The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  —

  MEANWHILE, IN THE CAVES, there began to be some disagreement. “We’ll be here until the end of the world,” warned Agata-the-fisherwoman.

  “Another half hour,” said Father Marco.

  The half hour became an hour, an hour and a half. An argument was just beginning to threaten when Concetta spoke up. “Enzo has a statue,” she said.

  All at once, Enzo found himself at the center of the crowd’s attention. A few people who had seen his great stone figure of Sant’Agata nodded in approval. Yes, yes. That was also a statue of the saint.

  “Fetch Enzo’s Sant’Agata instead,” said Concetta. “It’s waterproof. It was planned by his great-uncle, the artist Vincenzo. It’s almost finished. We can make the procession with that one.”

  The elderly scopa players nodded. The other Sant’Agata could be used. After all, wasn’t it an image of the same saint?

  “It’s too heavy,” said Bepe. “It’s made of stone. The normal Sant’Agata is plaster. How are six fishermen going to lift it?”

  “It can be lifted,” said Enzo. “It’s volcanic rock. It’s porous, like pumice. We’ll find some way.”

  At this, there were some mutters about the curse of weeping.

  “Let’s go and see the statue,” said Father Marco, guiding the old one farther back into the dry safety of the caves, where no squall could reach it.

  It was another half hour before the fishermen returned across the bay, and when they did, there were cries of wonder. The fishermen had loaded Enzo’s statue onto Rizzu’s old donkey cart, which no one had thought of in twenty years. Now the cart came into view across the bay, slowly, falteringly, emblazoned with its green and yellow island tales. Between them they hauled her, the fishermen and their descendants: Tonino, Rizzulinu, Matteo, ’Ncilino, Calogero.

  —

  ALL AROUND THE SHORES of the island, in the storm, the islanders bore their saint. Past il conte’s villa, shuttered and closed. A few of the islanders glanced up at the windows, expecting to see il conte there to nod his blessings on the procession as his father used to, but no face appeared. The statue was borne on, the fishermen heaving at the back of the cart, bracing it against the slopes. Past the rocky south end of the island, past the Greek amphitheater, now overtaken by scrub grass and thistles, along the cliffs, above the caves by the sea, past the gates of the new hotel where the Mazzus’ farm had once stood. The hotel was subdued, its plastic recliners by the pool overturned, its parasols heavy with water. But a few tourists appeared at the doors and joined the procession. Meanwhile, the saint, the water making rivers and torrents in the folds of her stone robe, swayed in the back of the donkey cart with one hand upraised. “Come on,” coaxed Maria-Grazia. “Not far now.” For she found herself breathless with anxiety, willing the statue to complete its pilgrimage as though it were the saint herself who swayed there in the cart, as though some metamorphosis had occurred during the miraculous hush of the night.

  At the quayside, before the old tonnara and the rusted remains of the boat Holy Madonna, Father Marco prayed for the saint’s good grace. Babies were brought forward for a blessing. The farmers’ crops, moldering in the constant storm, were consecrated anyway. Father Marco tipped a bottle of holy water into the general downpour over the prow of the island’s one new fishing boat, Matteo’s Provvidenza.

  The rain drove trade to the bar that evening. “Why so many people?” wondered Maria-Grazia. “Has everyone taken pity on us and decided to buy an arancello each, to keep the place open another summer?”

  Concetta came edging through the crowds, eyes lit with suppressed mirth. “I’ve just heard,” she whispered. “Arcangelo’s place has been flooded out, just like the winter of ’63 when we had those storms! My poor brother!”

  “A miracle!” cried Agata-the-fisherwoman. “I told you! That’s what all the rain was for!”

  The bedraggled clients of Arcangelo’s bar, a little shamefaced, sidled through the door in search of liquor and hot tea. Filippo Arcangelo hung about the veranda until Concetta took him by the arm and hauled him inside.

  But it was not enough, Maria-Grazia understood as she watched her sons and her granddaughter tend the overcrowded tables. They needed more than a few ninety-cent coffees, a few single-euro glasses of liquor. The rain had made the veranda impassable, and the ice cream crystallized in the vats, unused. Even the tourists didn’t want it in this weather.

  In the square as night fell there was dancing all the same, wildly among the great pools of water, beneath the sodden pennants of the saint, which poured their lukewarm cascades onto the heads of the revelers. Under the great hired spotlights on their stands, the islanders whirled to the music of Bepe’s organetto. Maria-Grazia, seated at the edge of the veranda beside Robert, under Giuseppino’s great striped golfing umbrella, told him of her father’s first night on the island. The story he had made of it for her as a girl: how he had marveled at the statue surrounded by a hundred red candles, the magical hush as il conte parted the crowd. How different from the festival now with its growl of generators, the flash of colored lights on the stalls, the pounding music to which the young gyrated in a corner, no longer enamored of the wailing island songs. And the tourists with their cameras taking a hundred thousand photographs when on her father’s first night there had been only one, the very first, the photograph that held within it everything that was to come after. No conte this time. Though no one but she would admit it, least of all the members of the Modernization Committee, the festival was hollowed out somehow, without his presence.

  But now, into the wet disorder of the piazza came Bepe and his nephews, running like young men. “There’s an emergency,” Bepe cried. “The ferry has broken down!”

  “Broken down?” asked Tonino.

  “Damned flying fish—a great shoal of them—stuck in the motor. This puttana of a storm!”

  “Leave the Santa Maria,” counseled Tonino, clapping old Bepe on the shoulder. “You’re soaked through—I’ll order you an arancello. We’ll fix it tomorrow, when we’re all sober and the rain has stopped.”

  “No, no!” cried Bepe. “You don’t understand. The Santa Maria del Mare has broken down, and there are people—lots more people—waiting to come across! We must fetch them!”

  There was some confusion at this. Tourists, from il conte’s big hotel? “No,” puffed Bepe. “All sorts. Visitors from the mainland. Islanders coming home—some third cousins of the Mazzus, so I’ve heard, who’ve traveled all the way from America to be here, and the Dacosta uncles from Switzerland! I think I even saw Flavio Esposito. Tourists, too. They’ve heard about our festival. They’re queuing at the quay. They want me to bring them to the island to see the saint. And now the ferry has broken down and I can’t.”

  Maria-Grazia rose, possessed with a fierce conviction. “Flavio? My brother Flavio? He must be brought here—we must send out the little boats. Where are the fishermen? Matteo? Rizzulinu?”

  Rizzulinu extracted himself from the dancing, wringing the ends of his wet jeans. “We can only bring five or six in the Provvidenza,” he said, when Agata-the-fisherwoman explained the difficulty.

  “How many are there, Bepe?”

  The old ferryman puffed out his cheeks. “I don’t know. Far more than that.”

  “Who else has a little boat?” cried Maria-Grazia. “Who else can help?”

  The youngest Terazzus stepped forward, one or two others. That was all.

  Now Agata-the-fisherwoman rose to a great height, hauling herself by the bar’s counter. “We’ll take the old boats,” she said. “We’ll launch the ones stored away in the tonnara. The old boats, painted, with the white stones, that we used before the war. There are ten or twelve in there.”

  The islanders began to stir themselves. Down the road to the quay they hurried, in cars and vans, on bicycles, on foot, bearing lanterns like little white stars. Maria-Grazia seized Flavio’s Balilla binoculars, and together she and Lena took the three-wheeled van and follo
wed them. In the dark that was all at once less storm-tossed, less rain-washed, the young men of the island launched the boats. On the waters of the harbor they rode again: the Sant’Agata Salvatrice, the Trust in God, the Santa Maria della Luce. The Provvidenza, the Maria Concetta, and the Siracusa Star.

  Lena and Maria-Grazia were left onshore with the rest of the islanders, watching the lights sail away from them. And here on the edge of the ocean, Maria-Grazia seemed to see the island as it looked to those ships leaving it, and must have looked to those Espositos who had left it: her son, her brothers, her granddaughter—a rock in a haze of water vapor, receding on the clouded surface of the water like a ship cast off. “Didn’t you want to go in the ships, too?” she asked Lena.

  “I’m going to stay here,” said Lena, “and prepare the bar for when they get back.”

  But Maria-Grazia, finding herself pensive, wanted to watch the ships awhile longer in case, by some miracle, her brother really was brought back on one of them. Lena left her with the keys to the van and went home on foot, at a run, through the last of the rain. So it was that when the land agent Santino’s son came running with a sodden note in Andrea d’Isantu’s handwriting, summoning Maria-Grazia to the villa one last time, Maria-Grazia found herself alone.

  —

  WHEN CONCETTA STEPPED INTO the piazza, to the abandoned music and the upturned chairs of the veranda, looking for her friend, she found a strange alteration. The savings bank was lit fluorescent white, its sliding doors open. Behind the counter sat Bepino.

  The widows of the Sant’Agata Committee led the charge through its doors. The remaining islanders followed. Rain-soaked, jostling, they came to rest before the yellow counter. “Now what’s all this, Bepino?” cried Valeria. “You’re doing business, in the middle of the night, during the festival?”

  “The bank is just open for an hour or two,” said Bepino, with a ceremonious little clearing of the throat. “I’m supposed to tell you that you’ll get your money back. The money from your accounts that you all deposited here.”

  “But the bank was failing,” said Concetta. “It can’t be unfailing.”

  “The bank is failing. But you’ll get your money, as we promised you.”

  But who could have paid so much? In wonder, the widows of Sant’Agata began withdrawing their savings and pensions. “Is it the foreign bank?” persisted Concetta. “Talk sense, Bepino. Is it them?”

  “Not them.”

  “Then who? Is it someone from overseas, investing money in our island?”

  Bepino gave a quick flick of his head, for what foreign investor would have done that?

  “I know who it is,” cried Agata-the-fisherwoman. “That same person who hid the money outside everybody’s doors, the same person who gave ’Ncilino the tiles for his roof and Matteo the outboard motor.”

  “Sant’Agata,” breathed one of the elderly scopa players.

  Into this scene of consternation came Maria-Grazia at last, in the three-wheeled van. She stopped beneath the palm tree and got out, and Concetta was dismayed to find her weeping. “What is it, Mariuzza?” she cried.

  But Agata-the-fisherwoman, who had not noticed Maria-Grazia’s tears in the general damp of the night air, merely seized her by the shoulder and said, “Come and help us puzzle this mystery out. Somebody’s given us back all our money, Signora Maria-Grazia. You’re the one who’s always known everybody’s secrets. You must know who it is, if anybody does.”

  “Sì,” said Maria-Grazia, without ceasing in her weeping. “Il conte.”

  Bepino’s translucent ears turned a fierce pink. “No one was supposed to say anything about it,” he whispered.

  “Now, Bepino,” cried the ancient Valeria, seizing him by the wrist. “You’re to tell us everything.”

  “I’m not supposed to,” said Bepino. But Valeria was the oldest person on the island, and neither did he dare to disobey her. “He sent Santino Arcangelo down here with a lot of cash,” he confessed at last. “To give back to everybody. So you don’t lose what you’re owed when the bank fails.”

  “Why?” asked the widow Valeria.

  “Aren’t all your businesses in difficulties? Don’t you all need this money back?”

  It was true—but all the same, il conte?

  “He beat the fisherman Pierino,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, in blank incomprehension. “He’s not a good man. Not like his father, the old conte. If he means to make amends, it’s much too late.”

  All at once, Maria-Grazia was seized with a pity so profound she felt she could taste it, like a storm coming in off the sea. “He’s never been such a bad man as you all think,” she murmured. “He doesn’t deserve this blame.”

  “You should know that best, Maria-Grazia,” said Valeria. “If he’s a good man, why have you been wandering up there at all hours of the day and night, skulking about in the alleyways and vaneddi like a lovelorn girl?”

  But now here was Robert, a little breathless, who had come up unobserved at the edge of the crowd. “Now, Signora Valeria,” he said. “What kind of accusation are you making?”

  The old woman reeled a little, for never had Signor Robert spoken so forcefully to anybody on the island. “Nobody here is making accusations,” she mumbled.

  “Mariuzza,” said Robert, touching her wrist. “Tell her the truth.”

  Maria-Grazia said, “Il conte is sick. He’s dying. I went to him because I was anxious about him, and as it turned out he needed my help, so I kept visiting. He has no family. He’ll be the last conte. He has no one to leave his belongings to, and so it will all be seized—the villa and his father’s hunting ground and the bank and the buildings around the piazza that have belonged to his family for three hundred years. And when he came back to the island and saw these troubles coming from across the sea, he decided to sell everything, to help everybody a little with their debts. Perhaps to make amends for the beating of Pierino, for Lord knows how everybody’s made him suffer for it.”

  “Go on,” said Robert. “Go on.”

  “It was he who had the idea of leaving gifts about the island in secret, the tiles and the outboard motor and the stacks of money, so that you’d think it was the saint. But how could he do that on his own, when he’s been confined to bed for months? How could he know who was in trouble on the island, who needed his help, when none of you speak to him any longer—when none of you have, since his father died almost fifty years ago?”

  “But why you, Maria-Grazia?” complained Valeria. “For he could have asked anybody. Santino Arcangelo, or his foreign assistants.”

  Concetta, understanding, said, “None of them would do. It had to be someone who knew everyone else’s troubles. Who else but Mariuzza?”

  For always, from a girl, Maria-Grazia had been the repository of the island’s secrets, since she had led the wild Concetta into the bar and tamed her with kindness and limonata.

  “And you’ve been doing this, Signora Maria-Grazia?” said Valeria.

  “Signora Maria-Grazia and I,” said Robert.

  Valeria was still dissatisfied. “There’s some ungodly connection between the two of them,” she mumbled. “Something not right. You’ve been visiting him, Maria-Grazia, since long before these troubles started. Every Sunday afternoon, if rumors are to be believed.”

  Maria-Grazia, drawing herself up like her mother, Pina Vella, said, “Of course there’s a connection between us. We’re half brother and sister. And all of you know it, so you might as well come out and say it, instead of gossiping about it in corners as you have for ninety years.”

  The elderly scopa players, feeling themselves to be very modern, murmured about the need for DNA tests and blood samples before any judgment was made on the matter. “We’ve done all that,” cried Maria-Grazia, allowing her irritation to get the better of her. “We did a DNA test three years ago. It’s all done with. Robert knows. Now can’t you all just let us be?”

  “Well,” said Valeria, launching a final halfhearted challen
ge, “what were you doing there tonight?”

  “I went to the villa because il conte is dying,” said Maria-Grazia. “And there’s not one person in this godforsaken little place who’s willing to visit him.”

  Maria-Grazia felt herself to have gone too far in her anger, to have been uncharitable—for really she loved the island as much as any of them. But Robert took her gently by the wrist. And the fact remained, Andrea d’Isantu was dying. Eighty-eight years old—the same age to the day as the ghost of Uncle Tullio, whose youthful portrait still hung on the stairs of the House at the Edge of Night, whose presence haunted the goat paths on still evenings—Andrea had been diagnosed with a persistent cancer of the liver, and now it had all but used him up. He had been too sick even to attend their festival.

  Now the widows of the island murmured in pity, thinking of the dying man in the villa at the edge of the town, unvisited, unmourned. The music had stopped, and no one knew anymore what to do or say. Even Valeria fell back a little, chastened.

  “We must go and see him, Mariuzza,” said Concetta at last. “We must bring him gifts, as we used to do for his father, il conte. How can we have neglected that part of the celebrations?”

  “He’s very sick,” said Maria-Grazia. “The priest and the mainland doctor are there with him—it’s too late now—they won’t want us all there.”

  “We must go anyway,” said Concetta. “It’s the proper thing to do.”

  —

  IN THE PINK AND AMBER ROOM with the cherubed ceiling, Andrea d’Isantu lay in the same bed in which he had been born. A rosary wound his right hand. Father Marco proffered holy water. Beside him, the doctor was making ready to leave, unlooping her stethoscope with an old weariness Maria-Grazia recognized from her father’s late-night returns when there was nothing more to be done. Into this room came the islanders, unannounced, dripping rainwater over the tiles. “Signor il conte,” cried the widow Valeria. “We’re here to bring you our festival offerings. We know the truth now. We know the truth about what you’ve done for us.”