The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  But as the restless days of April wore on, it began to become clear to Maria-Grazia that things would remain out of sorts on the island for a long while yet. Filippo Arcangelo had sent out blustering letters to everyone who owed him so much as fifty cents. The baker was in trouble, also the butcher, for they relied on supplying il conte’s great hotel, and the food for the Sant’Agata festival, both of which were diminished this year. And half the islanders, it emerged, had mortgaged their shops years ago in the general fever for cars and televisions that had swept Castellamare, cars and televisions that were now broken or worthless.

  Even the tourists, this spring, were thin on the ground.

  “Will the bar survive?” asked Lena. “Is the business in trouble? That’s what I want to know.”

  Lena and Maria-Grazia got out the accounts books, and with Robert’s help—for he had always had a cool head for such things—they tried to calculate. But now, in this uncertain world without the savings bank to shore up the island’s economy, anything might happen.

  As for il conte, he had refused to speak to anyone about it. But two weeks after the trouble began he summoned Maria-Grazia, by scrawled note, to the villa. In the bar after she departed, there was some arguing and muttering over the scopa tables. “She oughtn’t to be associating with him,” claimed Bepe. “It isn’t right.”

  “Oh, hush now,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Maria-Grazia must have her reasons.”

  “Think of poor Signor Robert,” mourned the elderly scopa players.

  Lena, finding her neck feverish with indignation, interrupted and risked a scolding. “I can hear what you’re all saying,” she said. “And you must speak to my grandmother about it, not go gossiping behind her back.”

  “I will speak to your grandmother about it,” muttered Bepe, “at the very next meeting of the Modernization Committee.”

  Though she never would have admitted it, even Lena felt a little impatient with her grandmother, at the way she skulked about with Andrea d’Isantu, as though they really were carrying on some secret affair. That night, she sought her grandmother out in the stone room by the courtyard, where Maria-Grazia was applying night cream before the spotted mirror. “Nonna,” said Lena, laying her head on her grandmother’s shoulder. “Everyone is gossiping about you.”

  “I know, cara,” said Maria-Grazia. “I know. But I’ve been gossiped about before, and I daresay I’ll bear it this time.”

  “Why does he call you to the villa?” Lena found herself lamenting. “What can he have had to say to you? And why must you obey him all the time, as though he still had some hold over you?”

  Maria-Grazia merely murmured, “Cara, cara,” and stroked her granddaughter’s hair. “I’ll tell you in good time,” she said at last. “I’m not free to speak about it now.”

  Meanwhile, il conte was expecting other visitors. Rumor had it that the savings bank was awaiting representatives from a foreign bank across the sea, who were to come and make arrangements to take it over. Sure enough, at the end of the month they arrived, and were admitted to the villa, where they sat in conversation with il conte on the terrace, turning over great sheaves of paper. Apart from the foreigners and Maria-Grazia, il conte would speak to no one.

  Now once again Maria-Grazia found herself the keeper of the island’s secrets. For, over the counter of the bar, her neighbors poured out to her their troubles: the mortgage payments missed, the businesses whose takings were lower than they should be, ruinously low for this point in the season, the sons and daughters thinking of departing for the continent, as their ancestors had between the wars.

  By the month of the festival that year, Maria-Grazia knew the difficulties of every one of them.

  —

  MEANWHILE, MARIA-GRAZIA WAS DETERMINED to resolve the matter of the bar’s mortgage to the savings bank. “We’ve only a few months left on that loan,” she told Robert. “Thirteen months, and it will all be paid off. Three and a half thousand euros. Couldn’t we ask Giuseppino?”

  “I don’t know,” said Robert. He had never approved of asking their younger son for money. “Better to leave him alone, and try to fix the problem ourselves. Lena’s home now, and she’s got a good head for business. Between us we’ll manage.”

  But Maria-Grazia invited Giuseppino home for that year’s festival all the same.

  In the first months of the tourist season, Tonino’s building company lost its contract with il conte’s big hotel. An extension to the building had been started, but now it was abandoned, and another building, the block of tourist apartments that was supposed to keep five island men employed all summer, was halted before it was properly begun, remaining just a skeleton of girders against the sea.

  —

  IN THOSE UNCERTAIN DAYS of early summer, Concetta was a little ashamed to find herself praying to the statue of Sant’Agata with the bleeding heart. She was never quite sure afterward what had come over her, except that she saw it there in Maria-Grazia’s hall, gathering dust, and was seized with pity: for the bar; for her nephew, Enzo, whose taxi sat unused among the artichoke spires for whole weeks at a time; for the girl Lena who at this rate would never be a doctor. Kneeling in the entrance hall, she lit a candle and addressed a few words to the saint. “I haven’t asked you for anything in my life,” she said, “not for you to bring Robert home during the war, or to end the feud with my brothers, or to help the Espositos when all their sons went away across the sea. But I ask you now to help the bar, and the island. It’s years since you’ve done any miracle for us, Sant’Agata. You brought us the miracle of twins born by different mothers, to Professoressa Vella and Signora Carmela, and the miracle of Robert’s rescue from the sea. You brought Maddalena home from England, and my Enzo from Rome. Just a small one now, please. Just for Giuseppino to return for the Sant’Agata festival, and reconcile this silly feud with his brother, as Maria-Grazia longs for him to, I know, and to give the Espositos enough money to keep the bar going another year. And the other businesses, too—Valeria and Tonino and even my brothers Filippo and Santino. Don’t let them fail.”

  The saint stared down, head tilted, one hand raised as though directing traffic, the candlelight rolling over the painted face that was, in this half darkness, gentle and impossibly sad.

  In the weeks that followed, others began praying to the Espositos’ statue of Sant’Agata. For someone had remembered that it had been an auspicious object, once housed in the little chapel beside the tonnara, and that it held at its heart a holy relic, the right thumb of the saint herself.

  Whether or not this was true, the widow Valeria one day, too, decided to pray to the statue, and only a few days later a startling and troubling miracle occurred.

  Valeria, close to a hundred, had asked the statue for 220 euros to make her mortgage payment to the savings bank. She was almost entirely deaf, and the customers of the bar heard her quite distinctly as she lamented in dialect: “And pi fauri, signora la santa, two hundred and twenty, just enough to make the payment on my mortgage, for Lord knows Carmelo has found it hard to get work, and poor Nunziata with her bad knees…”

  The following morning, rising before dawn, the widow Valeria’s granddaughter Nunziata roused half the town with her shrieking. She had discovered, stuffed down the side of the pot of basil outside her grandmother’s front door, a wad of banknotes. Exactly 220 euros, as though the saint knew.

  “It’s a miracle,” cried the elderly scopa players, when Valeria came shuffling enraptured into the bar to thank the saint’s statue.

  Agata-the-fisherwoman was inclined to be skeptical. “We all of us heard her going on and on about the two hundred and twenty euros. Why, it might have been anyone in this bar who left it there.”

  But that afternoon, inspired, a queue of islanders formed before the statue all the same.

  The next person to receive a miracle, however, was the fisherman-mechanic Matteo, who had not prayed before the statue at all and, as Valeria observed in outrage, hadn’t attended
Mass since he was a boy. Matteo, who drank a coffee on the terrace of the bar each afternoon after coming in from the ocean, had been stranded onshore several weeks for want of a new outboard motor, lamenting its loss to anyone who would listen. Now he found a brand-new one, wrapped in plastic, wedged under the little shed outside his mother’s front door. Someone had left it there in the night. It was true that Matteo had not attended Mass since his childhood, and had never knelt before the statue of Sant’Agata. But as the days passed, a spate of other odd miracles occurred: wads of money shoved under the doors of failing businesses; new parts for broken vans hidden in courtyards in the dead of night; tiles for damaged roofs left on doorsteps before dawn, so that when the inhabitants of the house awakened they were simply, unsettlingly, there.

  Some attributed these strange happenings to the saint. Others, like Agata-the-fisherwoman, were inclined to put them down to earthly causes. “Someone knows,” she maintained, “what everybody needs, and is sneaking about the island with kind intentions.”

  “But who would have the money?” said Concetta. For really it was becoming a great sum, when Lena totaled it in the back of the accounts book, more than they had thought their island held.

  “Maybe it’s Signor Arcangelo,” said someone, and the whole place became one yell of laughter.

  No miraculous gift was ever found on the veranda of the House at the Edge of Night, though Concetta and Lena searched it carefully each morning before opening the bar, a little drunk on the air of miracle that hung over the island.

  “This trouble over finances will pass, one way or another,” soothed Concetta, for Lena was inclined to be disheartened at such moments. “Giuseppino will come through, as he always has, with the money to make things right—and Sergio will just have to swallow his pride about the whole thing.”

  But inside Maddalena, doubt had taken hold. What if it didn’t pass? What if this crisis, not war, not earthquake, was to be the end of the House at the Edge of Night?

  “Now don’t talk like that,” counseled Bepe. “This isn’t a real crisis. By 2010 it will be over, and everyone will have forgotten it ever took place.”

  IV

  In the weeks before the Sant’Agata festival, a special meeting of the Modernization Committee was called. That night, while the islanders were assembling, a great storm broke over the island. It assaulted the windows of the House at the Edge of Night so that they shuddered; it poured with a guttural din down the drains and off the swags of bougainvillea on the veranda. It grew so loud that Maria-Grazia had to get to her feet and shout. “We need to make this Sant’Agata festival as good as any other,” she said. “Even if we’ve no money to pay for it anymore.”

  For the Castellamare Savings and Loan Company had always partially funded the Sant’Agata festival. The bank had paid for it for so long that the islanders had all but forgotten where the money came from—but now who would cover the bill for the flowers in the church, the procession of traditional musicians shipped over from the mainland, the stalls with their sugared nuts and plastic souvenirs, the vans full of fencing and generators and spotlights and amplifiers that must be brought across the ocean on Bepe’s ferry and installed in the piazza the day before? In the past two decades, in pursuit of more tourists and eager to please the former islanders who returned every year to mark Sant’Agata’s Day, the festival had become a grander and grander affair, which must now be maintained.

  As preparations for the festival began in earnest, the rain intensified. “Sant’Agata is angry,” muttered Agata-the-fisherwoman in the corner of the bar, her eyes moving to and fro, tracking the football players on the screen of the television. Juventus versus Inter. In her old age, Agata had become something of a football fanatic. “That’s what we always used to say when we came across a localized squall,” she said. “Sant’Agata is angry. A storm like this comes over a fishing boat when someone on board has a guilty soul.”

  One or two of the elderly scopa players glanced at Maria-Grazia, for it was no secret that she was still spending Sunday afternoons at il conte’s villa, for reasons she refused to declare to anyone except Signor Robert.

  “I think there’s a miracle coming,” said Concetta. “I think that’s what it means. There’s no need to be so gloomy about it, Signora Agata.”

  In a rare spell of gray calm, two weeks before the festival, a strange half miracle did occur. As Bepe’s ferry plied the churned waters between Siracusa and Castellamare, a shadow approached under the water. Closer and closer it came, making the tourists restless. “Sharks,” murmured someone. All at once, the shadow burst through the surface. A bullet of moving water, it soared for a moment, then crashed on the deck. Not a shark; a dolphin. As gray as the rain with a pink underside, it flopped on the rusted metal of Bepe’s ferry, croaking and squeaking in its own strange language, scattering the tourists. “Quiet!” cried Bepe. “Quiet. Let me approach him and see what he wants from us.”

  Bepe had last seen a striped dolphin as a young man, from a distance, from the bow of the Santa Maria della Luce. Now that this creature with its fishy smell had invaded his modern ferry, snapping unpleasantly with its teeth, he was not certain what should be done about it. Seizing his boat hook, he cut the engine and approached. “There now,” he murmured. “Hush, dolphin. Stop snapping. Good boy. Stai bravo.”

  The dolphin turned one glossy eye on Bepe. With cautious prods, Bepe slid it toward the side of the boat. Then all at once the dolphin gave a furious flip with its tail and sent Bepe staggering backward. It plunged over the side of the boat and hit the water. As the tourists crowded to the railing, they saw it bob up again to hang below the surface of the water, looking up with its little black eye. Then, with a twist, it was gone, leaving only empty sea.

  By the time the ferry reached the quay of Castellamare, the passengers hardly believed it had been real. And when Bepe brought the story to the bar, no one believed him there, either. “No, no, that never happened in my time,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, clicking her tongue in disbelief. “A striped dolphin would never jump into a boat in that shameless way, like a performing seal at a zoo.”

  “It did,” insisted Bepe. “It jumped into mine.”

  “Right up onto that great big ferry of yours? You’re getting old,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman. “With all respect, Signor Bepe, your memory is getting tangled.”

  “It was real,” cried Bepe. “I really saw it. And who are you to call me old, Signora Agata, when you yourself were born the same winter I was?”

  The two of them had never married, but it was no secret that they had carried on some kind of discreet affair for the past fifty years, and now in their old age they argued with the familiarity of an ancient couple. “You silly stronzo,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman affectionately. “You damn fool. A striped dolphin leap into a boat!”

  But that night the youngest fishermen, Matteo, and Rizzu’s youngest great-grandson, whom everyone referred to simply as Rizzulinu, arrived with strange stories of their own. They climbed the hill to the bar that evening in their ripped-off jeans and their sea-stained T-shirts with printed faces of American bands, and murmured in agreement at Bepe’s story. Yes, yes, it was certainly possible. They, too, had seen dolphins surfing a rogue wave off Morte delle Barche, two days ago. Also a great shoal of flying fish like hailstones had fallen one dawn on either side of their boat, the Provvidenza. And once, fishing late at night with their lights out, they had cut the engine and heard in the depths below them the mourning of a whale.

  “Everything’s turned strange,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, who believed wholeheartedly in Bepe’s story now that it had been confirmed by other sources. “Like there’s a miracle coming. The fish must know it, too.”

  —

  MEANWHILE, THERE WERE ODD RUMORS circulating about il conte. Though he still saw no one except Maria-Grazia, strange parcels had begun to leave the villa at the end of the avenue of palms. Square ones that looked like portraits wrapped in brown paper, and gre
at packing cases, and once even a box that jangled as though there were brass candlesticks inside.

  “He’s selling his possessions,” reported Bepe, who had heard it from the housekeeper. “Everything that belonged to his mother and father. The ancient portraits, the silver with the d’Isantu crest engraved on it, the French tables and chairs. Even the frescoes off the drawing-room walls. He’s become a communist in his old age, I suppose, since the failure of the bank.”

  “He must have gone mad,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman.

  “He has no respect for the old conte, his father,” murmured the elderly scopa players. “That’s what it means.”

  The storms continued. The fences for the Sant’Agata festival were blown down; the makeshift stage that the builders Tonino and ’Ncilino erected grew so heavy with water that, when it was tested, the middle of it fell away, dropping the brass band on their backsides in the mud. One morning, Maria-Grazia and Lena opened the blinds of the bar to find half the veranda down. The beams with their garlands of soaked vegetation were too heavy to lift back into place.

  The house itself seemed to be disintegrating. The roof leaked, dripping rain all over Amedeo’s velvet sofa so that its surface was permanently misted with water droplets. One of the upstairs windows had been left open overnight and now the wood had swollen and it would not close, so that any visit to the bathroom had become a rainy, windswept affair. The paint in the entrance hall had turned scabrous, and half the books in the library buckled. Sergio sat behind the bar counter blasting each one with Lena’s hairdryer to save it from permanent damage.