Filippo Arcangelo was the first customer each evening, standing nervously before the counter with his takings in a burlap sack. Soon the baker and the florist followed. And when Agata-the-fisherwoman asked, timid for once in her life before the new bank’s mainland assistants in their glossy suits, whether she might be eligible for a small loan to repair the earthquake damage to her floor, Andrea d’Isantu’s bank offered her the money to knock the house down and build in its place a concrete villa—all free of charge, all to be paid later. For Agata-the-fisherwoman had been persuaded to join Bepe’s ferry business as a partner, handling the accounts and bookings for him as well as piloting a quarter of the ferry’s journeys, and was likely soon to become as wealthy as he was.
“As if I’d want to knock down the house my great-grandfather built,” scoffed Agata. “But I’ll take the money to repair the floor—that I’ll accept, for I’m tired of the rain getting in in wet weather.”
Now word got round that Andrea d’Isantu’s company was not just lending to his father’s friends, but to everybody, indiscriminately. And while Agata-the-fisherwoman might be perfectly happy with her great-grandfather’s drafty house with lizard nests in the walls, others seized the opportunity to get out of the poky ancestral homes they had been living in for decades. On Castellamare, houses had always been an inherited thing, a kind of lottery of birth: You rejoiced if the windows were large and the view of the sea enticing, or mourned and patched the place up as best you could if it was narrow and dark like Bepe’s house behind the church, his dead mother’s. If there were no descendants to inherit a place, or so many descendants in so many foreign countries that they could not agree about how to divide it, then the house merely stood empty, valueless, until its shutters caved in and vines crawled over the mess of rubble inside. This was what had happened to Gesuina’s house before the bank replaced it. But now, announced the new conte, anyone with a good job and savings in his bank could apply for a mortgage to buy a patch of unused land and build on it a concrete villa of his own.
“Shouldn’t we put our savings into the new company?” asked Robert one night, caressing Maria-Grazia’s wrist. “For I’m always tripping over cashboxes and envelopes of money about the house. We’re getting wealthy, cara. Only last week I found a bottle of old lire stuffed down the side of the bed.”
Her savings, shored up against some future escape. She had almost forgotten about them. She reached behind the bed, retrieved the bottle, and unscrewed the cap. Out came a faint tang of Campari, an odor of dust. Digging inside with a bent hairpin, she pulled out lira after lira in a slippery torrent of banknotes. “What were these for?” asked Robert.
Smiling a little at the recollection, she told him. “But cara,” he murmured, half-mocking, half-serious, “how could you ever have wanted to leave this place?”
When she returned to bed, he drew her near, as though she were cold. “What do you think?” he murmured. “About what I said. The savings bank.”
“No,” said Maria-Grazia. “I don’t want to put the money there.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you did,” said Robert. “I’ve no difficulty with your dealing with d’Isantu. I don’t fear him.”
Sometimes, in Italian, he still brought forth these odd expressions: I don’t fear him. Her husband—strong, as brown as Maria-Grazia herself, with the shoulders of a fisherman from heaving the boys about all day—what fear need he have of the new conte, with his shattered leg, his sallow aspect, his fussy, old man’s gait? She kissed Robert’s hands one by one, and said, “Lo so, caro. I know.”
But still she did not deposit the bar’s savings in the bank.
“There’s a reason it’s called a savings and loan company,” said Amedeo, dampening the murmur of excitement that had filled the bar in recent days (for he found it hard to be charitable in any matter concerning his old enemy signor il conte). “Andrea d’Isantu is borrowing your money with one hand and lending it with the other. If Arcangelo puts his takings for the month into the bank, say a hundred thousand lire”—here he moved a set of salt-shakers to demonstrate—“all that Signor d’Isantu has to do is take that hundred thousand lire and lend it to Agata-the-fisherwoman to fix her floor. She pays him back at high interest—he pays Arcangelo back at low interest—and keeps the rest. That’s what he’s doing.”
“Whatever he’s doing,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, “it’s worked, and while he’s been overseas he’s become a wealthier man even than his father.” For Andrea d’Isantu had begun refurbishments and alterations to his father’s villa, installing proper electricity in every room, tearing down the dilapidated outbuildings, ripping off the buckled shutters and replacing them with new. He had sent the old motorcar away for scrap metal, and Carmela now drove around in a West German sedan with an impressive growl that had been shipped especially on Bepe’s ferry. As for the new conte, he remained locked up in the villa, where nobody could see him.
Pina, too, railed against the new developments. “That line of concrete villas,” she said, “why, they aren’t worth anything, not like these old houses in the town. Anyone can see the first earthquake will knock them flat. And before long there’ll be no view of the sea left, and no bay, and no space to graze goats, and more tourists in this place than islanders. And that new conte with his city ways will own everything.”
But Maria-Grazia could not deny that money flowed more easily in the bar now, that the cashbox (though its contents were still transferred to the backs of bookshelves and slipped between mattresses and pillows each Friday, not deposited in the new conte’s savings bank) was fatter and more quickly replenished. The walls of the house were painted, the coffee machine replaced, and Concetta from her rising salary overhauled the furnishings of her Zia Onofria’s house, painted it a pale blue all over, and planted orange trees in its front yard. Meanwhile, Robert worked long hours each Saturday repainting Tullio’s and Aurelio’s rooms, which Amedeo had finally relinquished, for Sergio and Giuseppino: discussing with the carpenter new furniture to be specially manufactured, sanding the doorframes, waxing the floorboards until they shone.
—
MARIA-GRAZIA NEVER ONCE SAW Andrea during the months he spent on the island on that first visit. At the beginning of the second week, she had gone very early in the morning to the gate of the villa and rung the bell, with no clear intention. After some five or ten minutes’ delay, the agent Santino Arcangelo appeared behind the wrought ironwork. “Sì,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I’m here to see Signor d’Isantu,” she said.
Santino disappeared. Without hurrying, he walked back up to the house, pausing to whip the long grass with a stick at intervals as though to demonstrate to her his utter unconcern for haste. It took him twenty-five minutes to return, and when he did, it was with an odd, satisfied sneer. “He won’t see you,” Santino announced from behind the gate. “You’re to leave at once, Maria-Grazia Esposito, for signor il conte has nothing to say to you.”
Walking home, she wondered why her steps were so heavy. What would she have found to say to Andrea d’Isantu anyway? They had not spoken in fifteen years. She had wanted him to know that she had never thought any the less of him after his confession about the beating of Pierino, that Flavio was happy in England, to judge by his unpunctuated missives, that the ghost of the fisherman was no longer seen on the island except under the influence of the widow Valeria’s extra-strength limettacello, that all here, in short, was well. But how would she have brought forth the words to say all those things?
Back at the bar, she found Robert arbitrating a disagreement between Sergio and Giuseppino in the courtyard, his thin hair blown vertical by the spring breeze. “I know where you’ve been,” her father, Amedeo, said quietly. “It’s all over the island already. Be careful, cara. Your husband’s a good man not to question you about it.”
“Damn this place,” she said. “Damn the gossips and the spies—haven’t they any proper work to go to? Must they always be poking abou
t in other people’s concerns?”
Then, for the first time, she fought with her father. “I don’t understand what you can possibly have to say to that man,” said Amedeo. “And what business you can have going to visit him at dawn, in secret, in your best clothes. While your husband is here taking care of your boys, minding the bar—”
“He doesn’t suspect me of anything, Papà. Maybe you should do the same!”
“Robert,” said her father, “has the patience of Sant’Agata. We all know that.”
Stung, she cried, “Cazzo—must I report everything I do to you? Are you my jailer as well as my father?” Which was unfair—even she felt it to be so. And yet, to save herself the humiliation of apologizing, she found herself storming instead into the bar, and starting up the coffee machine in a knot of fury.
So the argument was carried on in mutters about the bar all that day, and resolved only when she saw Robert walking toward her across the piazza at dinnertime, distorted by the heat mirage, a boy on the end of each arm. Then she ran out to him and buried her face in his neck and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything, my visiting him.” And Robert said, “I know.” And Amedeo, witnessing, patted his daughter’s arm in consolation as she returned to the bar counter, resolved to say no more about il conte’s boy.
In a few months, Andrea d’Isantu was gone again. Maria-Grazia never once saw him, and in years afterward she would struggle to believe that he had ever really visited the island, picturing him only as a figure in the shadows, appearing and vanishing like the ghost of Pierino.
—
THE DEVELOPMENTS THAT ANDREA had set in motion, however, were of a concrete nature. For instance, the matter of tourist accommodations. Currently, all visitors were obliged to make a great pilgrimage to get to the island, like devotees of the saint. To get here from the nearest mainland places, Noto and Siracusa, most had already traveled for a whole day from the airports in Catania and Palermo or on slow ships from northern seaports. So it was that the average visitor to Castellamare was still something of an explorer, interested in the history of the necropolis, attempting a little faltering Italian. “If only there were a proper airfield right here on the island, or just across the sea in Siracusa,” said Bepe. For he had heard from the foreign fishermen that the accessible islands of Greece, a short air-conditioned airplane journey from London and Paris, now lured thousands upon thousands of tourists to their blue waters.
Sometimes, in those heady years of development, great white liners passed on the horizon, blaring into the sea air, making the island children whoop and stamp in greeting. Through Flavio’s Balilla binoculars, you could see little gold heads in sunglasses moving about on the deck, long pink bodies extended on recliners. “If only they’d stop here,” said Giuseppino. Both of Maria-Grazia’s boys loved the tourists, with their air of other places and their cursory, brisk northern languages that seemed to speak of cities where important things happened, where things must be said in a hurry. Not like the dialect of the island, which dragged on and on by its nature, went round in epic, exhausting circles.
It was rumored that the new conte had bought the old farm belonging to the Mazzus, which had fallen into ruin when the old man died and the last son left for America. Carmela had hired mainland builders on her son’s behalf to dig up what had always been the island’s best field, the flattest one with a view of the harbor. The Mazzus’ old farmhouse was knocked down.
“They’re building a villa, I daresay,” complained Tonino, put out at being passed over for the contract in favor of those foreigners with their new cement mixers. “When it’s finished, I believe our new conte is going to move there with his mother and knock down the old place altogether.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” said Pina. “Why, half the tourists stop by the count’s villa for a glimpse, for don’t you know it’s partly Norman, Tonino, one of the oldest buildings on this island?”
The new building, a vision in pink concrete, was raised by degrees. At sunset, the light fell between its empty pillars and steel girders, making of it a burnished silhouette. By day, the builders labored under the full force of the sun. The building gained not only balconies and cornices but a swimming pool in the shape of a kidney, stained blue on the inside; a garden with palm trees, which were wrapped for protection in brown paper until the building dust settled; and, in the shade behind, a concrete wasteland for parking motorcars. The spaces in this American-style parking lot, reported Concetta, who had spied, were large ones, for foreign motorcars, twice the size of the little Cinquecentos and three-wheeled Ape vans favored on the island. And why should the new conte need so many spaces for his guests, for not a soul had visited him or Carmela since the death of his father (even supposing, muttered the elderly scopa players, he had the courage to come back to the island a second time)? Now the building rose and towered over the line of little concrete villas, which from the veranda of the bar looked no bigger than cigarette boxes. By the following summer, the great new building was ready to open its gates.
No one was clear on what the new building was meant for. “It’s signora la contessa’s new summer home,” speculated Agata-the-fisherwoman. “She’ll drive down the hill in that motorcar of hers in April to spend the summer by the sea, and that will save her the fifteen minutes’ switchbacking up and down each day.” For Santino Arcangelo bore Carmela back and forth daily in the German motorcar to her favorite spot at the end of the bay, where she sat alone under a parasol rubbing lotion on her papery arms.
“There’s no telling what these rich people like to spend their money on,” said Bepe.
“Televisions, for instance,” needled Agata-the-fisherwoman.
“It’s another bar,” said Concetta. “Il conte means to cut out our business, like Arcangelo.”
The pink building stood on the horizon, its gates open, its parking lot deserted.
“It’s a hotel,” announced Tonino, settling the matter that evening. “I’ve seen the sign, and a little reception desk with a brass bell.”
—
ON THE ISLAND, there had never been so many jobs as there were in the weeks before the hotel’s grand opening. Jobs cleaning and polishing and sprinkling the grass of the new hotel with water out of a hose (“A shameful waste,” grumbled Pina), jobs carrying in the beds and wardrobes and dining tables the new conte had ordered from the mainland, jobs preparing island delicacies and foreign food in the great silver kitchen. Even the island’s ancient band was hired, to provide a touch of local color. One morning, when the islanders woke, a great white liner hung like a miracle just outside the harbor, riding the calm waters of the bay. The children ran down to meet it. While they capered, the band tooted nervously through their island songs. The visitors were borne ashore, clutching suitcases and bags and boxes as though they had been rescued from some disaster at sea, muttering in their odd northern languages, unsure whether they should tip the ferryman or offer the children coins.
—
HERE A PROBLEM PRESENTED itself. These new tourists preferred the air-conditioned salon and neon-lit veranda of Arcangelo’s Beach Bar to the dark, old-century interior of the House at the Edge of Night. Il conte’s company had partitioned a section of the bay for them, on which they lay on plastic recliners. The beach bar served American cocktails, and whiskey in crystal glasses. Between the luxuries of the hotel and Arcangelo’s air-conditioned bar, there was no need for the new breed of tourists to make the hot climb to the town at all.
“But I can’t understand why anyone would choose that bar over this one,” maintained Bepe. “Arcangelo charges a hundred and fifty lire for a coffee, and his tastes like donkey piss.”
“Seek out those tourists,” urged Robert to Maria-Grazia, ambitious on her behalf. “Encourage them to come here. They’ll love the island, as I did when I first saw it, if only you can persuade them.”
One morning, two of il conte’s tourists at last braved the climb up to the town. They we
re sighted in the piazza shortly after the Mass bell stopped ringing, hanging nervously about the palm tree. Emboldened, Maria-Grazia went to the door. “Welcome,” she called, in English. “Come in.”
After some heated discussion, the couple crossed the threshold of the bar. “Coffee?” offered Maria-Grazia. “Tea? Pastry?”
The new guests, gold-haired, a little sunburned, glanced at the elderly scopa players in the corner, at the wireless radio, tuned to a Sicilian station, at the sweating cold cabinets full of rice balls and pastries, at the coffee machine. The man made a gesture like opening a book.
“Menu?” he said.
“No menu,” said Maria-Grazia. “But we make whatever you want. A coffee, perhaps? A rice ball?”
The man shook his head and eventually asked the price of a tea. “Thirty lire,” said Maria-Grazia. “Three American cents.”
But the couple, after examining the rice balls one last time, merely shook their heads and wandered back out.
The House at the Edge of Night, Bepe explained, was charging too little. “Arcangelo has two price lists,” explained Bepe. “One for the tourists, one for the fishermen.”
“We couldn’t do that,” said Robert, scandalized at this calling into question of his wife’s honesty. “The House at the Edge of Night isn’t that kind of business.”
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