The House at the Edge of Night (14 page)

Reeling a little at this outpouring of discontent, Amedeo said, “But you don't want to help in the bar, do you? You're a clever girl—you might go on to become an educated woman. And you don't want to go to those Fascist Saturdays, do you, and those camps?”

“My legs are
fine
!” roared Maria-Grazia. “And everyone else goes to them! I'm the only one on this whole island who doesn't!”

With that, she retreated in a rage behind the curtain of the bar. He heard her steps go away from him through the house—still slightly uneven after all those years in braces—and stung with a mixture of exasperation and love.

Was even Maria-Grazia to become adolescent and recalcitrant? He felt he could not bear that. Later he went to her and, soothing her with pet names and the choicest pastries from the bar counter, agreed to allow her to attend the
Piccole Italiane
on a trial basis.

As it turned out, the trial was short. The
Piccole Italiane
would not have her. Professor Calleja felt she could not keep up with the others, that her weak legs hampered her.

Racing up the bar steps in a storm of tears, Maria-Grazia shoved away her father's questions. “I don't want to hear anything about the
Piccole Italiane
anymore!” she cried. “I'm going to leave for the mainland and become a nun!”

It was the poet Mario Vazzo who enticed her out again in the end, serenading her so charmingly that she relented, a little angry with herself, and came back down.

“I'll send your mother to talk to that fool of a teacher Calleja,” said Amedeo. “She'll soon put him right.”

“I don't want to hear anything more about it, Papà,” said Maria-Grazia.

He had intended to speak to Pina about it, but the next day, the newspapers were full of the German führer,
il duce
's great friend, and his war in Poland. Though
il duce
was to dig in his feet and vacillate for another year, it was this war that soon became the only thing anybody could talk about. And it was this war that was to lead Amedeo's sons, one by one, away from the island.

Shortly after Tullio's nineteenth birthday, all the boys of his former school class were sent letters ordering them to the mainland. Here, they were to undergo a medical examination. Tullio returned from this examination with a new city haircut, and possessed of private thoughts that made him quiet and inward looking, though he had never before been a pensive boy. He had been pronounced medically fit, and a few months later a green postcard arrived ordering him to report to the barracks near Siracusa.

Tullio considered for half a day, lying on his back in the bedroom full of the football medals and tin cars of his boyhood, instructing his brothers not to disturb him. But that night, when his friends congregated on the veranda of the bar to discuss airplanes and machine guns, Italy's cities and far-off mountains, he was lost. After the bar closed its doors that night, he stood before his mother and father and announced his decision. “I mean to go,” he said. “I'd feel all my life that I'd missed the real thing if I didn't. And, anyway, I don't have a choice, so we'd better all be as cheerful as possible about it.”

His willingness to go cut Pina to the core, though she had planned from his infancy that he should have a life away from the island. It seemed indecent that he did not weep or struggle, that he waved grinning to them from the fishing boat that bore him away. “All of them will be taken,” she wept. “Why, by Sant'Agata and all the saints, did I ever wish for three sons?”

Tullio sent them a keepsake photograph of himself in his regimental uniform. He sent them fortnightly letters, in which he alluded only vaguely to his location. They believed from the dust that fell lightly from the pages that it was somewhere hot like their own island, Libya or Abyssinia, not the cold north—and for this at least Pina gave thanks.

When Flavio received his green postcard, he was already packed, prepared, and performing daily pull-ups and push-ups in his bedroom so as to be “battle ready.” He mailed an eager, unpunctuated letter from the barracks three weeks later, complete with a matching photograph, and that was the last they heard from him.

On the awful day in 1942 when the youngest, Aurelio, left the island, Amedeo stood at the bar counter without speaking, his hands wide apart, bracing himself by its support the way Maria-Grazia, years ago, had braced herself on the stone sill of the fisherman Pierino's window—and neither she nor her mother could think of a thing to say.

Aurelio, in his photograph, looked tearful and a little boyish, with a shaving rash on his neck.

The boys' regimental photographs were added to the display along the hall, and sometimes when Maria-Grazia came downstairs softly in the mornings, she found her father standing before them.

Meanwhile, she overheard her mother and father crying, a thing she had never witnessed before. It woke her in utter disorientation one night. “I should never have encouraged them to leave,” she heard Pina weeping. “I should never have told them about the mainland, about the universities and the cities and the
palazzi
!”

And her father: “Who has succeeded in keeping their children? Even the Rizzu boys have been ordered away now, and they had to be dragged off by the recruiting officer. How could we have kept them here?”

“All the same,
amore,
” Pina wept, “they won't come home. I know it—they won't come home.”

And now her father's voice, too, became high, lamenting: “I should never have made that bargain with the saint! I should never have gambled Maria-Grazia's life against theirs! What have I done, Pina,
amore—
what have I done?”

No one could get out of him what he meant by this—not Pina, not his daughter. But it was as though her father knew already that the boys would not come home.

THE NEWS OF TULLIO'S
disappearance arrived by telegram. He had gone missing in Egypt. The news that Aurelio was missing in the same battle came a week later: The two boys, Tullio, the eldest, always leading, and Aurelio, the youngest, always following, had vanished together. The news about their middle boy, Flavio, came three months afterward, though he had vanished at almost the same moment.

There followed a longer letter in which Amedeo was informed that Flavio had been awarded a medal by
il duce,
for service against the British in Egypt. This medal his sergeant enclosed, because it was all of Flavio that had been found during the retreat.

Holding the disc of metal in his hands, Amedeo broke, and so did Pina. With stooped shoulders, he ordered the customers away from the bar and shut its doors. “It will remain closed,” he ordered, “until our Tullio and our Flavio and our Aurelio are found.”

He retreated to his study at the top of the house, where he polished and repolished Flavio's medal, as though trying to scrub out the relief of
il duce
emblazoned on its bronze face. He became once again submerged in stories, with a kind of drugged distraction. Meanwhile, Pina, who had been summoned back to teach a little at the school now that Professor Calleja was fighting at Tripoli, did her duty calmly, but moved through the house as though asleep, too, troubled no longer by anger or passion or fierceness or—in fact—by anything at all. To Maria-Grazia it seemed that she was living now not with her mother but with the ghost of her mother, and with a vague, helpless double of her father who moved about like an old man, shoulders bowed.

The House at the Edge of Night was locked up. On the mirrors behind the counter, on which the bar's name was emblazoned in twirling, fanciful script, rust spots began to bloom and lizards crawled, leaving behind them trails of four-fingered prints. The bar, like all things on the island under the influence of sun and dust, returned with alarming speed to its perpetual faded amber, so that seen from a distance it was like the sepia photograph of a building.

Maria-Grazia finished her growing up in this reverential silence. They were both broken, her mother and her father, and she tended them with gentleness. But inside her a storm was raging. She was
not
broken: She was almost seventeen and full of tightly wound life, and here she was compressed between the two of them with their grief and their silences, with scarcely room to breathe. She did not want to believe, as they did, that her brothers were not coming home—that Tullio would never again be discovered entangled with some girl behind the bougainvillea, that Flavio would never again trumpet one of his Fascist marching songs. Worst of all, Aurelio, who (though she had never told her parents this, and refused to let herself remember it except very occasionally) had crept to her room in the early hours before his departure and wept, racked with silent fear, in her arms. Aurelio, always her kindest brother, was like her at heart, she knew—he had never wanted to leave the island, had loved its shuttered noons and its roads weighted with heat and silence. For Aurelio, this small world had been enough, and yet he had been sent far away across the sea, to be lost among the deserts of Africa. If she allowed herself to think about it she might, like her parents, simply refuse to inhabit her life any longer. So, for her own survival, she decided not to believe that they were gone.

The summer after Aurelio left,
il conte
's agents had come to the House at the Edge of Night with a written offer to buy the bar. “Why not?” said Amedeo, throwing up his hands.

“What will Tullio and Flavio and Aurelio do, if we sell the bar while they're away?” cried Maria-Grazia. “Have some sense, Papà!”

“The accounts won't balance,” said Amedeo. “I haven't the strength to open the place again.”

Then Maria-Grazia, exhausted with her parents' weeping, took charge. She had finished school with the highest marks—eights and nines, even tens in arithmetic and Italian. Without opening her prize books (Pirandello, Dante, and a volume of Fascist poetry), she put them away and the next morning occupied herself with the salvaging of the bar. If her mother and father could not take care of the House at the Edge of Night, she would.

She opened its doors and began trading in a reduced way, staving off the financial ruin that had begun to hang over them like the air of defeat hanging over the whole country. Chasing the lizards away from the mirrors, which they now considered their territory, she saw reflected in the glass the impossibly blue line of the ocean and allowed herself to dream of the day when her brothers would cross it as war heroes with medals on their chests. Then, perhaps, she would be an educated woman, but not yet.

She could no longer get the cigarettes or matchbooks that once had come from the mainland, the packets of chewing gum or the bottles of liquor. A shipment of
arancello
had been bombed in the Strait of Messina; the pistachios for the pastries, which came from Sicily, could no longer be bought because the Sicilian peasants, starving under the loss of half their manpower to the war effort, had foraged and eaten them all. At the beginning of the war the wives of Castellamare had hoarded the remaining mainland food: cans of fruit and hot chocolate from Arcangelo's shop, packets of
biscotti,
fat
salami.
Maria-Grazia could no longer get coffee for the bar, and drinking chocolate had long since been out of the question. The baker no longer supplied anything but the hard, rustic bread belonging to the island, and—when the supply of flour became sporadic—very little of that, and most of it dry and gritty. The island's pigs grew thin, and the butcher had taken to cutting their ham into petal-like slices in order to sell more for the same price. Everything that could be harvested that summer of 1942 was harvested as usual, but afterward the most desperate peasants went out into the fields as they had in the nineteenth century and gleaned what was left, and others took to roaming the hedges and abandoned orchards, foraging for wild “grandfather” oranges, the warty fruits that had been left on the trees since last year and were sometimes succulent and sometimes dry as sand inside. The peasants also foraged little bundles of “greens,” which were really just weeds and shooting plants, but could be tied up with string and sold in the marketplace. They gathered bucketfuls of the great
babbaluci,
ground-snails they found under rocks after wet weather. They dug nuts from among the thorny grass of
il conte
's uncultivated hunting land.

By the end of the war, they would all be eating snails and greens. For now, Maria-Grazia instead served approximations of the former glorious pastries; homemade
arancello
and
limoncello,
which she bought directly from the island's elderly widows; and what she christened
caffè di guerra:
hot water with a dusty trace of coffee. In a faltering way, complaining loudly, people continued to come to the House at the Edge of Night, if only for the company. Maria-Grazia, in the latter years of the war when all the railways were bombed and the ports occupied, would invent fantastical dishes for the customers out of what was left, a homemade
limonata
utterly without sugar, chicory coffee, bread-and-tomatoes, bread-and-onions, bread-and-greens.

Very little in the way of material goods could be brought from the mainland, because of the constant passage of warships around the island and the fact that there was nothing to be had. But occasionally extraordinary things washed up. One night the fisherman 'Ncilino, Pierino's son-in-law, brought word of a crate of wireless radios, in full working order, available for discreet purchase to the highest bidder. Maria-Grazia waylaid him on the way back from the sea and demanded to see the radios. Two or three were waterlogged, one had a smashed dial, and another was undamaged. “If you can get me a battery for it,” said Maria-Grazia, “and if it works, I'll buy it.”

The bar was becoming outdated, as Maria-Grazia knew, and in a fit of recklessness that kept her awake for several nights afterward, she spent the whole of her first two months' profits on the radio—outbidding even Arcangelo, who had wanted it for his shop. Once 'Ncilino had obtained batteries by some means known only to himself, the radio came alive.

She set it up on the counter. She loved the BBC station, which they picked up occasionally from Malta (“If the wind is right,” claimed Gesuina), and any station that played jazz music and orchestral music, so different from the wailing songs of the island, that were all she had ever heard. But cannily she kept the wireless tuned instead to news of the war. Now that the bar was hers, and now that the wireless radio might at any moment blare tidings of their sons and nephews and grandsons, people thronged to the bar and gathered round the wireless radio, in spite of having to pay one whole
lira
for
caffè di guerra
and gritty bread with a few greens arranged on top.

“I would have charged you more for that radio,” said 'Ncilino ruefully, “if I'd known I was selling you the only wireless on Castellamare. But there you go, Maria-Grazia, you're a clever businesswoman and I can say no more about it. Who would have thought you'd become so shrewd, you with your leg braces always clanking about?”

Maria-Grazia knew how she had always been viewed on the island. She knew that she was, at best, “that poor girl in the leg braces,” at worst, “the cripple child”—though she had stopped wearing the leg braces when she was fourteen, and tired now only when she walked long distances, or uphill. In the end she had not thrown away the braces, but stowed them in the old Campari liquor box in her father's room under the eaves, among the other family relics. She sometimes felt the phantom weight of them, and it seemed the rest of the islanders, too, still believed them to be fastened around her ankles. In fact, it had taken the blind Gesuina almost three years to realize she no longer wore them, for the simple reason that no one had bothered to tell her. “I couldn't hear them anymore, of course,” said Gesuina, who was nearly ninety and had to be led to and from the bar each morning. “But I thought it was just my hearing going, too.”