struggled to tell Sergio and Giuseppino apart. Despite Sergio’s long face and Giuseppino’s small red features and constantly searching eyes, the boys slept and woke at the same times, walked with the same gait, twisted the fronts of their hair with the same motion when they were reading, and quite separately decided to study at the same university in London, one or the other of them having seen its picture in Pina’s encyclopedia as a small child and folded down the corner of the page. On Sunday afternoons, plunging into the sea at Robert’s heels, glancing back to check that they were observed by their adoring mother and their Zia Concetta, they occasionally consented to play together and would remain immersed in intense, private games for hours at a time. Giuseppino, who roundly humiliated his brother every school sports day, who was the best football player and the fastest runner, had only one fear, embarrassing enough on an island of this size: the ocean. He would not stray out of his depth. Sergio, once, was observed taking his brother’s hand and leading him out, and for days afterward Amedeo and Pina discussed it, as though it were the sign of some great change in the boys’ comportment toward each other.
But both children disliked the island, to Amedeo’s dismay. It was as though they had been born out of place—perhaps their English father’s fault, he thought privately, though he would never hear a word openly said against Signor Robert. For really Robert was a kind of angel, the son who had come to them out of the sea when no other son was left, the only husband he could ever have pictured being the equal of his Mariuzza. But it must have originated somewhere, this dissatisfaction, brooded Amedeo, forgetting the restlessness that had driven him to seek his own life here on the island, and that had possessed his own teenage sons.
These two grandsons were forever complaining, this Sergio and Giuseppino! The bar was too stuffy for them in summer; the house too
drafty in winter; they railed at the lack of books and the absence of a cinema and the endless, relentless sea. Besides, both boys were sensitive enough to be troubled by the gossip of the town, the tireless exchange of rumors at every shop counter and street corner, rumors that very often concerned the Espositos. For instance, people claimed that their grandfather had been involved in some scandal between two women, years ago, that their father’s role in the war had been less than honorable, that Uncle Flavio had gone mad and run about the island naked, wearing nothing but his war medal. These rumors, which were really only the ordinary currency of gossip that had been circulating for half a century, depressed Sergio and infuriated Giuseppino; both were overcome by a great impatience to be gone from the place. As they grew older, Giuseppino began to talk only in formal Italian and Sergio only in English—“as if,” lamented Amedeo, “the dialect of this island wasn’t good enough for either of them.”
“These are different times,” soothed Pina. “They’ve seen motorcars and tourists from England. They’ve seen moving pictures of men from America flying into space. It’s natural that they want to be part of the rest of the world. You mustn’t go taking it so hard, amore.”
But how could he take it anything but hard, when he had watched his sons depart one by one from the island, never to return? In Amedeo’s mind, a plan began to form. “Supposing I instructed them in how to run the bar?” he proposed. “Like I did with our own boys? And put them in charge of it?”
“They’d hate it,” said Pina. “And besides, they want to see the world outside, these boys, and we’d do better to let them than to fight it and drive them away for good.”
Of course, as in all things, Pina was correct.
Nearly immobile now on account of her swollen feet, she sat on the veranda each day and read and reread the books she had loved as a schoolmistress: Shakespeare and Dante and Pirandello. Also new volumes that they could afford now to order from the mainland: Il Gattopardo and Danilo Dolci’s work on poverty in Palermo, which made her suck her teeth, glad to belong to a smaller, kinder place. Though her feet pained her too much to walk about, she traveled great miles in her reading as Amedeo once had in his recording of tales. And in all disputes between Sergio and Giuseppino she had the capacity to reduce each rebellious boy to a meek infant with her schoolmistress’s stern gaze. Things might have gone much worse in their infancy if it hadn’t been for their healthy respect for the fierce judgments of Grandmother Pina.
—
NEVERTHELESS, BY THE BOYS’ eleventh year, Amedeo had begun to fear that there really was some great ill erupting between them.
It came to light, as all things seemed to, during the Sant’Agata festival in June. But the trouble had really begun that February. Just after Sergio’s birthday, the boys had seen snow for the first time. When they woke, it lay dustily on the piazza. All was disorder beyond the doors of the House at the Edge of Night: The teenagers were waging violent war in the streets, the elderly customers refused to step out even into their courtyards, and six of the island’s motorcars had rolled down the slopes and crashed into the houses at the bottom. Also, Arcangelo’s Beach Bar had been flooded out by the winter storm, a victory for which the adults of the House at the Edge of Night refused to congratulate themselves.
The snow made the air odorless, and as sharp as glass splinters. His grandsons, Amedeo could tell, were enchanted. As the sun entered the courtyard the leaves of the oleander dripped a little, like the leaves of some alpine village. In the newspapers, which Robert brought in from the step in a snow-damp bundle to show his sons, they discovered photographs of English houses with snow piled on top like slices of ricotta, cars buried on the roads so that only their shiny roofs were visible. “Why couldn’t I have been born there?” cried Sergio. “Instead of only a stupid English passport, which I never get to use! Why can’t you take me there to see the snow?”
As Maria-Grazia poured the coffee for breakfast, Amedeo, wounded at Sergio’s words, sought feverishly in his red book for tales of snow belonging to their own island. But the boys weren’t interested. They kept jumping up at the window, jostling for space, and left their breakfast uneaten. Robert raided the disused pantry where they kept their winter coats, and came struggling out with his arms full of old knitted caps and gloves and furs from Pina and Amedeo’s youth, into which he proceeded to stuff the two boys before setting them loose into the snow. “Play together nicely,” called Maria-Grazia after them, with an optimism Amedeo found admirable, given their record so far.
Sure enough, after little more than half an hour, Giuseppino trailed in sobbing, flinging off his gloves and scarf in a passion. Sergio—fuming in his wake—followed with a bloody nose. The boys, it emerged, had fought over a bucket of snow.
“He took it all!” sobbed Giuseppino. “He went out into the courtyard and took all the snow before I could get any!”
“But you only wanted it for snowballs!” raged Sergio. “And I was going to make a snow statue, and I’d gathered it all up, from the steps and the tiles and the leaves of the oleander, and you came and snatched the bucket and made it fall in the dirt!”
“Where’s the snow now?” demanded Robert, getting to his feet.
“Go-o-one!” roared Sergio in a passion.
Giuseppino, kicking the baseboard, muttered, “There’s no need to be such a baby about it.”
As usual—Amedeo judged privately—Giuseppino was the unhappier, Sergio the most wronged party. Limping outside, leading each of the boys by one ear (something Robert would never consent to do, not even when provoked), Pina found from the scene of the crime that they had fought in the pile of spoiled snow, rolling over and over, until there was nothing left. Pina attempted valiantly to make a lesson of the situation. “You see,” she said. “You fight over something, and in the end no one gets it.”
“I hate him,” hissed Sergio, through his punched nose. “I hate him. I want to kill him.”
All that morning (the school furnace had broken, and lessons were canceled), Amedeo roamed the town in search of more snow for the disconsolate boys, who had been confined sulkily each to his own bedroom. But the snow was gone or else spoiled, the town disgorging its remains soggily from every roof and branch. By afternoon Giuseppino seemed to have forgotten the argument. But Amedeo observed that something had altered in Sergio. All that spring, rage against his brother boiled and seethed in him, threatening to explode. They fought over everything that season: their marks at school, their places at the table, the games of football in the piazza. Behind it all, he feared, was some graver, deeper ill.
—
IT WASN’T THAT SERGIO hated his brother—not really—just that there didn’t seem to be space for the two of them in a place as narrow as the House at the Edge of Night, and that when they tried to settle matters between them everybody seemed to lament over it, as though there were some terrible omen in their fighting. It had been that way ever since he could remember, and none of his relatives seemed to understand it. It was clear from what everybody said that the natural destiny of the two of them was to become, like every other set of siblings on the island who stood to inherit a business, the joint proprietors of the House at the Edge of Night. Sergio loved the bar, but if he were forced to share it with his brother for all eternity he felt he would go as mad as his Zio Flavio and run about the island in his nightshirt, too.
That year, the day before Sant’Agata, the scirocco came. A wind from North Africa with a voice full of gravel, it sifted red dust over the town and made everybody’s eyelids prickly and everybody’s tongue dry and sour. It huffed on the back of the neck like bad breath and turned even climbing the stairs into an ordeal. In the bar, the ceiling fan was jammed with dust, and sweat ran down the refrigerator doors and condensed on the gleaming levers of the new coffee machine. The boys, irritable and niggling, were sent out of the house and down to the sea so that the adults could finish their preparations in peace. Even their father, their usual ally, was immersed
in making an inventory of the stock in the back room and sent them away.
On their bicycles, bought by their mother out of the cashbox last summer in matching red—as though they were twins, fumed Sergio privately!—they dropped down the switchbacking road to the bay. The wind huffed in their faces at each bend but provided no relief.
Even the sea seemed listless today, rolling oily over itself to break against the red-silted rocks. It made Sergio’s head ache to hear it. The boys wore homemade bathing shorts that bagged embarrassingly when wet. Sergio put his on and plunged into the water near the caves. A scattering of tourists lay across the beach, roasting their white skins. Giuseppino sat on the shore and eyed the sea warily, flinging stones.
Some impulse to provoke his brother brought Sergio back, swimming his best crawl. “Here,” he said. “Come in with me. There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s time you stopped being afraid of the sea, Giuseppino. You have to get over it.”
A short way off, on the sand, a cluster of northern tourists lay immobile. Now a girl with gold hair, awkward and lanky in a too-small pink bathing suit, turned toward them. Sergio had spoken in English, hoping to shame his brother a little. The girl detached herself from the others and approached. Shyly she flung a stone into the sea.
“Lots of people are scared of the water,” said the girl at last to Giuseppino. English, with a southern flatness, unlike their own accents, which belonged, by several degrees of separation, to the north. And yet to Sergio the girl’s seemed the most beautiful voice he had ever heard. “How old are you?” Giuseppino said, evidently drawing the same conclusion.
“Eleven.”
“We’re eleven, too,” said Giuseppino.
“I am,” said Sergio. “He’s not.”
“Twins?”
“Brothers.”
The House at the Edge of Night Page 31