Immensely old, like a tortoise, Andrea d’Isantu strained up from his pillow, his neck a rigging of taut wires. He surveyed the islanders before him. Then he fell back and closed his papery eyelids again. All at once, someone broke ranks and came forward with a tray of baked aubergines, depositing it in his lap. Someone else advanced, bearing a chicken in a cardboard box, and shoved it into the arms of the doctor. Concetta held forth a great slice of tuna wrapped in plastic. And then a tide of islanders, bearing gifts, braved the disapproval of their neighbors to approach the ancient man, Castellamare’s last conte.
The old man raised his head again briefly and gripped in turn each of his islander’s hands.
So it was that the bailiffs who lurked across the ocean, when they returned at last, would find in Andrea d’Isantu’s great villa not one stick of furniture to be seized, not one ancestral painting or silver candlestick, not one crystal remaining on the cut threads suspended from the chandeliers—for all had been sold, all had vanished into outboard motors and patched roofs, fishing boats and ancient houses. The villa at the end of the avenue of palms was to be sold to developers, and the bank and the hunting ground and the empty houses cut into pieces and turned over to other hands. But the remnants of il conte’s great wealth had been swallowed up in the earth that made them, returned to the descendants over which his father had once ruled, and nothing now remained of them anymore.
—
MARIA-GRAZIA AND ROBERT WALKED home arm in arm, by the alleyways and vaneddi. The rain had stopped at last. A procession of lights was advancing up the road from the harbor. The visitors from the mainland. Enzo had got ahead of them. “Quick—get ready!” he cried, from behind the counter. “It’s going to be the biggest Sant’Agata festival we’ve ever seen!” Maria-Grazia, sinking down on the edge of the veranda, sat for a long time instead with her hand in her husband’s. He gripped her wrist with a calm pressure, as he had once gripped it when he was a young soldier and she a girl just out of leg braces, in the shadow of the war. “I’ve only ever cared for you, you know,” she said.
“Lo so, cara,” said Robert.
—
MEANWHILE, LENA, WORKING IN a great frenzy, had prepared the bar. She had mopped the rainwater from the floor, stacked bottles of arancello. She had heaved tables and chairs. She had polished the condensation from the mirrors until each one shone. Now, one by one, she dropped the rice balls into fat so that they should be crisped and burnished to perfection. Her father and her uncle she ordered about like schoolboys, to the great amusement of Zia Concetta, who busied herself with setting out the veranda chairs on her return from il conte’s, so as to be out of the way.
Into the piazza, slowly, as though making a pilgrimage of their own, the visitors came. They plunged into the night that now whirled again with the music of the organetto, surrounding themselves with the warm dark. They saw what Amedeo had seen a century before: a small shut-up place, fragrant with wet basil, beyond the dark edge of the world. And miracles, too: a saint lit red from beneath by a thousand candles; an extraordinary house balanced at the edge of the town. In their faces, Lena saw the wonder he, too, must have felt, the old doctor, to find at the end of his long journey an island such as this.
The visitors crossed the threshold of the bar. Lena plied the tables. She served coffee, chocolate, limoncello, arancello, limettacello, the limonata her grandmother had taught her how to make—unsugared, fragrant with honey, belonging to the war. She served endless cappuccinos, which had never before been ordered after eleven in the morning in the House at the Edge of Night. She served, in spite of the chill that still lingered a little, so much ice cream that Sergio and Giuseppino had to be set to churning a new batch, in a rush, in the bar’s back room. She served rice balls and pastries, which the visitors lapped from greased paper, as greedy as the girl Concetta.
“Why so many people?” marveled Bepe. “And not even tourists—not all of them—for some are quite ordinary people from the mainland.”
“It was like this after the war,” murmured Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Any hint of trouble in the world, and people renew their interest in miracles.”
It was true that the visitors this year were of a different kind: shabbier, more ordinary. And yet they ate and ate. In tips alone, which Lena amassed in the old box with the rosary and wax candles, she found that she had made up almost what they owed the savings bank for the month. “I wish we could have served them all for nothing,” said Maria-Grazia, a little sadly, her hand in Robert’s. “That’s what we did in the old days when a person in trouble came to our door.”
“Why didn’t signor il conte give you money?” asked Robert. “That’s what I’ve been wondering all these months. For he helped almost everybody else.”
“I think,” said Maria-Grazia, “that he knew we’d be all right without him. The bar always has been, after all.”
Lena appeared at the edge of the veranda. Setting down her tray of drinks, she approached her grandmother and grandfather. “Nonna,” she said, “I’m sorry I believed that gossip about you and Signor d’Isantu. And I’ve something to tell you. Grandpa knows already. I want to stay here and manage the bar.”
The girl could have been a doctor like her great-grandfather. And yet, in the great noisy thrill of the saint’s festival, to give things up did not seem to Maria-Grazia the loss it would have been in city places. What could Lena do but return, like a ship cast off upon the waters, like the Holy Madonna, as though drawn by an invisible compass to the shores of this place? Something in her granddaughter had settled, altered. Strange it was, that in this island where everybody knew your business before you knew it, where the widows burdened you with prayers and the elderly scopa players scolded and the old fishermen knew you by name before you were even born, it was possible still for a person to be as deep as the ocean, as unfathomable as the dark beyond the bar’s four walls. She understood now that Lena would go on returning to this place all her life. As Amedeo had, and Pina the schoolmistress, and Maria-Grazia herself—all of them, living and dead. Lena would return always, to walk the same goat paths her great-grandfather Amedeo had walked, with his medical bag in one hand and his head full of stories, foundling, founder, drainer of swamps, healer of sicknesses, sworn protector of this place.
All at once, with a gray brightening, the night became crepuscular. And then, at every window, a great unfurling. Into the rain, the islanders hurled fistfuls of bougainvillea and white oleander, trumpet vine and plumbago. Flavio Esposito, who stood trembling on the edge of the piazza, came forward at last into the hail of flowers. The air was clogged with them; the hired spotlights were extinguished. The dancers stumbled in the onslaught, blind, reeling. The organetto sang in the depths of it all. Wild with the noise, the two youngest Dacosta children flung firecrackers. And through the freshening dawn, the ghost of Pierino and the spirit of il conte took flight together, green, translucent, in search of other shores. The stone saint was heaved aloft by slow degrees, borne up on the shoulders of the fishermen—until at last they stood triumphant, slick with rainwater, and Sant’Agata swayed once more over Castellamare, all miracles upheld in her right hand.
For Daniele
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The House at the Edge of Night would never have come into being without the work of three great chroniclers of Sicilian and Italian folk stories: Giuseppe Pitrè, Laura Gonzenbach, and Italo Calvino. Pitrè, the real story-collecting doctor whose life inspired the character of Amedeo Esposito, rescued many hundreds of Sicilian folk stories from obscurity and The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, translated and edited by Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, was my first point of inspiration. Laura Gonzenbach’s Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales (also translated by Jack Zipes) was another important resource. My version of “The Two Brothers” is an adaptation of Andrew Lang’s retelling of Gonzenbach’s version of the tale. Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales introduced me to many of th
e haunting and beautiful stories from across Italy that found their way into Amedeo’s red book. The story that I have called “The Wrecked Ship” was inspired by Calvino’s version of “The Ship with Three Decks,” and the story that I have called “The City of the Dead” is an adaptation of Calvino’s version of “The Dead Man’s Palace.” The excerpt from “The Man Wreathed in Seaweed” at the opening of Part Two is taken from George Martin’s 1980 translation of Calvino’s Italian Folktales. The tale of the curse of weeping, however, is my own.
For invaluable help with my research into Amedeo’s early life, I am grateful to Dottoressa Lucia Ricciardi and the archive and library of the Istituto degli Innocenti, Florence, as well as the book Figli d’Italia: Gli Innocenti e la Nascita di un Progetto Nazionale per l’Infanzia. In The House at the Edge of Night I have presented a fictionalized version of that noble and forward-thinking institution, Florence’s foundling hospital, and any errors are my own.
My research into life under Fascism was helped enormously by R. J. B. Bosworth’s book Mussolini’s Italy, and by Francesco Fausto Nitti’s personal account of escape from a prison island, “Prisoners of Mussolini.” For its informative and vivid account of Operation Husky, I am grateful to Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944, and for its sensitive portrayal of the plight of deserters in World War II, Charles Glass’s Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Finally, I drew inspiration from two great chroniclers of postwar Sicily, Danilo Dolci and his book Inchiesta a Palermo, translated into English as Poverty in Sicily, as well as Carlo Levi’s Le Parole sono Pietre or Words Are Stones.
There are several people without whose immense personal support The House at the Edge of Night would never have been written. First, I would like to thank my agent Simon Trewin, the book’s greatest champion, who has, as always, been part of this project from the very first page. Second, my U.S. agent Suzanne Gluck, whose support and passion for The House at the Edge of Night have been incredible. Also Tracy Fisher, international agent extraordinaire, and Matilda Forbes-Watson, for her invaluable and much-appreciated support at every stage of the process. My editors, Kate Medina and Jocasta Hamilton, have championed both me and the book with infinite care and wisdom; I feel very fortunate that The House at the Edge of Night has been in their hands from the start. I would also like to thank Derrill Hagood for her support and guidance during the editing process, and Robin Duchnowski for providing important insights. The teams at Hutchinson and Random House, as well as my editors around the world, have been an invaluable support, and I am more grateful than I can say for their belief in The House at the Edge of Night and in the importance of telling this story of the financial crisis, the small town, and European history.
Many friends and family sustained me during the long process of writing The House at the Edge of Night, and I am extremely grateful for their immense love and support. In particular, I would like to thank my mother, Jane Wheare, my sister, and my father, Michael Banner, as well as Sally-Ann Gannon, Marta Ruth, Roberto Galloni, Michela Joppolo, Alessandro Galloni, my extended family both English and Italian, and those friends who offered me support and help in countless ways during the writing of the book.
Finally, and most importantly, I wish to thank my husband, Daniele Galloni, to whom this book is dedicated. His support has been so unfailing and his belief in me so complete that I feel that this book is as much his as it is my own.
BY CATHERINE BANNER
The Eyes of a King
Voices in the Dark
The Heart at War
The House at the Edge of Night
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CATHERINE BANNER was born in Cambridge, England, and began writing at the age of fourteen. She has published a trilogy of young adult novels. She studied English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and has taught at schools in the United Kingdom. The House at the Edge of Night is her debut adult novel. She lives in Turin, Italy, with her husband.
catherine-banner.com
Facebook.com/CatherineBannerAuthor
@BannerCatherine
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