Never before had the islanders faced the problem of rain at the Sant’Agata festival. Nevertheless, said Concetta, there might be a miracle approaching, a softening of the weather after all these days of tumult. “There hasn’t been a great miracle since Robert came from the sea,” she said. “It’s overdue—it’s time.”
All week the rain continued. Meanwhile, the numbers of tourists continued to diminish—a small tragedy, in a summer already so pinched and disappointing.
“You’re to call your brother, Sergio,” said Maria-Grazia. “If you call him yourself, if you invite him to the festival, maybe he’ll come this time.”
But the phone lines were down, torn from the corner of the House at the Edge of Night when the bougainvillea had made its abrupt descent onto the veranda. There was no calling Giuseppino.
Lena wandered the rooms of the house, but Maria-Grazia was ferocious with determination. “I’ll not leave the island,” she said. “It’s my intention to die here, like my father, Amedeo, and my mother, Pina. I’ll die in this house that’s been ours for ninety years. This house my father’s spirit still inhabits, this house where I was born. And Robert can’t leave. He’s bound to this place.”
“Figures are figures,” said Sergio gloomily. “Numbers are numbers. We can’t make money out of nowhere.”
“That’s what everyone else seems to have done,” said Maria-Grazia, and stalked to the room at the top of the house to gaze from her father’s old desk at the gray, roiling sea.
Since no one else seemed willing to do it, Lena began to go through their things and make the annual inventory, fearing the bailiffs belonging to the big bank from the mainland who had reportedly been seen on the other side of the water, knocking on doors, threatening to extract microwave ovens and televisions. For their next payment to the savings bank was due at the end of the week, and they risked falling behind. Beginning early in the morning, Lena hauled out sacks of papers and outdated stock catalogs for the rubbish, polished the coffee and ice cream machines until they shone, prepared the boxes belonging to the television and the football table so that they could be packed again at short notice. She went through the supplies in the storeroom—peach juice and paprika chips and hard little almond biscuits to accompany coffee; arancello, limoncello, limettacello. Yes, there was enough for the festival. These things were noted in the accounts book. Maria-Grazia watched her with pressed mouth and a frown like that of her father, Amedeo.
“Now, until the preparations for the festival are over, we’re not going to say anything more about what happens after,” Maria-Grazia declared, when Lena was finished. “We’ve too much to do. The whole bar must be decorated, three thousand pastries made. We need to scrub the windows, put up the lights in the bougainvillea. Clean the tiles of the veranda and do something about that fallen vine dripping all over everything where the dancing was supposed to be. Prepare the bottles of arancello and limettacello and limoncello. Get out the jars of coffee from the store cupboard. Churn the vats of ice cream, or they’ll be spoiled. When Giuseppino returns for the festival, we’ll ask him for help with this debt, and that will buy us some time.”
If Giuseppino returns, thought Lena, but did not say so.
Sergio stayed up all night making rice balls and pastries, working in silence in his apron and rolled-up sleeves. Around eleven Enzo arrived to help them for an hour, and ended up staying until morning. Enzo worked the dough as though it were clay, with delicate artist’s fingers, and his pastries all took the form of the saint. Meanwhile, Lena and Concetta ran into the rain to cut garlands of bougainvillea, which they hung inside the bar. The branches dripped onto the floor, making dark puddles. From the ceiling the three women, balanced on chairs in the darkening bar, hung pennants of the saint.
There was no florist anymore to provide the petals for the festival; Gisella’s shop had been the first to close. So that night, the women of the island went out with buckets and baskets and shopping bags, under flailing umbrellas, as they had after the war, and stripped every plant and hedgerow of its flowers. Lights were rigged up on the wreck of the Holy Madonna and on the arches of the fishermen’s tonnara. As Maria-Grazia and Lena climbed the hill again they saw now that the festival would come off after all, was already beginning, its magic hush suffusing the rain-washed dark.
—
INTO THIS HUSH WALKED Giuseppino, off the day’s last ferry, trailing his belongings in his hand. In his glossed gray suit, hauling his wheeled suitcase over the cobbles, he made an odd, diminished figure. The islanders did not recognize him as he climbed through the waterlogged town, as furtive as Zio Flavio had been on his return from war. It was only when Concetta came running into the bar—“Your son is here, Mariuzza! Your son!”—that Maria-Grazia stepped off the veranda into the darkness and knew her boy. He stopped before her and wiped the rain from his sparse hair. Lena shyly dried her hands on her apron, for she had never met Giuseppino and did not recognize him either. “Salve,” he said stiffly, in the Italian he had not spoken for decades. “I’m home.”
No joy before or since could match the joy of Maria-Grazia in that moment of her son’s return.
Summoned by the noise of exultation, Sergio came to the edge of the veranda, squinting into the rain. He descended the steps and consented to shake his brother’s hand. Concetta and Lena hung back, feeling a miracle at last draw close—for now Sergio spoke in a rush, fumbling with the strings of his apron: “A loan, Giuseppino—a thousand euros, or two thousand—enough to pay the savings bank and keep the bar going over the winter—otherwise we’ll lose everything—I’m behind on my payments—I know I shouldn’t ask.”
Giuseppino sat down. He massaged his chest, propping his case against a sodden chair. At last he said, “I can’t help you, Sergio.”
“Pi fauri, Giuseppino.”
“I can’t help you. I’ve no money. My business is gone.”
Maria-Grazia stepped forward now, took Giuseppino by the shoulders. “What do you mean?”
“I had to file for bankruptcy—the company closed—”
All at once, Maria-Grazia seemed a great-sized person, a giant like her father, Amedeo. “Bankruptcy!” she cried. “Look me in the face, Giuseppino! Explain to me what you’ve done.”
Her son, under the accusing eyes of his mother, became clipped and irritable. “I used to trade in futures, and now I don’t, and the money’s gone. The crisis. The business failed.”
“Your important job,” murmured Maria-Grazia, uncomprehending.
“It’s not an important job,” said Giuseppino. “I buy and sell contracts. You islanders, thinking I’m some wealthy man! I’ve only ever been at the edges of all that! What do you think I can do—some miracle?” His voice became brittle with contempt. A few neighbors had gathered at the edge of the veranda now, drawn by the air of scandal.
“The apartment,” continued Maria-Grazia. “The big cars—”
“I bought all those on credit!”
“Ai-ai-ai, Giuseppino!” cried Concetta, in spontaneous lamentation. “What’s become of you since you left this island?”
Giuseppino’s head bent lower and lower, exposing the great bald circle on the crown that matched Sergio’s. “Oh, Giuseppino!” cried Maria-Grazia. “If your grandfather Amedeo were here now, what could he possibly have to say to you?”
“Haven’t I always sent you money?” cried Giuseppino, stung at last into retaliation. “That two million lire for the refurbishment. All the times I’ve put my hand in my pocket for repairs, to make up a shortfall in the profits, again and again, though Sergio shut me out of everything to do with this bar from the beginning. You’ve profited, Mamma! You and Sergio and Dad and all the rest of you! You wanted a van and you wanted to repair the roof, to buy new televisions—all of you wanted to be in on it, not just me!”
Sergio, who had been lingering in the doorway without speaking, now found himself fixed by the spotlight of the neighbors’ attention, thrust into the unfamiliar position of the
more successful son. He saw his brother cowed, reduced, and the triumph tasted sour in his throat, like spoiled wine. “Mamma, Zia Concetta, that’s enough,” he murmured. “Giuseppino, come inside.”
Giuseppino rose from his chair. Into his mother’s hand he put Amedeo’s book of stories. “Here,” he said. “I brought this back. At least no one can accuse me of stealing it, for I always said I’d return it the next time I came to the island, and now I have.”
And in the end, it was a kind of relief to him to follow his brother through the door of the bar, embracing this homecoming like some wanderer in his grandfather’s book of stories, diminished, penniless, cut down to his original size.
V
Maria-Grazia could not sleep. Instead, she sat at the counter of the bar and turned the pages of her father’s book of stories. The story of the parrot and the girl who became a bird; the stories of Silver Nose and Body-No-Soul. And as she read further, seated behind the counter of the bar that cold dawn under her father’s old damp-spotted portrait, she discovered, too, a strange wonder: stories she had not read before—tales her father must have remembered in the last days before his death, recorded in Sergio’s scratchy teenage handwriting, carried off the island by Giuseppino before any of the rest of them had seen.
Maria-Grazia woke Giuseppino, who was sleeping on the velvet sofa in the room at the top of the house. “Caro, what’s this?” she asked, indicating the unknown tales.
Giuseppino’s neck turned red and blotchy, as it always had as a boy when he was caught out. “I didn’t photocopy the last ones,” he muttered. “I ran out of money before it was finished printing. And I figured Sergio remembered those ones anyway. He was the one who wrote them down.”
But she had never known about them! And now Maria-Grazia discovered the last stories belonging to her father, as though he were with her again for a spell, whispering his island tales to lull her to sleep as he had when she was a small girl in leg braces. Turning over the pages, she read tales of the island, of donkey auctions and rescues at sea, of feuds between neighbors, of a spectacular catch of fish in 1913 (“told to me in 1922 by Signora Gesuina”), of a great landslide in 1875 (“passed down in the Mazzu family”), and then, on the final pages, a tale belonging to the saint. This one was marked with no date and no teller, and forever afterward she would associate it only with her father and with the festival, convinced he had written it for her to discover at this precise moment on the eve of Sant’Agata’s Day, ninety-five years after the first one that he had witnessed.
Sant’Agata was once, wrote her father, sighted in the cemetery beside the swamp, when she appeared in a vision to the grave digger, rather alarmingly, hovering above the gateway with outstretched hands. When he went back to the grave, he found his shovel gone and the hole closed up as though it had never been opened. Most inconveniently, he was forced to give up his work and go home.
Those were earthquake-troubled times. Though the grave digger tried to dig again, he found the earth uncooperative, hard as marble, and one day, after a great tremor, he woke to find all the graves opened and gaping, a fearsome sight.
By this, he understood that the saint had either grown contrary, or else intended the burial of the dead in some other place.
The islanders called a meeting, and decided to obey the saint and move their dead to some safer lodging. But in those days, there was a great fear of disease, and the islanders refused to have the dead buried near their houses and their wells. And yet, refusing to obey the saint’s wishes, the island became troubled anyway. The islanders were once again afflicted by a plague of weeping.
One morning, the saint appeared again to the islanders, on the road outside the cemetery. She seemed to be gesturing, and a group of fishermen followed. She led them all over the island, on a miraculous journey through fields and ditches and olive groves, until at last they came to the caves by the sea. Here the saint took up post at the back of the cave, and waited. The islanders, after some deliberation, decided there was nothing to be done but move their dead to the caves.
Here they found a second miracle: little compartments, full of bones already, in which to house their ancestors’ coffins and funeral urns, and great stones, ready cut, with which to close them up.
The day of the procession was stormy. The islanders were uncertain, but the saint appeared all about the island, insisting that they carry their dead to the caves. The whole town gathered, and the procession took most of the afternoon, but at last they reached the caves.
Then, while the islanders were shut up inside the caves, an earthquake shook Castellamare to its roots. Great jettisons of lava sprung up beneath il conte’s villa, and the island heaved and convulsed. The islanders, cowering in the caves, emerged to find their town on the horizon flattened, not one building standing except the church and the villa and the House at the Edge of Night.
Then they understood that the saint had protected not only the dead but the living, for not one islander died in that earthquake, and all of them were sheltered by the ancient rock of the caves.
And when the islanders had finished burying their dead, a third great miracle occurred. The rock at the back of the cave, which had tumbled during the earthquake, held the form of the saint. The artist Vincenzo cut it free, to make of it a statue, and forever afterward the islanders knew that the caves were not a cursed but a holy place.
“And that, Mariuzza cara,” her father wrote, “is how the islanders ended the curse of weeping.”
—
THERE WAS ROBERT. He stood in the doorway, puffing a little at the exertion of walking the corridor—at last, she was forced to concede, an old man. Maria-Grazia put the book into his hands. “Someone should have written down all the other stories,” she said. For after her father, Amedeo, who had remembered to do it? What about Agata-the-fisherwoman’s rescue from the ocean? What about Robert’s own appearance? The day of the ships, when she and her father had witnessed them arrayed on the horizon like raindrops on a wire? The ghost of Pierino? The taming of Enzo; the building of the great hotel; the miracle of the bundles of money appearing after dark at the islanders’ doors? What about all the tales that had gone unrecorded? Someone should have made remembrance of these things.
“Well,” said Robert. “Can’t you write them?”
“Caro, I’m too old for that now. We both are. Look how the time has passed. There’s barely time for anything left now.”
Taking him very lightly by the wrist she led him back to their stone room by the courtyard. As they walked, Robert leaned on her a little, a fact that still disconcerted her, for it had always been the other way around. But now she understood that her time had nearly gone over. Robert seemed to believe so, too, for he had his spectacles on, the reading lamp beside his bed was lit, and he had clearly been awake, too, thinking. Maria-Grazia closed her father’s book and laid it on the nightstand. “Couldn’t you sleep either?” she said.
“No, cara. I’ve been making plans.”
“What about?”
“We’ve got both the boys in the same place now, at last, and it seems to me it’s time we talked to them about the future of the business.”
“What about the future?” said Maria-Grazia, a little startled.
“If Maddalena wants it,” said Robert, “they should hand it over to her. That’s what I think now. She’s loved the place since she was born. She’s tough enough to navigate it through this crisis. The bar should be hers, as it should have been yours all this time. I always loved your father the old doctor, but that was one thing he got wrong.”
Some stubborn pride in her, some trace of the spirit of Pina Vella, still wished so fiercely for the girl to go to medical school. But, “She won’t go,” he informed her, very gently, when she raised this objection. “She’s working up the courage to tell you, amore. She’s already told me.”
And something in her had known it already, that Lena, in her heart, was as ambitious as her grandmother and her great-grandfather b
efore her, capable like nobody else of protecting the bar.
VI
Sant’Agata’s day dawned colorless, the sea obscured in mist. The morning’s Mass, outside the church, was conducted under a phalanx of umbrellas. “Praise to be to Gesù and Santa Maria!” cried Father Marco, against the wind, shielding the plaster saint with his spread soutane. “Praise be to Sant’Agata and all the saints!”
The procession was a slippery, muddy affair. The statue, ancient, made in plaster by the great-great-great-great-grandfather of the artist Vincenzo, had never been out in the rain before. On the gravelly path down to the caves by the sea, a small tragedy occurred. The statue began to melt, her face tracked with black tears like those that had once fallen from the eyes of Carmela, her robe shedding its purple in rich streaks.
“Quickly, Rizzulinu, Matteo!” cried the priest. “Get the saint in at once out of the damp!” For Father Marco, in his old age, had become as great a devotee of Sant’Agata as any of them.
The fishermen, at a run, made for the caves by the sea. Scrambling in over the rocks, they bore the saint into the dry darkness, the rest of the islanders in pursuit. “Is she damaged?” cried the widows of the Sant’Agata Committee. Cigarette lighters flamed; mobile phones were illuminated. The saint, by a hundred lights, glimmered mournfully, her face shifting as though alive, a little paler than it had been before the storm.
“We can’t bring her back out into this rain,” said Father Marco. “The paint will run; the plaster will fall apart. We’ll have to keep her here and wait until the storm dies off.”
So it was that when the bailiffs from the mainland arrived on Castellamare to begin calling in the islanders’ debts, they found not one house inhabited, not one knock answered, the whole island empty and every shop shut up as though the place were abandoned—and at last were forced to put away their warrants and papers and briefcases and leave.
The House at the Edge of Night Page 40