The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  “As is their perfect right,” said Pina, and il conte gave a great huff like a sea lion.

  “Therefore,” concluded Arcangelo, as if no one had said anything, “we have decided that it will be safest to check for proof of loyalty among every man of voting age on the island—just to make sure that we are aware, as it were, of who is unhappy with the Fascist candidates, so that we can endeavor to reassure them.”

  “I see,” said her mother. “And you thought you’d check which way my husband voted, in case he’s one of those who voted ‘No.’ ”

  “Precisely, Signora Esposito.”

  “Amedeo,” said her mother. “Do you still have the unused ballot paper?”

  Her father looked down for a minute, and eventually, sulkily, said, “Yes, Pina.”

  “Then go and fetch it,” she said, “and let’s put an end to this silliness.”

  “I’m quite sure that your husband has voted ‘Sì,’ ” said Arcangelo, who was quivering like a ricotta. “I’ve always thought highly of your family, Signora Esposito, and of your poor deceased father, you must know. Therefore I’m sure that Signor Esposito has voted ‘Sì.’ ”

  “Naturally,” said her mother, “I hope that the opposite is true.”

  A pained little silence. Maria-Grazia knew by it that her mother must have said a very shocking thing.

  Her father came back through the curtain, holding a white card in his hands. “Here,” he said, putting it down on the counter. “I voted ‘Sì.’ Here’s the ‘No’ paper left over—you can see plain enough that the ‘Sì’ one went into the ballot box.”

  “There,” said Arcangelo, puffing. “That’s very satisfactory, Signor Esposito, and I don’t see why you made such a fuss about showing us in the first place. Everyone else has been obliged to show theirs—you’re no different, you know.”

  Then all at once her mother became angry—or perhaps she had been angry all along. “Please leave our bar,” she said. “We’ve nothing more to discuss with you.”

  With a slamming that startled Micetto out of Maria-Grazia’s arms, il conte and Signor Arcangelo left.

  When they were gone, her mother took the white card and crumpled it, as though it were some shoddy piece of work belonging to one of her pupils. Then she said, “ ‘Sì’ to the fascisti? I’m ashamed of you.”

  Il conte’s car roared outside. Micetto! She could hear him. She banged open the door and—stumbling, cursing the leg braces—launched herself down the steps of the veranda. Here Maria-Grazia lost her balance and dived into someone’s stomach, sending the air flying from his lungs in a great huff. “Ai-ee!” she screamed, fearing Arcangelo or il conte. “I’m sorry, signore—”

  The prisoner set her upright. “Don’t be scared,” he said, in formal Italian, as though he were speaking from a book of poetry. “I caught this gatto selvaggio trying to throw itself into the road. I think it belongs to you.”

  And he held out the screaming, fighting Micetto in both hands.

  This was where her mother and father found her ten minutes later, playing with the cat in the company of the prisoner, a poet whose name was Mario Vazzo and who knew all kinds of songs from the mainland and pretended not to notice when Maria-Grazia cried a little and then rubbed her nose on her sleeve. In this way, neither Pina nor Amedeo knew that she had heard anything at all about the vote. But in her heart, Maria-Grazia stored up the scene for future contemplation.

  —

  THE SECOND THING MARIA-GRAZIA witnessed that year was the beating of the fisherman Pierino.

  It was a few nights later—or else the same night—that she woke quite suddenly because her father had not come, as he usually did, to put on her night brace. She maneuvered herself onto the edge of the bed, into the square of moonlight from the window, and worked the pains out of her calves. The bar had closed for the night and downstairs, in the kitchen, Mamma and Papà’s voices were going up and down, up and down like a motorboat engine, as they often did these days. Flavio was coughing. He had been peaky all the previous winter, suffering with a protracted bronchitis for which their father had not been able to order the proper medicine. Maria-Grazia heard him hacking and hacking in his room above hers, playing his trumpet only in wheezy gasps. Now, he was trying to swallow his coughs, which meant he did not want to be overheard.

  After eight years of exercises, she could walk a little without her braces. She went sideways to the top of the stairs. Here she almost tripped over her brothers, who were lined up along the steps like sarde in a can, their heads through the bannisters, listening.

  Flavio, dark and fierce, attempted to glare her away: “You’ll make a sound, you with your metal pins—you’ll give us all away!”

  “But I haven’t got them on,” said Maria-Grazia. “And you’re the one coughing.”

  “You can stay if you promise to keep quiet,” said Tullio. Maria-Grazia got to her knees beside Aurelio. Nothing could be heard of what her parents were saying, only the rise and fall of their voices.

  “Cazzo!” said Tullio. “They’ve gone into the bar. They must know we’re listening.”

  Flavio said, “And that’s your fault for making a noise!”

  “It isn’t her fault at all,” said Aurelio, her kindest brother, and gratitude brought a sudden sting of tears into her eyes.

  She did love them, her brothers, but ever since she could remember she had been aware of loving them, adoring them, far more than they ever loved her. Even Aurelio. Always she felt herself to be trailing behind: trying to keep hold of their attention, cross with herself for wanting it. Now, succumbing to the same trap, she boasted, “I heard them earlier. Mamma thinks it’s shameful that il duce changed the rules so that you can only vote ‘Sì’ or ‘No’ in the election. That’s what she said—shameful—I heard her myself. She said it isn’t democrazia at all.”

  Flavio rounded on her. “What is there except ‘Sì’ or ‘No’? ‘Sì’ for the fascisti, ‘No’ if you don’t like them. If you ask me, il duce gets a bad press in this house.”

  Now she saw that she had hurt his feelings. Flavio had won prizes for his dedication to the Balilla. At nearly thirteen, her middle brother’s voice was unruly and his face obscured under an embarrassing constellation of acne, but at the Balilla meetings he became a fierce firer of rifles, a fervent singer of patriotic songs. He was invited to special meetings where he played his brass trumpet while Professor Calleja marched about, and Dottor Vitale, drafted in as il professore’s assistant after the swelling of the numbers, beat a great bass drum. Pina kindly pretended to admire Flavio’s medals, then consigned them to the back bedroom with their father’s collection of historic potsherds, but Flavio—undaunted—only brought home more. “Maybe you’re right, Flavio,” said Maria-Grazia, trying to make amends.

  But Flavio only hunched crossly away from her. Her brother had been in a bad mood all evening. He had come home late, a little tired and drawn, carrying his brass trumpet in one hand. His coughing had been too much at the Balilla meeting—il professore had sent him home.

  Tullio pressed his ear to the tiles and said, “Listen—I think I can hear somebody else.”

  “That prisoner Mario begging for work again,” said Flavio.

  “No. Shh. One of the neighbors.”

  Sure enough, whoever it was, they were speaking the dialect of the island—for no northerner could lament like that, on and on like a river, without pause, without end.

  “Oh, it’s probably just old Rizzu, come to get drunk with Papà,” said Flavio. “We won’t hear anything sensible now.”

  And indeed, the argument was over and all they heard now was a lamenting voice. “I think it might be Rizzu’s nephew Bepe,” said Maria-Grazia. “It doesn’t sound quite like Rizzu himself—and anyway, he’s supposed to be working at il conte’s tonight.”

  But her brothers had lost interest, and they all went creeping to bed. Maria-Grazia, however, was decidedly awake now. In her legs, liberated from the stifling night br
ace, was a feeling like electricity, a feeling of being shockingly alive. Perhaps this was how it felt always to have ordinary legs like her brothers’! Sitting up in bed, she heard her father’s footsteps ascending the stairs. She waited for him to come and fit the night brace, but his shadow crossed her door and continued. She heard him climb to the small room at the top of the house, pause there a moment, and come down again at a run. Edging her door open by a crack, she saw that in one hand he carried his medical bag, and around his neck hung his black stethoscope.

  Her father was leaving the house. Out of nowhere, the feeling of strength left her, replaced by a powerful fear. Hauling herself up on the curtains to look out into the moonlight, she watched her father cross the courtyard and disappear.

  Maria-Grazia sat very still for a moment, then got up and followed him.

  She could not have said what was in her mind as she descended the stairs, made her way across the stretch of moonlight in the courtyard, and pushed open the gate. By this time her father was a long way ahead and she had to run, keeping her legs stiff like Flavio’s wooden soldiers so as to manage the slight uphill without falling. She caught only the flash of her father’s shoe around the corner of each alley, the swing of the leather bag. It took her almost five minutes of concerted effort to catch up to him. It was when her legs buckled that she realized why running was a greater effort than usual—she had not had her night brace on, and in her panic she had left the house without putting the ordinary ones on, either, the ones she was never supposed to remove. And here she was running after her father, silent as Micetto.

  At least the alleys were narrow here, and she placed both hands on the walls to propel herself forward. Past the shops, past the fountain that always smelled of green weeds, even in summer, around the side of the church where there was nothing to hold on to and she almost toppled. Sure enough, her legs had begun to tremble now as though she were suffering a high fever. But her father, mercifully, came to a stop at this moment, outside the skinny house that belonged to Pierino the fisherman.

  Pierino was family, her mother had told her once. Their cousinship was so distant that they no longer remembered how they were connected, but sometimes at Christmases the two families sent each other a bottle of limoncello or a cassata cake with an affectionate label. But Maria-Grazia had entered Pierino’s house only once before. After Mass, Pierino’s wife, Agata-the-baker’s-daughter, had called her in to be prayed for, because of her legs, and reluctantly she had submitted to the papery hands the old women laid on her forehead, the soporific chanting of their Ave Marias and Our Fathers. On the front of the house Pierino had rigged several washing lines for the sheets and pinafores belonging to his eight children, so that while the women prayed for her in the hot stupor of the upstairs parlor the house itself seemed to swell and catch the wind, the sun flickering through its sails like a ship on the sea.

  Now, the washing lay limp, the house shuttered.

  Her father went to the side door. Before she could call out to him, he was admitted, leaving behind only the scent of the basil plants disturbed in his passing. Shut out, Maria-Grazia wished all at once that she had not followed him.

  She hauled herself up by the windowsill and looked in at the kitchen window. Her legs were almost used up. But she was seized with a fierce determination to see what was happening inside the room.

  What she saw was candlelight, like a funeral vigil. Neighbor men whose names she knew only dimly: fishermen and peasant farmers. Mazzu, Dacosta, Terazzu. On the empty kitchen table, Pierino lay on his back, his chest hair thick with petrol as it had been one evening last summer when his motorboat engine cracked clean in two, dousing him with the liquid. (“Twenty buckets of hot water it took,” his wife, Agata-the-baker’s-daughter, had complained. “And he still stank of petrol at the end of it—I could smell it everywhere about the house; it got into my cooking, the parlor furniture, the eggs of the chickens in the yard—”)

  She could see that old woman now through the glass, standing at Pierino’s head, and Pierino’s youngest daughter, Santa Maria, at his feet. And there was her father, stooping to keep his head from hitting the ceiling. Someone turned on the electric light. The streaks on the fisherman’s chest shone, and Maria-Grazia understood at once that they were not streaks of petrol but of blood. Someone had whipped his skin raw.

  Her father spoke—and though the glass absorbed some of his words, others passed through clearly to the alleyway where she clung in terror. “When?” said her father.

  “Two hours ago,” answered Agata-the-baker’s-daughter. “He voted ‘No,’ signor il dottore. It was he who did it. If only, by the grace of Sant’Agata, he hadn’t taken it into his head to vote ‘No.’ ”

  Her father began swabbing Pierino’s chest with a clear fluid, pausing to pick out little pieces of grit that glittered in the lamplight and which he set aside in a butter dish. As her father worked with his tweezers, Pierino’s chest rose and fell. Her father began to wind Pierino in bandages, the fishermen assisting—they heaved Pierino up as they heaved their nets full of sarde, then laid him gently down again.

  “Who did this?” her father said.

  Agata-the-baker’s-daughter was overcome and turned away, burying her face in her hands.

  With a rumbling came the voice of old Rizzu. “They carried him up here and threw him in the alley,” he said. “Signora Agata heard the thump and came out, thinking it was the stray dogs making trouble, and instead she found her husband thrown down here in the dirt like a sack of old rubbish, and whoever did it had run away—that figlio di puttana! I’ve given in my notice to il conte—I’ve had enough of his friends and their politics.”

  “Was it il conte who did it? Or Arcangelo?”

  But here a murmur: “No…no…not il conte. Not Signor Arcangelo.”

  Pierino woke with a cough. He began to twist on the table. Her father held him down and continued bandaging. Pierino twisted for several awful minutes before he lay still again. Now, her father went to work on his head, cutting the hair from the scalp with a razor blade. A wound emerged, slitted like the inside of a blood orange. Her father began working at the edge of this wound with his needle, getting the red juice from Pierino all up his arms.

  Maria-Grazia could not loose her fingers from the windowsill. Terror had stuck them fast. Instead, she began to make up a story for herself about how it wasn’t really Pierino’s blood at all coming out of Pierino. About how it was petrol after all, or else the harmless blood of a fish. The youngest fisherman, Totò, who could pull in twenty small tuna in an afternoon and still dance all night with a girl on the veranda of the bar—this fisherman had once come up the hill at dawn drenched in blood like an executioner. He had battled a tuna bigger than himself for a day and a night, he claimed, and sure enough the other fishermen followed him into his mother’s kitchen, singing, bearing the corpse of the tuna on a stretcher above their heads.

  They had also been drenched in blood, and Totò’s elderly mother had fainted clean away at the sight of it before she could even scold them for messing her kitchen tiles.

  But Maria-Grazia knew that this story was not the real one, not this time. Pierino was old. Only a young man like Totò could battle a tuna.

  She could see now that her father had almost finished fixing Pierino. He drew the broken seam of the fisherman’s head together as neatly as her mother, Pina, repaired her brothers’ split knickerbockers. He had been sewing a long time. While she watched, the gray light of dawn illuminated Pierino’s gray skin, and reflected in the glass, making the scene recede a little. At last, when her father had finished sewing, he spoke again. She did not hear everything, only a few words at a time, in the silences between the waves of the sea—for this morning the sea was restless. On an ordinary day Pierino, in his vest and greasy tweed trousers, would have already been hauling his nets and his lobster traps down to the shore.

  “Some hemorrhaging in the brain,” Maria-Grazia heard. “Unsure how far…difficult
recovery…rest and good care…”

  And Agata-the-baker’s-daughter sank down over her husband, as though she wore some great chain around her neck. When Maria-Grazia’s father came out of the door, he moved just as heavily.

  “Mariuzza!” he said, when he saw her at the windowsill. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”

  Her legs were trembling; they could no longer support her. She did not know, once she let go of this windowsill, how she would get back home, and—suddenly sorrier for herself than for Pierino or Agata-the-baker’s-daughter or even her poor, tired father—she began to cry. Her father stepped forward and took her in his arms, prying her hands off the windowsill as if he were unsticking a riccio di mare from a rock.

  “Gesù, Maria-Grazia!” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Papà, I thought bad things were going to happen, so I came to look for you and then I got stuck here, because my legs wouldn’t work anymore. I didn’t mean to spy. I thought you’d come back out and find me.”

  “How long have you been here?” her father asked, shaking her a little. “What have you seen?”

  Maria-Grazia found herself sobbing more violently than ever. “Just five minutes,” she said. “Just five minutes. I didn’t see anything at all.”

  “What have you seen?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  Her father hugged her and rocked her. At last he put her down, took a good look at her, and said, “Where are your braces?”

  “I haven’t got them.”

  “Maria-Grazia! You walked all this way on your own two legs, without the braces?”

  “Yes, Papà. I’m very sorry for it.”

  But her father lifted her up and—in spite of the stink of blood and exhaustion still clinging to him—he swung her around and around in pure joy.

  Riding in her father’s arms through the waking streets, she began to feel a little better. Her father said that they must go secretly, that some people wouldn’t want him fixing Pierino, and so he carried her not by the main street but through the alleyway belonging to the Fazzoli family, their washing flapping coolly in her face as her father bore her along. Soon her father was lowering her into bed again. “Is Pierino going to die?” she said.