The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  As Flavio mimed the notes the others sounded, a curious sensation came over him: moving the stumps of his right hand, it was as though the fingers came to life again; he could feel them pushing and resisting against the stops as they had when he was a boy. When he looked, nothing. And yet he felt them, the ghosts of his fingers, playing the trumpet in the air.

  Some altercation was taking place between il conte and his son, meanwhile, il conte murmuring and wheedling, and his son protesting, “I won’t! I won’t!” And then a great eruption: “I won’t be made a fool of by you, you stronzo, you figlio di puttana!”

  An ass—a son of a whore—never had any islander of Castellamare talked in such terms to his father. Flavio was seized with a kind of horrified admiration. Andrea d’Isantu left the car, slamming the door behind him. He came up the drive at a furious strut, limping with a cane. While the band struck into their first verse, he passed them and limped on. Past the band, past the peasants, past the servants, and around the corner of the villa. He vanished, leaving them all looking ridiculous in his wake. Il conte, caught in undignified pursuit of his son, beat a hand in the air at the musicians, made them stop.

  The musicians waited in the hot silence, but no one else came. An embarrassed servant brought the band a jug of limonata eventually, and half a bottle of arancello. They stood on the scorched grass before the villa and drank, and then they went home.

  —

  AFTER THE FAILED WELCOME COMMITTEE, Andrea d’Isantu remained shut up in his father’s villa. His mother had called the priest for him, his father the mainland doctor. Andrea sent both away.

  “He’s sore at losing the war,” murmured Rizzu, in the bar. “That boy must have been a real Fascist.”

  But Flavio, who had got a good look in Andrea d’Isantu’s eyes before he vanished, understood that the truth was different. Flavio had stung with a kind of recognition as il conte’s son passed—as though the two of them were fellow initiates, brothers, sufferers of the same shameful disease.

  Now he assembled his scraps of memory concerning Andrea. Flavio remembered once playing “Giovinezza” on his brass trumpet for the visit of some dignitary; Andrea had sung. Andrea had possessed a startlingly high voice, nasal, very pure, unbroken even at sixteen. No one considered mocking it. In general, he had been left utterly alone by the other children, protected by the suits of foreign clothes in which he came to school, by his habit of speaking proper Italian to the teacher, saying “grazie” with an “e” instead of the normal “grazzi” belonging to the island, “per favore” instead of “pi fauri”—“Like a character from a textbook,” Tullio said. Andrea had walked to school alone, and on hot afternoons the old man Rizzu collected him in the donkey cart, or the agent Santino Arcangelo, the grocer’s elder son, in il conte’s motorcar, swerving all over the road, sounding delighted beeps to clear the other children out of his way. Andrea had completed his last years of school alone in the library of the count’s villa.

  But here he was now, back from the war with a sick look in his eyes.

  The next time Flavio caught a glimpse of him, after the failure of the welcome committee, was toward the end of autumn. There he was, limping through the edge of Flavio’s vision with his walking cane. In the other hand, he carried a few storm-battered trumpet vine flowers. The bones in the boy’s knee had shattered, Flavio had heard; it had taken five operations in an American hospital to put him back together. Andrea paused a moment by the green-smelling fountain and lowered his face to the orange mouths of the trumpet vine. Flavio watched, rubbing the itching stumps of his fingers. At length, Andrea raised his head, turned, and said, “What do you want?”

  Flavio said, “Salve, Signor d’Isantu.”

  “But what do you want? Why do you stare so?”

  “Mi scusi,” said Flavio. “Only I heard you were also captured in Africa, during the war.”

  “Come here.”

  Flavio approached and stood before him. Il conte’s son had his father’s manners and his father’s protruding, insolent eyes. He raised the flowers like a toast. “For my mother. She loves them. We have none on our estate. She’s been a little difficult since I returned, a little demanding, so I go for long walks to gather them, and that way she gets her flowers and I get a little peace. They’re almost finished now.”

  Flavio offered up a sentence or two about his own mother: how she had arranged his football cards on his nightstand, had forced on him his brass trumpet—as though he could still play that thing, with all his fingers shot off! “They can’t help thinking we’re just the same, these damned mothers and fathers,” said Flavio, becoming strident in his urge to be understood. “They don’t know anything except this island, the sea, fishing boats, village gossip, the damned Sant’Agata festival…”

  For everyone on the island seemed a child now to Flavio, all of them very cheerful and simple, like the inhabitants of some previous century. He found Andrea nodding: Yes, the count’s son understood this also. “You don’t have to tell me I need to get out of this place,” said Andrea. “This isola di merda. I’m dying here. You, too.”

  Thus, a peculiar friendship began.

  —

  AS THE ISLAND BEGAN to heave itself upright the following year, to shake off the dust of war, a fever for weddings swept Castellamare. Every Saturday, handfuls of rice strewed the main street; at every Sunday Mass, Father Ignazio was obliged to read the banns, so that he began to confuse the names of last week’s newly joined couples with this week’s expectant brides and bridegrooms. On still nights, village boys with their guitars and organetti could be heard at a distance, serenading the new couples under their windows, beating on the doors of the parents’ houses where they passed their cramped, embarrassed wedding nights. The florist Gisella had never done such a trade, and the hedges and courtyards were stripped of trumpet vine and white oleander in the furious demand for bouquets, so that it seemed that summer had not come this year, or had passed early, without any flowers.

  As the last of Maria-Grazia’s classmates, Giulia Martinello, danced in exaltation down the steps of the church with her husband, young Totò, pinned firmly by the arm, Maria-Grazia was seized with a melancholy so profound that she could taste it, the way you could taste a storm coming in off the ocean. Pinioned in her smile and her too-small Sunday clothes, flinging rice in the faces of Giulia and Totò, she understood that this summer marked three years since the americani had taken Robert away across the sea.

  At first, her mother and father had carried on their backs, as she had, a great grief at the loss of the Englishman. But she had refused to mention him—had turned away when they spoke his name—until they had given up and retreated, hiding it away in some chamber of their hearts where the memories of Tullio and Aurelio were also incarcerated.

  So no one talked about the Englishman any longer, except the girl Concetta and old Rizzu. “We all loved the inglese,” the old man told Maria-Grazia one afternoon in the bar, seizing her by the hand. “We all loved Roberto Caro. But a marriage is a marriage, and it’s time we were finding someone for you, Maria-Grazia.”

  “You’re wrong about that, nonno!” cried Concetta, upturning Rizzu’s coffee in her rage.

  “What’s wrong about it?” quavered Rizzu. “There’ll be no one left if poor Mariuzza waits any longer!”

  “Maria-Grazia’s waiting for Signor Robert,” said Concetta. “She must wait until Signor Robert comes home.”

  “There’ll be no one left,” mourned Rizzu. “There’ll be no one left, Mariuzza.”

  “There’s no one left already,” said Maria-Grazia.

  It was true. The rash of weddings was subsiding as quickly as it had come on. In loyalty to Robert, she had held herself aloof, even when half chances at happiness had been offered her. She had lowered her eyes when she served the young fisherman Totò, who had given up hissing at her as she moved about the bar and gone in pursuit of Giulia instead, securing her hand with admirable efficiency in just ten days. She
had treated the middle-aged widower Dacosta with a daughterly, bluff cheer until he stopped hanging about at the counter of the bar offering her his views on politics and farming, and took his coffee alone at the corner table instead, the newspaper before his eyes. Even Dacosta had married again now, finding a wife among his second cousins on the mainland when he had visited the previous winter. There was no unmarried man that she knew of on the island except the priest and old Rizzu. Jokingly, Rizzu made a pantomime of proposing to Maria-Grazia with a ring-pull from one of the new American soda cans the bar stocked now, singing in his splintered old voice the most romantic of the island’s songs.

  It was meant to cheer her, but Maria-Grazia turned away with tears in her eyes, feeling herself mocked before them all.

  —

  AT THE COLD END OF AUTUMN, she came out onto the terrace to gather the dirty glasses and found il conte’s son, in an English linen suit, lounging against the veranda. Since the incident over the voting in ’34, never had il conte or any member of his household approached the House at the Edge of Night. The enmity between il conte and her father, an unspoken thing, had its own force, which must be respected. “Good evening, Signor d’Isantu,” she said, all the same. “May I offer you a table?”

  “No. I’ll not set foot on your terrace. I’m only here to see Flavio.”

  “I’ll fetch him.”

  Andrea, used to being obeyed, said, “Come here a moment.”

  Maria-Grazia set down the glasses and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “You’re Maria-Grazia, aren’t you? I remember you from school. The clever one.”

  His attention held her hostage. A narrow face, black oiled hair like his father’s, interrogating eyes. Every muscle of him gave off an odd intensity. He dragged himself a little closer on the silver-topped walking cane, and she felt a sudden tenderness, remembering the frustration of her own leg braces. Now she stood straight and tall, and he was the one who was spoken of by everybody as a cripple, in hushed tones. Eventually, when he had appraised the whole of her, he said, “You’ve changed since the war.”

  Maria-Grazia, who did not know how to reply to this, said nothing. At an upstairs window, Amedeo looked down on the two of them, the boy at the edge of the veranda and his beautiful daughter, and knitted his eyebrows in a single line, wondering what trouble Andrea meant to cause.

  —

  THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN FLAVIO and Andrea d’Isantu had begun to be noticed. They had been spied by the elderly Mazzu taking walks together around the circumference of the island, Andrea beating at the scrub grass with his cane, Flavio gesticulating in the air with his wounded hand. They made an odd pair, the count’s son and the son of his enemy, the doctor. Several times, Flavio had invited Andrea to sit with him on the veranda of the bar. But Andrea d’Isantu refused to set foot on Esposito territory, in deference to his father. So Flavio moved a table into the neutral space under the palm tree in the piazza, a meter or two beyond the bar’s boundary, and the matter was resolved. Here Flavio sat with his friend and engaged in fierce discussions over bottles of arancello.

  Neither Pina nor Amedeo approved of the friendship, and nor did Carmela and il conte.

  Meanwhile, Maria-Grazia heard the way her brother and Andrea d’Isantu talked about the island: Isola di merda, they called it—narrow, gossip-ridden, an island of inbred goatherds and pickers of olives. Though she herself had flung accusations at the island a hundred times in her heart, she sprang to its defense now to hear it maligned out loud; she burned with suppressed rage as she cleared the tables. She felt abashed in Andrea’s presence, constantly wrong-footed. Several times, collecting dirty glasses or arranging plates before the customers on the veranda, she looked into the palm tree’s black shadow and found Andrea d’Isantu looking back at her, a gaze that seemed to come from the depths of a mirror, matching her own. As she moved about the veranda his eyes followed her, going everywhere she went.

  She remembered him at school, laboring at a desk set apart from the other children’s in tribute to his father’s status, with blocks of concrete under the legs to elevate it above the others. Some idea of Professor Calleja’s to get into il conte’s favor. Andrea d’Isantu, neck smarting, had bent his head over his mathematics problems at the humiliation, and to Maria-Grazia his slicked hair and skinny neck had seemed the loneliest thing in the world. The separateness of the two of them, he with his expensive clothes and Latin diction, she with her clanking, creaking leg braces, had never been enough material from which to forge a friendship. But now his eyes followed her, and hers sought him out, with a kind of rhythm, repeating and returning.

  He looked at her as though they shared some complicity, the two of them.

  Early one morning in December he came to the bar asking for Flavio again. A rain like wet ropes was falling outside. Andrea stood with the water running down him. “Flavio isn’t up yet,” she said. “I’ll fetch him.”

  In this rain, there was nothing to do but invite him in—courtesy held sway over everything else on the island, even old feuds. “Wait inside,” said Maria-Grazia. “Come into the hall for a moment. You’ll be soaked through.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  “Please, Signor d’Isantu, come in.”

  But here Andrea was adamant. He knew the story of how Pina Vella had driven him from the bar as a baby in his mother’s arms, and pride compelled him to maintain his position now, even in the force of this downpour. “I’ll not come in,” he said. “I’ll not set foot in your bar. I’ll wait here beyond the steps.”

  Rain poured down on him, battening his hair monkishly to his pale forehead, making great well buckets of the pockets of his English suit. All at once, Maria-Grazia was seized with a fit of rage at the absurdity of the feud, this pride, the waste of a good suit of clothes! It wasn’t to be borne any longer. She threw her cable of hair over her shoulder and stamped her two feet on the wet veranda. “I’ve never heard anything so silly!” she cried. “Come in when I tell you! What—are you going to stand in the rain?”

  “I will,” said Andrea.

  “You won’t, you stronzo!”

  Never had anyone on Castellamare spoken thus to il conte’s son. Winded, puffing a little, he opened his mouth to resist. But before he could repossess himself of the power of speech, Maria-Grazia had hauled him by the arm so fiercely that he became unbalanced, stumbling on his weak leg. “Come on,” she said. Dragging the furious Andrea behind her, she gained the shelter of the entrance hall of the House at the Edge of Night, muscled il conte’s son inside, and shut the door. “There,” she said, shaking the water out of the pockets of his suit. “That’s enough of that nonsense.”

  Andrea, utterly discomposed for the first time in his life, said, “There’s no need—there’s no need—” while water dripped from his pockets onto the red map-of-the-world tiles.

  Now, all at once, Maria-Grazia was a little abashed at what she had done. For a moment, the two of them regarded each other. “Wait here, please, Signor d’Isantu,” she said at last. “I’ll fetch Flavio.”

  Andrea stood, shuddering, ill at ease. Maria-Grazia ascended the stairs, and his eyes ascended with her.

  “Flavio!” she called, beating on her brother’s door. “Your friend is here! Signor d’Isantu!”

  Flavio, with a great moaning, awoke. “I’ll be down in a minute or two—tell him to wait.”

  “He’s waiting.”

  But now Andrea’s presence at the bottom of the stairs was a dark weight, like a cloud over the ocean. Maria-Grazia retreated to her own bedroom, astounded at what she had done. Her brother was blundering about in the room below her, waking—that room she still thought of as Robert’s. She still remembered the little noises belonging to the Englishman: the protest of the bedsprings as he turned, the coughs he made, foreign sounding, the thud of his book on the nightstand as he readied himself for sleep.

  The postcard from Robert lay in its accustomed place on her nightstand. She lifted it caressingl
y, looking for unseen meaning in those few inadequate words.

  With a shock she realized that Andrea d’Isantu had climbed the stairs. Now, huffing from the effort, hauling his bad leg in both hands, he was here, at the very door of her room. She dropped the postcard and retreated to the window. “Flavio’s room is downstairs—on the landing—not here—”

  “I wanted to apologize,” said Andrea. “You’re right—this feud is a silly thing. All of it.” He bent, keeping one leg straight, to retrieve her postcard from the floor. “Sto pensando a te?” he said.

  “It’s from a friend—”

  “Your Englishman. Flavio told me.” His shrewd eyes, a little mocking, held her hostage. She kept herself taut and stern under his gaze, feeling like an old spinster warding off some perilous suitor. She hugged her own elbows, leaning back against the knobby front of her chest of drawers. Once—she recalled it dimly, like something that had only been narrated to her secondhand—Robert had pressed her against these drawers, made love to her, bracing her against its edge so that when they were done they found two circles printed on the small of her back.

  Andrea held out the postcard, which now, she saw, bore a wet thumbprint where he had gripped it. But as she reached to take it, he caught instead her wrist and held it there before him, as though uncertain what to do with it now he had possession of it. “When you took my arm just now,” he began at last. “Since I came back—since the war—not one person’s touched me—not my mother, not my father. Just you.”

  All at once her father filled the doorway; she had not heard him climb the stairs. He advanced, big with a rage she had never seen in him before. “What’s this?” he cried. “Leave hold of my daughter!”

  Her father came forward and with one swift blow broke the boy’s grip on her wrist.

  “Out!” he cried. “Out!”

  Andrea retreated before the yells of the incensed Amedeo, his cheeks inflamed. “You are not to see my daughter,” roared Amedeo. “You are not to pursue my daughter. You are not to speak to her.”