The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  Then the Americans turned to the problem of what should be done with Robert. “We’ll take you back to Siracusa,” said the lieutenant. “Get you a good meal and a transfer back to your regiment.”

  “I can’t go,” said Robert. “I tried to leave, to get back to my regiment, already. It won’t work. The wound in my shoulder began to bleed again when I left the island.”

  “Sì, sì,” added one of the villagers, an elderly woman with blind eyes that showed only a white film. “Un miracolo di Sant’Agata.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She says it’s a miracle of Sant’Agata.”

  “Come on now,” said the lieutenant. “Enough of this. We’ll get you off of here and into a proper hospital, if you’re wounded. We’ll get you evacuated to Tunisia. Or sent home to England if that’s what you want.”

  But Robert shook his head.

  Amedeo was ushered forward by the crowd of islanders to give a medical report. Yes, yes, he agreed. There was nothing to be done about Robert’s shoulder but wait for it to heal. A period of rest; it was advisable not to move the patient from the island at this delicate stage.

  “Let me see your shoulder,” said the lieutenant. Robert unbuttoned his shirt and exposed the scar, now silvering over.

  “That’s healed pretty good,” said the lieutenant. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “But not when he leaves the island.” Maria-Grazia came forward, twisting her rope of black hair, speaking clear English. “Then it bleeds again.”

  The islanders, murmuringly, agreed. The lieutenant remembered the field guide to Sicily they had been handed before disembarking at Messina. The bulk of the inhabitants are Roman Catholic and much addicted to Saints’ Days. The British man seemed to have some kind of a hold on them. “The fighting must have turned him a little nutty,” he muttered in the sergeant’s ear.

  But the sergeant was clearly spooked and inclined to disagree. “I ain’t so sure about that,” he said. “I heard about other miracles in this war, from my brother-in-law Harvey who flies planes.”

  “Come on.” The lieutenant tried again, addressing only Robert. “Wouldn’t you like to come with us back to Sicily and have a proper meal and see a doctor and find out what’s happened to your buddies?”

  But Robert shook his head. He could not go with them to the mainland and would not submit to medical treatment in an army hospital. “I can’t leave,” he said. “This is the only place where my shoulder can heal. This is the only doctor who can cure me.”

  Here, for the first time, the sergeant was moved to speak up. “His shoulder’s busted anyway,” he said. “Seems to me it don’t make no difference if we leave him or if we bring him.”

  “A deserter’s a deserter,” said the lieutenant. “We can’t just leave him here.”

  —

  THE LIEUTENANT HAD EXPECTED more resistance on the Englishman’s part, but in the end Robert went with them. What he had not expected was the procession of islanders who followed them down the dust road to the quay, lamenting, protesting in dialect, and in some cases even weeping openly, clinging to the Englishman’s hands. The lieutenant, sweating, leading the pale and sullen Robert by the elbow, wished he’d never been sent to this island. It made matters worse that his sergeant, a superstitious young man who had been raised in a shack in California, obviously sided with the Englishman.

  On the quay, the islanders waited in silence for the americani to take Robert away. The lieutenant felt some kind of announcement should be made. Clambering up on the thwart of the God Have Mercy, he addressed the islanders. “We’ll take good care of your friend,” he said. “We’ll see he gets treated right.”

  The islanders continued to stare in silence while Robert and Maria-Grazia exchanged one single, brief embrace. Then the fisherman cast off, with the americani and the Englishman on board. The islanders, a sad crowd, remained on the quay for a long time, watching the boat depart.

  “Hell of a place,” said the lieutenant.

  “Bad omen, if you ask me,” said the sergeant.

  As the fisherman plied the choppy waves of the open sea between Castellamare and Siracusa, the Englishman gave a low murmur. Black blood was blossoming from the wound in his shoulder. The lieutenant fumbled in his first-aid kit and brought forth a Carlisle dressing from its plastic wrapper. “Here,” he said. “Put that on your shoulder. We’ll see you get medical attention when you’re back onshore.”

  Meanwhile, a memory came to the sergeant unbidden: how, as a boy of fifteen or sixteen pulling in the harvest on a ranch near Soledad, he had seen a man fall from a wagon onto a pitchfork, how the man had bled until there was no blood left in him.

  He was glad, when they deposited the soldier at the English field hospital, to have nothing more to do with him.

  —

  FROM SIXTY-SIX GENERAL HOSPITAL, Catania, Robert, still bleeding, was evacuated to Tunisia and from there put on a hospital ship bound for Southampton. On the journey he was confined to his bunk, and could drink only a little beef tea. His wound would sometimes begin to heal, but every few days it began to bleed once more. Robert’s temperature rose and fell; he was troubled by persistent headaches. This was an infection no ammoniated mercury or sulfanilamide tablets seemed to cure; it seemed to run deeper, to have taken root in him.

  His regiment—what was left of it—was training farther north, but Robert could no longer be deployed anywhere. While his comrades of the Number Six Guards Parachute Platoon floated down over Arnhem, Robert lay in a bed with gray curtains, sometimes recovering, sometimes declining, and dreamed of Maria-Grazia. Of her embraces on hot afternoons when the rest of the town lay drowsing behind shutters, when they had held their breath so as not to disturb the great silence of the island. Of the thick rope of her black hair. Of the calm of waking beside her in that room with the palms at the window, the blue line of the sea. Whether these things had happened or had only been imagined, he could not now tell for sure. The whole world seemed a submerged place in which great chunks of time were swallowed up and yet days themselves dragged listlessly. But still he clung to the belief that he had been her lover once, and would love her again.

  He listened to the wireless, understood that the war was drawing to a disordered close. That a pair of great bombs had been dropped in Japan, whole cities flattened, an awful thing. Then surrender. Hitler dead, Mussolini dead. Soon, he knew, soldiers would be returning in ships, on trains, a great exodus across the known world in all directions, their enmities abandoned, like the migration of birds toward home.

  —

  MARIA-GRAZIA RECEIVED A POSTCARD with a photograph of a redbrick English hospital on the front, in the autumn of 1945. Addressed only to “Maria-Grazia Esposito, the House at the Edge of Night, Castellamare Island,” it somehow found her. “Sto pensando a te,” it read. “I am thinking of you.” By this, she knew that Robert had survived.

  II

  The girl Concetta woke her before it was yet light. “Maria-Grazia, come down!” she called, her voice setting up an echo in the courtyard. Maria-Grazia surfaced from strange dreams, dreams of black caves, of falling. She fumbled for the window latch and put out her head. “Concetta?”

  A light rain had fallen; the sky was dense with stars. “Maria-Grazia!” called Concetta. “Wake up! It’s rained and the babbaluci are out. If we go now, we’ll get the best of them.”

  Maria-Grazia dressed in the dark and descended the stairs, past the shadowy photographs of her brothers. In the courtyard, drizzle was still hanging in the air; the night seemed saturated with it. Maria-Grazia picked up two metal pails, a little slime-ridden on the inside from the last time they had gone out to gather ground snails. Others would be out already, she knew: the Mazzus, whose harvest had been poor this summer; il conte’s underemployed peasants. “Let’s go to the ruined houses,” said Concetta. “No one else looks there. The babbaluci hide in the cracks in the walls, all stuck to each other in a ball. I’ve seen them. Come on
, Maria-Grazia.”

  Concetta, who had never been known to suffer from fatigue or low spirits, ran alongside Maria-Grazia through the wet dark. In the piazza, the peasant laborers were already stirring. Some were standing about waiting for il conte’s agents to drive up in the motorcar and hire them as day laborers—it was what they had always done when there was too little work. But some of them were gathering now for a different purpose, looking furtive, bearing red flags, under the direction of young Bepe. “What are they doing?” said Concetta.

  “Protesting,” said Maria-Grazia. “Come along—leave them.”

  The trouble between the peasants and il conte had first started when Bepe had gone to visit his cousin in Palermo. He had come back agitated, running up the steps of the bar the night after his arrival with a Palermo newspaper under one arm and a store of righteous indignation in his heart. “There are new laws,” he announced to the peasants and fishermen sitting around the scopa table. “I’ve only just heard. My cousin told me about them. Land reforms. They’ve been in place for a year or more, but no one told us about it. But the new laws apply to us here, too, just as much as anybody else in Italy! We’re to get a proper share of our grain and olives from now on, not the usual quarter il conte offers us. And those of you who aren’t tenants or sharecroppers aren’t supposed to stand about in the piazza each morning waiting for work—instead, you’re to be given a proper contract. And any land that isn’t cultivated is ours to take and occupy! Even il conte’s unused land is ours!”

  The peasants gathered grudgingly around Bepe’s newspaper, unwilling to be taken in. But sure enough, the mainland newspaper confirmed what Bepe had said—and what was more, if the new laws weren’t properly followed, claimed Bepe, carabinieri from the mainland would come and make il conte follow them, because the new minister for agriculture was a Communist and had said so.

  “Yes,” confirmed Maria-Grazia from behind the counter. “It’s been in all the newspapers here, too, only no one reads anything in this bar except La Gazzetta dello Sport.”

  “There’s one important thing,” said Bepe. “We have to form a cooperative before we can occupy the land.”

  “A what?” said the tenant farmer Mazzu, with suspicion. “I’m not cooperating with any of you.”

  “We have to form an organization,” said Bepe. “That’s all I mean. And we have to go out and occupy the land together. That way the government will listen to our claims. And”—Bepe whipped an expanse of red cloth from under his jacket—“we’ll carry this Communist party flag when we go, and stick it in the soil on a little pole. There’s a lot of uncultivated land, when you think about it—il conte’s hunting ground, and that stony bit to the south no one ever bothers with. Which used to be common ground,” he added, and one or two of the older peasants, remembering, stirred with an old indignation.

  Gradually, by degrees, Bepe went about the island and made himself heard. The year before, no one’s harvest had been good; half the island was in debt to il conte and his agents. On the day that il conte and his wife left for their estate in Palermo, fleeing the late summer heat, Bepe at last succeeded in tipping the other peasants into action. The following Monday morning, the men—accompanied by their wives with great cooking pots on their heads and an excitable straggle of children—forayed out to claim il conte’s unused land. The stony field on the south of the island, occupied until now only by wild goats and nests of lizards, was divided into strips with lines of taut fishing wire, and planted with autumn wheat.

  At lunchtime, il conte’s agents, armed with hunting rifles, rode up on donkeys. “You’re to leave this land alone,” they ordered.

  The peasants left, but came back when the wheat sprouted, and subversively thinned the rows.

  No one knew what would happen when the heat broke and il conte returned from Palermo. But now again the peasants were marching out to the fields to claim his unused land: the hunting ground this time. Concetta followed them for a few paces, drawn by the noise of Bepe’s muted organetto, until their ways parted. Concetta and Maria-Grazia’s path took them down the bare hillside, while the procession of peasants wound on along the road, the lights of their cigarettes brief fireflies in the dark. In their wake the music faded; all was darkness and rain. Maria-Grazia and Concetta, pushing through wet grass and clumps of thistle, reached the abandoned houses where the prisoners had once been kept. Sure enough, kneeling down among the rubble, Maria-Grazia found the babbaluci everywhere, poking out their heads.

  Maria-Grazia felt a pang of regret as she dropped the snails into the bucket. Concetta kept a gleeful count: “Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three…”

  “We’ll make a stew,” said Maria-Grazia. “With oil and wild parsley and garlic, and a little pepper.”

  With the dawn, the ruined houses shrank to ordinary proportions and the snails began to dig deeper underground. The two of them worked side by side without speaking, racing the sun and the day’s heat, until one pail was full. “Maria-Grazia,” said Concetta, gazing into the bucket of snails. “What do you think has become of Signor Robert?”

  Maria-Grazia stiffened a little at this question. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Nothing especially. But what do you think has become of him?”

  “I don’t know. He’s still in England, I expect. I showed you the card he sent.”

  “That card,” said Concetta, “didn’t have much to say, and it came more than a year ago.”

  “I expect his shoulder was hurting again, so that was all he could manage to write.”

  “Can’t you write to him?”

  Maria-Grazia shook her head. She had written to the hospital a year ago. No news, they told her. The patient had left. They did not know where he had gone.

  Concetta lifted a snail and watched it put out its horns and retract them again, as though it were dancing. “Can’t we go to England to find him? On a boat, or an airplane. Me and you, Maria-Grazia?”

  “Oh, Concetta, you know what that would cost. Lire and lire. Anyway, he’ll come back as soon as he can—I’m sure of it.”

  The child disappeared behind the wall. Maria-Grazia heard her muttering to herself and scratching in the earth. The girl would be searching for the smaller snails, the attuppateddi, who lived an inch underground. “Don’t put the attuppateddi in with the babbaluci,” said Maria-Grazia. “They’ll only fight like last time, and the attuppateddi are bitter—they’ll have to be soaked for a day or two in bran to get out the bad taste.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Concetta, by way of grudging reply.

  They worked until the sun was overhead, and all the remaining babbaluci were gone, buried in their crevasses and holes, the attuppateddi sunk deep underground. Concetta, covered in earth up to the elbows, dropped the last handful into her pail. “Can I eat one or two now?” she pleaded. “I don’t mind them raw.”

  “Oh, Concetta—wait until we cook them.”

  Only as she straightened, hoisting the first pail, did Maria-Grazia become aware of someone standing a short way behind them, throwing a shadow across her back.

  Perhaps it was because Concetta had just mentioned him, or because such things had happened a hundred times in her secret imaginings—but for a moment, as she turned, she was convinced it was Robert. Instead, here was a man in ill-fitting foreign clothes, with a dented cardboard suitcase and a face like one of her brothers’. A face a little compressed and lined but known to her somehow, with its spread nose and dark features and thick eyebrows under a mass of well-oiled hair. It dawned on her in a rush of terror: “Flavio! Dio, is it you?”

  “Maria-Grazia,” said the man like her brother.

  “Oh, Flavio. Is it really you, not your ghost?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Where have you been? We were told you were missing in North Africa.”

  “Aren’t you going to greet me?” he said.

  But when she embraced him, he held off a little, stiff and unyielding in her arms. “You were exp
ecting someone else,” he said. “When you turned and saw me, you were disappointed.”

  Now she found herself in tears. “No—it’s just the shock of seeing you. Come home to Mamma and Papà—”

  “Aurelio and Tullio? Are they back yet?”

  “We haven’t heard from them.”

  She took his wrist and led him, Concetta stumbling behind with the buckets of snails.

  Inside the town walls a few people seemed to recognize Flavio and murmured a “salve” or a “buongiorno.” But no one approached. Aware of this, she talked a little too eagerly: “I’m so glad—and you’ll see things are just the same here—we’ve your medal, too—”

  Concetta, struggling behind them, let go the buckets and called, “Hey! Hey!”

  Maria-Grazia turned. “Sorry, cara—it’s too much for you to carry. Give me one of those.”

  Flavio put out his hand for the other. “What is it?” he said, drawing back a little from the roiling heap.

  “Snails.”

  “For eating?”

  “What else? To tell the truth, there hasn’t been much to eat lately. But thank God and Sant’Agata for the fishermen—I’m sure the people on mainland Sicily are starving much worse than we are, miles from the ocean in those dry stony places.”

  She noticed all at once, when he took the bucket, that the fingers on his right hand were gone, except the first one and the thumb. She felt tears threaten. “What happened to your hand?”

  “Oh.” He looked at his hand both ways, first the front, then the back, as though it were new to him. “Shot off,” he said eventually. “But there’s nothing to say about that, and I’d rather not.”

  All the way up the main street she tried not to stare at them, the poor lost fingers that had once danced over the keys of his brass trumpet, sounding bright notes.

  Outside the house, she stopped and set down the bucket. “Let me go in first,” she said. “Let me tell them.”

  Flavio nodded and stood stiffly, holding the bucket of snails.