The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  Robert found that, under this strange sun, unable to communicate more than two words with Maria-Grazia, his love was like a fever of its own, immoderate, a constant provocation. If he knew she had passed on the stairs, he would rush to stand in the air she had breathed, gasping for a trace of her perfume (which was dry and a little like oranges). If she touched something on the bar’s counter he would surreptitiously pick it up, for the simple pleasure of touching it, too. Robert serenely believed that no one had noticed his adoration. Unable to contain his passion, he even began to speak to her of it. She would come to his room with a jug of water or a book, and as she leaned over to deposit it, he would say, in an ordinary voice as though he were merely thanking her, “Let me make love to you, here, at once, before your father wakes up from his siesta.” Or, as she swept the corners of the bar after closing, he would begin by talking to her about the radio broadcast or the weather, and end by informing her that she was the most beautiful woman he had seen, that the air itself through which she moved was holy.

  It was thus that Maria-Grazia—who really spoke perfectly good English, only she had been too shy to admit it in the first place—became aware with a shock of joy that he loved her.

  Robert, noticing her blushes, wondered if perhaps something in his tone had given away a trace of feeling, and he resolved to be more matter-of-fact in his declarations. But not to abandon them—for he could not have done that, any more than he could have stopped adoring her. It was part of the miracle of this island, part of the very air he breathed here.

  —

  HUNCHED OVER THE STATICKY BBC broadcasts for news of his comrades, Robert heard that the push into Sicily had been successful, that the Italians had surrendered, and that the Germans had been driven back to Messina. Now that his shoulder was starting to heal, he began to be preoccupied with getting back to his regiment. At least, the fragment of him still dimly motivated by duty was preoccupied. The greater part of him wanted to remain in Castellamare, lulled by the waves and the whirring of the cicadas, boldly declaring his love to Maria-Grazia—to remain here, and forget there had ever been a war.

  But gradually, this vacillation began to be a kind of misery to him. Either he must leave now, or he would not leave at all, and that would cause difficulties of its own. One day, during the siesta hour, Maria-Grazia came to his room where he was sleeping a little fitfully, the wireless radio beside him receiving only static. Kneeling beside the bed, she took his hand and poured out a stream of Italian, her narrow eyebrows as soulfully tilted as her father’s bristling ones. He understood nothing, but it was all he could do not to take her in his arms and tell her the words that had been the first Italian he searched for, feverishly, in Pina’s school dictionary, “Ti amo. Ti adoro.”

  Instead, he listened while she spoke to him: She seemed to consider, remonstrate, double back, and finally beseech—then at last she fell silent, apparently satisfied, and dropped his hand.

  Without another word, she climbed the stairs to her own room. He heard her moving about (that tread of hers, always slightly uneven). He heard the quick strokes of a brush through her hair, her clothes falling lightly to the floorboards. The bed sighing as she accommodated herself; it was an ancient thing, like all the beds in this house, and too short for Maria-Grazia, who would curl herself slightly to fit into it, her lovely eyes languid, her black braid resting as heavy as rope on the pillow.

  Sometimes, when the braid swung over her shoulder as she maneuvered a tray of pastries or swept the corners of the bar, he longed to take it in both hands and kiss its glossy length.

  If he didn’t leave now, how would he ever reconcile himself again to the war he was supposed to be fighting?

  He had prepared a note in Italian, days ago—inadequate, he realized now, to the Espositos’ kindness. His tongue felt as heavy, as feverish, as it had during his illness. He laid the note on the nightstand and took his gun and left while they were all still sleeping.

  Outside the church, he ran into Father Ignazio. The priest eyed the gun thoughtfully. “Where you go, Robert Carr?” he said at last, but Robert pretended not to understand his English, and with smiles and nods made his escape along an alley. He took Concetta’s shortcut, through the scrub and between the prickly pears, reaching the road by this means unobserved. He went at a jog past the Mazzus’ farm, supporting his shoulder with one hand because really it was not as strong as he had thought, and hotter with pain, now that he was in the open air. He almost wished that he had allowed the priest to intercept him. The Mazzus’ dogs barked, flinging themselves to the ends of their chains, but no one stirred from behind the shuttered windows.

  When he was almost at the quay, he heard quick footsteps at a distance. Maria-Grazia, running. The very thing he had dreaded, for now he would be obliged to explain himself. He watched her approach, the cat Micetto streaking in her wake, Concetta scrambling through the scrub yelling, “Wait, Maria-Grazia! Wait!” Maria-Grazia stopped before him. And now, from her mouth, poured a great tide of English: “You leave,” she said. “Why you leaving now, Robert? We all want you stay. It’s grace that brought you here, everyone think so. Grace of Sant’Agata. Why you leaving just for get killed in another battle?” She gave a dry sob. “I thought you coming up to my room. That was what I ask of you. And instead you turn and leave—it was something I do or say, Robert? You make my mother and father very sad now. You make all of us sad.”

  Robert said, a little roughly, embarrassed, “You’re speaking English.”

  “Yes, yes. I always know to speak English. Only I was too shy, before. Today I ask you, in Italian, to come up to my room, and instead you go and leave us.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me in English, since you speak it?”

  Maria-Grazia, eyebrows fierce, said, “Why you no tell me you love me in Italian, since you know it? I see you leave that page open on your table, again and again.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you so now,” said Robert, still more roughly than he had intended. “Ti amo. Ti adoro. But I have to go.”

  “Your shoulder isn’t healed. You not able to fight anybody with that shoulder, Robert—you will die.”

  “It’s healed enough for me to walk until I find my regiment.”

  Maria-Grazia wept. “You will die,” she repeated. “Everyone think so. I wish to God and Sant’Agata that the wound reopen—anything that stop you going back to that war.”

  “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll go, and I’ll come back. Haven’t I said I love you?”

  Maria-Grazia followed him along the dust road, weeping.

  At the quay, he discovered a curious thing: Not one of the fishermen—Bepe, or ’Ncilino, or even Agata-the-fisherwoman in her borrowed boat—was willing to carry him to Sicily. All of them flatly refused, standing guard over their oars and shaking their heads. Agata-the-fisherwoman launched a stream of dialect at him with such ferocity that he recoiled. “Why is she angry?” he asked Maria-Grazia, almost tearful at the way Agata, one of his rescuers, had turned on him. “She not angry,” said Maria-Grazia. “But she not willing to take you, either.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She say you cannot leave now that the war is over,” said Maria-Grazia. “She say you’re good luck to us, you bring good luck. She say they catch nothing but good sarde and large tuna since you come here—that’s just her superstition, of course—”

  But Agata-the-fisherwoman had not finished. “What’s she saying now?”

  “She say…she say this island, it lose enough good men already.”

  Robert, driven a little mad by all this, decided there was nothing to be done but to swim to Sicily. Holding his rifle above his head he made a run and launched himself from the quay. Maria-Grazia, the fishermen, the girl, and the cat stood in a row watching him, stunned at last into silence. He got as far as the rocks, grunting at the pain in his shoulder. At this point, he was forced to lower his rifle.

  Dimly, he heard shouts behind him. When he turned, he saw a gre
at crowd assembling at the end of the quay. There was the doctor, Amedeo; and Pina, and the priest, Father Ignazio; and Rizzu’s granddaughter leading Gesuina by the hand; and the elderly scopa players; and even the grocer Arcangelo, who had barely exchanged three words with him and until a month ago had been a Fascist. “The townspeople declare,” Arcangelo called across the water, hesitantly, whispering to Pina for a translation, “that if you not stay of your own free will, il conte and I will be forced to make you—come si dice?—prisoner of war. Come back now, won’t you please, Signor Carr?”

  As Robert trod water, gasping in the spray and the salt air, a little dizzy at this exertion, the hot pain in his injured shoulder narrowed, intensified. He raised his hand. A sticky residue messed his fingers. The wound had opened and begun to weep. It wept until the three fishermen, Bepe, ’Ncilino, and Agata, had forged through the water, taken him in their arms, and borne him safely to shore.

  There was once an old woman who took it into her head to put a curse on a king’s daughter. “You shall never marry,” she declared, “until you have found the Dead Man, and watched over him for a year, three months, a week, and a day.”

  The girl grew up, and the curse remained. Though she had many suitors, and was very beautiful, never did she meet one whom she liked well enough to make her husband. “Father,” said the princess at last, “it’s no good. It’s plain to me that I cannot marry until I find the man whom I was cursed to marry, for no one else will do. Therefore I intend to go out into the world, and seek the Dead Man.”

  The king, her father, wept, but the girl would not be dissuaded, and the next day she saddled her horse and packed her bags and went out into the world in search of the Dead Man.

  After journeying for many years, she came to a great white palace. The door was open, and the lamps were lit. A fire burned in the fireplace. The girl entered, and went from room to room until, at last, she found a dead man lying before the hearth in an upstairs chamber. “Now here is my bridegroom,” said the princess. “And I must watch over him a year, three months, a week, and a day, until he awakes.”

  So saying, the princess flung herself down on the tiles before the hearth, and waited for the Dead Man to awake.

  —

  A TALE BELONGING TO Venice, also told in the Decameron and by Signor Calvino in his book of tales, which somehow found its way to Castellamare during the second war. It is my belief that it must have come from one of the northern prisoners. First recorded when Signor Rizzu retold it to me in 1942.

  I

  The war burned itself out that summer when Maria-Grazia and Robert became lovers. The following spring, when Sicily had been occupied for eight months and the fishermen had begun, tentatively, to venture further out upon the ocean again, an unfamiliar boat appeared at the horizon. Running to the top of the house, Concetta and Maria-Grazia inspected the sea through Flavio’s binoculars and found the boat, the fisherman rowing, and two American soldiers in tin helmets.

  The late arrival of the Americans on Castellamare was an oversight. The island should really have been occupied months ago. But in the chaos that engulfed Siracusa, the Sicilians had simply forgotten to mention to the occupiers that the small island on their horizon was inhabited at all. It was only a long time later that a colonel, bent over his aerial photographs with a magnifying glass, made out a grainy smudge to the southeast of Sicily. Blowing the picture up, the colonel found the gray blocks of a quay and a red bloom that might represent houses. He made inquiries at the market below his office window. Sì, sì, said the Siracusans, sì, Castellamare was inhabited, there had even been a prison camp there, many clever men from the north, four or five guards.

  The next morning the colonel dispatched a boat across the water to investigate.

  The Americans—a sergeant and a lieutenant—had offered the elderly owner of the God Have Mercy a single dollar bill to transport them to Castellamare. They landed shortly after four, in a bestial spring heat. The fisherman docked at the empty quay and pointed the way between the olive groves and cacti to the summit of the island. Then he sat down in the bottom of the boat and began laying out a hand of solitaire on the thwart, announcing very firmly his intention to stay behind.

  “It’ll be a damn hot climb,” said the sergeant.

  “We’ll find someone with a motorcar on the way up,” said the lieutenant.

  The fisherman pursed his lips. “No motorcar here,” he said, with the disdain of the city dweller for the village. “No refrigerator, no television, no wireless radio. Nothing here. You understand, americani?”

  Slogging up the hill, the americani understood. In the fields the tendrils of the vines were just pushing out, reminding the sergeant of home and the fields of California. In the distance, close to the sea, a line of laborers moved as one, the chopping of their mattocks against the dry earth audible even from this height. Beside them, on the dust track, was the tiny form of an unexpected motorcar. “Shall we double back down there?” said the sergeant. “Ask those people?”

  “We’ll try the town first,” said the lieutenant, who couldn’t face another climb in this heat.

  But they found no other sign of human life until at last they passed under the peeling archway into the town. The arch had become a kind of blackboard for slogans of all political persuasions. “Viva Il Duce!” and “Viva Mussolini!” were almost obliterated now, replaced with the names of the heroes of half-liberated Italy: “Viva Badoglio! Viva Garibaldi! Viva il Re!”

  The lieutenant nodded approvingly. “No Fascists here,” he said.

  “Leastwise not anymore,” said the sergeant.

  The fisherman from Siracusa had been wrong about another thing: There was a wireless radio. After some searching, they located it outside the bar. Here they found a strange assortment of people: widows, elderly card players, two or three fishermen, and a British soldier, drinking coffee and arguing over the BBC news report.

  “Where is the rest of your regiment?” the lieutenant asked the British soldier. “We weren’t told this island had been captured already by British forces.”

  Robert put down his coffee and got to his feet. “It hasn’t,” he said. “I’m the only one. I was washed up on the night of the ninth of July. I got separated from my regiment when the tugs ditched us into the sea, and I’ve never seen any of them since.”

  The sergeant had heard about the landings from his brother-in-law, a tug pilot: how the wind and the rain had confounded the tugs, forcing them to ditch the gliders too early; how the British paratroopers had been scattered among mountains, plunged into rough water, discarded in vineyards a hundred miles behind enemy lines. In the days that followed, those who could still fight had fought where they found themselves; those who were still floating about on bits of wreckage had been picked out of the sea and shipped back to Tunisia. Some of the Tommies had been so incensed at the Yankee tug pilots that they had to be confined to camp. “Goddamn mess,” murmured the sergeant. “We heard about all that.”

  Now, the British soldier said: “Number Six Guards Parachute Platoon, Third Battalion, First Airborne Division. Do you know if any others got out of their planes? That’s what I keep thinking. I dream about it at nights. Did any of the others get out?”

  “We only got to Sicily six months ago,” said the lieutenant. “I don’t know anything about that.” He glanced from the British soldier to the old men at their card table, the widows murmuring in the corner, and the two fishermen who had set aside their newspapers and were now regarding the two soldiers with benevolent interest. “I thought there was a prison camp,” he said at last.

  Pina was summoned. She led the soldiers along the main street, to the collection of ruined cottages where the prisoners had once been housed. Too shy to speak in English before these foreigners, Pina explained instead in formal Italian that the prison camp was gone. “She says this was where the prisoners were kept,” translated Robert. “There wasn’t any proper camp except this. Then, she says, when the fighti
ng started, the Fascist guards all left. It was just at the time I landed on the island.”

  “What about the prisoners?”

  “There’s a university lecturer. One or two socialist deputies. The rest have gone, too.” Even Mario Vazzo had gone—returning to the mainland in search of his wife and child.

  “What about the local government? Are there any of them we need to deal with? The mayor?”

  Robert shook his head.

  By now, half the islanders had got wind of the American soldiers’ arrival. They crowded around the American liberators, clapping them on the shoulders. Someone began a cheer of “Viva l’America!” Concetta wriggled free of Maria-Grazia and emerged at the front of the crowd to peer up at the foreigners. “It’s all damned strange,” said the lieutenant, who had hoped to take the island in grander style. “We were told there was a prison camp, four or five guards.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Robert. “She says there was a prison camp, but it’s all gone now.”

  “Bring the americani back to the bar for a coffee,” said Rizzu. “Offer them something to eat and drink.”

  The American soldiers were led back through the streets as guests of honor, which mollified the lieutenant a little. At the House at the Edge of Night, they refused Maria-Grazia’s caffè di guerra, but did consent to sit down at the bar, under the ceiling fan, where they asked that the island’s former podestà be summoned at once.

  Rizzu, riding proudly in the front of the motorcar for the first time in his life, brought il conte from the fields. Il conte made a stiff bow to the liberators. “Can you understand English?” asked the lieutenant.

  Il conte, who had never been much of a scholar, was obliged to shake his head. Robert and Pina were called upon to translate. While il conte turned red and looked at his knees, the American soldiers declared the island captured and il conte relieved of his duties as mayor. Il conte shuffled forward and, after a tense moment when rage seemed to swell in him, he subsided, and consented to shake the soldiers’ hands.