The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  Andrea took his walking cane in both hands. His eyes strayed toward Maria-Grazia as he spoke, then returned to the old professor. “No one’s to enter this patch of ground.”

  Bepe, enraged, dropped from his donkey and advanced three paces into il conte’s land. “There you are, Signor d’Isantu,” he declared. “Someone just has.”

  Andrea took the stick and tapped him across the shoulder. “Get back, Bepe. I’ve told you, no one’s to enter.”

  “It’s common land now,” murmured Father Ignazio. “And in any case, Signor d’Isantu, wouldn’t it be better to resolve this cordially, without coming to blows over the matter?”

  Andrea advanced on the priest as though the man were one of his father’s peasants. “I’ll come to blows with anyone who tries to take my father’s land!” he cried. “If any stronzo of you crosses this fence, I’ll come to blows with him, as Sant’Agata is my witness! See if I will!”

  Bepe took another subversive step forward. Andrea swung the walking cane, and with its silver-topped handle sent Bepe flailing into the dust.

  “Everyone involved in these land occupations is dismissed,” Andrea told the assembled peasants. “You’re to find other work. You’re to be sharecroppers on my father’s land no longer, you stronzi, you figli di puttana, if you won’t respect it as you ought to!”

  “Where’s your father, Andrea?” said the priest, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Isn’t this his business? Don’t act so rashly—dismissing families who’ve worked for your family for generations—”

  “I won’t be ridiculed like this. The amphitheater is ours, the land is ours—”

  Andrea swung the walking cane again in white-faced fury. The peasants scattered, breaking up into their separate groups. Bepe’s donkey, braying wildly, cut free of the boy Agato and went at a loping canter down the road, his master forgotten. All was disorder. Behind Andrea, il conte’s agents had grown watchful, and shouldered their guns. “The land occupations are over,” said Andrea. “You’re dismissed.”

  —

  “THE AMPHITHEATER WAS AN inferior example of the type either way,” consoled Professor Vincio later, while Amedeo bandaged poor Bepe’s bruised head over the counter of the bar. “From what I could see. Roman, small, rather damaged. Still, I’d have liked to get a proper look at it—and I’m sorry that you were struck on my behalf, Bepe. And I’m more sorry than I can say for the loss of the peasants’ contracts.”

  Bepe fumed in outrage. “I’ll go to sea again,” he vowed. “I’ll be a fisherman. I’m done with this island and that stronzo of a conte.” The following day, Bepe rolled up his Communist flag and went to sea in an old boat of Pierino’s, which he had repainted and named the Santa Maria della Luce. Roaming the squally depths, he was gone for whole weeks at a time. “If I’m not to improve things here,” he was fond of repeating, on his brief and bitter returns to the bar, “then I shall go elsewhere.”

  But the breaking up of the land occupations contained its own strange blessing—for it was what led Professor Vincio, indirectly, to make a much more important discovery.

  As a prisoner, Professor Vincio had never heard tell of the caves by the sea. They were only mentioned to him by chance during his fifth day on the island, when the professor sat on the veranda of the bar, sipping Gesuina’s best limettacello and studying Amedeo’s book of stories. Gesuina had left twelve bottles of limettacello behind her when she died, which were brought out only for the most important visitors: Ten were still left. Now, as the archaeologist, warmed by its glow, read Amedeo’s story of the caves, a thought lit upon him. He leaned forward and touched the doctor lightly on the inside of the arm. “These catacombs?” he asked. “Are they real, or mythical?”

  “Real,” said Amedeo, a little surprised at the question.

  “Yes, yes,” said Rizzu, overhearing and interposing himself eagerly between them. “Square caves. With skulls and bones and things in them. All sorts of relics.”

  At this news, the professor became as excited as a boy. Spilling his limettacello, he went running up the stairs for a flashlight, then came blundering back down again with his odd scrubbing brush instead and had to be sent back up; he drove his assistant flailing about for equipment: “Bring the screens, the brushes, both trowels—no, no, just come at once—we’ll get all that later!”

  Rizzu escorted the professor to the caves in his donkey cart, wondering if the disappointment over the amphitheater had driven the old man insane. “There’s not as much to see as maybe you think,” he cautioned. “Just a few skulls and bleached bones. Perhaps I exaggerated a little.”

  But as soon as they reached the caves the professor immersed himself in the dark. Caressing their walls like the curves of a lover, he declared the place to be a necropolis, a city of the dead. “A rare thing,” he said. “An important site. A place where people in ancient times buried their dead. There are very few others so well preserved. Signor Rizzu, this is much more exciting than an old Roman amphitheater! This is a site of worldwide importance. It may be thousands of years old.”

  “A city of the dead,” said Rizzu, in wonder. “That explains the curse of weeping.” The islanders reeled with pride at the professor’s judgment of Castellamare as a site of worldwide importance—always suspected, now confirmed by a clever city man!

  The following week, a whole team of archaeologists arrived from Bologna and set up an excavation site with tents, fences, stakes, and bits of string. The earth tremors had dislodged the skulls from their places and opened up a passage in the second cave. Now, digging out the soil from this passage with what still looked to the islanders like shaving brushes and toothpicks, the archaeologists discovered a system of burial holes, a cache of pots, two gold coins. Rizzu had put it about that the foreign archaeologists were going to solve the mystery of the curse of weeping once and for all, and the islanders were disposed to be helpful. Old Mazzu appeared at the caves on the third day, offering a set of hoes and spades. “You’ll be wanting these,” he said. “It’s a damned shame you can’t afford any equipment, so we’ve agreed to make you a present of them.”

  The archaeologist accepted this gift with a bobbing little bow, but when old Mazzu passed by the caves the following day, he found to his disappointment that they were still scraping away with those scrubbing brushes. The following month, a team of German archaeologists arrived to join them. From dawn until nightfall, the foreigners could be heard chipping at the rock, scraping in the dirt, exclaiming in their northern languages as treasures were brought to light.

  —

  MEANWHILE, SINCE THE BAR and the island were destined to be her lot in life, Maria-Grazia hauled herself from the cave of her self-pity and decided she might as well make the best of them.

  Bepe had abandoned communism. But now he had another scheme in mind. Marching into the bar one night, absently flinging upon the counter a small, rather bloody tuna, he announced his intention to start a ferry service. “Il conte makes sure no one on the island does business with anyone except their neighbors,” said Bepe. “I’ve been puzzling it all out. He ensures that we make no money, while all the money he earns goes off the island, to be spent in the restaurants of Palermo, in Paris, in Roma. We haven’t even got a proper ferry. I’d like my children to go to high school on the mainland. And why shouldn’t the ferry bring people to the island as well as carry them off it? I’d like tourists to come here and buy Vincenzo the artist’s pictures and drink coffee in your bar and look at our sights, just as they would in Athens or Valletta or Palermo. Now that we’ve got a proper archaeological excavation.”

  At this, Agata-the-fisherwoman snorted her coffee all over the table.

  “What?” cried Bepe, enraged. “Haven’t we got a church, and a saint, and a set of ruins, just like the best of them? Things to stare at! Things to buy! That’s what they like best, the tourists—I’ve seen them in Siracusa! Greek ruins! Postcards! Little plaster models of the Colosseo! We’ve a city of the dead, haven’t w
e? Isn’t that just as good? Already half of you are making money out of this discovery, boarding the archaeologists in your houses. There’s more to be made! If we’re not to be communists, we must be modern people instead, and beat il conte that way!”

  “I agree with you, Bepe,” said the priest, unexpectedly, from the corner. “I think you’re right. Visitors must come and look at the caves by the sea, and witness the Sant’Agata festival. Our children must go to high school on the mainland. We must get the resources to take people to the hospital when they are sick—you know that’s been a long obsession of mine. Il conte and his family have shown their hand over the occupations. If we want to modernize, we must do it on our own.”

  “We could have a committee,” said Maria-Grazia, surprised to find herself weighing in on this debate when a moment before she had only been polishing the coffee machine. “Like the Committee of Sant’Agata, only for making improvements to the island.”

  “That’s a good thought,” said Bepe, seizing upon her idea. “That’s good, that thought of Mariuzza’s—a committee. We’ll have that.”

  “You mean to drag me into more cooperation,” muttered Mazzu, but when Maria-Grazia passed a page of the accounts book around the bar that afternoon, to make a list of prospective members, even he signed.

  On the fifth of July, a week after the Sant’Agata festival, the first meeting of the Committee for the Modernization of Castellamare took place. In attendance were Amedeo, Pina, Maria-Grazia, Father Ignazio, the artist Vincenzo, the two farmers Mazzu and Rizzu, and half the dismissed peasants of il conte. And Agata-the-fisherwoman, for since her brother’s return she was a fisherwoman no longer, and felt herself somewhat relegated. Agata, who had not married, remained alone in her little house submerged in trumpet vine, with only the dog Chiappi; she had serenely resisted her mother and brother’s attempts to dislodge her. “A husband would be the death of me,” she was fond of saying, though it was well known that Bepe had been trying to win her since the end of the war.

  At the meeting, it was agreed that tourist tours would be advertised, and a ferry service established with twice-daily crossings. The money that was made would pay for improvements to the houses damaged in the earth tremors, and, if things went well, new nets for the fishermen’s cooperative and an extension to the school.

  “Look here,” spoke up Amedeo, when the discussions were almost concluded. “We’re to be careful how we approach this. Haven’t we always swapped and bartered, helped our neighbors out in times of trouble? I remember how you rallied around me with baked aubergines and pasta al forno, when Mariuzza was so sick as a child. I didn’t appreciate it then, maybe, but this island mustn’t change its ways because there’s money to be had. You must be the same Castellamare people I’ve always known.”

  Maybe so, said Bepe, but money was money and it was time Castellamare became a modern place.

  The following Saturday, Bepe and Agata rowed to the mainland with a newly painted sign advertising historical tours of the “Ancient Necropolis of Castellamare.” For a hundred lire, or a dollar bill, tourists would be ferried over to the island and borne in Rizzu’s donkey cart to the caves by the sea to watch the archaeologists at work. “Historic bars!” their sign proclaimed, putting everything on the island ambitiously in the plural. “Old churches! The shrines of Sant’Agata! Donkey rides! Ice cream!” (The ice cream had not arrived yet, but it was hoped that the new influx of tourists would allow the House at the Edge of Night to install its first ice cream machine by the end of the year.)

  Visitors came. Not an influx, but a few, lured by the rustic sign, by the romantic aspect of the island across the water, by the fantastical colors of the ferryboat Santa Maria della Luce. Finding, after their long and rattling ascent in the donkey cart, that at the heart of the island was a bar in which they were offered tea and pastries, where the BBC blared from an old wireless, the tourists felt themselves to be both adventurous and safely within reach of the civilized world, a gratifying combination. Besides, half of the visitors were scholars, attracted by Professor Vincio’s preliminary research on the recently discovered Cave Necropolis of Castellamare, which had just been published in the American Journal of Archaeology.

  One of these first visitors was the former prisoner, the poet Mario Vazzo. A man now gilded with a little fame, hung about with literary honors, he nevertheless arrived alone, climbing the hill to the House at the Edge of Night on foot. From her customary seat at the edge of the veranda, Pina rose to meet him. The two of them recognized each other at once. Mario climbed the steps and took both Pina’s hands in his own. They remained like that for a long time.

  Mario Vazzo had lost his wife at the end of the war, he told them, but his son had survived. A university student now, his son read law in Torino. Mario’s chest puffed with pride at any mention of the boy. Mario had also brought with him a paper parcel, which he put into Pina’s hands. “My newest book,” he said. “You’ll see that I found at last the words to write about the war. I’ve been meaning to come back and bring it to you in person, and been putting it off, and then I saw the newspaper article about the excavations, and it seemed too much like a sign to ignore. This island, on the world map at last.”

  The book was named, simply, Odissea. “Is it a verse epic?” asked Rizzu, no longer mocking now that he saw the thing in printed form and the price on its cover, one thousand lire.

  “It is,” said Mario Vazzo, with a little acknowledging bow of the head. “It’s a modern version of the Odyssey.”

  “That sounds interesting enough,” conceded Rizzu. “As long as there’s a sea battle or two, and you’ve kept those parts about the naked ladies on the rocks.” For everyone on the island knew the story of the Odyssey as well as they knew their own island tales. Pina herself had read it to the children in the schoolroom on hot afternoons, opening the windows first to make a sort of backdrop of the noise of the sea.

  Later, when she and the poet were alone on the veranda, Pina drew the book from its wrappings. According to the book’s cover, Mario Vazzo had been shortlisted for two important prizes: the Bagutta and the Strega, neither of which Pina, to her shame, had heard of. Odissea had sold tens of thousands of copies, a “fenomeno nazionale,” wrote the professor from Rome whose remarks were printed on its front cover. “That story used to preoccupy me while I was here,” said Mario Vazzo. “And when I left, it haunted me. So I retold it. With Fascist guards for the Cyclops and prisoners for Greeks, trying to get home.”

  Pina sat on the veranda and read it slowly, making it last like a glass of arancello, while the poet lay beside her drowsing in the sun. Pina approached the reading of the book with great seriousness, pausing to mark passages in pencil as she had as a schoolmistress when she pored over Dante and Pirandello. She finished the book moved beyond speech, with tears in her voice. “A work of genius,” she declared.

  Amedeo read the book, too, guiltily leaping through the pages the next day while Pina took their guest to inspect the excavations at the necropolis. The thing was good, Amedeo admitted grudgingly to himself; perhaps it was even a work of genius, as Pina said. He recognized incidents, transformed from the sordid, shameful shape they had taken during the war into struggles of a mythic quality, like those belonging to the island tales he loved. The beating of Pierino became an epic battle, the arrival of the americani a godlike deliverance. All very clever.

  One section, though, troubled Amedeo. It described how the prisoner Odisseo, who Amedeo assumed to stand for Mario Vazzo himself, fell in love with an island woman. On a night of “black water and many stars,” these two characters made love in the caves by the sea, “rolling among the skulls, within the walls of the city of the dead.” Mustn’t that mean Castellamare’s caves? Amedeo felt the description to be vivid, almost indecent, stamped with the lurid mark of truth. It brought back to him, with a hot shame he had not felt in twenty years, his own assignations with Carmela. Here were the facts of the place: bones digging into the spine, sand i
n the hair, cold water seeping beneath the entangled limbs so that they became puckered with gooseflesh. And which island woman had Mario Vazzo known or cared about but Pina? Pina who had employed him, defended him, gathered his fragments of verse and kept them in the drawer of her nightstand, tied up with string? Amedeo had seen the yellowed paper napkins there himself not six months ago, surprised to discover them preserved so carefully. Pina had never spoken of Mario Vazzo after he left the island, but the napkins had troubled Amedeo then; their memory provoked him again now.

  So, too, did the way his wife had greeted the prisoner, silent with emotion. Now doubt began to work at him, too absurd to articulate but not yet ridiculous enough to dismiss altogether. He would find himself staring at the poet over the beans and sarde of the dinner table, or across the crowd in the bar, his soul run ragged by the very possibility of the poet and Pina engaging in such shameful acts in the caves by the sea. Had there been some affair between them? Strange if, after his years of guilt over Carmela, his wife had carried out a betrayal of her own. Peculiar rumors were about now, that the two of them had been observed together on the cliff top above the caves by the sea—and it was true that Pina had taken to returning at odd times from long walks across the island, with disarrayed, windblown hair. Amedeo had heard his wife speaking with Maria-Grazia in the room at the top of the house after dark, her voice going up and down like a motorboat as it had during the war, pouring out some secret or some story, too far away for him to hear. He could make out none of it, no matter how he pressed his ear against the door.

  Many of the islanders were exhilarated at this turn of events, calling it a kind of poetic justice.

  Not knowing what to say, Amedeo said nothing.

  Still, he was glad when the poet departed. He took Odissea and hid it away in the Campari liquor box at the top of the house, pretending to his wife not to know where it had gone. Unperturbed, and without displaying any outward sign of guilt, Pina merely crossed to the mainland on Bepe’s ferryboat and bought another copy from the bookshop in Siracusa.