“So it could be that the original name was Casa di Alberto Delanotte.” Amedeo was a little discouraged by this unpoetic truth.
“But I prefer to think of the name as meaning ‘at the edge of night,’ ” said Pina. “Because it is, if you look in both directions from here.”
Amedeo looked. Illuminating the terrace was a single streetlamp, around which mosquitoes circled and inside whose panes lizards basked, sending their scuttling shadows across the tiles. Beyond it were the reassuring lights of the town, and in the distance the coast of Sicily, framing the island on either side, so that Castellamare could have been a peninsula, an outcrop of some greater mass. Look in the other direction, though, and all was sea and night, a vista of emptiness unbroken as far as North Africa. “It’s an odd place to put a bar,” said Amedeo.
“It was always a bar,” said Pina. “The first count wouldn’t let them have a bar at the center of the town, for fear of drunkenness and gambling. Before the Rizzus took the business over, the house was standing empty for years. Some of the old people will never cross the threshold. And there is some bad luck that seems to cling to the place. Look at Rizzu’s brother. Two sons dead in as many years. You can see why people call the house cursed.”
“It’s this damned war that has been the curse,” said Amedeo. “Not an old bar.”
Pina said, quietly, “True.”
Amedeo wondered if she was thinking of her husband. But Pina allowed herself to reflect only for a minute, twisting her cable of black hair in one hand, and then, straightening herself, she said, “Anyway, I must get home.”
It had always been for il professore that she had had to get home. Amedeo wondered if she felt her solitude as he did, as she moved alone through the rooms of her old house by the church. On both sides her neighbors had immigrated to America. Even her beauty was of a handsome, far-off kind, as forbidding as a Greek statue. Perhaps this was why no suitor had approached her since Professor Vella’s death. Her elderly father had been the island’s schoolmaster at the turn of the century, Amedeo knew—Professor Vella had married Pina on the old man’s death, inheriting both girl and schoolroom. Now she had no remaining family on the island except the fisherman Pierino, who was a sort of distant cousin.
Afterward, draining alone the dregs of red liquor, he wished that he had unburdened himself to her a little, for Pina was always so composed, a woman stronger than the walls of the old house. He wished that he had told her how the war had opened a grayness inside him, a grayness that he had sought to fill with the affair with il conte’s wife, with the purchase of the crumbling house, but which still yawned and gaped on nights like this. Fitting that he now inhabited the House at the Edge of Night, for his own spirit these days could be precisely divided—half of it light and fathomable, half as dark and deep as the ocean.
—
ONE NIGHT IN LATE OCTOBER, his friend Father Ignazio intercepted him outside the church. “Come and drink a coffee with me, dottore,” he said.
Amedeo was on his way to examine the infected eye of the Mazzus’ goat (for he was treated indiscriminately by the islanders as both physician and veterinarian). But the priest’s words were an order, not an invitation, and so he followed his friend under the austere arch of the priest’s house, and into its courtyard, a dark place green with the scent of oleander bushes, a courtyard that never seemed to get warm.
Father Ignazio poured coffee, arranged cups and saucers on the little rusting table, and addressed Amedeo sternly. “It’s time there was a wedding on this poor island,” he said. “That’s what I want to discuss with you.”
Discomposed, Amedeo sat, stirring his coffee. “You and Pina,” said the priest. “I may as well come out and say it directly. The girl’s got a great affection for you—anyone can see it. And look at you, a bachelor of nearly forty!”
Amedeo was forty-four, but did not say so. “I’d like to see her married again,” said the priest. “She’s lonely, especially since you left her house to go and knock about in that old Casa al Bordo della Notte.”
Amedeo, uncertain how to reply, said at last, “I still see Pina very often.”
“Yes, but why not see her every day? As man and wife. Amedeo, you’d be a good husband for Pina. You wouldn’t nag at her to give up thinking and reading, as less enlightened men would. She’d be willing to marry you, I’ll bet ten thousand lire—though I can’t say for certain that she loves you. But she’ll come to, Amedeo. Her husband has been dead three years. It was a poor match to start with, made because of some family connection over a house and a lemon grove, not out of love. She’s an outstanding woman, Amedeo—loyal, resourceful. She’s young enough to bear children, with some luck. Why do you hesitate?”
Amedeo drained his coffee and examined the grainy depths.
“Unless there’s another woman,” said the priest. “I can’t deny I’ve heard some strange rumors, these last few months.”
“No,” said Amedeo. “There’s no other woman.”
“Then consider it at least. It grieves me to see the two of you moping about in your great crumbling houses, both alone.”
Pina. He walked away dizzy with the strangeness of it.
That afternoon, he inspected the eye of the goat on the Mazzus’ farm, receiving a sharp bite on the thumb for his pains. Mazzu always paid Amedeo in food, having no other currency, and he walked back to the town with his pockets stuffed with hazelnuts and white truffles from the Mazzus’ olive grove. He checked a bad case of constipation on the Dacosta farm, and called in to inspect Rizzu’s two smallest grandchildren, who were suffering from an itching complaint of the skin. He found them, still scabby, wrestling in a heap with an assortment of their brothers and sisters. He would be treating them all by Friday, no doubt. Always, children everywhere on this island. It gave him a pain in the chest, so that he could hardly look at them directly. Disinfecting the small, hot backs of the youngest Rizzus, comforting their tears at the sting of the iodine, he felt dizzy for a moment in the unseasonable heat, when really it was his own longing for a child that all at once overwhelmed him.
He went to Pina’s house and walked in without knocking. Pina was at the stove, her hair pinned up, preparing a chicken. He waited, dry mouthed, attempting a polite smile. At last, he knelt at her feet (she had no living father or brother to ask for permission), and asked her to be his wife. “Or at least consider it,” he said, his courage failing.
Pina, to his surprise, consented immediately and with tears in her eyes: “I don’t need to consider; I already have my answer; oh, Amedeo!”
They agreed to be married at once. On the last day in November, Father Ignazio bound their hands before the statue of Sant’Agata and the whole island.
—
IT WAS PINA WHO was responsible for the first recorded photograph of Amedeo. A few days after the wedding, she ambushed him with the folding camera at the top of the stairs. “Stand still!” she cried. “Stand still! Let me capture you!” Amedeo, startled, posed a little self-consciously with one hand on his waist. Just back from his morning rounds, he had yet to put down his medical bag. He had with him also his book of stories—the widower Donato, whom he had treated that morning, had just finished recounting to him a tale about his aunt’s visitations by the saint during the festival of 1893. In the photograph Amedeo seemed aflame with happiness, possessed by it, his whole being angled toward the woman behind the lens. For Pina, it turned out, possessed within her the depth of passion he had been lacking all this long while. He had not found it in Carmela. He had found it in the schoolmistress with a face like a Greek statue; it was here.
They had made no wedding journey, though in honor of his new bride he had set aside all work except emergencies for five days. After the wedding, Pina, with her small neat trunk of belongings, her crates of books, had followed him to the House at the Edge of Night, which was now beginning once more to be habitable. The house was fragrant with the purple scent of bougainvillea, its rooms sonorous with the noi
se of the sea. Happiness hung in the air, hummed inside the walls; now it seemed a thing that was attainable. That first night, Pina had climbed through the house, exploring every half-forgotten, dust-sheeted room, throwing open every window. Amedeo followed in her train, picking up the pins that fell from the rope of her black hair. Then, at the top of the house, suddenly mischievous, she removed her bridal crown of oleander and set the rest free. The glossy ropes of it filled the room with their perfume, and he found himself seizing them in great handfuls. They pursued each other through each room of the house. It seemed for the first time to be a place of joy again, as it had been before the war.
By some good fortune, there were no serious illnesses that week, and they passed it blissfully undisturbed. He was thankful that he had never brought Carmela to the House at the Edge of Night, that he had now broken all ties with her. He resolved to be a better man. And to his gratification he found that as his passion for Pina grew, during those wondrous days of makeshift honeymoon when they ate their dinner off old cracked saucers and out of coffee cups like fishermen at sea, and never opened the shutters until noon, and made love wherever they found themselves—on the newly sanded floorboards, on the dust-sheeted sofa in his study, on the straw mattresses in the spare bedrooms—during those days, the memory of Carmela became smaller, less significant, like something seen through a gray veil, belonging to another time, to his life before the war.
But Carmela had not been easy to break with. She had turned vindictive at the news of his engagement, had threatened to reveal their association to her husband unless Amedeo submitted to her advances one last time, and a last, and one more. Reluctantly he had continued to play the part of her lover, breaking the thing off painfully, gradually, rather than all at once as he wanted to do. He had last visited the caves by the sea—it caused him hot shame even to confess it to himself—on the eve of his wedding. Then, at last, in the darkness full of the spray of the churned autumn ocean, he had managed to break with Carmela for good. On his wedding night, Pina wondered why he sneezed so, in what damp place he could have caught such a cold.
Shortly after their wedding, Pina became pregnant. And in the joy of this news, the affair with Carmela was forgotten; it became something he regarded dispassionately, as though it had never happened to him at all. He did not want to consider it. For when he did, a dark fear possessed him that Carmela might at any moment take it into her head to tell her husband the truth. He gave thanks that the count was always absent in those months, and absorbed himself instead with Pina.
Had he felt some dim sense of foreboding at the news that Carmela, too, had given thanks at the shrine of Sant’Agata, for the conception of a child? He could not now remember. Everything in those days had been fogged by his love for Pina, and his own happiness. But by continuing to vacillate between the two of them—out of weakness, out of fear of scandal!—he had somehow got into this predicament. He had hoped that the affair with Carmela would go unnoticed on the island. Now he saw that it could become a thing of monstrous size, impossible to shake off, a thing that could pry his whole life apart.
V
By noon on the day of Pina’s baby’s birth, it was rumored across the whole island that the doctor had delivered two babies, one his wife’s and the other his lover’s. It was the greatest scandal ever to sweep Castellamare. It was also the most thrilling entertainment, and several people took the day off work especially to follow its development.
When Pina heard, she wept, turning her face to the wall. She refused at first even to nurse her child, so that Amedeo was obliged to carry the wailing baby from room to room. The count raged in the streets, making an exhibition of himself; the priest and the mayor had to be summoned to coax him out of the public square; and Carmela, despite the exhortations of her friends, her midwife, and her servants, sat up in bed and refused to retract her story. For the first time in her marriage, she had the upper hand over her husband, and she was not about to relinquish it. Her baby, she repeated, was Amedeo Esposito’s. She and the doctor had been lovers for half a year, only ceasing their meetings the night before his wedding day. “If the baby belongs to my husband,” she said, “why have we been married six years with no child, so long, in fact, that he accused me before the whole town of being barren?”
This, no one could answer—least of all Amedeo, who cursed himself for never considering the possibility that the difficulty had been il conte’s.
In the circumstances, one path of action presented itself.
“I never met with her,” he insisted (his desperation lent the words a certain credibility). “I never did any of those things she claims, as God and Sant’Agata are my witnesses!”
Pina would not be consoled. Carmela would not retract her story. In the House at the Edge of Night, all was disorder and weeping.
Amedeo was thankful when his duties allowed him to flee the house. The sound of his beloved Pina sobbing now permeated the walls at nights (he had been banished upstairs to sleep on the damp sofa, under the tarpaulin). Yet soon, during those first days of his son’s life, he began to feel himself unwelcome not only in his own home but in certain corners of the island. When he went to the ancient Signora Dacosta’s door to check her rheumatic knees, the old woman merely answered that she was “quite well, thank you, dottore,” and closed it, clearly still limping. Gesuina, he noticed, slammed her shutters with unnecessary force whenever he crossed the piazza. The grocer Arcangelo, with whom he had sat on the town council since before the war, excused himself when Amedeo entered the shop and sulked in the back room until he was gone.
Meanwhile, the fishermen reported that the count’s doctor friend had been summoned from the mainland. With bottles of wine and boxes of Palermitan marzipan, he came. The two of them could be heard late at night raising their voices on the terrace of the villa, the count drunkenly roaring, the rich doctor consoling. Carmela, apparently, was shut up in her room with the baby, and the count would not see her.
On the third day, the mainland doctor examined the baby and, after some consideration, declared his characteristics to match those of signor il conte in every way.
Amedeo knew that it was possible to draw blood from a child and from the suspected father, to ascertain their blood type and (somewhat unreliably) to test the paternity that way. The mainland doctor, clearly, did not read the latest medical periodicals. But in the light of this evidence, the count now underwent a violent reversal.
“She means to shame me,” he raged to his friend. “I see it now. The whole thing was calculated to shame me. She means to take my son from me, and make me the laughingstock of the island, by claiming an affair with this Esposito, this bastard doctor with holes in his shoes with whom she has hardly exchanged a word in her life! I won’t stand for it. Bring me the child.”
The baby was taken from Carmela’s breast and brought wailing to his father. The count kissed him and made much of him, and after some thought chose for him the name Andrea, his own first name. “There,” said the count (who was holding his son at arm’s length because the boy was now frothing in an unappetizing, milky fashion). “Take him back to his mother. It’s settled. The boy is mine.”
The news spread around the island that the baby was the count’s after all. There had never been any affair between the doctor and Carmela, and the whole thing was a slanderous lie on Carmela’s part designed to discredit her husband.
But most of the islanders preferred the first story. Rizzu had come to life again in his wonder over the week’s events. “It’s a miracle of Sant’Agata,” he told the priest. “Two babies, born on the same night! A miracle. The miracle we have waited and prayed for since the start of the war—longer—since the saint mercifully cured the legs of Signora Gesuina!”
Father Ignazio, who was pruning the oleander bushes in his yard with his soutane rolled up, merely raised an eyebrow.
“Twins—miraculous twins!” continued Rizzu in his rapture. “Twins born by different mothers on the same nig
ht, to the count’s barren wife and to Pina, a woman far too old to bear a child.”
“Pina is hardly more than thirty,” said Father Ignazio. “And it’s not a miracle for two babies to be born on the same night, merely a matter of statistics. It’s never yet happened in my time on the island. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I’ve seen both children, and they don’t look alike.”
Something troubled Rizzu. “Look, padre, do you believe this tale about Amedeo and il conte’s wife carrying on with each other in the caves by the sea?”
“No,” lied Father Ignazio, and inadvertently hacked a dozen buds from the oleander bush.
The next day, the doctor himself came to visit. Amedeo wept with his head bowed, and Father Ignazio found himself playing the uneasy role of comforter, when really it was Pina whose side he inclined to in this matter. “There,” said Father Ignazio, thumping the doctor’s shoulder. “There, now. You’ll have to hold your head up, you know, Amedeo. When a rumor takes hold in a place this small, with nothing else to talk about, it can be the ruin of a man; it can drive you from the island, if you let it.”
“It’s Pina I mind about,” said Amedeo. “It isn’t what everyone else is saying, it’s that Pina believes I did those things.”
“Talk to her,” said Father Ignazio. “Tell her the truth about it, one way or the other.”
Amedeo raised his head. “Padre, the truth…”
But here Father Ignazio raised his hand. “No, no,” he said. “I’ve never been your confessor. I know you aren’t a religious man. I think it’s better that you make your peace with Pina, and leave the rest of us in the dark about the matter. Don’t add to her humiliation.”
When Amedeo got home, Pina was sleeping, with one hand stretched above her head, exposing her nightdress and the brown curve of her right breast. Her eyelashes were wet; her rope of black hair, unwound, spread itself over the pillows. He could not now remember how he had loved Carmela—if, indeed, he had loved her. A great homesickness overcame him for the first time since he had set foot on the island.
The House at the Edge of Night Page 6
