The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  To the child Lena, the change of year was nothing to be marveled at. To Lena, things on the island stayed perpetually the same. But for Maria-Grazia, the closing of the century in which she had lived most of her life recalled to her the inescapable truth that she was growing old.

  That year seemed full of portents. During the summer, Maria-Grazia watched with her granddaughter a solar eclipse. The event was over in a minute or two, the eclipse itself merely a black fingernail of shadow that could only be looked at indirectly, on a sheet of white paper or through a special pair of cardboard glasses. In the autumn, a great storm carried several tons of sand up the beach, depositing it in the mouths of the caves, leaving behind a small miracle: the wreck of a ship, lying beneath the water of the bay. The children dived, and made out the name: Holy Madonna. Somehow, Agata-the-fisherwoman’s boat had made its way back to the island, dragged by the currents, little by little, until the storm did the rest. That winter, at the House at the Edge of Night, the islanders celebrated the new year, and watched city dwellers set off fireworks, shrieking as the television cameras swooped low over their heads. Inspired, Lena and Enzo let off a few firecrackers in the piazza, startling Concetta from her chair. But as the light dwindled, the islanders returned in the dark to their separate houses, leaving the island unaltered, swept by the same hot breezes, lulled by the same hush of the sea.

  —

  THE FIRST MODERNIZATION OF the new century, when it came, threatened to provoke outright war. “Why,” demanded Agata-the-fisherwoman one morning over the bar, “have you got two prices beneath the arancini in your counter?”

  “We’re having a new currency,” explained Lena, who had learned about it at school. “You’re to swap your lire for the new coins.”

  “Says who?”

  “The government in Rome.”

  “Oh,” said Agata, relieved, for it was well known that no one listened to them.

  But the new currency was coming. Bepe’s ferry had a new tariff, and Arcangelo had also introduced two sets of prices in his shop, based on a favorable conversion rate of his own devising. Meanwhile, the islanders who still mistrusted the savings bank were outraged at the news that they would have to bring all their savings to the bank in order to exchange them. “How will I know I’m getting the right amount?” demanded the widow Valeria.

  “And I’m certainly not putting my money in those accounts of theirs,” said Bepe. “For I don’t trust il conte any more than I did his father.”

  On the appointed day, the exchange took place. The islanders came slinking from all corners of Castellamare with buckets and crates and sacks full of lire, millions upon millions, a small hoard. The elderly scopa players, for all their complaining, had five sacks between them; Agata-the-fisherwoman had ten of her own; and Bepe and his nephews were obliged to borrow Tonino’s van to haul their two hundred million to the bank, for it could not be carried. In return, they received plastic pouches full of coins and new paper currency.

  “I never knew our island was so rich!” cried Lena in wonder.

  But the island had, in its quiet way, continued to prosper. And in those years, it seemed anyone could get a loan from the savings bank. Sergio, creeping across the piazza, borrowed a little more to stave off the tiresome mortgage, still not entirely paid. Others bought motorcars in monthly installments, televisions, complicated pension accounts guaranteed to grant them a luxurious retirement. Il conte’s concrete villas, which had cracked as predicted in the first earthquake, were shored up and extended out of the savings bank’s funds. “It borrows the money from bigger banks overseas,” said Bepe knowledgeably, for one of his nephews worked there. “They can get as much as they want. But for my part, I’d rather keep my money where I can see it.”

  To interest Lena in the opportunities of the outside world, her father borrowed the money to buy a computer, and had it shipped to the island; this borrowing displeased Maria-Grazia, for she was inclined to distrust the savings bank, too. It was the first computer to arrive on Castellamare. Sergio would pay for it, he assured her, in twenty-four monthly installments. And how could she be angry with him? For he did it, as he did all things now, out of love for the child. As Bepe’s nephews carried the computer in its black-printed box up the main street, a procession of children followed them. Sergio unpacked the computer, examined its separate parts, read and reread the English instructions, then sat defeated on the floor of the bar. It took an afternoon’s labor on the part of Enzo and his friend Pino, who had already seen a computer at their mainland high school, to assemble it and bring it to life.

  To connect to a thing called the Internet, the thing that had most interested Sergio in the first place, for he had heard it was like a great encyclopedia, there was a special black box with a line of red lights that flashed on and off. “Come, Lena,” Sergio called. Lena came, barefoot, leaning affectionately against his shoulder. Curious, Robert and Maria-Grazia, too, bent over the thing. “How do we make it work?” Sergio asked at last. “Do we type commands? I’ve seen that on television.”

  “No, no,” said Enzo. “That’s old-fashioned stuff. You just click on the Internet icon now, and the Internet appears.”

  “Icon?” murmured Robert, thinking of saints’ images, candlelight. Maria-Grazia squeezed his wrist, an old signal between them. Now what she meant by it was this: Caro, we’re growing old.

  Enzo hunched over the keyboard and moved an arrow across the screen, too quick for Maria-Grazia to follow. The computer made a series of beeps as though it were telephoning to America, a static noise, a couple of low tones, a weird growling, a whirring like that of the cicadas. “It’s broken!” cried Sergio in dismay. “They’ve sold me a faulty one!”

  “It’s dialing,” said Enzo.

  Words appeared. “There,” said Enzo.

  “Is that all?” said Sergio, crushed. “Is that the Internet?”

  “It can do other things, too,” said Enzo. “You just have to learn how to do them.”

  “We should charge people to use it,” said Lena. “I saw it last year, when I went to England. An Internet café, it’s called.”

  Sergio blinked a little, divided between pride in his daughter’s great knowledge, and regret that she had already encountered such things.

  Maria-Grazia, however, studying the computer’s instruction manual, found that it was quite straightforward to work. She took Lena’s advice, and after she had learned how to use it, she hired it out to the island’s teenagers and foreign visitors at fifty cents an hour.

  In one plunge, the House at the Edge of Night had entered the new century. After that, to Maria-Grazia, it seemed no time at all before Lena had finished growing up.

  II

  More than half a century after he had first left the island, Andrea d’Isantu, now past eighty, returned to Castellamare. He came by sea, and when Maria-Grazia saw him she was struck with terror—for she saw, quite clearly, that death rested upon his shoulders, as she had seen it once rest upon the shoulders of the fisherman Pierino, and upon the shoulders of her father, Amedeo, in the autumn before he died.

  This time, she had been given a day’s warning of il conte’s return. She heard Bepe whispering about it over the scopa table. “He’s coming alone,” Bepe hissed, “and I think he means to stay.”

  The following evening, she walked down to the quay to witness the ferry coming in. A few of il conte’s old retinue stood assembled on the concrete. The brass band played. She made out Andrea’s narrow form, inscrutable in his great foreign overcoat. The ferry rolled in toward the quay. As Bepe’s youngest son put the engine in reverse, il conte’s thin hair was sea-blown, and he seemed to shudder in the wind like a suspended husk, not really there at all.

  That night she went by the side roads and vaneddi to the d’Isantus’ villa once again.

  Santino Arcangelo appeared behind the gate as usual, wearing his customary insolent grin, though he struggled to swagger now on account of his two hip replacements. “Signora M
aria-Grazia,” he said, maneuvering himself up to the gate on his crutches. “It won’t do. Signor il conte won’t see you. Surely you know that after all this time.”

  Maria-Grazia had brought with her a plate of grilled aubergines wrapped in foil, as though this were merely some conventional visit. “Then I’ll wait,” she said, “until he’s ready. These melanzane are for signor il conte. Will you please tell him I sent them?”

  For the time had come, she felt, to put all this silliness to rest. Maria-Grazia, sitting down upon the old hitching post before the gate, slid the aubergines under the wrought ironwork and settled down to wait with neatly folded hands.

  Santino left the aubergines where they were and turned to make his way back toward the villa.

  On the road, the fishermen passed, returning from the sea. “Maria-Grazia!” hooted Bepe. “What is it you’re doing here, sitting at Signor d’Isantu’s door like a lovesick girl?”

  “Nothing but minding my own business,” said Maria-Grazia. “What are you doing, Signor Bepe, walking up the road? On the way to a tryst with Signora Agata-la-pescatrice?”

  Bepe, a little shamefaced, left off his teasing and hobbled out of sight in the wake of his nephews, and the road was once again empty. Night fell with a great plunge of the sun over the edge of the sea. Maria-Grazia shifted her position, to let her hot neck cool. Well, now, that was the worst of it, and she might as well wait here until something happened.

  —

  SHE MUST HAVE SLEPT, or half slept, for she woke to a full moon burnishing the leaves of the palms, to the vanishing of the song of the cicadas. The aubergines on their foiled plate were gone, and someone stood in the shadow beyond the gate. “What have you come for?” he said at last. It was the first time Andrea had spoken to her in half a century, and the breaking of the silence, or perhaps her abrupt awakening, made her dizzy. Had his voice really been so dry and insubstantial, so much like an old man’s?

  “Signor d’Isantu,” she said. “I want to speak with you.”

  Andrea stood for a good long while behind the gate, working at something with the side of his mouth. He fretted on the other side of the bars, sucking his teeth. Then, at last, he took three steps forward and unchained the gate. His hands were too weak to lift the great chain; it went rattling to the ground as he tried to grasp it. Maria-Grazia lifted it. Carrying it in both hands, she followed him through the gate.

  —

  SHORTLY AFTER ANDREA D’ISANTU’S RETURN, Lena heard the widow Valeria, whose hardware store was opposite the Arcangelos’ grocery, whispering about her grandmother on the veranda late one autumn night. “She’s visiting him every Sunday after Mass,” Valeria hissed at the elderly scopa players, with mischievous intent. “Drinking port wine from Palermo on his veranda, and laughing, and reminiscing about the past. She stays for whole hours at a time. I don’t know how Signor Roberto stands for it. And at their age”—Valeria herself was nearly ninety—“at their age it’s indecent, a damned shame.”

  Lena said nothing about this to any of her elders, but she contemplated it in her heart. She did not have to wait long before she heard more. “I’ve been told Signor d’Isantu’s remaking his will,” muttered the florist Gisella, whose shop was next door to the solicitor Calogero’s office. “And it’s no secret these Espositos will benefit, for he’s said to be quite as smitten with her as he was as a boy.”

  It was true that Lena’s grandmother often went out now on Sundays, in her best clothes, leaving the bar to the care of Sergio and Robert. And sometimes she did not return until five or six in the evening. Meanwhile, Lena found her grandfather exasperatingly calm about the matter, merely spreading his hands and sipping his arancello, unwilling to say anything about what he knew. “I trust Mariuzza,” he said. “I know it’s no love affair. She’s told me so herself. Why should she have to justify herself to these gossips in the bar?”

  But Lena found herself impatient with such capitulations, such weak acceptances. In those days, it seemed, she was impatient with everything: she would find herself beating the unwieldy vine with a stick when she was supposed to be pruning it, flinging the glasses into the dishwasher in a passion, without knowing how or why she found herself so out of sorts. The elderly customers had their own suspicions on the matter. The boy Enzo had left for art school in Rome. With a safety pin through one ear, a rosary of Sant’Agata swinging from the rearview mirror of his car, and the radio tuned permanently to foreign stations on which American bands shouted exuberant songs, he had been the island’s taxi driver until he had at last outgrown Castellamare and left in a plume of exhaust smoke the previous summer. Since then, though Enzo sent Lena hasty letters assuring her he still thought of her entirely as a sister, nothing had been right on Castellamare, and Lena found herself entering her sixteenth year with restlessness in her heart.

  Like her great-grandfather Amedeo before her, she remedied this by plunging herself headlong into stories.

  “What’s got into you?” complained Concetta one evening, helping her wash out the heavy ice cream vats while her father, Sergio, swept the bent scopa cards and cigarette ends from the floor. “You’re the same, you and Enzo. He wouldn’t be content until he left the island. And look at you, Lena, reading and rereading those foreign books of your Papà’s as though you were meaning to leave us, too.”

  Lena, humiliated, turned War and Peace facedown. “It doesn’t mean I’m going away,” she said.

  “Whenever a person reads great big books like that,” said Concetta, “they’re thinking about going away.”

  Over the sink, Lena fumed silently, swilling the ice cream in its rainbow variations down the drain.

  “Sometimes I think I’d go if I could,” said Concetta. “Sometimes I think I’d have liked to get away from this island to a proper city, like my Enzo. But then I remind myself that I’m old, and this is my home, and the feeling passes.”

  —

  THAT SUMMER, ON CONCETTA’S suggestion, Lena went to visit Enzo in Rome, carrying the cardboard suitcase that had once belonged to her Zio Flavio stuffed with his aunt’s melanzane paste and limoncello and marmellata. She found him lovably pleased to see her and unaltered, except for the fact that on their long walk around the archaeological excavations, during which he slung his arm over her shoulders like a brother, he confided to her that he was in love with a boy from Torino whom he had met at his art history class. This she was not to tell anybody (“Except my Zia Concetta and your nonna and Signor Roberto, for they’ll understand”). The story of the boy from Torino, which Lena poured out between sobs on the telephone to her nonna that night, had not—she swore furiously—broken her heart. All the same, Lena spent the whole remaining three months of the school holiday with her mother in England.

  In other years, Lena had telephoned her father each evening with a homesick pain in her stomach just to listen to the sounds of the bar: the roar of triumph as an elderly scopa player gathered in a hand, the hiss of the coffee machine, the swing of the door on its axle. She would stand by the phone in the hall with closed eyes, holding the sounds of the island before her like a glass of water, careful not to lose a single one. But this year, the telephone calls made her impatient. “I’m going to lose her,” mourned Sergio. “Her mother’s going to keep her there. I know it.”

  “No, no,” consoled Maria-Grazia. “She just needs time.”

  But Maria-Grazia, returning from il conte’s great villa one Sunday evening, slipping off her shoes, which were as misshapen now as Pina’s had once been, setting her Sunday handbag on the table before the statue of Sant’Agata, heard the telephone ring and knew with premonitory certainty that it was her granddaughter with bad news.

  “Cara,” she answered. “Now tell me, when are you coming home to us?”

  “I’m not,” said Lena, her voice very thin and small. “I’m staying here for a while.”

  —

  LENA, WHOSE ELDERS HAD always praised her intelligence, was going to remain in England and s
tudy, like her great-grandfather Amedeo, to be a doctor.

  And now the House at the Edge of Night seemed a hollow place; now, its walls contained within them the absence of Maddalena as they had once held the curse of weeping. Everyone mourned her departure: the elderly scopa players, who sought about for the girl bustling with her upraised tray; the widows of Sant’Agata, who had no beloved child on which to hang their rosaries any longer; Sergio, behind the counter, who felt once again that the island was too small, too narrow, and who had become again merely il ragazzo di Maria-Grazia; and Robert, whose medal, forgotten, grew tarnished on the hall table beside the statue of Sant’Agata with no one to take it up and polish its bronze face. Maria-Grazia even caught Concetta weeping about it, the very first time she had ever seen Concetta cry about anything. “I’ve been an old fool,” confessed Concetta, “for I hoped the two of them would marry, Mariuzza—I did—and that they’d take over the House at the Edge of Night!”

  “Well,” said Maria-Grazia. “And can’t Lena and Enzo run the House at the Edge of Night between them, all the same? Why must they be married to do it?” For she found herself, as she had in the weeks after the departure of her brothers, furiously refusing to believe that the girl would not return. No, she told herself, as she had told Sergio—Lena just required time.

  Meanwhile, weeks passed, months passed, until the girl had been gone almost an entire year. Maria-Grazia found herself existing from Sunday to Sunday, when the girl would telephone with her news. She had made progress in her studies, passing a series of important English exams with grades Maria-Grazia understood to be impeccable. There was talk, to Maria-Grazia’s relief, of some other boy. “She’ll come home,” Maria-Grazia murmured to Robert on Sunday nights, as she lay sleepless in their bed in the stone room by the courtyard. And Robert gripped her wrist as he had in sleep on summer afternoons when they were first lovers, and murmured, “Lo so. I know.”

  —

  IN THE END, IT was a kind of vision that called her back, or so Lena would explain it to her grandmother, years later. On that particular evening, ascending from the Underground station in a gust of hot air, a strange thing happened: She was assaulted by the scent of bougainvillea. At first just a trace of it, in a woman’s perfume. Then it was everywhere, an invisible rain of flowers, at once near and far off. The force of memory brought her to a halt. She had missed, for two years in a row, the Sant’Agata festival.