The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  He went directly to his foster father’s house. A sticklike woman opened the door at his knocking, not the housekeeper he remembered. “Esposito?” she said. “The old doctor, you mean? He’s dead. He was carried away last winter. Influenza.”

  His foster father’s real relatives had already descended from Rome and carried off all his things. The woman returned to Amedeo only his bundle of army postcards.

  She allowed him to walk through the rooms of the house. Gone were the snakes in jars, the masks, the whale brushes over the stairs. Only a few wires and squares of discolored wallpaper remained where the exhibits had once been suspended. “We’ve all lost people, you know,” she said, slightly scoldingly, when Amedeo wept.

  —

  IN THIS GREAT DISORDER of mind he returned to Castellamare. It seemed that his previous journey, in the Neapolitan steamer, had taken place in a different life, and the war was the only real thing that he had lived: He had never dwelt with his foster father at the house like a museum, never been licensed as a medico condotto, never been apprenticed to the watchmaker or the baker or the printer, never been a foundling, never been born.

  But Castellamare. He had lived that. The memory of Castellamare endured.

  Father Ignazio had written to him when the war ended. “Things go very badly here,” he had said. “Many of the young men are gone—at least twenty-seven at my count—and others still missing, and others threaten to leave in the general fever for America that now seems to be sweeping the island. The war has made this place more cramped, a good deal hungrier. You will find us much reduced.”

  Amedeo discovered from the priest’s letter that Rizzu’s brother was gone, departed for America. The bar was shut up, for no one wanted the place. Professor Vella the schoolmaster had been killed. Two of Rizzu’s grandsons had been killed. Only the household of il conte, who had been invalided out of Trentino in 1915 with a leg wound, was unaltered. Carmela, wrote the priest, had fallen out with her husband and left for the mainland shortly after his return, but she had been retrieved. Some matter of a lover. (“Be careful of Carmela,” Pina would warn later. “This war has made her restless.”)

  In spite of Father Ignazio’s letter, Amedeo had not expected to see the town itself so diminished. He arrived during the siesta hour, and the houses on the main street were shuttered. But some, he saw, were closed up entirely, their doors and windows boarded. Objects were abandoned outside them: a chair with a missing seat, a dry basil plant in a cracked pot. Two children played in the dust. Dimly he recognized them, children he had delivered, twins belonging to the Mazzu family. “Maddalena,” he called. “Agato.”

  They came, tentatively. “Where is the priest?” he said, for a great wish had come over him to see his old friend again, to check that Ignazio at least was not altered. The children did not know.

  Amedeo walked the route he had trodden his first night on the island. The House at the Edge of Night was shut up as the priest had written, its veranda sagging under the untended vines, its front steps already rife with weeds.

  —

  HE TOOK AGAIN HIS old room in Pina’s house. He tacked the photograph of the island to the stone wall inside the closet. Pina was the only person on the island who seemed to walk straighter and taller since the war. After her husband’s death, she had been appointed the schoolmistress. Late at night, the two of them sat up with Father Ignazio, around a bottle of spirits, making plans for the rescuing of the island from its abandonment. They needed to modernize. They needed a ferry service, a two-room hospital. They needed a second classroom for the school, a system of funeral insurance for the elderly. Il Conte d’Isantu had been elected mayor again, complained the priest, and nothing now changed on the island. D’Isantu was always on the mainland, pursuing his own advancement in some obscure way with friends in Catania, spending long months at his Palermitan estate, when here things needed to be done. The bar rotted, the missing did not return, and no one played scopa in the square or danced to the music of the organetto.

  When Amedeo saw the beautiful Carmela again, some weeks later, it was reassuring to find her so unaltered. Waylaying him on the sea road, where she had been walking in her Sunday clothes, under a parasol, she made a pouting display of her displeasure. “Dottore, you’ve never come to pay us a formal visit,” she said. “And they say you’ve been back a month. Things have been dull here, and I don’t mind telling you. No clothes, no decent food. No visitors, during the influenza. But I’m glad you’re back safely—and probably a war hero, too, unlike my husband.”

  Amedeo, who had not been aware that she cared one way or the other about his safety, sought about for a reply.

  She invited him to go with her to look at the caves, which were a historical oddity he had never seen before the war. Still in the same mood of bemused curiosity, he consented. As soon as they were in the shelter of the damp dark, she began to kiss him, to caress him.

  Reeling, Amedeo supposed that she meant to appoint him her lover as Pina had warned.

  “Don’t worry about my husband,” Carmela murmured in his ear. “I’ve never loved him, and the whole island knows he’s a tyrant and a fool.”

  Amedeo got free of her and excused himself, mumbling about the feverish Mazzu children and the elderly widower Donato he had promised to visit before noon.

  For a fortnight she kept up her pursuit, intercepting him on his rounds in silent corners of the island. On the fifteenth day, he acquiesced and they made love on the cold stones of the cave. Why, he did not know, but she was insistent, and afterward he found that he did not, in fact, very much regret it. It was difficult to feel anything in particular.

  Dressing in the dark, stumbling about, something clicked under his feet. Kneeling, he unearthed a cache of whitened bones.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said Carmela, with a laugh. “They’ve been here two thousand years. Did you think the caves full of white skulls were only a charming folk story? Go further in and you’ll see them. The fishermen won’t enter this cave, for fear of curses.”

  He stumbled away instead, into the light. They clawed the sand out of their clothes and hair; he fetched her parasol. Buttoning her underclothes, fastening the little waist of her jacket—which, despite her complaints about the lack of new clothes, still smelled of dye from the tailor—she was elegant once again. She took out a silver mirror and by the cave’s dim light repinned her hair. She had an ability to compose herself that he found both alluring and frightening. He was damp with perspiration, disheveled, giddy; she had not even broken a sweat. She replaced her hat, adjusted the angle, and regarded him calmly from behind its visor of dotted tulle as though they were strangers again, all propriety restored. “Dottor Esposito, I’ve detained you,” she said, “and you’ll be late for your next patient.”

  On the way back up to the road, she showed him a second cave, in which there were not bones but hundreds of luminous white stones. These he recognized, for the island’s fishermen nailed them to their ships as talismans. “We’ll meet in this one next time,” she said, “if you like it better.”

  They returned to the town separately, Carmela by the main road, he by paths and alleys, getting burrs stuck in his good wool trousers. Pina looked at him strangely when he entered the house, but had nothing to say.

  —

  AFTER THAT, CARMELA BEGAN to summon him to the caves once or twice a week, and then, when il conte was absent, to the villa. Amedeo found himself making a circle of the town on these nights, first talking to everyone, maintaining the pretense in his own mind that he was at liberty to choose whether or not to answer Carmela’s summonses. The truth was he was not free; he never refused. But on such nights, his lengthy detours around town meant that he approached the villa only long after nightfall, when he could be certain that he would not be observed. As he made his journey, creeping up the avenue of palm trees, Carmela would appear in the window with a lamp. She would admit him silently to her room with its mock-baroque cherubs, its ceiling of p
eeling clouds, so as not to alert the servants to his presence. The count was thinking of installing electricity, she told him. For now their encounters took place in a dim light of pink and amber. Carmela dictated the terms of all their meetings, and always sent him away before dawn.

  Once, he raised again the matter of her husband. “My husband is a fool,” said Carmela. “I’ve been unfaithful before, you know. I even left for the mainland, but he got me back here. He said if I had another affair it would be the death of him. Well, good. I hope it is.”

  Her levity frightened him. “But, really, Carmela—”

  “Don’t worry about him finding out. He doesn’t see anything. He hasn’t looked at me in months. He’s too busy being an important political man, and I’m glad to be rid of him. I’m not sure he spends his nights alone, either. No, it suits us both very well. He only found out about my last affair because I told him. Anyway, Amedeo, you’ll hear him coming.”

  For the count had recently bought a motorcar, the island’s first (and destined, in fact, to remain the island’s solitary motorcar for thirty years). He’d had it shipped from Palermo, and unloaded at the little quay by ropes, with much gesticulating and shouting. Now he drove it about the island’s dust tracks and stony roads, and from the driver’s seat, sweating in his leather cap and goggles, he inspected the work of his tenants in the fields. The old men made the sign of the cross when il conte approached in his great metal box with its formidable coughs and growls.

  Once, as Amedeo left Carmela’s house at dawn and started out along the avenue, he heard around the bend the motorcar’s gruff roar. With a painful clenching of the gut he threw himself into the grass, watching the motorcar churn the dust and illuminate the trunks of the trees as it passed by.

  He seemed to be living a life not of his own devising in those days, an odd, dreamlike existence.

  —

  SANT’AGATA’S DAY THAT YEAR, too, was altered.

  From dawn the heat was of a feverish, seething quality. The morning Mass, in a church so crowded not even a fly could pass between the shoulders of the islanders, was unbroken by a sigh of wind. Noon brought shimmering light and short shadows. Tradition dictated that the statue of Sant’Agata must be borne around every inlet and curve of the island’s coast: along the edge of the fields belonging to the Conte d’Isantu, over the rocky crenellations at the island’s head, through the bare villages of its southern coast, in and out of the sea caves (here at least the dark was cooler), and then into the port, where the statue was greeted with incense and a storm of flowers. But this year there were no young fishermen to carry the statue, and so the old men shouldered the burden. The statue weighed half a ton. On the procession around the coast the aged fishermen stumbled; wreathed in tidemarks of sweat, they had to be fortified with sips of wine and wiped with cold cloths. Coming to the end of their journey, the fishermen plunged with relief into the waters of the bay, but found that the surf was barely cool enough to satisfy them; it was listless, tepid, except around the rocks, where it seemed to froth and boil.

  The ships were blessed, the year’s three new babies baptized, and the islanders made the slow journey back up the hill. As the fishermen labored on the stony road, the sun at last descended. The islanders assembled in the piazza, relieved by the dark.

  Old Mazzu dragged out his skinniest donkey to be auctioned, guitars were tuned and organetti dusted, and the widows emerged from Gesuina’s kitchen, where they had been shut up since dawn, bearing plates of grilled anchovies and stuffed zucchine. But the House at the Edge of Night remained in darkness. There were no games of scopa on the terrace this year; no dancing; no drinking of arancello. The islanders were sober and in bed before dawn.

  —

  THAT AUTUMN, AMEDEO DECIDED to buy the House at the Edge of Night. He could no longer bear to see it standing empty, and now that the island was half emptied of its inhabitants, houses were worth less than salt. Even a medico condotto could afford one.

  A light had gone out of Rizzu since his brother’s departure. “That house is crumbling,” he said. “It won’t be any good to you. It’s a bad-luck sort of a place.” In the end, Amedeo could only persuade him to accept five hundred lire and a chicken for it, and he had to barter the price up.

  Amedeo recorded the purchase in his red notebook and the date, the twenty-fourth of September, 1919. Now he had a home, and he hoped he could catch hold of the life he had been about to seize before the war interrupted. The house was indeed crumbling. He installed himself in the upstairs rooms and began to sand the walls and replace the sagging doors. He began collecting as his foster father had done. He gathered around him stories, artifacts, objects belonging to the island. Roman potsherds and coins, which the farmers threw away daily, he salvaged and bore carefully to the House at the Edge of Night. On the walls he hung tiles decorated in fantastic colors, patterned with sunflowers, fleurs-de-lis, the faces of lords and ladies. The images, some hundreds of years old, were painted in a hasty, swirling style that gave them the air of having only just dried. The artist Vincenzo had many ancestors who had painted more tiles than anyone ever needed, and Vincenzo dug them out of his cellar and gave them to Amedeo quite willingly—for the tourists had stopped buying them on his trips to the mainland, he said, and he was glad to be rid of them.

  From the catacombs by the sea Amedeo brought back pocketfuls of white luminous stones, and lined them up along all the upstairs windowsills. Meanwhile, on the hall table, little trinkets belonging to Sant’Agata accumulated, for these were often the currency in which he was paid for the delivery of a baby or the setting of a broken arm, by those of his patients whose treatment was not paid for by the municipality. He gathered miniatures of the saint, holy water bottles, and one statue in which Sant’Agata tore open her chest to reveal a heart of red-daubed wood. For this statue, he felt both affection and fear. He had never found comfort in religion.

  But he seemed at last to have begun to grasp, to inhabit a real existence. He plunged into the sea each morning before making his rounds—earning the ridicule of the fishermen, for no grown man of Castellamare would have swum in the water like that, for amusement, at the very edge of autumn, as though he were drunk! Climbing the hill, salt prickling in the folds of his skin, he would pause to pick up a white stone or a Roman potsherd to carry back to the House at the Edge of Night. In addition to collecting, Amedeo kept records of everything he purchased, as well as each improvement he made to the house. The downstairs rooms were still damp and uninhabitable, the upstairs bedrooms dark, their furniture mantled with dust sheets. It was slow work at first. He was obliged to sleep under a tarpaulin on stormy nights, and on these occasions he was something close to happy.

  During these first weeks of autumn, he began to make a systematic study of the island’s stories, for with the general altered state of the world, he had started to worry that the stories would be lost. It was not only Amedeo who was preoccupied with the disappearance of things. Stories poured forth, and all he had to do was go where they could be heard, to the places his daily rounds naturally took him: the dim upstairs rooms where widows pored over their rosary beads; the dusty sheds of the fishermen; and the abandoned houses, rocky and biblical, at the edge of the town that were haunted by the island’s children. Stories, it seemed, were to be found in dark places. Returning from these places, he transcribed the tales into his book.

  He installed his old folding camera in the one dry room, the little junk room under the eaves, full of old packing cases that had held, according to their labels, Modiano cigarettes and Campari liquor. In front of it he hung a red curtain, as though the room were a photographic studio. In his mind the House at the Edge of Night was a great tall museum like his foster father’s house, full of books and curiosities, and although he had no wife, no children, still he longed to photograph the descendants, numerous as stars, whose pictures would one day adorn the hallway and hang along the stairs.

  During that hot autumn after the festival,
he began to feel less satisfied with his association with Carmela. He had formed the habit of deferring to the fearsome Sant’Agata statue as he went in or out of the house, particularly if called to attend to a birth or a death, for, as irreligious as he was, he felt now that he would gladly accept good fortune wherever he might encounter it. It was the same desperation, the same grasping after life, that had led him to acquiesce to Carmela and to purchase the house—a feeling that his life must change. And yet sometimes the statue, on nights when his rounds had taken him to the lit window of Carmela’s villa, seemed to greet him with sad, reproachful eyes. He sought a wife and a family, the statue seemed to scold him. And as yet what did he possess but this faltering connection with Carmela, which often, like the watery soup he drank on days when his patients had not paid him, left him hungrier than before?

  In penance, he sought out his old friends—the priest, the schoolmistress, the men of the town council—and threw himself with fervor into the task of repairing the house.

  One evening, sipping the syrupy remnants from one of the old Campari bottles on the overgrown terrace, Pina Vella told him the story of the House at the Edge of Night. “It’s the second-oldest building on the island,” she said. “The old people consider it unlucky. It was the last place where the famous curse of weeping still remained, all those centuries ago. The islanders tried to pull the house down. But the walls were too thick—they couldn’t do it. It’s survived four earthquakes and a landslide besides. It’s won a kind of respect.”

  “Then how can it be unlucky?” said Amedeo.

  “You can look at it in two ways,” said Pina. “To survive such things a house must either be blessed by Sant’Agata or cursed by the devil—one of the two. That’s what they say.”

  As for the old name “Casa al Bordo della Notte,” she did not know where that came from. “Some of the old people think they can remember an Alberto Delanotte living here,” said Pina.