The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  Though Pina was to receive a steady supply of misspelled letters—was even to hear his voice, tinny but recognizable, across the telephone wires in later years—Flavio did not come back. After his departure, Pina began in earnest to get old. But Maria-Grazia believed her brother had left for his own private reasons, not all sad ones, and she reconciled herself to his second departure. For, in the end, a kind of order had been restored on the island. “I thank you for what you did,” he wrote to her a year later, across the cutout inside of an English cereal box, “I sleep more easily now.”

  VI

  Into this world of change and seismic tremor came a foreigner, seating himself in his old place behind the counter as though he had never been gone.

  When Maria-Grazia returned one afternoon from the church, to which she sometimes walked on days when her heart was melancholy to speak a little with Father Ignazio about her brother, she knew by the self-satisfied smiles of the old women outside Arcangelo’s shop, by the blessing the widower Onofrio cried from his upstairs window as she passed, even by the unusual quiet of the doves in the palm trees, that something had altered on the island. Pondering its strangeness, she went home by the vaneddi, the little roads, so as not to be further gossiped over.

  Concetta greeted her in the doorway of the bar. “You’ve a new customer!” she crowed. “You’d better come and meet him.”

  Maria-Grazia, in good humor, took the girl’s guiding hand. She expected one of the archaeologists, perhaps another returned prisoner. To hope for Robert would have been as absurd, by now, as to expect Sant’Agata herself to be sitting there.

  So it was with a great shock that she beheld her old lover waiting at the counter, smiling in abashed pleasure at the shock he had caused.

  He was older, smaller than she remembered, badly dressed. Her voice came from a distance and stunned her: “What are you doing here?”

  Robert got to his feet, rubbing a little sweat from his eyebrows. He was speaking to her, making clumsy expressions of tenderness in English and Italian: cara mia, darling girl. Expressions that belonged to those hot afternoons of five summers ago, when she had still been a girl, which were not things to be aired publicly in front of the neighbors in the bar. She found herself unable to reply, so extreme were the emotions that broke over her in quick succession: first shock, now joy, now anger. “What are you doing here, Signor Carr?” she said again.

  Robert was mumbling, reaching for her hands. “I’m back,” he said. “Maria-Grazia, I can’t tell you how happy—and you haven’t changed—” He spoke Italian now, of sorts.

  Unchanged? After five years? She who had picked up snails and gathered bitter greens, who had steered the bar out of the war and into safe waters, who had lit on the idea of the Modernization Committee and proven Flavio’s innocence at last? She found herself clenching and unclenching her fists. “You never wrote,” she said.

  The elderly scopa players had turned around their chairs, and now nodded at her in expectation.

  Was she to throw herself upon him before them all, to give them the satisfaction of this reconciliation?

  She swayed, pressing one hand against the counter to prevent herself from falling. Robert approached, a little anxious now. “I shouldn’t have shocked you like that,” he said. And then again, more timidly, “All this time, Maria-Grazia, I’ve loved you. I’m back. I’m back for good now.”

  She looked up and met his eyes. His hair had dulled, grayed, in his absence; the skin that had once been as translucent as tissue paper had coarsened and reddened. She wanted to speak, but still these waves of rage and joy were breaking over her, violent as a fever, so that she shuddered. “Is it that you love someone else?” he murmured, when she maintained her silence. “Is it that you don’t care for me anymore?”

  As they stood face-to-face before the counter, the earth gave a sudden sidewise jolt. So extreme was the disorder of her mind that it took her several seconds to locate it outside herself. Again, another tug. “Tell me what’s wrong,” Robert pleaded.

  “You never wrote,” she said again. But before he could form a reply, a great crowd had barged into the bar. The congregation leaving Father Ignazio’s twelve o’clock Mass had got wind of the Englishman’s return, and now they came to pay their respects. Robert was separated from her, absorbed in a noisy crush of delight. “Signor Carr! Signor Carr!” “The inglese is back!” “Praise-be-to-Sant’Agata-saint-of-misfortunes-and-praise-be-to-all-the-saints!”

  Here came Father Ignazio, seizing Robert by both hands. “There’ll be a wedding now,” announced a widow Maria-Grazia barely knew, nudging her in a sidelong fashion, delighted with her own wit. “Prepare to read the banns one more time, padre!”

  They must get away from these crowds! She felt nauseous, light-headed—she could not think, with their damned noise. But as she struggled toward the door, seizing the wrist of the Englishman, another wave of islanders appeared, swarming up the steps of the veranda. Old Mazzu, driving his goats before him with a metal washing pole, followed by a crowd of il conte’s peasants. Mazzu held both hands aloft at the sight of Robert and anointed the Englishman on both shoulders with his stick in spontaneous blessing. “Signor Carr!” he cried. “Signor Carr! Thanks be to Sant’Agata, you’ve returned at last! And here’s Maria-Grazia, to be made a bashful bride!”

  “All of you leave us alone!” Maria-Grazia cried. “You with your gossiping, your orchestrating, your interference!”

  With that, she fled through the curtain of the bar. She took refuge in the courtyard, among the sunlit flapping of the sheets Pina had washed that morning. Now she heard the door bang: Robert had followed her, as she had hoped he would. “Maria-Grazia?” came his voice. “Perché mi fuggi? Why do you run away from me?”

  Then the wave of rage in her broke, swamping temporarily the joy that had risen at his faltering Italian, his murmurs of “darling girl.” “Because you didn’t write!” she cried. “Because you didn’t send me anything for five years, except that damned postcard! Because you’ve subjected me to ridicule, to humiliation—”

  “But cara…”

  Wrestling his way through the sheets, he found her and stood before her. “You didn’t write,” she said. “Nothing but that postcard: Sto pensando a te. Do you think that’s adequate? Do you think that’s just?”

  “No,” he said, bringing forth each Italian word with care, “I don’t think it’s just.”

  “Then what explanation can you possibly give me now?”

  “When I sent you that postcard,” he murmured, “I intended to overtake it, and be with you in a matter of days. Otherwise, I swear to you, I would have written more.”

  She turned—not to run again, but perhaps to provoke him a little with the fear that she might. “Wait!” he cried in anguish. “Wait, Maria-Grazia. At least let me explain. It takes me time to find the words—I’m trying, cara. I can explain, if you’ll just give me time.”

  Indignation took the breath from her lungs. She seized the washing basket, upturned it, and flung herself down. “Bene. Very well. Explain yourself.”

  —

  MEANWHILE, IN THE BAR, a mutiny was threatening. A strange fierceness had come over Amedeo, and he was refusing to let anybody follow Maria-Grazia and Robert into the courtyard. More islanders were converging on the bar by the minute in search of the Englishman, and Amedeo would let none of them go. “Where’s he hiding?” demanded the widows of Sant’Agata, marching in formation up the steps. “We’ve a welcome bottle of limoncello to present to him, and a pennant of the saint.”

  “No,” ordered Amedeo. “You’re not to disturb him. I absolutely forbid it.”

  In this matter, too, Pina Vella was adamant, and stood guard over the curtain of the bar in case anybody should attempt to pursue Robert and Maria-Grazia. “They haven’t spoken in five years,” she said. “In the name of Sant’Agata, you’re to leave them alone, all of you! If you so much as try to go after them, I’ll lock the doors of this bar and keep you
prisoner here. There’ll be time enough to see Signor Carr after they’ve had a chance to speak to one another.”

  The neighbors resigned themselves, and sat muttering about the bar and the veranda awaiting the Englishman’s reappearance.

  But Concetta could not bear such uncertainty. Waiting until Pina was distracted, she crept through the door of the bar and escaped by the alleys. Hauling herself up on top of the courtyard gate, she made out the figure of Signor Robert, a figure behind the sheets like a puppet in a shadow theater, making gestures with his hands. And there was Maria-Grazia, seated on the washing basket, her arms knotted, her face turned away. Concetta, a declared heathen, nevertheless offered a secret prayer to Sant’Agata that Mariuzza would turn around.

  —

  ROBERT HAD BEGUN HIS STORY, falteringly, at the moment of leaving Castellamare. He told her how the ships had borne him away from her: the fisherman’s little rowing boat and a great gray transport and a hospital ship whose cavernous holds were full of sighs and groaning. From Siracusa to Catania, from Catania to Tunisia, from Tunisia to Southampton, and then, at last, to the hospital with gray curtains where he had sweated out the rest of the war. Always, on that journey, he had felt himself to be looking back over a widening stretch of gray water, searching in a blur of fever for her face among the crowd.

  As Maria-Grazia sat unmoved, he found that the words came more easily. Now, in desperation, he laid them all before her.

  For months his shoulder had wept pus, he told her, bled, refused to heal. It had remained unhealed until the day the fighting ended. The wound had prevented him from parachuting into Arnhem after D-Day, from dying in the churned mud outside some Dutch village like almost everyone else he knew. His shoulder had cost him the rest of the war. But as May 1945 began, the wound began to pucker and heal, and the fever abated. As the fighting ended, he found that there was no longer anything wrong with him.

  “That’s when you wrote to me,” said Maria-Grazia. “That’s four years ago. What about the rest of that time?”

  “Lo so,” said Robert. “I know, cara. I’m coming to that.”

  The trouble had begun with his recovery, he told her. For he had found himself not discharged from the hospital, but ordered to Holland to rejoin his regiment. The soldier in the next bed, a melancholy captain, had told him it might take years to be discharged. He could not wait for that. He packed his belongings and absconded. On the way out of the hospital, he penciled Maria-Grazia a note in the only Italian he remembered: “Sto pensando a te.” I’m thinking of you.

  “I couldn’t write more,” he said. “I had to leave.”

  He fled the hospital and made for the sea, walking along the roadside with his belongings in his arms, wearing the same mildewed uniform in which he had been admitted to the hospital. He felt the motorcars at his back slowing to regard him with curious eyes. Halfway there, a woman ambulance driver picked him up. She was driving as far as the docks, she said. She could take him there. But she didn’t know where he could buy a ticket for Sicily. Besides, Robert had very little money. After the ambulance driver left him, he was obliged to go into a bank to withdraw it, and he had been uncomfortably aware there, too, of the attention that his rumpled uniform got, the stares directed at his bundle of belongings wrapped in a hospital towel. As he left the ticket office, having bought at last the precious ticket across the channel (Sicily he would get to by degrees), he was intercepted by a pair of military policemen. They wanted to see his discharge papers.

  He told her the rest in odd moments, anxious not to inflict on her the desperation of that time and yet desperate all the same: to plead his case, to win her over. They had ordered him tried for desertion, he told her. They had confiscated his ticket. He told her how, at the court-martial, he was defended by a major as thin as rope, a stranger, who had sat with him in the entrance lobby of the court and ran over his case, making misspelled notes. How Robert’s trial had been the seventh in a series of twenty-nine that week. How, meanwhile, London and Paris swarmed with deserters; they roamed about stealing trucks, robbing cafés, waging war. “You should have made for London,” said the major wryly, as he wrote underneath Robert’s name (“Carr” spelled with one “r” and “Private” for “Paratrooper”) the fact that Robert had been “treated by a native doctor in Castle Amary, Sicily, afterward at Netley Park.”

  The court-martial was a divided affair, since it was felt that somehow for a simple shoulder wound to open and bleed, to weep pus, to cause shivers and fever, and to heal on the last day of the war, was a circumstance suspicious enough to have some psychological root. And yet clearly, at some point, the man had been unfit to fight, for it was there in his medical notes.

  “What about this Sicilian doctor?” asked the colonel who presided over the panel. “Can we get some record from him? Have we any assurance that you were really so ill as you say you were, too ill to rejoin your regiment, during the years 1943 to 1944?”

  “There wasn’t enough time to write to the native doctor for a statement,” said the major, with perfect truth—for he had met Robert two hours previously.

  “Are you willing to go back to the Third Battalion until your discharge?” asked the assistant counsel for the prosecution.

  Robert was not willing. It was only when he was sentenced to ten years with hard labor that he understood the great error he had made.

  In the first days of his imprisonment, thinking of Maria-Grazia, who had been a girl when they were lovers and would be almost thirty when he returned to her, Robert had given himself over to despair. “For how could I write to you?” he said. “How could I ask you to wait for me, to wait ten years, even supposing they’d have given me the paper and the pen and the foreign stamps, which they wouldn’t? You were just a girl when we met—I spoke none of your language—we were lovers for a few months, during the war. How could I presume that what you felt for me was the kind of love that would make you willing to wait, to forfeit any other chance of happiness? How could I presume that anything would be the same in peacetime? How could I have asked that of you?”

  “What about the love you felt for me?” asked Maria-Grazia, very coolly. “Was it that kind of love?”

  “Yes, cara. It was—it is—of course it was. But I wasn’t sure of your feelings. It was all such a long time ago.”

  “I loved you, too,” said Maria-Grazia, stung. “I was just a girl, but I loved you. I would have waited if you’d asked.”

  Now buoyed with a little hope, he forged on. The only thing he told her about the glasshouse, the military prison where he had served his sentence, was that a kind church woman had talked to him, a charity visitor, and asked him about his arrest, and that afterward, some months later, she sent him the books with which he learned Italian. “Couldn’t she have sent me a letter?” demanded Maria-Grazia. “Couldn’t you have asked her to?”

  And Robert said, startled, “But, cara, I did. She did. She sent ten or fifteen letters.”

  But apparently, those letters had never reached Castellamare. Now he began to understand her indignation.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked now, still unbending. “You’ve six more years to serve in prison, according to your tale.”

  So he should have had. But four years into his sentence, a colonel had come to the glasshouse requesting prisoners with good conduct who might be deployed to the north to work in the undermanned coal mines. A northern man, born in a mining village, eager to earn himself an early discharge, Robert was put forward. He received a slip of paper to be exchanged for a train ticket. “You can go home now,” said the colonel.

  Robert hitchhiked to Dover and boarded a ship for Calais. This time, he met no military policemen. He begged lifts, he walked when no lifts were forthcoming, and he made his way down the continent. Before crossing to the island, he had washed in the ocean with a bar of carbolic soap, trimmed his hair and shaved in the mirror of a motorcar, and purchased from a peasant for a few lire a set of new clothes. It had
been Bepe who had carried him across the ocean. Timid with hope, Robert had asked the old man about Maria-Grazia, and Bepe with a shout of joy had recognized the Englishman. “I’m not here to cause trouble, if she loves somebody else,” Robert murmured. “Only tell me, is she married? Do I have any hope? She never replied to my letters.”

  “Go up to the House at the Edge of Night and see for yourself,” counseled Bepe.

  By the ferryman’s continuing roars of joyful laughter, by the welcome he had received as he disembarked at the quay, he had understood that there was some remnant of hope. Now he was less certain.

  Strange what short work he had made of those years, when he told them. “I’ll be wanted as a deserter if I’m found,” he said. “That’s the difficult situation I’m in. I should have done my time in Holland, and waited to get discharged properly—that was my mistake, and even if I could have written I wouldn’t have dared to ask you to wait ten years for me because of it. But it was never lack of love, Maria-Grazia. Don’t accuse me of that.”

  He had chosen the particular word for a difficult situation, frangente, which was also the word for the long white breakers of the sea, and she found herself stirred with emotion at the way he laid it before her, tenderly, hesitantly, as Andrea d’Isantu had once offered her a flower. “You can’t go back?” she asked at last, a little timid at the rage she had flung at him.

  “No, amore. I can’t go back to England.”

  She bent and touched the cool tiles before her, without knowing why, until it came to her that it was the ground of home that she was touching. His predicament frightened her: to be condemned never to return home to the earth that had made you, never to be lulled by the familiar noise and hush of its ocean, never to be comforted and infuriated by the narrowness of its walls.