The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  He told her the story of the girl who became an apple, became a tree, became a bird. He told her the story of the parrot who kept a young wife safe by spinning for her a never-ending tale. He told her a story of Gesuina’s about a boy who made a pact with the devil to save his father’s life. The boy’s father got well, and the boy went about the world and grew rich and successful, a great king, and he began to love the world so much that he forgot his pact. In ten years, when the devil came for him, the boy did not want to go. On those unreal nights in the room at the top of the house, the only sound the far crashing of the sea, Amedeo began to believe that all of these stories were in some obscure way the story of himself and his daughter, that they were locked in some ancient struggle that had been repeated and repeated like the struggles in those tales.

  He told her, as he had told baby Tullio, the story of the island. Of the caves, and the curse of weeping, and the girl Agata, the peasant’s daughter, who had cured it and become their saint, patron of misfortunes.

  Amedeo, who had never been religious, now found himself overcome with superstition. Thoughts of the afterlife had never troubled him; now he was impatient to baptize the child. “You name her,” said Pina. “I can’t bear to name her myself, not if the Lord and Sant’Agata are going to take her from us afterward.”

  His thoughts inclined toward heavenly names: Angela, Santa, Madonnina. He settled at last on Maria-Grazia. The name had been Pina’s grandmother’s. He gave his daughter Agata as a middle name, in case the saint saw fit to throw him down some scrap of good fortune in return. In the first nights of his child’s life, he was surprised and a little ashamed to find himself praying to the statue. “Holy Sant’Agata,” he prayed, “if this is some punishment for my sins with Carmela, chastise me another way. Take something else from me for the wrongs I have committed on your island—not this little daughter.”

  In his great desperation he thought that he would more easily bear the loss of his wife, his sons, than this fragile child he barely knew, this child who should still have been in Pina’s womb with curled fingers and closed eyes.

  The boys sensed that something was amiss. They had stopped their rampaging on the stairs and their battling with sticks in the courtyard. Once, during the first days, they had accidentally woken the baby by throwing a rubber ball against the wall of the nursery, and their father’s rage had been so great that he had frightened everybody, even Gesuina. He had flung the ball out of the window into the prickly scrubland. Since that day the boys had played more quietly in the courtyard, and even the smallest, Aurelio, seemed to be aware that his sister was hanging in the dark space between life and death.

  Meanwhile, the bar remained closed, and Gesuina kept the neighbors, with their gifts of baked aubergine and their hunger for gossip, firmly out of the way. Even so, it became widely known that the fourth child of Dottor Esposito and Pina Vella was in the process of dying.

  When the baby was ten days old, Amedeo had his friend Father Ignazio come and baptize her. Afterward, the family assembled around the baby’s cradle and he took a photograph. The picture was to remain undeveloped until the crisis of the baby’s first months was over. Forever afterward, when he passed the picture on the stairs, it had the capacity to bring him to a sweat. There she was—yes, she had really been so small and frail!—with her eyes closed, her fists curled. Every time his daughter slept soundly, he was seized with fear and rested his head very gently against her chest to hear the soft suck of her breathing.

  He continued to neglect the bar, though they had reopened it in a faltering way at the end of the winter. He could not bring himself to mind about anything except his daughter. The girl would sleep soundly only when she was in his arms, would take milk from the spoon only when he held it. Rizzu began to man the bar on afternoons, Pina when she could persuade the boys to play quietly behind the counter, and at nights—when his daughter was always most unsettled and Rizzu worked as a watchman for il conte—Amedeo trusted the customers to get their own liquors and boxes of cigarettes, and leave the money in a small box on the till.

  Rizzu nailed a postcard of Sant’Agata with a bleeding heart to its lid. “To shame everyone into honesty,” he said. “No islander of Castellamare would steal anyway, of course, but especially not when confronted with the blessed face of the saint.” Rizzu garlanded the box with rosaries for good measure, drilled two holes in its top and stuck them with huge, wax-dripping candles, and he borrowed from Father Ignazio a small wooden crucifix to tack to the inside of its lid, in case any thief got as far as actually opening it.

  Whether because of the blessed visage of the saint or out of fear for burnt fingers, no one stole from the box, everyone paid the correct sum for their liquor, and the bar—haltingly—remained open.

  It took his daughter until the end of January to gain the strength to suckle properly, by which time Pina’s milk was dry. But the baby could suck a little from a bottle with a rubber teat, and she began to appear larger and more solid even to the unbelieving Amedeo. Still, her life proceeded in fits and starts, an uncertain thing. A cough delayed her for another fortnight, and when the cough cleared her skin became jaundiced. Amedeo carried her out onto the veranda and held her across his lap in the sun, shielding her eyes with a folded handkerchief, until her skin lost its yellow tone.

  He weighed his daughter every morning in the brass scales behind the bar counter. At last, one morning in February 1926, he felt a change in the balance, a light fluttering, and the next day the brass dish dropped. The baby had begun to grow in earnest.

  By spring she was gaining weight just like his other children. In the summer she smiled; soon afterward she rolled over and began to attempt to crawl.

  He saw that there was something wrong with the development of her legs. He had suspected it, but he could see it plainly now that she was no longer frail in every other respect. She could manage only a dragging movement, hauling herself about the floor by her arms like a lizard. She would require leg braces at the very least. But that did not matter; none of it mattered, if only she would live. Reluctantly, he returned to his duties behind the bar counter, but he kept the baby with him, letting her crawl about on a blanket, or sleep in his arms as he served pastries and poured coffee, in a kind of makeshift swaddle that earned him the ridicule of the peasants and the admiration of their wives.

  Maria-Grazia, against all expectations, grew into a joyful, self-contained child. When she crawled about the floor she laughed softly to herself. Everything pleased her: the sun; the great bunch of keys belonging to the House at the Edge of Night, which her father hung on a string so that it twirled above her; a branch of the bougainvillea that Gesuina brought in from outside with its petals still chilled. The bar’s elderly customers fussed over her, promising her their prayers and their grandchildren’s cast-off clothing. They also tried to feed her with sugared ricotta from their fingers and pieces of browned pastry if Amedeo did not keep an eye out.

  It took him until her first birthday to believe that she was not going to die. By that time, it was so evident to everybody else that even he had to accept it.

  So things began to return to normal. Still, Pina was shaken; he was shaken. Something in both of them had altered during the months of their daughter’s struggle—now a quite ordinary island song could bring tears into Pina’s eyes, and Amedeo felt the same tenderness barely suppressed in him, as though something had broken, or softened, some carapace that had once made him less permeable to the world. Pina told him one night that she had forgiven him the affair with Carmela, blotted it out entirely. “We’ll have no more children,” she said, caressing his wrist in the dark. “I don’t think I can live through such a time again.”

  Amedeo, on the whole, agreed. Four was enough—especially three boys who were so warlike and a daughter who would need special treatment. For although she was boisterous and stout now, still an aura of miracle was to remain about Maria-Grazia, a sense that the life she possessed was a fortunate one, ble
ssed by the saint, one that should never have been lived.

  II

  On each of their children’s birthdays Amedeo took a photograph. He saw within the sequence of pictures belonging to his daughter a struggle unfolding, a fierce soul like Pina’s battling the circumstances in which she found herself. In the first photograph, Maria-Grazia sat bandy legged on Pina’s lap, the deformity in her legs plain to see. But in the second photograph, look how she stood already!—clinging tightly to their hands, buoyed by her parents’ pride. By the third picture, she had succeeded in balancing upright by herself. On each leg was a boot with a metal brace that extended to her knee and ended in a leather band. The leg braces gave her an odd stance, poised, like a wrestler in combat. The doctors in the hospital in Siracusa had told him that the child must wear these every day for the next ten years. They would be specially adjusted each autumn.

  At night, there was another brace that held the feet in position more rigidly, against a steel bar; this would be worn until she was eleven or twelve, at least, perhaps longer, and replaced with a tighter one as she grew. Maria-Grazia never cried when the night brace was put on, though her eyes narrowed a little. She could not move in this night brace, not even to turn over, and if she needed to go to the bathroom she was obliged to call out to her mother or father to carry her there. Sometimes, from their stone room downstairs, they did not hear her calling—and in the morning they found her lying patiently among wet sheets, enduring the ridicule of her brothers. She never once complained about this humiliation.

  In the fourth photograph, Maria-Grazia stood in her wrestler’s pose in front of the ocean. This one made his heart hurt a little, for he knew that her brothers were at that moment capering among the waves, beyond the frame. The leg braces could not be worn in the sea; even the salt air of the island made them rust, so that they had to be rubbed with glass paper and treated with olive oil.

  Of all the photographs, the fifth was his favorite. Here he felt that Maria-Grazia, in spite of her difficulties, had begun to assert herself over her brothers in one important way: While they blundered and struggled their way through school, she was fiercely intelligent. In this photograph, Maria-Grazia was submerged in study of one of her brothers’ schoolbooks, her hair—which was braided in a black rope to match her mother’s—resting lightly on the pages, her pale amber eyes fringed like Pina’s with lovely bristling lashes. Absorbed in private delight, she smiled at whatever it was she read: history, mathematics, the Iliad—who knew? The child was a prodigious scholar.

  At first the schoolteacher, Professor Calleja, had refused to enroll Maria-Grazia in the school, believing that the weakness of her legs must be matched by a feebleness of the mind. When Pina received the letter informing them of the fact, she took Maria-Grazia by the hand and half walked, half hauled her to the schoolroom. There, Maria-Grazia stood before the blackboard and the bewildered Professor Calleja, who stood in a corner working at the ends of his mustache. At Pina’s prompting, Maria-Grazia demonstrated her ability to count to a hundred, add, subtract, multiply, recite the poetry of Luigi Pirandello, and describe the patterns of the stars that were visible above Castellamare, all of which she had learned from a concerted and independent study of her brothers’ schoolbooks. When Professor Calleja refused to be convinced, Pina seized a copy of La Divina Commedia at random from the pile on his desk and pressed it on her daughter. “Read, cara,” she exhorted. “Read!”

  Maria-Grazia knew how to read, and she did so, stumbling a little over the mainland Italian, the odd poetry of it, pronouncing the words without understanding them: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say—”

  “Very well,” interrupted Professor Calleja, unwilling to be entirely generous in the face of this defeat. “She can begin school in the autumn and we will see how she proceeds. If her marks are good enough, she’ll stay—otherwise not.” Reluctantly, he even agreed to allow Maria-Grazia to borrow the copy of La Divina Commedia in order to finish reading it before school began.

  Pina carried her daughter home on her shoulders, crying tears of anger and pride.

  The sixth photograph had been taken on the eve of her starting school, an occasion more important even than her birthday or name day to the child, who trembled all the evening before like a blown vine. In the photograph, Maria-Grazia wore proudly over her leg braces a schoolgirl’s white grembiule. In her arms was a packet of new books tied up with string. Her brothers had had to share, and in truth had opened their books so little between them that the savings had been justified. But all Maria-Grazia’s books were brand-new, ordered from the mainland and delivered to the island in Pierino’s boat from the bookshop in Siracusa, wrapped carefully in brown paper.

  Her brothers tried to be kind, in their way, dragging her along with them in their noisy games, defending her against the children who kicked her leg braces and stole her books. But a rift had begun to open between them. The boys had their own urgent concerns. Tullio, a great giant like their father with a mess of black hair and the same formidable eyebrows, had developed a consuming obsession with the workings of motorcars. Aurelio, the closest brother in age to her, stocky of form, earnest of intention, swam and swam. Her middle brother Flavio, whose looks were dark and severe, like those of their mother, Pina, shut himself up in his room and made protracted experiments with a brass trumpet. It was clear to the boys that Maria-Grazia was the best-loved child. And it was clear to Maria-Grazia that neither love nor learning could remedy the fact that she was a different sort of person from her brothers—a person who, while other children roared and hit things with sticks and cavorted in the sea, sat primly on the sand in leg braces, reading books about the stars.

  “Your treatment is progressing well,” her father would tell her, consolingly, on such occasions. “Next year you can take off your leg braces for short periods to swim.”

  Maria-Grazia knew that by then all the other children would swim faster or else would be tired of swimming, but she did not say so.

  Preoccupied with her loneliness, her father encouraged her friendships with the bar’s elderly customers, and with the stray cats that roamed the courtyard at nights. One evening Maria-Grazia ran to the counter in tears and led her father to a cat’s nest, where a rather off-putting black kitten, matted with its own excrement, was giving out a pitiful “Miu, miu, miu.” “He’s sick,” Maria-Grazia wept.

  Stooping, Amedeo found a wound in the kitten’s side, hot to the touch. “He’s got an infection, cara. There’s very little we can do unless we can get his wound clean, and he won’t be willing to stay still long enough for us to finish the treatment.”

  “Fix him, Papà.”

  A good number of the bar’s elderly customers had followed them out into the dusk, and now gathered round, tut-tutting in pity—even the town’s confirmed cat haters. “Fix him,” said Maria-Grazia. “Papà, get your medical bag and fix him.”

  “Cara, I don’t know about that.”

  “Fix him,” echoed the old people reprovingly.

  The mother cat watched from a bush, her tail beating a wary rhythm.

  Amedeo, against his better judgment, allowed his daughter to coerce him into bringing his medical bag down from the room at the top of the house. “Fix him,” Maria-Grazia continued to weep, as Amedeo worked. “Don’t let him die.” Amedeo finished the job, laid the clean kitten back in its nest, and detached the mother cat from his shoulder, claw by claw.

  His daughter’s tearful gratitude knew no bounds. And when, three weeks later, she brought the kitten to him and showed him its wound, neatly scabbed over, and the tame way it licked her hands, it was all he could do not to weep himself. “His treatment is progressing well,” she said. “Like mine.”

  It was true. Maria-Grazia was to remain small all her life—the only descendant of Amedeo who was not a giant on the island—but otherwise there was no sign, except for the
leg braces, that her parents had ever feared for her survival.

  —

  NOW THAT AMEDEO BEGAN to be concerned not with Maria-Grazia’s survival but with her future, he became aware that an alteration had taken place in the world. News from outside reached them only foggily at the best of times. The financial troubles in America had been a subject of conversation in the bar for a while; the elderly scopa players had marveled over photographs of rich families camped out in motorcars, sleeping under tarpaulins. (“To think, americani living like us poor folk! Just as well my ’Ncilino never left for Chicago after all!”) But the island’s solitude had saved it from serious trouble. Except for ordering a few cigarettes from the mainland now and again, the islanders of Castellamare had no dealings with the economies of great nations. As Rizzu said, there would have been no motorcars to camp in if the island had suffered a depression, excepting il conte’s, and nowhere to go in them anyway, and the only thing any islander possessed a stock or share in was the Committee of Sant’Agata or the Fishermen’s Guild.

  Now, though, a tectonic shift had occurred closer to the island’s shores. During the chaotic babyhoods of his children, the changes in Italy had reached Amedeo only faintly. Like the dim sound of breakers from the caves by the sea, the world outside had never seemed as important as the world inside the walls of his house. The year Flavio was born, there had been some disagreement over the voting (due to a rather alarming vomiting episode of Tullio’s, Amedeo had lost track of the time and made it to the polls only after they were closed). Listening to the furious discussions in the bar the next day, he had grasped the gist of the disagreement. It seemed that no one on the island had intended to vote for the fascisti, except il conte and perhaps Arcangelo. To remedy this, il conte had posted two of his agents at the doors to the town hall on election night, armed with sticks. By this means, il conte’s peasants had been persuaded to recognize that the island was a ship from which il conte could eject all mutinous passengers. When it came time for il conte to count the votes, the fascisti had received a majority.