The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  “Well, can’t we be lovers, like before? What’s the difficulty in that?”

  Robert replaced the new spectacles and blinked through them in abashed surprise. “What about all the gossip, cara?”

  “The gossip I can take,” said Maria-Grazia. “I’ve suffered worse.”

  Without shame, she returned to the bar and served tables all that afternoon, meeting Robert’s eyes from time to time when he lingered in the kitchen doorway. That night, she invited him back to her little room with the vista of palm trees for good, laughing a little at his great joy, his professions of adoration. “I’ll accept a ring,” she told him. “I’ll be your lover as before. I’ll love you always, as I always have. All of that I’m happy to do, caro mio. But we’ll marry some other time.”

  And in the years that followed, though no one on Castellamare could have doubted that she loved him, though it was rumored scandalously that they lived as man and wife, though they ran the bar between them, making up the accounts in companionable quiet every night on either side of the counter, for all the world like a long-married couple, that was the only answer she would give to the prying of her neighbors: “We’ll marry some other time.”

  —

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL the spring of 1953 that she changed her mind. Maria-Grazia, on that particular morning, had returned to the bar from the widow Valeria’s house behind the church, where she had successfully made a deal for a dozen bottles of limettacello to be ready in time for the festival. On that particular morning, she found Robert bent over the wireless radio, in tears, the customers clapping him on the shoulders as they did with the bereaved and drunk. “What is it?” she cried, seizing his wrist. “What’s wrong?”

  The wireless radio was tuned to English. Bepe nodded in its direction. But in her consternation she could not make out the words: They were utterly foreign to her once again, as they had been when she was a girl.

  Eventually Robert heaved himself up on his elbows and wiped his eyes. Seeing her, he took both her hands and kneaded them between his own. “The deserters have been pardoned,” he said at last, in her ear, getting her face all wet with tears. “The deserters have been pardoned.”

  “Signor Churchill has pardoned them,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, “and Signor Robert can go home.”

  Then Maria-Grazia found herself, too, in tears, without at first knowing why. “Do you want to leave?” she said at last. “Will you go away again?”

  “No,” said Robert. “No, cara. I promise you, I’ll never leave this place.”

  “More fool you,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, not really meaning it. “But Maria-Grazia, even I think you’d better marry poor Signor Robert now.”

  Sì, sì, the elderly scopa players protested—hadn’t she made him wait almost four years, nearly as long as she had waited for him? Still, the thought made her despair a little, as it had in the midst of her joy when he had first returned. “I don’t want to be a wife,” she cried, “and have to wash and clean and cook all day, and trail around with a baby carriage, and never be in charge of this bar any longer, this bar that’s been in my family since the end of the first war—and who will take care of it then? You aren’t a wife, Agata, for you’ve always sworn it would be a kind of death to you, and what if I feel the same way? What then? None of you think of that. If I marry, I’m forced to give up the bar.”

  “If that’s the only thing that troubles you,” said Robert, a little giddy, when they lay together that night in her room, “then I’ll wash and cook and clean. I’ll trail round with the baby carriage. Run the bar if you want to! Anything, Maria-Grazia, if you’ll just say yes.”

  “In that case,” she said, trying and failing to suppress her elation, for she knew he meant every word, “I suppose we had better marry after all. There’s only so much gossip a person can bear in a lifetime.”

  —

  MARIA-GRAZIA AND THE ENGLISHMAN were married by Father Ignazio, like her mother and father had been. Afterward, Robert signed his name in the grimy book the priest offered. To cut the thread of his old life, he took her name: Robert Esposito.

  Then, for the first time since the war, there was dancing on the terrace of the House at the Edge of Night. Il conte did not attend to give his blessing and drink a sip of arancello, as was customary at the islanders’ weddings. After the departure of Andrea, il conte and la contessa had entered a period of mourning. The shutters were kept closed, the façade of the house left unpainted, and the servants were under permanent orders to report to the villa in black. But nothing could disrupt the festivity of the House at the Edge of Night. Maria-Grazia had to be hauled away from serving the drinks and counting the takings. Then there was Robert, very English and flustered and a little drunk, holding out both hands for her to dance. As she whirled about in his arms, the island beyond him narrowed, became less significant than the man before her. “I’m glad,” she murmured.

  “Of what, cara?”

  “To have married you, in the end.”

  By the light of the moon, to the strains of the organetto, they went on whirling, pinned in each other’s arms. Inside her dwelt already the fingernail of life that would become the next Esposito.

  Two brothers were fishermen upon the sea, both very handsome and so alike that nobody could tell them apart, and both very poor. After a day of fishing without luck, they caught at last a tiny little sardine, hardly worth eating.

  “Let’s eat it anyway,” said the elder brother. “It’s worth a few mouthfuls.”

  “No,” said the younger. “Let’s spare it. It’s not worth killing.”

  They spared the fish and it brought them good fortune: two white horses and two bags of gold, with which to journey about the world, and a pot of magic ointment with which to cure all wounds. Since this could not easily be divided, the elder brother, who was braver and stronger, gave it to his younger brother to protect him from harm.

  The brothers rode away in opposite directions. The younger brother had no adventures—at least, if he did, the story does not mention them. The older brother rescued a princess from a sea serpent, cutting out its seven tongues and hacking off its seven heads, and for this labor won her as his bride. He saved a valley from the curse of an evil sorcerer. He journeyed to the bottom of the ocean in an enchanted ship and dug up pearls. His hair grew long, he married the princess, and he no longer looked like his brother anymore.

  Then, still not content, he went in pursuit of a witch whose evil was enchanting a whole country, whom no one could manage to kill. Riding up to her castle with his sword, he threatened to cut off her head. But this witch was cunning. Looping a single strand of her magical hair around the boy’s throat, she took him prisoner. “Now,” thought the witch, “I will make him my slave, and he will defend me from these troublesome knights who come riding every day to cut off my head, and I will sit and eat roast meat and pastries all day.”

  Meanwhile, the younger man, growing lonely, was riding about the world in search of his brother. For many years he rode, asking everyone he met whether they had seen the man on the white horse with a face like his own. At last he came to the witch’s valley, and heard tell of his brother’s capture. “Now,” said the younger brother to himself, “the moment has come, and I must rescue him.”

  On the way, he met a little old man who asked him where he was going. “To free my brother,” said the younger brother, “who is under the power of the witch.”

  Then the old man told him what to do. Since the witch’s power was in her hair, he must seize her by it and keep hold, and that way he might overpower her. “Then cut off her head,” said the little old man, “and do us all a favor.”

  The young man rode to the witch’s castle. Out came a fearsome knight with flowing hair, swinging his sword, roaring in anger. With one blow the terrified younger brother cut off this knight’s head. Then, seizing the witch by the hair, he drove his sword through her body and killed her, too.

  But now that the spell was broken, he sa
w that the fearsome knight he had killed, the witch’s slave, had something familiar about him. Bending near, he recognized the face of his brother, and wept and wept at what he had done.

  All at once, he remembered the magic ointment. He ran to his horse, and returned with it to the place where his brother’s headless body lay. Kneeling beside it, he rubbed the ointment on the body, and the skin healed and the dead man sat up. The two brothers embraced each other, and the younger asked forgiveness for the terrible crime he had committed. Then they went back to the older brother’s palace side by side, and never again were they parted all their days on this earth.

  —

  AN OLD ISLAND TALE, as told to me by the widower Mazzu, which bears similarities to the Sicilian tale of the same name and probably derives from it. Recorded circa 1961.

  I

  Years later, when both of them had grown up and ceased to have anything to do with each other, Maria-Grazia would struggle to remember a time when her two sons had not been at war.

  The boys were born what their English great-aunt and -uncle, in the stiff congratulatory letter they sent to the island after their second nephew’s birth, called “Irish twins.” They emerged at the bracket ends of the year: Sergio in January 1954, Giuseppino the following December. The arrival of Sergio was prefaced by a forty-hour breech labor. In its worst throes, at four in the morning of the second night, Maria-Grazia swore again and again to Robert that she would never have another child.

  But the day she carried Sergio home from the hospital in Siracusa, the three of them bundled in Robert’s overcoat on the thwart of the ferryboat Santa Maria della Luce, he tenderly stroking her bruised sides, she changed her mind. “We’ll have another one after all,” she said. “Only we’ll have to hurry, before I lose my nerve.”

  If Robert was alarmed at this news, he did not say so. “Cara,” he said, “we’ll do whatever you like.” Before the infant Sergio could sit up by himself or take solid food, the elderly customers of the House at the Edge of Night had reason to gossip once more at the ballooning of Maria-Grazia’s ankles and her sudden rushes from the bar to plunge her head in some lavatory or wastepaper basket. “That Englishman of yours is a force to be reckoned with,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, prodding Maria-Grazia in the side, eliciting sniggers from the elderly scopa players.

  But nothing now could shame Maria-Grazia. “These island men can take note,” she said, eliciting a chorus of hooting laughter from the fishermen in the corner.

  Giuseppino emerged on his due date, obligingly headfirst. The delivery took less than an hour. Afterward, relatives and neighbors would never cease to point out this difference to Maria-Grazia, as though it revealed some profound fact about the character of each child. And perhaps that was where the trouble began.

  The first thing that Sergio did, when the second baby was brought home, was crawl over to its cradle. Dragging himself to the foot of the crib, the infant Sergio hauled himself up by its bars and looked in. “Oh,” cried his grandmother Pina, moved. “See—he wants to greet his new brother.”

  Instead, Sergio roared in the face of the other baby, startling it into tears. Sergio would not stop roaring until Pina had borne him away.

  This was odd, for as Maria-Grazia remembered it, her younger boy, Giuseppino, had been the one who had started every argument ever since.

  —

  ROBERT HAD PLANNED, in the joy that had followed her consenting to marry him, to take sole charge of the bringing up of the two children while Maria-Grazia handled the affairs of the bar.

  But the care of the boys was not a thing that could be parceled out to one adult. It was a messy, disorderly thing, liable to engulf every nearby relative, to deprive all of them of sleep. The two babies could not be left alone together. Very quickly they wore both their mother and father out. In the spring of 1955, Concetta came in search of Maria-Grazia and found her asleep behind the counter of the bar, the customers having resorted to getting their own coffee and liquor. Rousing Maria-Grazia, the two of them traced Robert by the screaming to the red-tiled upstairs bathroom, where he was close to tears in a mess of baby shit and talcum powder, while Sergio was striking Giuseppino great blows to the head with one fist. Concetta considered all this with narrowed eyes. Then she knelt, retrieved Sergio from the puddle behind the toilet cistern, wiped Giuseppino’s soiled backside, and supplied Signor Robert with a handkerchief.

  “Oh, Concetta!” wept Maria-Grazia, who had followed her up the stairs and now witnessed the rage of her two sons. “These babies hate each other!”

  “Now,” said Concetta, in the tone she had first learned from Pina Vella. “That’s silly.”

  “We can’t manage any longer!” cried Maria-Grazia. “I can’t get down to the bar, and Robert can’t take care of both of them all by himself, and my mother and father are too old—” For Amedeo was eighty now, Pina close behind him, and she was afflicted by a swelling of the feet that had diminished her at last, so that she could only limp and hobble after the babies. “The business will be ruined,” said Maria-Grazia, “and these boys will kill each other before they’re ten years old.”

  “It’s just fighting,” said Concetta. “All children fight. When I was a child I fought everything that moved. Other children, dogs, lizards. Your brothers must have fought, too, didn’t they?”

  “But not like this,” cried Maria-Grazia.

  “Now, now, Mariuzza,” said Robert, putting a hand on her back comfortingly. “We’ll find some way to resolve things.”

  But their mother’s despair had penetrated even the enraged consciousnesses of the two brothers. They ceased their warring for a moment and looked up at her, gazing with matching opal eyes from beneath peaked English eyelids. Sergio was a sage infant, with a curiously oversized face that gave him the look of a statue, some bald professor or diplomat from a nineteenth-century bust. Giuseppino, meanwhile, was a red little thing, alert, watchful, constantly spoiling for a fight. Concetta seized him and bore him out of his brother’s sight, into the doorway, where she fastened the diaper with admirable speed and lulled him into calm.

  But Concetta, despite her command of the warring babies, was not herself, Maria-Grazia saw now. Her shoulders were a little bowed down, her usual bright face somewhat pallid. The girl had been suffering troubles of her own. All spring, the island had been aflame with rumor about the girl and her father, Signor Arcangelo.

  It had been known for some time that Arcangelo was vexed with his wayward youngest child. Concetta, according to her father, was supposed to be at an age when she put on long skirts and began to consider a husband. And instead here she was running about the island with the teenage sons of the fishermen, lighting fires and plunging into the sea in ripped-off slacks. She appeared to have grown out of her childhood seizures. And now she refused to be prayed for any longer, and had—during one particularly fierce argument, audible through Arcangelo’s open windows all over the southern part of the town—flung her rosary out into the courtyard, announcing herself a heathen like Agata-the-fisherwoman.

  This had gone on from Epiphany to the festival of the Presentation. On that night, after another particularly ferocious argument, Concetta had staged a rebellion. She left her father’s shop in the midst of the last streaming storm of winter and proceeded, with a neat burlap sack containing all her belongings, along the main street, past the green fountain, through the Fazzolis’ alleyway and up the poky passage grandly named Via Cavour, to arrive at the door of her great-aunt Onofria’s house at a quarter past twelve. During her solitary march, which it seemed the whole town had witnessed from behind their curtains, everyone had observed the red marks running like a ladder up the backs of Concetta’s arms and the bruises under her eyes. Concetta would not say where she had got them, claiming they had merely appeared like the stigmata of a saint, but any fool knew that when the backs of the arms were faintly lashed like that, the shoulders in between would be a mess of belt strokes.

  Now, those islanders who
had always sided with Arcangelo swung the tide of their favor toward Concetta. For the grocer, it emerged, had been beating her since she was a child. And other odd rumors surfaced: The girl had been made to sleep on the floor at her father’s house, it was said, and had been ordered to hide away in the storage cupboard or the outside bathroom whenever a fit came over her to avoid alarming the shop’s customers. Concetta did nothing to deny these rumors or confirm them. She merely shut herself up in the back bedroom of the widow Onofria’s house and refused to come home.

  “She’s shamed me,” raged Arcangelo to il conte. “Can’t you do something—bring her home, stop these lies about me spreading any further?” For his other children had always been so obedient: Filippo, who had followed him into the shop and now all but managed the place, allowing Arcangelo himself an easy retirement; and Santino, who worked as a land agent for il conte and rode about daily, swelling his father’s heart with pride, beside il conte in the island’s motorcar.

  But il conte was not interested in the plight of his former friend. Since Andrea’s departure, the count went about in distraction and seemed hardly to be listening at all. “Hasn’t everyone beaten a stubborn child?” pleaded Arcangelo. “Hasn’t everyone had to punish a son or a daughter? Am I to be held up for rebuke and shame because I’ve admonished my child—out of love, mind, not cruelty—merely in order to set her on the right path?”

  “My wife and I never once beat Andrea,” said il conte. “You must solve your family troubles yourself. But”—here he extended a small scrap of comfort—“I daresay Concetta will come back once she’s starving, for God knows the widow Onofria doesn’t have enough about her to keep the girl.” For Onofria was one of il conte’s dismissed peasants, and poor as a plowed field in winter, subsisting half on her wits and half on charity.

  “Yes,” said Arcangelo, soothed. “Yes, yes—that Concetta’ll be back soon, damn her, in time for the visit of her cousin Cesare for the Sant’Agata festival, and with any luck he’ll consent to take her off my hands this year. She’ll be old enough to marry.”