The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  On the following morning, ’Ncilino set off. But no sooner was he out upon the open sea than his boat started leaking and began to sink. ’Ncilino wept. “My poor grandmother and grandfather,” he cried. “My poor island, which I’ll never see again.” Then he thought of the saint whose festival his grandmother and grandfather had always celebrated. Surely she must have been a great and powerful saint, for they had sold him, the thing they loved most in the world, in order to celebrate her feast. The boy decided to ask the saint to rescue him: “Dear Sant’Agata,” he cried, “please help me!”

  Then all at once the saint appeared in a solid gold ship, and lifted up ’Ncilino and bore him away to the island, where his elderly grandmother and grandfather were waiting to welcome him, and from which he would never stray again all the days of his life.

  —

  A STORY I HAVE heard many times in various versions, which seems to have its roots in a tale of Saint Michael belonging to the west of Sicily. This version was told to me by Agata-the-fisherwoman, circa 1970.

  I

  It was the child Maddalena, in the end, who brought the bar back to Maria-Grazia.

  The change of year had been tempestuous, dominated by crisis. Sergio and his wife had not been able to reach any kind of accord, and now there was some graver, darker difficulty. In the weeks after the baby’s birth, Pamela sat on the windswept veranda looking toward England. In her arms lay the infant Maddalena, staring at the sky. Even when Pamela consented to sit with her family-in-law in the kitchen, she placed herself a little way off from Sergio, allowing the baby to feed from her without encouraging her one way or the other. Often, the baby went disregarded. Then Maria-Grazia took the child and sang to her, “Ambara-bà, cic-cì, coc-cò!,” the song her father, Amedeo, had sung when she was a child. Or Robert would chant for her English songs with their odd nonsense words: “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,” “Rock-a-bye baby.” The baby’s face would light with recognition, with a sudden dazzling smile. They turned to Lena as to a bright fire, feeding off the distraction that the baby provided from the trouble that was hanging over their house.

  Before Christmas, Maria-Grazia was so concerned for poor Pamela that she summoned Concetta from the blue house with the orange trees. While Enzo prodded baby Maddalena, Maria-Grazia and Concetta drew Pamela from the shadows and set her to work with them rolling rice balls for the Christmas Eve celebrations. Maria-Grazia offered the girl an early gift, a pearl bracelet that had once been Pina’s, and when Maria-Grazia fastened it around her wrist, Pamela’s eyes welled at the kindness. “England very beautiful at Christmas,” Concetta said. “England I like. Lovely place. Kensington Gardens Park. Queen Elizabeth. Yes?”

  Pamela, tearful, told them that she wasn’t used to the loneliness here, the dust, all the vegetables, plates and plates of them covered in oil and salt, which they were obliged to eat each evening, the ferocious stray cats that ambushed Maddalena’s pram as she pushed it about the village, the island dialect she couldn’t understand—though she had tried to learn Italian when she and Sergio were first married! Soon, her voice became wailing and insistent, unlocked by the two older women’s sympathy, a rising tide of grief: “The truth is I hate it here—and I can’t look after the baby—and Sergio doesn’t understand—and the lizards everywhere, the dust, the sun, and so cold in the winter—I’m sure I’ve never been colder, not even in England—all those old women staring at us when we walk down the high street—I don’t love the baby—I don’t love Sergio anymore—”

  “I’m sorry for the vegetables, cara,” said Maria-Grazia in regret. “I would have cooked you English things.”

  “It’s not that,” wept Pamela. “It’s not that.”

  “Postnatal depression,” said Concetta knowledgeably, dropping the rice balls in breadcrumbs. “Also my mother she have this problem, though no one diagnose it properly in the old times. But you get help from proper doctor, maybe you feel better, cara. And the old women not mean any evil, you know, when they stare. And the cats, they timid really. You give them one flick with your handbag and they no bother you no more. They learn.”

  “I know,” cried Pamela. “I know. But I can’t stand it here any longer.”

  “Then you must go to England,” said Concetta. “What game is Sergio playing, not letting you?”

  Maria-Grazia had asked herself again and again the same question. “Now, Sergio,” she told her son at last, early in the new year, “you’re to talk to your wife one way or another about when you’re going to move to England.”

  Then, too late, Sergio attempted to make amends. “Be patient, Pam,” he murmured into the warmth of her unresponsive back that night. “Give me another month or two.”

  Pamela huffed over the narrowness of the bed, pulling the covers this way and that. He found himself desperate, pleading, like a hurt child, “Don’t you love me?”

  “I can’t stay here,” she said at last. “That’s all.”

  “Just for a few months more.”

  “But you won’t ever come with me to England,” she said. “That’s the truth of the matter. You won’t ever leave this damned island. At least do me the decency of admitting that.”

  “I can’t,” said Sergio, his stomach constricting. “I can’t leave, Pam. I’m sorry.”

  The next morning, Sergio was aware of Pamela’s weight leaving the bed beside him, and the water in the bathroom turned on and then off again, leaving a dim echo in the pipes. By the time his mother woke him properly, Bepe’s ferry had sailed, with Pamela on board. She had taken everything with her except the baby.

  —

  NO ONE HAD CONSIDERED that Pamela might leave without her child. That night, Maddalena was afflicted by a bad case of colic; she screamed and screamed, blotchy faced, for relief. It was Maria-Grazia who took the baby’s soft weight. She shut up the bar, pulled the blinds, and carried her granddaughter from room to room. The baby had peaked English eyelids and lovably oversized ears. And yet her eyes belonged to Castellamare, eyes of an indeterminate opal color with bristling lashes that seemed the softest thing, like the legs of a caterpillar. Maria-Grazia found herself reeling with love for the child.

  “Pam will come back for her,” said Sergio. “And I’ll sort everything out then.”

  But what if Pam didn’t come back? Maria-Grazia asked herself this half in fear, half in hope. Didn’t the baby, for her part, love the island? Already she had grown fat, her skin a little burnished. She wrestled spiritedly with Concetta’s Enzo, and grasped for the lizards as they traversed the walls above her cot. The sounds she had begun to make, Maria-Grazia believed, were half English, half those of the island dialect, and she tilted her head and listened to both languages with equal attention. She would soon sit in thrall to the island’s stories if she were allowed to remain—she would run on the goat paths with Enzo and the other children, plunge fearlessly into the ocean, and learn every one of the wailing Castellamare songs.

  She was destined to remain, in fact, for Pamela did not return to collect her.

  When the baby finally quieted that first night—this Maria-Grazia never told anyone except Robert—she stopped before the picture of her father, Amedeo, and took in her heart a private vow to protect Maddalena.

  —

  SO, FOR EVERYBODY’S SAKE, Maria-Grazia resumed once again her old post behind the bar. While Sergio carried the colicky baby from room to room and Robert attacked the chaos of the past decade’s bookkeeping on his wife’s instruction, determined to get the accounts in order now that they had a child’s future to worry about, Maria-Grazia took over the running of the House at the Edge of Night. She instigated a strict schedule for the posting of lire into the little box with the crucifix each Friday, in order to get the mortgage paid off sooner, and systematized the contents of the lending library. She also replaced the old spluttering coffee machine with a new one that made americano and caffè macchiato and great soupy bowls of cappuccino, for that was what the tourists wanted now.

&nb
sp; Often, Maria-Grazia thought Lena must have been born with a love for the place in her veins, a side effect of having been accidentally born between its four walls. The infant staggered her first steps between the tables and chairs, was lulled asleep under the counter by the blue hiss of the sea and the rattle of the swinging door. Once she was up and running, she tore in and out of the rooms of the old house and unearthed strange objects—Amedeo’s forceps and surgical scissors, Uncle Flavio’s war medal with its Fascist insignia, the leg braces in which her grandmother had once been imprisoned. Maria-Grazia took the braces in both hands and showed Lena how they had fitted. She told the child the story of Flavio’s war medal, and Robert’s.

  Seated beside her grandfather in the great stone kitchen, Lena polished and repolished the medal with a little Brasso on a tissue until the face of King George was shiny and zealous again. And Robert, who had never spoken of such things since the summer when he told Maria-Grazia the stories of his youth in order to win back her heart, consented to talk a little again about the war. “Why did you never tell me these things?” asked Sergio, entering the room to hear Robert recounting the sinking of the glider. “That you jumped from planes, that you were wrongly imprisoned for three years?”

  And Robert, blinking, said, “I never knew you wanted to hear.”

  A change had come over Sergio since the birth of Maddalena. He had emerged from the ruins of his marriage no longer an overgrown boy, no longer discontented. After Pamela’s departure, he had thrown out the graying polo shirts of his high school years, and when the widow Valeria had prodded his stomach with a mocking tone one Sunday afternoon, he had taken the matter rather too much to heart, in his mother’s opinion, swimming lengths of the bay each morning until the fat around his middle was all gone. Now everyone was forced to admit that a steadier Sergio had emerged, a man whose marriage might have disintegrated and whose business sense might never have matched that of his mother, Maria-Grazia, but who was possessed with an earnest desire to acquit himself as a father. He taught his daughter to read, and carried her to school on his shoulders, and the elderly scopa players and the widows of Sant’Agata stopped referring to him as il ragazzo di Maria-Grazia, Maria-Grazia’s boy, and instead called him plain Sergio Esposito. Even—occasionally—signor. Perhaps it had been the child, not the wife, that had been lacking all along.

  For a wonderful thing it was, thought Maria-Grazia, to have a child like Maddalena in the house, so alive with the future and yet so in love with the past. From the photocopied sheets that were all that remained to them of Amedeo’s book of stories Sergio read to her Amedeo’s fantastical tales. Lena heard tell of the girl who became a tree, became a bird, became an apple. She heard of giants cut up in pieces; of a demon named Silver Nose and a sorcerer named Body-No-Soul; of brothers who repaired each other’s severed heads with magical ointment; and—in a little-known story Amedeo had gathered from Concetta’s great-aunt Onofria just before she died—of a boy whose head got back to front somehow, and who was so alarmed at the sight of his own backside that he fell down dead. At this tale, the girl screamed in horrified delight.

  Lena and her Papà lay on winter afternoons among the shelves of the lending library, immersed in its volumes. The library’s patrons filled in little pink request forms, on which they ordered from Maria-Grazia romances, thrillers, and long and protracted epics of great foreign families in which everybody seemed to have the same name. But though the elderly islanders consumed these books with a fervor, none of the foreign stories ever seemed to Lena quite as good as those belonging to Castellamare. By the time she was five, she knew by heart each one of Amedeo’s tales. She knew in detail, too, the episodes belonging to her own family, for Maria-Grazia herself had told her granddaughter as soon as she was old enough about the time Uncle Flavio plunged into the sea in escape from the island, the time her uncles, one by one, left for war. The day her great-grandfather Amedeo had first set foot upon the island. The twins born by different mothers. The man from the ocean. The warring of her father and Zio Giuseppino. If only Lena herself had been alive when those legends walked the island—Gesuina and old Rizzu and Father Ignazio and the ghost of Pierino, Pina the schoolmistress with her rope of black hair and Amedeo with his book of tales! To her, their spirits still hung about the goat paths and the alleys, as important as the presence of the saint. For the island itself seemed alive to her, a place where the earth heaved with stories.

  The day before the Sant’Agata festival of her sixth year, the enterprising Lena wrote a cardboard sign, “Museo dei Miracoli,” in felt-tip capitals, and arranged a handful of precious family relics beneath it on the veranda—the two war medals, the leg braces, the little tin medallion that had arrived at the foundling hospital with Amedeo, the photocopied pages from the book of stories. “A thousand lire!” Lena yelled at the tourists, in English and Italian. “A thousand lire to see the wonders of the island! A thousand lire to see the Museum of Miracles! Or a dollar, or whatever you have.” Enzo knelt on the pavement beside her and sketched with chalk a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, which he had seen a real artist doing when he had been sent to visit his mother’s family in Rome.

  Whenever the tourists stopped to look, Lena went up to them with her relics and artifacts, and explained to them the stories belonging to the objects: “This was what my grandfather Robert won from the English government, during the war, before he was shot down in the ocean….This one my uncle won from Mussolini….This was the book of stories my great-grandfather wrote, when he used to be a medico condotto….This lucky Sant’Agata rosary is mine….” By midnight, when the two children fell asleep under the museum table to the whirling of the organetto, she and Enzo had made thirty-seven thousand lire, two dollars, and a British pound. After that, they repeated the enterprise every year.

  For Lena seemed to be the first Esposito who had been born with no wish to leave Castellamare. In the bar, her grandmother let her carry the round trays with the logos of the coffee company, which she heaved above her head in both hands to get between the tables. Solemnly, she took orders on a little hologrammed notepad she had won as a school prize. Robert drove her in the three-wheeled van to the cash-and-carry warehouse on the mainland, and together they rode back on Bepe’s ferry with the van full of cigarettes and coffee jars and mainland chocolates. “Will the bar be mine one day?” she asked her grandmother, when she was six years old.

  Maria-Grazia thought of the mortgage to the d’Isantus, which had become a tiresome, rolling thing, never quite repaid. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  —

  WITH EACH PASSING YEAR, they became more certain that Pamela would not return to take Lena. Maria-Grazia had watched her granddaughter carefully for signs of damage—for the child’s beginnings had been inauspicious, the girl barely three months old when her mother had departed across the sea. But Lena seemed a robust child. Though she had developed a habit in her infancy of following Maria-Grazia about the bar, which she never quite abandoned, she seemed otherwise mercifully solid. Besides, she had found a hundred protectors on the island. Even from the customers in the bar she received special treatment: The elderly scopa players, around whose legs she had played without fear of scolding since her infancy, brought her historic potsherds and coins from about the island to add to her museum; the widows of Sant’Agata prayed for her every week, garlanding her with more charms and rosaries than she could carry; and the members of the Modernization Committee (who had, without Maria-Grazia’s knowledge, sworn themselves the child’s protectors at the very first meeting after Pamela’s departure), reported back to Maria-Grazia by telephone the child’s comings and goings about the island. “She’s just walking up through the Mazzus’ olive grove,” the widow Valeria would hiss furtively, like a detective. “She’s awfully sandy, Maria-Grazia. Catch her and make sure she gets a bath.” Or, “She’s on her way home from school,” Agata-the-fisherwoman would report, from her little house beneath the vines. “Walking as good as a little sa
ntina, Maria-Grazia, and she’ll be home in five minutes or less.” With such careful attention, how could the child do anything but grow and flourish?

  But, of course, as Maria-Grazia was to reflect in years to come, it was no use congratulating oneself on the raising of a child to ten years old, for most of the real trouble came later.

  Once a year, at the beginning of the summer, Lena was dispatched to England to spend a month with her mother. Pamela seemed, to Maria-Grazia’s relief, to have recovered, as far as Sergio had, from their brief and stormy marriage. Lena had two small stepbrothers, and a room of her own with pink curtains. Pamela, Maria-Grazia knew, hoped each year that Maddalena would decide of her own accord to stay. Always, for a few weeks, there were long evenings of tearful telephone calls between the two of them after Lena had come home. But the girl had confessed to Maria-Grazia that in London her stomach always ached and she slept badly, listening to the strangely muted English traffic, with no put-put-put of motorinos, no seething back-and-forth of the sea. This was her curse: to miss her mother all year, and then to sleep badly and lose her appetite until she was back on the island, running between the prickly pears or plunging with Enzo and the other children into the foaming ocean. Thus Lena came to believe that it was her personal destiny to remain on Castellamare, to become the next proprietor of the House at the Edge of Night.

  —

  IMMERSED IN THE STEERING of the bar across the difficult period of Lena’s growing-up, Maria-Grazia found her life once again accelerating giddily, the century drawing to a close. She was more than seventy years old. Robert said, when she informed him of this fact in wonder, “Well, and doesn’t it seem a long time to you, all these years we’ve lived?” And it did, but not that long. Not seventy years.