The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  “Remember, Zia,” said Sergio. “The girl we were swimming with the day Giuseppino almost drowned.”

  This story had troubled Maria-Grazia, though she could not have said why. Only it seemed to her that her son was attaching too much importance to the tale. He had even telephoned his brother to recount it to him. “What Pamela?” said Giuseppino, too, claiming no knowledge of the angel in the pink bathing suit. When Sergio announced the news of the baby, Giuseppino, on the other end of the telephone, had gone very quiet. He and his own wife, Maria-Grazia knew, had never been able to have a child. “Congratulations,” he said in English, and nothing more.

  But at first, all had gone well. Then Sergio, in those storm-troubled early days of spring, had attempted to talk to his wife again of the scirocco and the pink bathing suit and the tunnel through the rocks. Now, it seemed, Pamela was no longer interested in miracles. “Why does it make any difference either way?” was all she said.

  “But, Pam, don’t you remember it yourself?”

  “When was it?” said Pamela. “At the beginning or end of the summer?”

  He had always assumed that the incident must stand out to her as it had stood out over the years to him, a moment of special importance. “The day before Sant’Agata,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-five.”

  Pamela seemed barely to be listening. “I don’t know. We went to Mediterranean places every year—in my mind they get mixed up. I suppose it must have been me.” She shrugged off the question. “Would it have made a difference?”

  And how could he tell her that it would have made a difference, her not being the real Pamela? She was already a little irritated at his asking. He became incoherent in his desperation to lay it all before her. “Don’t you remember swimming through the tunnel, the scirocco? And then think—what was the chance that I would find you again? Just like one of my grandfather’s stories.”

  But, “You and your stories!” she hissed now, in inexplicable rage. “You Espositos and your damned stories! Of course it wasn’t me!”

  They were eye to eye now in the dark of his boyhood room. “I wasn’t even eleven in 1965. Surely you know that.” She was the one who accosted him with words now, while he lay mute, unyielding. “In the summer of ’65 I’d have been sixteen, Sergio. I wasn’t even here on the island. We never could have met. You know that! Don’t be a child about it. We submitted a marriage application with our dates of birth.”

  “Then why did you go along with it? If it was all so ridiculous in your eyes?”

  “I found it flattering, Sergio,” cried Pamela. “For God’s sake! You pretending I was five years younger than I am. I didn’t think you really believed it! You didn’t, did you?”

  Sergio felt washed up at the edge of something, hopelessly unraveled; he could not say. There was the baby, he confessed to his mother, and besides, did it really matter, her being the real Pamela? No, they would marry either way.

  And Pamela, in those weeks, had still loved him. In their wedding photograph, taken outside the Siracusa registry office on the damp morning in April when they had held their twenty-minute ceremony with Maria-Grazia and Robert as witnesses, her little red-dyed head emerged from a puff of white organza, resting affectionately on Sergio’s shoulder. She had even let Maria-Grazia teach her how to make limoncello when they returned from their brief mainland honeymoon, with alcohol and sugar and a sack of lemons from the tree in the courtyard, and Maria-Grazia, watching the girl stir the cloudy liquor, had allowed a great tenderness to come over her for this unexpected daughter-in-law.

  All that had changed when autumn came. Now, Maria-Grazia saw, Pamela wished to go home. “We need our own place,” she overheard her whispering. “There isn’t enough room here.”

  And Sergio, meekly, misunderstanding, “But love, there are plenty of rooms.”

  Maria-Grazia, for her part, inclined toward the girl’s point of view. For how could she fail to be oppressed by the indefinable boyhood smell of Sergio’s bedroom, by the noise of the bar rising through the open window when they retreated upstairs together on warm summer evenings? Privately, she agreed that Sergio must follow the girl to England, or lose her.

  Now, as things grew strained, their marriage seemed a last-ditch thing, a union of two separate lonelinesses. “Visit England,” Maria-Grazia urged her son. “Take her on a visit at least. Introduce yourself to her family.”

  But Sergio, in his indecision, had never booked the tickets. He attempted to talk with her family on the telephone. But Sergio found himself incoherent in English when he had to speak it with these strangers—why, he grasped for quite ordinary words, threw out wild guesses, calling toes “foot fingers,” the highway the “autostreet,” translating literally from the languages he knew better, as though he weren’t English at all! He had always spoken English without trouble to his father and his brother. But now, Maria-Grazia understood that Sergio was cleaving to the island, that some formidable stubbornness had emerged in him at the thought of being forced to leave it. “He’s being a child,” she raged in a whisper to Robert that night. “If she wants to live in England, he must let her. Didn’t you come all the way here for me?”

  On this matter, Robert—who had returned half for Maria-Grazia, half because he had never been able to imagine loving any other place but Castellamare—found himself utterly divided. And Maria-Grazia, too, if she was forced to be honest, was a little discouraged at the thought of a foreign country with no sea hush, no cicadas, a land composed of black and white. But they would visit him there, and the grandchild, and Giuseppino, and perhaps if they found themselves on the same island again the two brothers would find some means to reconcile.

  —

  EVEN THE CUSTOMERS IN the bar had noticed that Sergio Esposito’s English wife was growing discontented. Meanwhile, Sergio threw himself with new vigor into his old concerns that autumn: the pouring of coffee, the rolling of pastries, the gathering of grimed lire at the end of each night on the counter of the bar beneath the photograph of his grandfather Amedeo—ostensibly in order to save the money for tickets to England. But really, his mother saw, he did it for love. This was a life, it seemed to her now, that he would not be persuaded into leaving. For at last he seemed to have decided, seventeen years too late, that the island was the place to which he belonged.

  Maria-Grazia was adamant that they must deal with the mortgage on the bar as soon as possible, if Sergio were to leave before December when the child was due. Still half of it was left to pay, with interest—a sum of three million lire: ten thousand coffees at the bar’s current rate of profit, as she put it, in an effort to get him to understand, eight thousand rice balls. The flow of tourists that had been so steady for twenty years had begun to slow. Fewer visitors had checked in to the hotel than expected this year; by September, they were all gone. The archaeological site was shut up for the winter, the amphitheater covered over with black tarpaulins. The fences around the caves by the sea became disordered, assaulted by early autumn storms; some fell down altogether. This year, no one bothered to fix them, for there would not be any visitors to pay the two thousand lire entrance fee until, God and Sant’Agata willing, they returned next spring. The local teenagers colonized the caves with their bicycles and what Concetta called “those American booming-boxes.” The catacombs became again a place haunted by the sea. And yet Sergio seemed to think all at once that to pay the debt would be an easy thing, a thing of little significance. And, he confided in his mother hopefully, perhaps by the time it was paid Pamela would have come to love the island and the bar.

  Giuseppino had not come back for Sergio’s wedding. Instead, by way of consolation, he sent them a check for two million lire to refurbish the House at the Edge of Night.

  The roof had begun to leak in the usual places. Maria-Grazia telephoned the builders Tonino and ’Ncilino and asked them to come and repair it. “Could you cash that check from your brother?” she asked Sergio.

  Meanwhile, Pamela hissed urgently, “Pay
off the rest of the mortgage with it, and you’ll be free of your obligations and we can leave for England before the baby is born.”

  The check lay on Sergio’s nightstand for several weeks, untouched. How could he explain it to either of them, that he still felt wrong-footed by his brother? Giuseppino sent regular checks to keep the bar afloat, to pay for refurbishments and alterations. Giuseppino had paid for the new three-wheeled van that had replaced the original Ape and which now stood in the piazza and was used to bring the cigarettes and coffee tins back from the mainland. Giuseppino had paid for the second football table, the newest television. But the bar hadn’t been Giuseppino’s for seventeen years, and it wasn’t his now.

  Work on the bar began during the second week of October. A week afterward, when the builders Tonino and ’Ncilino had stripped off half the roof tiles, Sergio tore up the check from his brother and threw it into the sea. He would pay the cost of the building work himself. He had coaxed the bar into making a profit in the past, and he would do so again.

  He counted it as a mark of Giuseppino’s excessive wealth, his carelessness, that he never noticed the check had not been cashed.

  On the island, the absent Giuseppino was a kind of celebrity, a fact by which Sergio tried to prevent himself from being infuriated. It was always Giuseppino, Giuseppino in the bar, from morning until night, or so it seemed. Two years previously, the butcher and his wife had gone on a package tour to London. On the way back to their hotel after a visit to Buckingham Palace, they had taken a detour with the special purpose of viewing Giuseppino’s apartment. The butcher had come back with a grainy set of pictures of the gated apartment complex, taken from behind a dumpster. In one photograph, Giuseppino was visible, very blurred and miniature, getting into one of his cars. In another, the whole building was captured, identified on the reverse simply as “Giuseppino’s house.” These pictures were still brought out and pored over in the bar when other news was slow. “To think,” marveled Agata-the-fisherwoman to Sergio, “that your brother made all that money telling fortunes. Millions of lire, just from telling the future. Why, Concetta’s great-aunt Onofria used to do that, with a pack of tarocco cards, and no one ever paid her anything much. Of course,” Agata-the-fisherwoman added, “that was partly because she wasn’t any good. But still, think of your brother making all that money from telling the future, thousands of pounds!”

  “Not telling the future,” said Sergio. “Selling futures. It’s different.” In truth, he was hazy as to how. “It’s something to do with finance,” he said. “Stocks and shares. Trading.” But what Giuseppino did, he knew, was also in some obscure way related to houses—or had that been merely a side project? “I think he sells contracts for houses that haven’t been built yet,” he finished, satisfying no one.

  The preferred rumor on Castellamare was that Giuseppino was a famous fortune-teller.

  “And what is it you’ll do in England, Signor Sergio, when you and your wife leave?” asked Bepe the ferryman. “Will you sell futures, too? Or own a bank like il conte? All kinds of good jobs there are, in a place like London.”

  “I’d always have liked to be a librarian,” admitted Sergio.

  This job, which Sergio had coveted since he first opened his grandfather’s book of stories, captured Bepe’s enthusiasm. “A librarian!” he cried. “That’s a fine job—a good job. Why, everybody needs books.” The elderly scopa players nodded in agreement—yes, yes, they all needed books.

  “But no one needs to go to fancy cities, to Londra and Parigi, to be a librarian,” said Bepe. “You could do that very well here.”

  Bepe himself had a special affection for literature. Every book on the island had to be ordered from Siracusa, and made its journey to Castellamare on his ferry. When shipping was delayed, Bepe opened the packages and read every one, taking care not to break the spines. Romances, family sagas, crime thrillers. Nobody on the island could get enough of them. And nobody could accuse him of reading them, for he kept the brown paper in which they had been wrapped and returned them to their packaging before delivery. But a library would be better.

  “Why shouldn’t you be a librarian here on Castellamare?” said Bepe. “We’ve never had a librarian. You could carry your books about in a little van. Or keep them here in the bar for people to borrow. Five thousand lire a read,” he added enterprisingly. “Or else charge a monthly fee for membership. That way even the greatest idioti on this island will sign up, for fear of looking stupid before their neighbors, and half of your customers won’t even borrow the books, and that way you’ll get rich.”

  “No one wants a library,” said Sergio.

  But the elderly scopa players shook their heads at this. “Every town wants a library,” Bepe repeated. “Here—I’ll even lend you the money to set it up if you’ll make me a shareholder.”

  “I need to talk to my wife,” murmured Sergio. “She doesn’t want to stay long-term.”

  “What’s ‘long-term’? You could run it twenty, thirty years and still go to England to retire when the baby is grown up—keep her happy that way.” Bepe hauled a stack of notes from his back pocket and deposited them on the counter.

  The next day, he brought Sergio a bookstore catalog from the mainland, zipped carefully into a plastic freezer bag to protect it from the damp sea air. “Here,” he said. “You can choose all the books, and I’ll ship them over for you. Why, you were the one who last modernized the bar, Sergio. You installed the first television, and the football table. Everyone remembers that.”

  Then something stirred in Sergio and he remembered how, driven to ambition for the first time in his life by the departure of his brother, he had worked all night to put together the first football table with a screwdriver, and climbed on a stepladder to oversee the hoisting of the neon sign. Why not a library, too? And maybe, by the time the library was established, Pamela would have come to love the island. “The idea of a library is a good one,” said Maria-Grazia, gratified despite herself to find that her son was, after all, a businessman. “But you must have Pamela’s blessing first.”

  “You go through the catalogs for me,” said Sergio. “Then it won’t be as if it was all my own idea.”

  Maria-Grazia, against her own better judgment, agreed. “We could have books of folk stories for the children,” she said, turning the catalog’s pages. “And Sicilian books—Il Gattopardo. Pirandello. English books, and history. We’ll draw up a list.”

  Sergio and Maria-Grazia sat up late that night going through the catalog, and the next day he ordered two hundred books. He arranged them at the back of the bar, under the spotted photograph of Amedeo. Thus the business became the House at the Edge of Night Bar and Lending Library: membership one thousand lire. On the first day, fifty islanders signed up. By the end of the month, Bepe was repaid for the first two hundred books.

  “How long do you expect me to stay?” Pamela confronted him that night, brittle with fury. “We were supposed to leave for England. The baby’s due in eight weeks.”

  Sergio found himself pleading. “I might as well improve the business while I’m here. The library will start making money, and we can put it toward anything we like—the plane tickets to England—”

  “If that’s so,” she said, “you’ve got a month to buy the tickets. And we can’t go by plane anymore.”

  “We’ll go once everything is in order here,” he pleaded. “I can’t put a time limit on it.”

  Pamela walked away, slapping up the stairs in the sandals she had been wearing since the summer.

  At nights, she cried on the telephone to her mother, weeping in fast English while her mother’s staticky voice on the other end could be heard, over and over, embarrassingly amplified by the echo in the hallway: “Come home, love. Leave him. I never thought he was right for you, love. Come home.”

  —

  THE PROMISED BABY WAS forecast for the end of the year, and arrived during the second week in November. On that morning, Maria-Grazia found herse
lf pacing anxiously between the door with its Chiuso sign and the kitchen where Pamela stood bent over a chair, cut through with labor pains. Back and forth Maria-Grazia paced, looking for the doctor. Sergio knelt before Pamela, massaging her back, caressing her hot arms.

  “She’ll come,” soothed Sergio. “She’s on her way.”

  Below, at the bottom of the tumble of scrubland, the sea was wild, showing its white breakers. “The ferry won’t be able to carry the doctor back in time,” Maria-Grazia fretted to Robert, concealed behind the curtain of the bar, “and the baby will be born too early, like all the Esposito children have been since time began, no matter what we do to stop it.”

  “No, cara,” said Robert. “She’s here.”

  For here came the doctor at last, windblown, at a run, with her bag and her little plastic shock machine in case of emergencies, and the midwife after her. Sergio’s daughter, baby Maddalena, was delivered half an hour later, born like her grandmother all in a rush, within the walls of the House at the Edge of Night.

  Once there were two elderly people who were very loyal to Sant’Agata. Every year they celebrated her feast. They had no money, only a little grandson whom they loved more than anything in the world. But one year, after a bad harvest, they found themselves penniless and with nothing to sell in order to celebrate the saint’s festival. So they decided to take the little boy across the sea and sell him to a foreign king, to raise a few lire and ensure that the child had a chance of a richer life. The king offered them a hundred gold pieces and took the little boy in.

  The little boy, ’Ncilino, grew up in the king’s palace alongside the king’s daughter, and very soon she fell in love with him. The king, seeing this, grew anxious, for he didn’t want to marry his daughter to a penniless youth from an island at the edge of the known world, and so he resolved to send the boy away.

  When the boy was eighteen, the king told him, “Now listen, ’Ncilino, I am going to send you on a trading expedition, and you have a day and a night to load your boat.” Then the king took out his oldest boat, full of holes, and gave it to ’Ncilino to sail.