The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  But at last he had a son. He had not been allowed to hold the boy since that first morning. Now, he took the baby and bore him away to the top of the house. So tiny the boy was. His hands, his pink little face, his small barrel of a chest rising and falling.

  He longed to offer the boy some gift, some token. And so, in a whisper, he offered the first thing that occurred to him: He told his boy the story of the island.

  —

  THE FIRST NAME GIVEN to the island was Kallithea, he told his son, by a group of Greek sailors in search of a homeland. The name could mean “most beautiful” or “auspiciously burning.” Either was a possibility, for the island was volcanic; the sailors of Siracusa claimed to have seen it glow and shoot up flame. Now, it shone like a beacon and the travelers steered their ship by its light. As they made safe passage across the waters, the island’s summit smoldered and went out.

  The travelers landed and passed the night in a series of square caves cut out of the cliffs. The island was a place of black water and many stars. In the early hours, the moon came out and illuminated the sea, and the travelers were woken by a clear sound of weeping. It seemed to surround them, to come from the rocks of the island itself. Groping in the dark, they found hard white skulls and heard under their feet the click of bones. The caves were not caves but tombs. Clearly, something terrible had happened here.

  The new islanders prospered, but for one thing: They were disturbed each night by the sound of weeping, which provoked in them troublesome dreams. Gradually, the situation became so unbearable that the islanders decided not to sleep at all. So the first settlers in their town of stone huts became a wakeful people. They gathered on nights full of flame and stars, and sang and shook tambourines to drown out the weeping. But whether it was the wailing voices or the isolation of this place with its black sea and many constellations, all their songs were melancholy. No one could write a joyful song, not even the greatest of their poets. Even now (the doctor told his boy), the folk songs of Castellamare sounded to the stranger so mournful that, if you listened to them long enough, they might turn you mad.

  (Hesitantly, murmuringly, so as not to wake Pina, the doctor sang to his boy the most beautiful and least melancholy of these songs.)

  He had been going to tell his boy the rest of the story, how the curse of weeping was lifted: how a girl named Agata, a peasant’s daughter, saw visions of the Madonna; how the islanders, stone by stone, rebuilt their town. But here the boy stirred and let out a cry, and Pina, downstairs, awoke with her son as though by instinct. “Amedeo!” she called. “Where is my son?”

  He caressed the boy’s face. “Time to go down and talk to your mother,” he said.

  Pina, when he entered the room, was still for a moment disoriented—he could tell by the way she languidly smiled at him, as she had on her first morning in the House at the Edge of Night. Then she recalled their present trouble, and her face altered. “Give me my baby,” she said.

  He put the boy in her arms. The arch of her shoulders made him unwelcome, but he remained. “Pina,” he said. “I need to speak to you. I’ve done wrong by you, Pina.”

  Now she did not weep but was straight and unyielding. “Yes,” she said. “You have.”

  He became beseeching. He had not meant to, but he did. “Pina,” he said. “Amore. Tell me how I can make it right.”

  “It’s the lying I mind most of all,” said Pina, hard-eyed and quiet.

  So he told her the truth.

  It was a long time before Pina had anything to say. “You’ve disgraced me before everyone,” she said at last. “Our neighbors, our friends, the whole island. Do you think you can behave so badly and expect everyone to forget it? This isn’t a big city like Firenze. Once people know a thing, they remember! There’s nothing else to talk about. Now, everyone will know—and their children’s children—how you went with another man’s wife on the eve of your own wedding.”

  “I’ll make it right,” he said. “It’s you, Pina, I love. I’ll show it to be true.”

  “Can’t we go away somewhere?” she said. “To the north, to Firenze! Can’t you find another position, in some big town where we know nobody?”

  “And leave the island?” said Amedeo. In spite of himself, he shed tears of self-pity. They struck the baby like great raindrops, making him look up in wonder. “Isn’t there some other way, Pina? Ask me anything except that.”

  Pina dismissed him.

  —

  THAT AFTERNOON, ARCANGELO’S TEENAGE SON appeared on his bicycle on the dust road above the Rizzus’ farm. Amedeo was in the Rizzus’ kitchen, inspecting the children’s skin infection. The boy took flight down the hill in a fog of dust, and, propping the bicycle outside the gate, removed his hat and entered the kitchen. “You’re wanted, signor il dottore,” he said. “A special meeting of the town council.”

  After Amedeo had finished bandaging the children, he made the climb back to the town. On the slope between the prickly pears, the dust was silken, the heat like a weight on his back. Arcangelo, sweating, waylaid him on the steps of the town hall. “You’re to wait outside,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘outside’?”

  “In the lobby. You aren’t wanted at the meeting. We’ve your position to discuss.” Arcangelo took out a handkerchief and polished his forehead. “After this week’s events, we need to consider your situation on the island. Therefore il conte has called for a special meeting, and you’re to wait outside for our decision.”

  The count’s motorcar drew up with a retch. Up the steps came the count in his mayor’s sash and suit of English linen. Without a word to Amedeo, he caught Arcangelo by the elbow and drew him into the darkness of the building.

  Quick in pursuit, alight with fury, came Father Ignazio. Amedeo met him halfway up the steps. “What’s this?” he said. “You’re discussing my position. I was told only to come to a special meeting; I wasn’t told anything about this.”

  “I’ve only just heard it myself,” said Father Ignazio.

  “Am I merely to wait outside?”

  “We’ll fight it out, Amedeo,” said the priest. “I certainly intend to.”

  On the varnished bench in the entrance of the town hall, Amedeo waited. From within he heard shouting, roaring voices: the count’s voice and—to his surprise—the priest’s. “Damn you!” he heard the priest shout. “Do you think you’ll find someone else to take his place? And what about when the Mazzus were laid low with that fever last Christmas? And the idea of draining the swamp—not a child’s succumbed to malaria since! Why, your own wife would be dead now, d’Isantu, and your newborn boy, if it weren’t for Amedeo Esposito!”

  With a great banging of doors, the men of the council emerged into the dusty half-light of the entrance hall. Amedeo got to his feet. For the first time on the island he felt stooped, wrong-footed, as though his great height made him vulnerable to attack. The priest was red in the neck, his soutane flying. “They’ve stripped you of your duties!” he said. “The damn outrage of it, the indecency! I’ll deal with these stronzi no longer!”

  Arcangelo came forth, bearing an oily apology. “As deputy mayor it falls to me to inform you that you have been suspended from your offices as doctor and public health officer. The good character of the public officials in a town like ours, you must understand, is of first importance.”

  Amedeo began to sweat, as though stricken with a fever. “Give up my duties? But nothing’s been proved against me! I’m accused of no crime!”

  “Even so,” said Arcangelo. “There have been suspicions.”

  “And what about the patients I’m in the middle of treating? The Dacosta girl, Agata, and Pierino’s nephew’s broken leg, which I was to take out of its cast tomorrow afternoon so he misses no more of the tuna fishing season?” Stupidly, he thought also of the Mazzus’ goat. In three days, its eye would again need lancing.

  “How long am I to be forbidden from carrying out my duties?”

  “All I know is, w
e can’t allow you to occupy a position of trust in this town without further consideration.”

  Amedeo, shamefully, asked, “And what about my pay?” For his savings had been depleted since the wedding with Pina, and the baby was ten days old.

  “That also will be suspended,” said Arcangelo. “My best advice would be to look for a position beyond the shores of this island. We’re all very grateful for what you’ve done here, but better to leave without causing a scandal.”

  This island was the first place he had loved. But he saw now that it could also be a small place, a mean place. How could they remain, unless by some miracle of Sant’Agata they learned to survive on its sunlight and its water? Amedeo walked home by a long route. He could no longer imagine a life away from this place.

  “There may be hope,” said Father Ignazio that evening. “For Lord knows it was difficult to find you, Amedeo. There may not be anyone else willing to take the post. An island so cut off from the modern world, so inward looking. Not everyone could survive here.”

  But the count disappeared to the mainland on “political business” the following afternoon, and returned six days later with a spectacled youth, pale as an Englishman, who had been found to take the post of doctor, temporarily, until a new physician could be appointed. This young doctor had a certificate from the university in Palermo, and was the son of a friend of the count’s who had once been a kind of duke in Punta Raisi. He was installed in an empty house on Via della Chiesa, and instructed to take over Amedeo’s duties at once.

  For five days, Amedeo remained in his house, existing on the food the widows of the island brought him, and the four chickens the Rizzu family had sent as payment for the curing of the children. Pina still talked of leaving the island. But she was kind at heart; she could not help being so. Seeing how he moped and suffered, she relented and began to allow him at least to see the baby, whom she had named, at last, Tullio. During these days, he became inseparable from the boy. He carried him everywhere, curled against his shoulder or folded in the crook of his arm. In the face of their misfortune, Pina seemed to straighten the way she had after the war. On the sixth day, she summoned their friends to the house: Father Ignazio, Rizzu, even the disapproving Gesuina. (“I don’t support your carryings-on, dottore,” Gesuina announced, “but it’s plain this island can’t be left without a proper physician. Why, only a devil would try to drive you away!”)

  “We must lodge an appeal,” said Father Ignazio. Passing the baby between them in the dim lamplight of the cavernous kitchen, they drafted a letter to the government in Rome. Father Ignazio folded it in an envelope and put it inside his soutane to be sent with the fisherman Pierino, Pina’s cousin, to the mainland post the next day.

  —

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, just after nightfall, there was a tapping on the window. It was Signor Dacosta, his hat in his hands. “Signor il dottore, little Agata is sick again,” he said, “and the new doctor says it’s nothing but croup. But she’s had croup already—you remember—and it wasn’t like this.”

  After some deliberation over the morality of his position—for he had been clearly forbidden to practice—Amedeo fetched his coat and hat and followed Dacosta out into the night.

  The Dacostas’ farm was the poorest on the island, between the dry southern side where nothing grew and the recently drained swamp. He found the child tossing drily in her tangled bedsheets, beside her sleeping brothers and sisters. He had suspected for some time that the girl was afflicted with asthma. He ordered a bowl of hot water to be brought, and made a tent of damp sheets over her head. “Lean forward on your elbows,” he exhorted her. “Breathe.”

  Gradually, in his arms, Agata gained her breath again.

  “I’ll not call that new fellow a second time,” said Dacosta. “He didn’t know anything about that trick with the sheets.”

  “She would have been fine either way,” said Amedeo. “Just frightened.”

  “That damned cazzo of a new doctor, frightening my child!” raged Dacosta. “I won’t stand for him. Thank you, dottore—I knew you could be relied on. And I don’t care whether you’ve been screwing with every woman on this island,” he added.

  —

  IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, he began to feel the tide shifting once again in his favor. For, confronted with this new outsider, the islanders now began to see Amedeo as one of their own. Others broke ranks and came secretly, by alleys and back ways, to summon Amedeo for their sick relatives. But these were the island’s poorest, the costs of whose treatment had been paid always by Amedeo’s salary from the comune, not out of their own pockets. These patients could not afford to pay him in money. And their gifts of vegetables and spindly chickens were not enough to keep any man’s body and soul together, never mind a wife and child.

  “We could go to Firenze,” Pina said. “We could live in an apartment in the city, and have hot running water and a newspaper seller just down the street, and listen to the bells from the Duomo every morning, and later we could send the baby to a proper school, and a university. No one from Castellamare has been to a university. I don’t know if it’s right, to bring up a child on this island. Won’t he just leave us? Won’t he go away to some city or some war, and we’ll never see him again? I would have done,” she concluded bitterly, “if I had been a boy.”

  “Give me time and I’ll make everything right,” Amedeo said, to distance himself from the day when he would have to think about leaving the island.

  —

  ON THE FIRST NIGHT in October 1920, he began to consider the house. It had been a bar; it could be so again. He summoned their friends. “What about the House at the Edge of Night?” he said. “It could be reopened. I could reopen it. I could make a living that way.”

  Rizzu spoke up: “But the place is falling down.”

  “It could be restored,” said Amedeo. “I could restore it.”

  “Ai-ee,” said Rizzu. “No one would come to this old place.”

  Father Ignazio had been considering; now he spoke. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s an idea. D’Isantu is trying to drive you off the island. You’ll not get your old position back while he’s mayor. But he can’t do anything about your living here if you find some different occupation. If Arcangelo is mayor again, or someone else, you can perhaps be reinstated and things can go back to normal. Why shouldn’t you have some different trade until then?”

  It was Pina that Amedeo was waiting for, Pina whose approval he needed. In her eyes he thought he saw passing sadly the bells of the Duomo and the newspaper seller on the corner, the apartment with streams of hot water and the university for their son. At last, she looked up and nodded.

  By this nod, he understood that it was possible she still loved him. “I’ll make it right,” he promised. “I’ll make all of it right. Rizzu, show me what must be done with the bar.”

  —

  “THIS USED TO BE THE COUNTER,” said Rizzu, gesturing to an old board propped against the wall, furred with dust. “Here were glass-topped cabinets with pastries, rice balls, chocolates. My brother was going to install a machine for ice cream, but he could never afford the down payment. Then here were the tables, ten of them. Also behind the counter he had cigarettes, liquors, matches, aperitivi, peppermints, Leone violet pastilles, toothpicks, replacement blades for razors, ladies’ silk stockings (too expensive—no one ever bought those), and American chewing gum. He used to make sandwiches for people, and prepare coffee in little cups without handles. Those cups must still be stored away somewhere in a back room; you’ll not have to buy new ones. Our old mother, God and Sant’Agata have mercy on her soul, used to make all the rice balls and pastries and carry them up the hill at five in the morning, and my brother would sell them all day. The best rice balls on the island, better even than Signora Gesuina can make.”

  Amedeo, who had no idea how to make a rice ball and doubted whether Pina had, either, merely nodded and wrote all this down in his red book.

  “And he h
ad newspapers from the mainland,” said Rizzu, with pride. “From Sicily. He paid Pierino the fisherman to bring them over in his boat. They were only a week old—or sometimes two, in stormy weather. People came here to read the latest news. At first he charged ten centesimi a read, but people said that was mean-spirited.”

  Amedeo brushed the dust from the mirrors behind the counter. “Casa al Bordo della Notte” emerged on each one, in a twirling, fanciful script. In the windows, beyond the mess of bougainvillea, the sea seemed to hang in the air, crossed by the black diamonds of the fishing boats. “It might be possible,” said Amedeo.

  Each day that winter he labored, sweeping and scraping, his lungs full of the dust of the place. He felt, obscurely, that he was invested in a labor as great as that of the first islanders who had rebuilt the town stone by stone, to quell the weeping in the walls.

  Gesuina, feeling her way around the kitchen, taught Pina how to make rice balls and pastries, and how to tell when a coffee was perfectly strong or a cup of chocolate suitably smooth. “You’re to remember all this, girl,” said Gesuina, “because when you’ve got to my age you only say a thing one time.”

  Pina wrote the recipes down in her clear schoolteacher’s hand in an old exercise book, then put it firmly into the hands of Amedeo. “This is your bar,” she said. “I will have enough to do with looking after Tullio, and the next baby when it comes. You make the pastries and the rice balls.” But though she spoke firmly, he saw when he opened the book how precisely she had recorded each recipe, how neat and careful all her observations in the margins (“drain rice thoroughly, and not too much salt”; “an extra half-spoon of lard, cooled, if the pastry is too elastic”). Seeing this, he allowed himself to hope a little.

  And she had begun to talk of another child. This gave Amedeo another vestige of hope.

  He had allowed Pina her own way in everything. First, the boy’s name. Tullio had been her father’s name, and Pina liked the Latin sound of it. (“A name for a man of importance,” she said.) Also this matter of a second baby so quick on the heels of the first. Flavio, he was to be called—she had already decided. The third, Aurelio. After her two uncles. Then perhaps, she thought, a girl.