The House at the Edge of Night (13 page)

Maria-Grazia saw Tullio step away and sit down at the nearest table, resting his head on his palm as their father did whenever he was seized with some difficult thought he wished to pursue to its conclusion. Flavio paced the veranda, and at last began to beat upon its beams in frustration. Aurelio, with a little whimper, went up and shook him by the shoulder.

“It isn't true,” declared Tullio solemnly at last. “Of course it isn't. But someone means to shame our family. Someone wants to make fun of Papà because of that damned election they've all been talking about. Someone has it in for us,
ragazzi.
”

“It's that bastard Filippo!” Flavio could not bear this rational discussion of his enemy. “Not
someone,
him!
He's
the one whose head needs smacking!
He's
the one who needs his ankles broken! If you hadn't stopped me, I'd have done it myself!”

The swinging door opened and there was Pina. “
What's
this I'm hearing? Flavio? Tullio?”

Her schoolteacher's inflection was enough to make Tullio start up out of his seat, but Flavio continued to rage. “Mamma, boys from school have been saying things about Papà and we've got to go and knock some sense into them, that's all. It's no one's business but ours, not yours or Papà's—”

“Not my business! If I catch you fighting once more, Flavio, I'll
make
it my business—you'll stay home and mend socks and gut chickens and peel potatoes with me all summer, without going out to play at all.”

But though the others bowed their heads and shuffled, Flavio's fury was unbending. “Mamma, you don't know what they've been saying! They've been gossiping that Papà did bad things with
il conte
's wife. They've been saying he was screwing with her all over the island, behind the bushes and in the caves by the sea, that
puttana
!”

Pina didn't give Flavio a slap, didn't even acknowledge his bad language. “Lower your voice,” she said. “Lower your voice at once, Flavio!”

“No!”

“You will lower your voice.”

“I won't!”

All at once, her anger was a force of greater strength than his, and beat his into submission
. “
I'll not have you talking like this in plain hearing of our neighbors!” she raged at her sons. “I won't stand it! Come inside at once, all of you—where's Maria-Grazia—the
risotto
is sticking to the pan while I have to deal with you!”

“Is it true about Papà?” murmured Tullio.

“Of
course
it isn't true—of
course
your father didn't do those things—why do you think I'm so angry—haven't you got enough intelligence between the three of you to know what's true and what isn't—”

Even Flavio, fists clenched, submitted as she manhandled him in through the door. In the piazza, all that remained was heat and silence.

Cowering behind the vine, Maria-Grazia—despite the awful sick feeling in the bottom of her chest—was certain that her father was innocent.

NOT LONG AFTER, ANOTHER RUMOR
began to circulate on the island. According to this rumor, Flavio had been seen skulking home late on the night of the beating of Pierino. When Professor Calleja was asked at what time he had dismissed Flavio from the
Balilla
meeting,
il professore
was definite: well before nine o'clock. Flavio hadn't got home that night until ten, and Pierino had been found at exactly the same moment—his wife, Agata-the-baker's daughter, confirmed it.

A grim object was discovered one morning, shoved in among the bougainvillea branches on the veranda of the House at the Edge of Night, a thing her father tried to hide from her but Maria-Grazia still saw, with awful clarity: a great horsewhip, its flails crusted with dried blood.

This was the fourth scene Maria-Grazia witnessed, the shaming of her brother. Over the years, the islanders would tell many stories about what had happened on the night of the beating of Pierino. The tale about Flavio was the first, and she was the first of the Espositos to hear it, whispered in the schoolyard behind her back with mischievous intent.

Flavio Esposito, the rumor went, had been dismissed early from the
Balilla
meeting, had taken the concealed path between the prickly pears, and had reached the road at about half past nine, when Pierino had returned from the ocean, alone, a little drunk after a day's good catch. Climbing the hill from the
tonnara,
Pierino was unaware of the Esposito boy shadowing him.

At the dark corner beside Pierino's house, under the flapping laundry, Flavio had attacked—for everyone knew the doctor's son was a good little Fascist, a favorite of Professor Calleja. But, really, the boy had gone too far this time—a dosing with castor oil would have been enough, and besides, wasn't Pierino some kind of cousin of his mother's? The whole thing was shameful. With a well-timed blow to the head, Flavio had rendered Pierino senseless, whipping him across the chest as he fell. Then he must have come home by the byways and
vaneddi,
and—shoving the whip in among the vine branches—had climbed the steps of the House at the Edge of Night and returned to his parents with his brass trumpet in his hand, for all the world like an innocent boy.

“I didn't do it!” cried Flavio, when his father held the whip before him. “Someone's put it there to shame me—to shame us—to make everyone think I was to blame! I've never seen that whip in my life. Why would I beat Pierino? He's family. And Professor Calleja dismissed me at half past nine.”

But when their father shook him by the wrists, demanding he tell them at once who might have spread such a wicked rumor, Flavio could not say.

News came that
il conte
's groom had noticed just such an ancient horsewhip missing from
il conte
's stables. He could not say when it had been stolen, for it had hung there, laced with cobwebs, for a hundred years, and he never paid it any attention. Only now, suddenly, he realized it was gone—had been gone perhaps for six months. Couldn't the Esposito boy have crept in and stolen it after leaving the
Balilla
meeting that night?

“How could I have taken it?” cried Flavio. “How could I, when I've never even set foot in those stables? And what about my brass trumpet? I had it with me the whole time. How did I beat a man senseless with a whip in one hand and a trumpet in the other?”

Besides, neither Santa Maria nor Agata-the-baker's-daughter had heard coughing in the alleyway that night, and Flavio was still racked with the same cough that had troubled him all year.

Meanwhile, poor Pierino was in a bad state. He could no longer speak or move his right side. When his wife and daughters spoke to him, tears fell from his hangdog eyes, but he said nothing. Death lay upon him now; it seemed only a matter of time. His silence, to many of the islanders, was further proof of Flavio's guilt.

One of the elderly
scopa
players dared to voice these suspicions too openly one evening in the bar. Then Amedeo rose to his full height. “It was not my son,” he said. “My son had nothing to do with that shameful attack. Someone means to frame him as a criminal, when he's never done anything wrong. When I find out who it is they'll leave this island, for I'll chase them off myself. How can you believe such a wicked lie?”

No one dared repeat the accusation after that. And, a little ashamed, those islanders who had allowed the story to get out of hand in their imaginations now remembered that it was the good doctor Esposito, after all, who had treated Pierino, that the fisherman and the schoolmistress were distant cousins. But the tide of opinion on the island never turned back fully in Flavio's favor; the rumor had left a stain on him, indefinable, impossible to remove. Feeling this, Flavio shrank away inside himself and swore to leave.

THE FIFTH THING THAT
Maria-Grazia witnessed was harder to comprehend, a thing she would only come to understand a quarter of a century later. She saw the prisoner-poet Mario Vazzo, at dusk, his hair oiled, his shoes held together with fishing wire from the old
tonnara,
turn to leave at the bugle call of the
fascisti—
and then he hesitated, caught her mother's wrist, and pressed into her hand a single fallen bougainvillea flower.

This, too, Maria-Grazia stored up in her heart.

It was the beating of Pierino that led, indirectly, to Amedeo's reinstatement as doctor on the island.

That autumn, an opposing rumor gained strength, crushing the grim one about Flavio. Someone whispered in the bar that Dottor Vitale had refused to treat Pierino's injuries. That was why Amedeo had been called, in the dead of night, and why the former doctor was still overseeing Pierino's recovery and not the one who was supposed to be in charge. This rumor spread into every corner of the island by nightfall. The following day, poor Dottor Vitale found himself utterly without patients.

Meanwhile, a disorderly queue of sick and injured islanders had formed on the steps of the House at the Edge of Night.

“I can't treat you,” remonstrated Amedeo over the coughing and groaning of his would-be patients. “I'm not the doctor anymore. You must all go back to Dottor Vitale, who knows about your treatments and keeps all the medicines.”

But the death chime of Dottor Vitale's reputation had sounded.

Something in Amedeo had altered on that awful night of the beating of Pierino. It was not the fisherman's injuries that caused the change. Amedeo had sewn together dismembered soldiers at the Piave River; he had seen men blown apart, men whipped raw by shrapnel and flame. Always he had been able to separate these things from his own real life, which was a thing lived privately, behind the doors of the House at the Edge of Night. But when he had emerged from that bloodstained room to find Maria-Grazia standing at the window—his Mariuzza, the purest and best of his children—then, in anger, the political portion of himself had woken and shook itself, fierce like a bear out of hibernation.

Now he found himself becoming by degrees a political man.

He allowed Pina to employ the prisoner-poet Mario Vazzo to work afternoons in the bar (the guards prevented any prisoner from working any later than five). They transmitted his wages directly to his wife and child in Milan, who—Mario said—had suffered nothing but trouble since he was taken, moving from apartment to apartment, the child beset with a series of colds and fevers. Sometimes, sitting at the bar, the prisoner-poet composed fragments of melancholy verse on paper napkins, which he later abandoned, and Pina gathered these, proud that a real poet, an educated man, was serving behind the counter of the House at the Edge of Night.

No one else had an educated man working for them, for no one else had employed any of the prisoners. Indeed, many people made it known that they thought it a damned shame that a northern man, a man with a respectable five
lire
a day, should be employed in preference to one of the island's own. But Pina had decided, and Amedeo deferred to Pina in all things in the end.

Mario Vazzo had luxurious curling hair, which, in his new poverty, he slicked with olive oil. He questioned Amedeo about the island's legends, and spent many days poring over Amedeo's red book of stories, researching what he called an “epic verse drama.” (Rizzu snorted at this, and Pina retaliated by calling Rizzu a
filisteo,
and for a while there was very nearly war between them.) Pina would allow none of the islanders to mock Mario Vazzo, and though many of the elderly peasants and widows could not take entirely seriously a man who had made his living by scribbling on napkins, soon he was afforded a kind of respect by his association with the former schoolmistress. Besides, he was fascinated by the legends belonging to the island, an interest Amedeo was keen to foster, and which flattered everyone. Pina had told the poet, early on, the story of Castellamare. “There must be some explanation for it,” he said. “That noise like crying. All those white skulls.”

“So there must be,” said old Rizzu. “But it won't be any earthly one. This island's a mysterious place.”

All this, the poet wrote down. When the
fascisti,
his guards, entered the bar, the prisoner-poet vanished out of sight behind the curtain.

To remedy this, Pina began a campaign of passive resistance, merely taking note of what the guards liked best—violet pastilles, Modiano cigarettes, a particular brand of Palermitan
arancello
—and failing to restock it, until the guards found in exasperation that they could get nothing they asked for.
“Mi dispiace,”
Pina would say. “The war in Abyssinia has disrupted the supplies yet again,
signore.
” The
fascisti
repaired instead to Arcangelo's shop, which never seemed to have the same troubles with its stock.

All of these actions were Pina's, true, but Amedeo no longer wished to look away from what was happening to their island. Always, his wife had been ahead of him, from that very first evening when he had pursued her through the house, picking up the pins from her hair. She was ahead of him now, and she was, as always, right. Besides, Pierino had been her last living relative, however distant. She insisted on sending parcels of food weekly to Agata-the-baker's-daughter, despite the depleted supplies in their own house, for the fisherman's family were struggling now with Pierino out of work.

One morning the islanders woke to find Dottor Vitale gone. Now that the island was without a doctor, there was little that
il conte
and Arcangelo could do to stop the islanders coming to the bar for treatment. And if Amedeo occasionally treated the injured and sick among the prisoners, too—well, he was scrupulous about hiding his instruments and covering his traces, and the islanders swore they knew nothing.

So Amedeo resumed his practice of medicine. Besides,
il conte
had his arthritic old war injury, Arcangelo his indigestion, and though they were too proud to come to the doctor directly, they soon began to send their sons for bottles of pills from Amedeo the same as everyone else.

DURING THE SIXTEEN YEARS
since Tullio's birth, Amedeo had not stopped watching the boy's phantom twin, Andrea d'Isantu, for signs of similarity. But the two boys, though born almost in the same minute of the same night, had never been alike—and to his knowledge, had never spoken to each other except when school or
Balilla
activities demanded it. Neither was Andrea like
il conte,
however
.
The boy had been a sallow child, pinched looking, more like a poor man's son, with none of the luxuriant fatness of the count. Now, at sixteen, the boy's thinness had become something more coiled and potent. Andrea's marks at school, his sons reported, were impeccable (second only to those of Maria-Grazia, who was beginning to overtake him). He had excelled in the
Balilla,
and had graduated now to the
Avanguardisti,
where he beat even the zealous Flavio at sports and shooting, and he was to be sent away to a mainland university where he hoped to become active in the
Fasci Giovanili di Combattimento
and then become a party man.

Amedeo tried to make conversation with Andrea when the boy came to collect his father's aspirin tablets every month, but Andrea was oddly self-contained. “My own sons tell me you are making fine progress at school,” Amedeo would say, and Andrea would merely reply, “Yes,
dottore,
I am making progress, thanks to Professor Calleja.” Or, “And how does your mother feel about your departure for university in a year or two?” he would ask, guilty at speaking Carmela's name aloud in case he gave some hint of lingering feeling, but the boy would merely say, “Fine, thank you,
dottore.
She understands that I wish to better myself by going to the mainland.”

This Amedeo knew to be a lie, though a polite one, for whenever he had seen Carmela with the boy—at a distance, during village festivals, or riding about in
il conte
's motorcar—it was clear that she adored her son. In public, she would cling to his arm for support, or brush imaginary mosquitoes from his hair. This attention Andrea endured with the same clear-eyed equanimity with which he endured everything, allowing her to caress him and make much of him, without feeling the need to shake her off as other boys might have done. He was politer and more composed than his father, and better liked on the island, and yet also—in some obscure way—he was felt to be more dangerous. “You know where you are with
il conte,”
said Rizzu. “That's why I could stand working for him for twenty-six years. He shouts when he's angry and laughs when he's glad, and you know then whether to keep out of his way or suck up to him for a favor. He was like that even as a boy. His father was a better landlord, but he's easy enough to read, the current
signor il conte.
Whereas it's anyone's guess what that Andrea with his sharp eyes is thinking. He's polite enough, but I daresay he'll turn out to be a harsher master in the end.”

Still, Amedeo had little time to think about Andrea, for his own sons were getting to an age when he needed to find occupations for them.

He had loved his boys—fiercely, heart-achingly—as small children, but sometimes now he was troubled by the youths they had become. They seemed to belong more to the world beyond the House at the Edge of Night than they did to him and Pina. He had not known bringing up children would be like this, a slow process of losing. The dark Flavio, his middle son, was the most worrying one. He had developed an odd fascination with the
fascisti,
which had divided him from his mother in recent years. He had insisted on pinning a portrait of
il duce
above his bed until Pina took it down and shoved it away in a drawer; he practiced Fascist marching songs every evening on his brass trumpet. Now it seemed Flavio was perpetually running about the island in his
Avanguardisti
knickerbockers and black fez, swarming up mounds and into ditches, firing guns. Outside of the
Balilla,
Flavio was close as a
riccio di mare:
dark, sallow, reserved of manner, grave of habit, just as Amedeo himself had been as a young man.

The bristle-browed Tullio, in contrast, seemed unable to stop talking. Leaning on the veranda, with thick black hair like his mother's and Amedeo's great stature, he charmed the girls on their way home from Mass, exchanged cigarettes with the fishermen, won the confidence of the elderly
scopa
players, and, in short, was admired by everybody. But Amedeo was uneasy at this self-assurance; it seemed a thing too big to be contained by a five-mile island. Tullio spoke incessantly of America, where some cousin of the Rizzus lived and was said to drive a big motorcar and own a refrigerator, having hauled himself spectacularly out of the Depression. It would not be long, Amedeo feared, before Tullio, too, launched himself across the sea. Amedeo, on more than one occasion, had had to extract his eldest son from the bougainvillea, where he had been discovered entangled in the embraces of the eldest Mazzu girl, scandalizing the elderly
scopa
players, and he rode his bicycle so fast about the island that Pina feared he would come into some fatal collision with
il conte
's motorcar.

The youngest of Amedeo's sons, Aurelio, did not talk about leaving the island, chiefly because he was still mired in the painful and protracted process of attempting to complete his final years at school. This youngest boy, Amedeo felt, was most completely his. Aurelio would still sometimes sidle up to him demanding to hear the latest story from the red book, still sometimes consent to sit beside his sister on the veranda and tease the cat, Micetto. Aurelio had a good round face and a voice that still occasionally plunged endearingly out of his control. But even he, Amedeo knew, would tire eventually of catching lizards in the scrubland, of diving into the same patch of ocean from the same bank of rocks each summer weekend, of the endless football game in the piazza. Amedeo saw the way his youngest son followed the elder Tullio about, imitating his swagger, copying his greased hair.

Now he feared, in his heart, that he needed some pretext to keep his restless sons from leaving the island. And so he immersed them in the life of the bar, teaching them how to make coffee and chocolate as Gesuina had taught him almost twenty years ago, keeping them up late at night cooking rice balls and pastries, and enticing them with a modest share of the profits to spend on whatever they wanted: chocolates and football cards and presents for the various neighborhood girls who hung about the veranda on Saturday nights, hoping for a glimpse of “the Esposito boys.” All three walked with a swagger as they imagined American movie stars did, and oiled their hair like the prisoner-poet Mario Vazzo.

THE TRUTH WAS,
Amedeo's work as the island's unofficial doctor was becoming all-consuming, and he was glad to have the boys' help in the bar. In those days, people came to the back of the house to have a tooth pulled or an arm bandaged, and to the front for sweet wine and strong coffee and a game of cards, sometimes both in the course of an afternoon. From the terrace of the bar, recovering patients and other customers could sit under the chaos of vines and sip coffee or liquor while contemplating the bar's singular position: in one direction, the whole bright and seething expanse of Europe; in the other, the vastness of the sea.

One day he came upon his daughter weeping on the veranda steps. “What is it, Mariuzza?” he said, covering her in kisses. “Is Micetto sick?”

“No, no,” she said crossly. “No, Papà.”

“Then what? Do your legs pain you?”

“Papà, my legs haven't pained me in three years.”

He supposed that was the truth. “Then what is it?”

Maria-Grazia gave a cross little huff. “Why do you never let me help in the bar? You let Tullio and Flavio and Aurelio help. Why don't you let me go to the
Piccole Italiane
like the other girls, and do the marching, and the camping, and the singing? All the boys went to the
Balilla.
I can sing, Papà. And I can help in the bar and do sums and give customers the right orders much better than Tullio, who's always got his face stuck in his magazines with pictures of cars, or Aurelio, who barely knows up from down!”