The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  Sergio, who in truth knew nothing about interest rates or good business, hunched behind the counter and muttered, “I mean to pay it all back.”

  But in burdening himself with this mortgage, he had only shackled himself further to the place.

  Giuseppino did not come back. He mailed them a photograph of himself when he graduated from university, looking fierce in a black gown and card-lined mortarboard, standing before a screen on which was printed a square of grass, a brick building, an impossibly cyan sky. In spite of the fact that he was still a little in disgrace on the island, it was added to the array on the stairs.

  That summer, Sergio increased the business’s opening hours, replaced the old coffee machine, and with the profits from sales of ice cream—more than he needed to make his payment to the savings bank—had a neon sign installed at last. It was hoisted onto the front of the bar with ropes by the builders Tonino and ’Ncilino. Now, the veranda glowed with a mystical green light. This light drew the local wildlife in all its eerie variations. Lizards basked beneath the neon tubes as though in the heat of an alien sun, and great velvety moths bumped up against them, making sparks. Sergio ordered a football table, and sat up all night putting it together with a screwdriver and 270 little white screws that blistered his fingers. Now tournaments were held every Saturday afternoon and Tuesday evening.

  Sergio replaced the ancient wireless radio with a color television, subscribed to the sports channels, and in a single stroke, as his mother had done a generation ago, restored the bar to the heart of the island. For now, the neighbors crowded to the bar to watch the mainland football matches and the dubbed dramas belonging to the Italian channels, the advertisements for washing machines and window-cleaning solution, the multicolored announcements of the BBC News. With the extra money the savings bank had offered, he had already bought a little three-wheeled Ape van like the one the builder Tonino drove, and repainted the whole of the building. The place seemed to be entering an era of prosperity, as it had when Amedeo first opened its doors. And yet, to Maria-Grazia, it seemed that nothing changed any longer in the House at the Edge of Night. Sergio had settled down behind the counter to pay off his debt. Giuseppino, meanwhile, in London, collected about himself effortlessly the trophies of a successful life, and mailed each one back across the sea in a triumphant photograph: girlfriend, wife, house, motorcars. He seemed immune to his parents’ professions of forgiveness over the staticky long-distance telephone line; he would not come home even to visit. Behind the counter of the bar, Sergio waited, still in his high school shirts and short boyhood trousers, refusing to let Maria-Grazia mend the holes in his vests or cut his hair.

  And again, oddly, she felt that she was losing herself a little, as she had when she was first a mother. For hadn’t it always been her bar?

  “If only he’d make up his mind to marry,” Maria-Grazia lamented to Robert in the stone room by the courtyard, which was now theirs. “Or if only Giuseppino would bring that English wife to meet us, and make his peace with his brother. Any change would do.” But Sergio, stubborner than his brother in the end, persisted in his loneliness, sitting like a martyr behind the counter as Flavio had once knelt in self-abasement before the statue of the saint.

  And now, until some change came to shake the bar from its slumber, Maria-Grazia felt that it would remain as hopelessly locked in time as it had been in the last years of the war—Giuseppino absent, Sergio absent in his mind, and everything out of place.

  So it was that for a long time nothing happened at the House at the Edge of Night.

  VI

  The change that at last came to the bar, and to Sergio Esposito, was the arrival of the child Maddalena. She was born feetfirst like her father, Sergio, had been, disconsolate and roaring, in the same week that the bar’s three televisions broadcast the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

  It had been an odd year to begin with. In January, between Santo Stefano and the festival of the Epifania, Carmela d’Isantu had died. Andrea d’Isantu had returned to Castellamare for the funeral. He refused to see Maria-Grazia, but all the same the islanders had revived the ancient gossip about his throwing of sand at her windows, his tossing and turning in bed sick with love for her for days at a time; they whispered about it in the corners of the bar in a way Maria-Grazia found tiresome and infuriating now, forty years after it had been interesting news to anybody. She had glimpsed Andrea this time, across the funeral crowd at the windswept burial of signora la contessa, a small thin man with extravagant eyebrows, more old than middle-aged.

  “How can that be Andrea d’Isantu?” she marveled to Concetta, as the two of them walked home arm in arm.

  “But we’re all getting old,” said Concetta. “Haven’t you noticed lately? Bepe, who used to be so handsome, has a paunch the size of a wine barrel, and Totò’s hair is all gone, and Agata-the-fisherwoman wears a housecoat and slippers and shuffles about just like Signora Gesuina used to.”

  Maria-Grazia was forced to concede that this was the truth.

  But still, how could she and Robert be old? The two of them, who still slept entwined like teenagers in the stone room that she continued to think of as her mother and father’s, who danced at the Sant’Agata festival with the same abandon with which they had danced on their wedding night. Her life seemed to her an odd thing, a thing that had dragged all the time when happiness still seemed far off, when she was a girl in leg braces, and at last, when happiness had been afforded her, seemed to have rushed over at a breathless speed, leaving no room for thought.

  Even Concetta was past fifty. She had never married, but all the same she had recently acquired the custody of a child. This child, a formidable boy of five named Enzo, had been her brother Filippo’s—still was, if truth be told. But the boy had lost his mother, and as soon as he could walk he had begun to roam the island, catching lizards, hitting things with sticks, launching himself down the steepest and most rock-strewn of the island’s hillsides on a blue plastic donkey with red wheels. By four, he had become quite ungovernable, the elderly scopa players reported, for Filippo Arcangelo’s raised voice had been heard all about the south part of the town from his open windows, exhorting the child down from ladders and out of cupboards and off the great towers of boxes in the grocer’s back room.

  Now Concetta herself, who had not spoken with either of her brothers in thirty years, became stern. “I’ll go over there,” she told Maria-Grazia, “and see that they’re treating him right.”

  Filippo, it emerged, had not mistreated Enzo. Rather, it was Enzo who had the upper hand. Concetta found her aging brother seated on the back step of the grocer’s, while the boy ran roaring circles in the yard around him, covered in syrup and flour. “So you’ve heard, too, sister,” he said, raising his hangdog eyes to her, “that I can’t control my child, and here you are to pass judgment.”

  “I didn’t come here to pass judgment, you fool,” said Concetta, “but to offer you help, for Lord knows I was wild, too, when I was that age. Enough of this silly argument between us. The boy has no mother, and I came here to tell you that he’s got an aunt, even if you and I can’t be civil to each other. Whenever he’s too much trouble, you’re to send him to me. However wild this boy is, I was much wilder. Enzo—come here!”

  The boy, startled, obeyed. “You’re to come to visit me sometimes,” said Concetta. “Would you like that?”

  “Sì, Zia,” said Enzo meekly, for he had heard a hundred stories about his fearsome aunt. The following weekend, with his little grocery bag full of belongings, riding his blue plastic donkey, he came to spend the day at the blue house with the orange trees, trussed and buttoned in his Sunday clothes. A little dark boy, as undersized as she had been, with thin wrists and ankles, he moved his aunt to tenderness, and she decided to occupy herself with bringing him up.

  Concetta had not attained any great height or breadth, but in all other respects she was a large person. The life in her radiated forth when she was troubled just as when she was
merry, a fierce kind of energy that made her hair frizz out from her head, her cheeks gleam like a girl’s. She was the equal of the boy Enzo, and Enzo sensed it from the beginning and behaved.

  Industrious in middle age, Concetta had thrown her energies into the planting of a garden. It engulfed her house on all sides, so green it hurt the eyes. An ingenious system of perforated hoses watered the rows of vegetables each morning. Concetta had planted vines of zucchine, rows of tomatoes and aubergines, and pots of basil. The basil grew at alarming speed, each clump tall and wide enough to swallow up the child. Along the front of the house grew tangled, floor-creeping vines of watermelon whose tendrils encroached under the windows and edged eerily round the doors. Between the orange trees grew asparagus, fennel, mint, and great artichokes bristling with silver spears. Concetta let Enzo loose in this jungle. “Scream and hit things with sticks all you want,” she told him. “I don’t mind what you do.” Placing a man’s greasy Borsalino on her head, she began serenely to cut a row of bull’s heart tomatoes from their spidery stems and left the child to his own devices.

  Soon Enzo came creeping back, all his roaring and hitting used up now that no one much minded whether or not he did it. “The cuori di bue are coming ready all at once,” Concetta said, without turning to look at the child, for she knew he was as timid as a lizard despite all his noise. “We’ll make great salads out of them, and rice balls with mozzarella. Will you help me?”

  “Sì, Zia,” said Enzo. All afternoon he worked by his aunt’s side, rolling rice balls and working bread dough and lifting the great colander to shake the bitter dew from the salted melanzane, until he was quite exhausted.

  “There,” said Concetta with satisfaction, delivering the boy back to his father in his filthy Sunday clothes. “He’s calm. You’re to send him to me whenever you want.”

  From then on, Enzo spent half his time at his father’s and, when he couldn’t be trusted to behave tamely, he packed up his little bag and came to spend the day or the week at his Zia Concetta’s house. Though he loved her as well as a mother in the end, he never quite lost his awe of her. Even when he was at his wildest she could still outstrip him in running and roaring, still push him with alarming speed on his blue plastic donkey, whipping the air from his lungs. Having met his match in his formidable zia, Enzo resolved, in her presence at least, to be calm.

  In this way, the feud between the Arcangelo brothers and their sister, Concetta, which had simmered ever since she defected to the House at the Edge of Night, became a thing with less sting in it, still carried on for old times’ sake, but no longer worth speaking about. In deference to his sister, Filippo Arcangelo even began sending spare tourists up the hill from Arcangelo’s Beach Bar to the House at the Edge of Night, though Santino Arcangelo, furious, did his best to catch them and bring them back again, “For,” as he said, “there’s family feeling, and then there’s plain stupidity, brother.”

  In February the child Enzo turned five, and became calmer still. The final descendant of Vincenzo the artist on his mother’s side, he had discovered pencils and paper. “Good,” murmured Concetta to Maria-Grazia, watching Enzo feast on a handful of cassata at the counter of the bar, a stick of chalk in the other hand, sketching the elderly scopa players in unflattering detail. “He’ll be good now, and go to school quietly, a thing I never managed to do.”

  “How did you calm him?” asked Maria-Grazia, for even she had been a little alarmed at the child’s roaring.

  Concetta said, startled, “But Mariuzza, with kindness—the very same way you tamed me.”

  And strange it was, thought Maria-Grazia, that the little straggle-haired girl in the white sundress, gobbling arancini and sour limonata, had grown to a woman of such strength, the most enduring friend of her life.

  —

  IN MARCH ANOTHER GREAT EVENT had occurred. At last, when everybody had given up hope in him, Sergio Esposito had brought home a girl to the House at the Edge of Night.

  Sergio was thirty-five, and for seventeen years Maria-Grazia and Robert had begged him to leave the island to seek his fortune, to marry, to do whatever he wanted except sit hunched behind the counter in his graying high school polo shirts, looking as though he wanted to be elsewhere. If he did it to spite his brother, the real pity, Maria-Grazia felt, was that his brother, immersed in a life of his own two thousand miles away, did not seem to have noticed. Now, without any word of warning, Sergio led a girl through the door of the bar, stood her before them, and informed his parents and the assembled customers, “Mamma, Dad, this is Pamela.”

  Neat, small, Maria-Grazia noted approvingly, a little person with red-dyed hair that clung to her head like a bathing cap, the girl stood before them and said, “Buongiorno, piacere,” over and over, for those were the only two words she knew.

  “You are American?” asked Maria-Grazia, and the girl said, “No, no—English.”

  “Pamela and I have been seeing each other for a while,” announced Sergio, as though he had only just recalled the fact, “and we’re having a baby.”

  At this, a great rejoicing erupted in the House at the Edge of Night. The elderly customers would have greeted anything in female form, Maria-Grazia knew, from a goat to a riccio di mare—but, still, the girl was charmed. A little overwhelmed, she consented to let herself be placed at the best table, and plied with rice balls and presented with flowers. Meanwhile, Maria-Grazia watched her son across the bar and saw him for the first time alight with happiness, possessed by it, no longer hunched and apologetic as he had been since a boy.

  —

  BUT SOON, DIFFICULTIES HAD EMERGED. Pamela wanted to have her baby in England. This was the first disagreement that Maria-Grazia overheard between the young couple. Then there were others. Why hadn’t he sent out applications for jobs in London, as he had promised? Why did he speak to the baby only in Italian? Where was the money for the plane tickets home?

  By “home” the girl meant England. Maria-Grazia listened to these hissed arguments, and worried for her son.

  Sergio loved Pamela. Of this Maria-Grazia was certain, for they had come into the bar on that day in March lit up with the auspiciousness, the particularity of their affection, as she and Robert had been. That illumination had continued in Sergio for a little while, suffusing his long face with a youthful sheen as he flung himself into new enterprises in the bar: the installing of a larger television, the systematization of the last half century’s accounts, the repair of the cracked veranda tiles. And, inwardly, she and Robert had rejoiced, too, at first. Sergio had occupied too long that odd, shadowy position between childhood and adulthood that on Castellamare could be extended indefinitely, leaving him an overgrown boy in everybody’s eyes. She knew what they muttered about him: a man of more than thirty still sleeping in his childhood room, still eating his mother’s risotto and baked melanzane, dressed in an odd assortment of his high school clothes, keeping company with his childhood acquaintances: Nunzio, the baker’s son; Valeria’s boy, Peppe, the manager of the hardware store; Calogero, the lawyer. All of them were still children by the rules of Castellamare, stranded behind the counters of family businesses, subjected to the scolding of the grandmothers and the gossip of the elderly scopa players, embroiled in weeks of scandal if any one of them should bring home a girl. So the English girl, Pamela, had at first seemed a deliverance to everybody. In Maria-Grazia’s experience, the only way to escape such a position was to get married, make money, or leave.

  But she had begun to be uneasy when Sergio had poured forth, shortly after their wedding, the story of their love affair. “We met each other before,” he cried, exuberant, slopping more wine into everybody’s glasses. “As children. I never told you, Mamma, Dad, Zia Concetta. We met in ’65.”

  “How can that be?” said Robert, inclining his head in the direction of the beaming Pamela, but here Sergio spoke again: “Pamela was here as a girl. She came with her parents for a holiday.”

  Then Sergio recounted how the two of them
had become acquainted again, last summer, on the stretch of sand outside il conte’s great hotel.

  Sergio had the habit of swimming early every Sunday morning from the rocks in front of il conte’s fenced square of sand. On this particular morning, Sergio had arrived a little earlier than the others. He had thrown down his bicycle beside the quay as usual and crossed the hot rocks at a run, removing his shoes, his jeans, and the graying polo shirt with the holes under the armpits that Maria-Grazia was always trying to throw out on his behalf, until he stood in his trunks in the hot sea air, ready to plunge. Only then, with acute embarrassment, had he become aware that the nearest plastic recliner was occupied by a young woman, and that she was crying.

  Pamela, nodding, laughing a little now, confirmed this account. “My husband and I had just divorced. I came out here for a little holiday. I’d been here as a girl, you see, with my parents, and I remembered the island.”

  Sergio had done the only honorable thing to be done in such a situation: He had retrieved his shirt, retrieved his jeans, buckled his belt, sat down beside the stranger, and attempted to comfort her. “A real gentleman,” Pamela said, in English. “He asked me about when I last visited the island and I told him, in ’65, with my mother and father.”

  “I was eleven at the time,” said Sergio. “And she said she was about eleven, too, and then I asked her name and it was Pamela.”

  Then he told them how it had come back to him, like a vision: Pamela of the pink bathing suit, plunging beneath the waves to come up streaming seawater, Pamela of the scirocco and the caves.

  “What Pamela?” asked Concetta, who did not know the story.