This fact, as it came over Lena in the darkening street, seemed to her so awful that she began to weep.
A van swerved; a motorbike passed with a long blare. She gained the safety of the curb, and the scent was gone.
She didn’t resolve to come home that day; not yet. But from that day onward, a great unease lay upon her, so that she was as irritable as Agata-the-fisherwoman before bad weather. The island had forced itself upon her attention, as though something were badly wrong. The way she had recounted it to her grandmother, it was as if she had sensed that the bar was in trouble. That was odd, thought Maria-Grazia, for if there had been any trouble simmering during those last months of 2007, it was like the shudders that came before an earthquake, too faint to detect without special gauges and needles, and no one had yet been aware.
—
THAT AUTUMN WHILE LENA was still absent, Concetta’s Enzo had returned to Castellamare. “Why?” asked Maria-Grazia, when Concetta came running to the bar with the news. “I thought he wanted to get away.”
“Homesick!” cried Concetta, half in joy and half in frustration. “He said he was homesick! He wants to drive his taxi again, and make statues of the saint. Maria-Grazia, I fear he’s gone entirely mad.”
But the truth was, Enzo had made his peace with the island. For, shorn from Castellamare, a strange affliction had come over him. At art school in Rome, to his dismay, every sketch he attempted turned under his hands into a scene of the island: its church, its piazza, its lines of prickly pears, the goats grazing on the slopes of its bay, the boat Holy Madonna with its rusted keel, the avenue of palms leading up to il conte’s villa, and over and over again the image of Sant’Agata. So he had returned, one windswept day three years after he left, to drive his taxi again.
“Why come back here?” Concetta harangued, though she had wept when he left, cursing his ambition. “You were going to be a fancy artist, in Roma or America, with exhibitions and galleries and I don’t know what else.”
Enzo, instead, began work on what was to become his masterpiece. In his ancestor Vincenzo’s old studio, a rough-hewn block of stone had stood for as long as anybody could remember: a rock belonging to the caves by the sea. Vincenzo had commissioned the fishermen to haul it out with winches at some point in the last century, intending to make from it a life-size image of the saint. Now Enzo resolved to complete the statue.
Working the edges of the stone with a chisel, he frowned, pale and distracted, his hair bristled through with some ashy substance. “It won’t come right,” he said, speaking through his Zia Concetta rather than to her. “I can’t get it to work.”
Concetta, narrowing her eyes, said, “What’s it supposed to be?”
“Sant’Agata.” Enzo touched a fold of the saint’s robes. “And here at her feet, this is supposed to be a map of the island. Here are the fishermen’s boats with all their names—the bottom of her robe becomes the sea. Look, here’s Trust in God, Holy Madonna, Sant’Agata Salvatrice, the Santa Maria della Luce. Maria Concetta here, and Siracusa Star. All the boats that ever sailed to or from this island, the surviving and the wrecked.” Gesticulating, reaching toward something, Enzo gave up and dropped his arms to his sides. “The volcanic rock’s too porous, too brittle. But Vincenzo specified that it must be made from this particular block. He must have had something in mind. It’s all somewhere inside the stone.”
Concetta didn’t know whether to rejoice or despair over her nephew. There he sat, hunched over the saint’s form, and late at night the sound of his chisel could be heard from the old studio’s open windows.
“Perhaps,” murmured Maria-Grazia to Robert that night, afire with expectation, “Lena, too, will come home.”
—
SO SHE DID, at last, crossing by Bepe’s ferry at the beginning of the following summer. She had been gone two entire years. Sitting on the varnished wooden seat at the prow of Bepe’s boat, she felt worn thin, as though time had traveled twice as fast since she had left the island. Her skin was no longer well armored; she had forgotten the way it stung you, this sun, the air that came over you in hot waves, the bare white to which all colors turned under its glare.
The ferry swung against the tide, water pooling under its left flank, and before her reared the island. And now she was down on the quay, and now climbing the old hill, and the island assaulted her with the force of memory: the sea’s hydraulic hiss, its familiar hot-dust smell. And yet she saw it through her mother’s eyes, too: saw how the streets she climbed were full of stale air, the pavements crusted with dog turds, the façades of the church and the shops peeling, and every inhabitant in some phase of advanced age. The kind of place one could not love without effort, and yet, she understood now, the only place on the face of the whole earth that she herself loved.
On the row of chairs outside Arcangelo’s shop, people stared. “Is that Lena Esposito?” hissed the widow Valeria, quite audibly. “Is that Maddalena Esposito, Sergio’s girl?”
“Yes, Signora Valeria,” said Lena, trying on this day of homecoming not to be irritated with anyone. “I’m home.”
“Isn’t she so much taller—and so pale, like a little ghost?” hissed Valeria to the pharmacist, raising her hand in innocent greeting to Lena.
But now here was the piazza. Here was the veranda with its mat of bougainvillea. Here was her grandmother—and yet she doubted a little, as she approached: Was she really so neat and small, so old? Maria-Grazia set down the tray she had been carrying. Then all at once she was running as though for her life, arms readied in an embrace, crying, “Lena! Lena! Lena!”
Her cry reached Robert, who came out, too, disbelieving, shielding his eyes against the white sunlight with one hand. And here was her father, Sergio, abandoning a tray of drinks to run and run and get there before either of them. Lena allowed them to bury her in embraces, with no thought of leaving now.
“Lena’s here!” Maria-Grazia cried to the watching customers. “My granddaughter is home! Didn’t I always tell you she would come?”
So it was that Lena became the first Esposito to leave Castellamare and return again. “I’ll stay here,” she told her grandmother. “I’ll be a doctor some other time.”
III
One morning in September, Maria-Grazia turned on the television in the bar to find strange images of unrest: men in glossy suits, emerging from great glass buildings into the green-lit New York night, with boxes in their arms. “An attack?” cried Maria-Grazia, fearing fire or murder, for the men moved slowly, with stunned eyes.
“No, no,” said Sergio. “They’ve lost their jobs.”
“Why are they walking out with boxes like that?” said Agata-the-fisherwoman. “What’s that you say? Englishmen like Signor Robert, are they, or americani? Turn it up—I can’t hear!”
“You can’t hear?” retorted one of the elderly scopa players, with spirit. “Why, it’s we who can’t hear, with you turning and turning up that television every day, and those boys rattling on the football table—”
Here an argument broke out, and the facts of the matter were missed altogether. By the time Maria-Grazia got the customers under control, the men with their boxes were gone from the screen, to be replaced by more familiar calamities.
Maria-Grazia went out to Robert, who was taming the bougainvillea on the veranda, an almost monthly task once the summer began. “There’s something strange,” she said, sitting down beside him, taking his hand in hers. “Something odd happening in the world outside.”
“This house has survived trouble before,” said Robert, kissing the palm of her hand.
Lena was worried, too. All that week, though she was supposed to be making—under her grandmother’s orders—an application for a medical school in Sicily, which, after all, wasn’t too far from home, she scrutinized the newspapers for an explanation instead. By degrees, she understood that the English and American banks were beginning to founder. “Like ’29,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman. “A Great Depression.”
/> “No, no,” said Bepe. “Nothing like that.” For though he mistrusted il conte’s bank on principle, he had a great respect for those towers of finance across the sea.
In the bar, there was some disagreement over how the trouble had started, for all the newspapers seemed to tell them different things. Some of the customers maintained that it had begun with two rich Americans, Freddie and Fannie, others that it had started with two brothers called Lehman, still others that it was something to do with a city called Northern Rock. A few recalled that, late the year before, the savings bank had stopped giving out loans. The money that had poured forth like miracles a decade ago was now being withheld. But could that really be related to these troubles across the ocean? In the bar, Maria-Grazia studied the newspapers and kept the television tuned to the news channel.
Slowly, the crisis moved toward them, like a tidal wave.
“You’d better be careful,” counseled Agata-the-fisherwoman. “A business like yours can be gone in eighteen months, and in another eighteen there’s no trace of it left.”
“Now, you know that’s silly,” said Bepe. “Think of all the storms this bar has weathered. Both wars, and any number of scandals, and two earthquakes, and that stronzo Arcangelo opening his rival business right at the bottom of the hill. We hardly noticed when the americani suffered their Great Depression. What did it matter to us?”
Agata-the-fisherwoman said nothing. Always, her family had possessed a prodigious gift for predicting the weather.
—
THE FOLLOWING SPRING, trouble came to the doors of the House at the Edge of Night.
Lena was behind the counter, half scanning the papers for news of the crisis, half listening to the small morning noises of the island. Already the bar was populated. Fishermen; the elderly scopa players; Father Marco, who came in to check the football results each morning. Also Tonino the builder, who was waiting for a contract with il conte’s hotel to be finalized and occupied himself meanwhile with daily study of La Gazzetta dello Sport. Robert, on the veranda, paused over the accounts book to watch Filippo Arcangelo come striding up the steps, full of some private rage. So it was that Signor Arcangelo had several witnesses as he blustered into the bar in his striped apron and plastic slippers, fresh from the counter of the grocery store, and announced, “I’ve come about a debt. Is Signor Tonino here?”
The builder, shamefaced, got to his feet, already suspecting humiliation. “You owe me”—here Filippo Arcangelo paused to read off a long receipt, calculating with the fingers of one hand—“eight hundred and eighty-nine euros, and seventeen centesimi. To be repaid in full by the close of business today. I’ve given you your groceries on credit for a full three months, and enough’s enough, Tonino.”
“I haven’t got it,” said Tonino. “I’m still waiting for that contract to come through on the new hotel. You know that, Signor Arcangelo.”
At this, a few of the elderly scopa players got to their feet in the builder’s defense. “Coming here in front of everybody, without any shame!” “Don’t you know he’s waiting for his contract?”
“Am I not to be paid?” Filippo Arcangelo swung his body, stout as his father’s now in middle age, from side to side in his passion for justice. “Do I not have my rights, too? I’ve sent Signor Tonino warnings. He’s been avoiding my shop for months since he racked up this enormous bill—he refuses to answer the door when I call at his office or his house. These are his personal debts to my shop. Do I not deserve to be paid for the food he’s eaten and the wine he’s drunk?”
Here, the tide began to turn a little. “Yes,” murmured Bepe from the corner. “Signor Arcangelo should be paid one way or another, that’s true.”
“It’s no good asking me for money when I’ve not got it yet,” cried Tonino, wounded into retaliation. “How was I to know the contract with the hotel would take so long?”
“I’ll have what’s due to me!” shouted Arcangelo in a frenzy. “All of you are running up accounts at my shop, telling me you’ll pay at the end of the summer. It’s not just Tonino. How am I supposed to order stock, pay my own bills? Haven’t any of you thought of that? I’ve got a debt come due at the savings bank myself, and I must pay it.”
“Signor Arcangelo,” said Sergio. “Business is bad for everyone at the beginning of the season. You know that. Every year, you’ve allowed us to run up accounts and pay them at the end of the tourist season. That’s how things work. The tourists come and our businesses prosper and we pay.”
Arcangelo glanced around, drawing everyone into his confidence. “There’s something happening overseas, in case you fools haven’t noticed. At the end of the summer, half your businesses might be gone. There might not be any more tourists. I want my money now.”
And then a strange thing happened. The bar came to life with indignation, as the islanders remembered other debts they owed their neighbors, and—more important—the debts their neighbors owed them. “What about my ten thousand lire!” cried one of the elderly scopa players. “Why, I lent them to Signor Mazzu to buy a goat in 1979, and now I recall that I never got them back!”
“What about the money I put into Signor Donato’s house when it was damaged in the earthquake?”
“What about the investment I made in Signor Terazzu’s lemon grove in ’53, in return for marrying his daughter to my son?”
A kind of madness now came over Castellamare, as it had at the end of the war. The owners of each of the shops—the printing shop, the baker, the tobacconist, the butcher, the electrical goods store, the pharmacy, the hairdresser—went into battle with one another, loudly and in public, over who owed how much to whom. Frightened by these displays of panic, the widows of Sant’Agata in their respectable black made a raid on the savings bank, having heard from a reliable source that it was about to meet the same fate as those giants of finance across the sea.
Bepe’s nephew, the only islander who worked in the Castellamare Savings and Loan Company, was sent out to talk to the customers. Though he was forty-three, Bepino seemed a boy again in his suit and cheap tie; the sun shone through his large ears, his nose sweated. “You can’t take your money all at once like this,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
The widow Valeria spoke up at last: “We’ve heard the bank is going to close its doors.”
“Is it true?” demanded Bepe of his nephew. “You’re to answer me honestly. Is the savings bank failing?”
“Sì, zio,” said Bepino, who could not have lied to the widows of Sant’Agata even if he had wanted to. “It’s true.”
“What does that mean, ‘failing’?” cried the chief widow, Signora Valeria. “If there’s something wrong at the bank, I want it back now, in full, the money I put in.”
“You’ve about seven thousand saved with us, haven’t you?” said Bepino.
“Seven thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven euros.” She brandished a savings book with the yellow-and-blue insignia of il conte’s business. “You can take it out of the pile you’ve got locked up in that great safe of yours. I’ve seen it, in your back room that used to be Gesuina’s parlor, God rest her soul.”
“Take it out of the safe?” said Bepino. “There’s not enough money in that safe. A few thousand euros at most.”
The widow put a hand very firmly on the door, ready to give it a shove as soon as Bepino got it open. “That’s all right,” she said. “A few thousand euros is enough for me for now.”
But here a clamor arose: “What about my pension savings?” “What about my investment account, with almost eleven thousand euros, that il conte sold me personally in ’92 and that I’ve been filling up ever since?”
“Oh,” said Bepino, understanding the problem. “We don’t keep that money here. We can’t give it all back at once like that. Don’t worry. The money will find its way back to you eventually, one way or another.”
“But where is it?” said Bepe. “You’re to tell us at once. If you’re borrowing from one neighbor to lend to ano
ther, without having enough to go round, that’s a damn dishonest trick you’ve been playing, Bepino, and I’m sorry to hear it of you.”
“It’s not like that. We don’t keep it here at all.”
“Where does it go?”
“Abroad,” said Bepino, whose own knowledge was incomplete on the subject. “To foreign banks, bigger ones.”
“Then get it back from them,” cried Bepe in frustration. “Gesù, Bepino, haven’t you the sense you were born with?”
“But it’s not like that—they haven’t got it,” said Bepino. “They’ve probably given it to other people, too, for all I know.”
“That’s how you do business?” cried Bepe, in a rage. “Why, I’m glad I’ve kept my money in a bag under the mattress, even when I had two hundred million lire of it, and I don’t mind telling you so, Bepino!”
“It’s not my fault,” protested Bepino, hot with embarrassment before the accusing eyes of the islanders. He struggled against the tide of their incomprehension, their disappointment. “It’s just how it works,” Bepino pleaded with them all, his voice cracking a little in shame.
“You shouldn’t have invested in the place!” cried Bepe. “None of you should. How many times do I have to tell you that il conte is a bad man?”
—
THE LUNCHTIME HEAT IN Castellamare had a force of its own, and today it tempered the fury of the island. It drove the shopkeepers indoors, the stray cats into the shade, and slowed the widows in their impractical black almost to standing point. Inside, the usual quiet of early afternoon presided over the bar. But Maria-Grazia’s outrage at this contemptible bickering over debts would not be calmed. She marched along the road to Concetta, whose day off it was, and found her seated on her doorstep with a copper pan of beans between her knees, stripping off the spines. While Maria-Grazia lamented, Concetta, without pausing in her deft knife work, consoled. “Never in the town’s whole history has there been such squabbling over a thing like money,” Concetta said. “Because no one’s ever had any, and we’ve always got along fine. Think how many coffees you’ve given on credit. Why, Father Marco never pays, for instance. It wouldn’t be right. Tonino, too—how could we charge him while he’s waiting for that contract? This will all pass over.”
The House at the Edge of Night Page 38