The House at the Edge of Night (18 page)

Maria-Grazia sent these admirers packing, though she would not have admitted to herself that there was anything in her heart but indignant concern for the Englishman's recovery. “He doesn't want to see you,” she could not resist calling after them over the counter, a little too low for the girls to hear. “He's out of danger right now, but one look at your painted faces would be enough to bring his sickness back again.”

And Gesuina—who had always believed it a great injustice that poor, good Maria-Grazia got the worst of everything among her classmates—woke from her slumber and gave a shout of delight.

But the truth was, the English soldier was not out of danger. Amedeo, as he sat over the young man's bed, felt himself to be engaged in the same struggle he had endured during the birth of each of his youngest three children. The boy's temperature peaked and dipped. He was troubled by a raging thirst. The shoulder itself wept, refused to heal. “Bathe the wound in water blessed by the statue of Sant'Agata,” suggested Gesuina. “That should do it, right enough.”

“What I need,” said Amedeo, “is more sulfanilamide tablets.”

Gesuina pursed her lips at this irreligious talk, shuffled off, and returned with a Sant'Agata medallion to hang round the Englishman's neck, a lucky stone in the shape of the Madonna, and a bottle of holy water from last year's festival.

To Gesuina's great gratification, the wound began to heal. Little by little, the young soldier seemed to be fighting off the infection—until, one morning, Amedeo uncovered the shoulder and, with a nod of satisfaction, found it cool and dry. “It will itch a little,” he told the Englishman, bandaging the wound. “Don't touch it.” For it was his custom to talk to his patients constantly, whether or not the boy understood. Robert grasped enough to sense that the news was good and said,
“Grazie. Grazie.”

“
It's time for you to get up out of this bed,” said the doctor. “It will do you good to sit out a little on the veranda, or in the bar, and get some sea air.”

The Englishman nodded and said,
“Mare, Mare,”
having understood that one word: sea.

MANY OF THE ISLANDERS
had regarded the shuttered window of the foreigner's room with suspicion. But now that he at last emerged into the town, they found to their surprise that they liked him. His lack of language made him oddly attentive and deferential; he would nod along obligingly with even the most outlandish opinions, murmuring only
“Sì, sì, sì.”
He hung about Maria-Grazia in the bar, and he had a flattering habit of rushing to pull out the chairs for the customers or diving to retrieve the lost cards of the elderly
scopa
players, emerging red and flustered and just like the picture they had in their heads of an Englishman. He was attempting to learn Italian, and this provided much daily amusement: The day on which he confused the word for “year” with the word for “anus” was to become legendary on the island. (“I'll never forget it,” Rizzu would weep with laughter, years later. “That young man asking how many
ani
Signora Gesuina had, and the look on her face!
Ha!
”)

What was more, both Micetto and the girl Concetta loved Robert, and as Gesuina said, with grudging approval, “If that wild creature and that wild girl will take to him, anyone will.”

Robert found that, under this strange sun, unable to communicate more than two words with Maria-Grazia, his love was like a fever of its own, immoderate, a constant provocation. If he knew she had passed on the stairs, he would rush to stand in the air she had breathed, gasping for a trace of her perfume (which was dry and a little like oranges). If she touched something on the bar's counter he would surreptitiously pick it up, for the simple pleasure of touching it, too. Robert serenely believed that no one had noticed his adoration. Unable to contain his passion, he even began to speak to her of it. She would come to his room with a jug of water or a book, and as she leaned over to deposit it, he would say, in an ordinary voice as though he were merely thanking her, “Let me make love to you, here, at once, before your father wakes up from his siesta.” Or, as she swept the corners of the bar after closing, he would begin by talking to her about the radio broadcast or the weather, and end by informing her that she was the most beautiful woman he had seen, that the air itself through which she moved was holy.

It was thus that Maria-Grazia—who really spoke perfectly good English, only she had been too shy to admit it in the first place—became aware with a shock of joy that he loved her.

Robert, noticing her blushes, wondered if perhaps something in his tone had given away a trace of feeling, and he resolved to be more matter-of-fact in his declarations. But not to abandon them—for he could not have done that, any more than he could have stopped adoring her. It was part of the miracle of this island, part of the very air he breathed here.

HUNCHED OVER THE STATICKY
BBC broadcasts for news of his comrades, Robert heard that the push into Sicily had been successful, that the Italians had surrendered, and that the Germans had been driven back to Messina. Now that his shoulder was starting to heal, he began to be preoccupied with getting back to his regiment. At least, the fragment of him still dimly motivated by duty was preoccupied. The greater part of him wanted to remain in Castellamare, lulled by the waves and the whirring of the cicadas, boldly declaring his love to Maria-Grazia—to remain here
,
and forget there had ever been a war.

But gradually, this vacillation began to be a kind of misery to him. Either he must leave now, or he would not leave at all, and that would cause difficulties of its own. One day, during the siesta hour, Maria-Grazia came to his room where he was sleeping a little fitfully, the wireless radio beside him receiving only static. Kneeling beside the bed, she took his hand and poured out a stream of Italian, her narrow eyebrows as soulfully tilted as her father's bristling ones. He understood nothing, but it was all he could do not to take her in his arms and tell her the words that had been the first Italian he searched for, feverishly, in Pina's school dictionary,
“Ti amo. Ti adoro.”

Instead, he listened while she spoke to him: She seemed to consider, remonstrate, double back, and finally beseech—then at last she fell silent, apparently satisfied, and dropped his hand.

Without another word, she climbed the stairs to her own room. He heard her moving about (that tread of hers, always slightly uneven). He heard the quick strokes of a brush through her hair, her clothes falling lightly to the floorboards. The bed sighing as she accommodated herself; it was an ancient thing, like all the beds in this house, and too short for Maria-Grazia, who would curl herself slightly to fit into it, her lovely eyes languid, her black braid resting as heavy as rope on the pillow.

Sometimes, when the braid swung over her shoulder as she maneuvered a tray of pastries or swept the corners of the bar, he longed to take it in both hands and kiss its glossy length.

If he didn't leave now, how would he ever reconcile himself again to the war he was supposed to be fighting?

He had prepared a note in Italian, days ago—inadequate, he realized now, to the Espositos' kindness. His tongue felt as heavy, as feverish, as it had during his illness. He laid the note on the nightstand and took his gun and left while they were all still sleeping.

Outside the church, he ran into Father Ignazio. The priest eyed the gun thoughtfully. “Where you go, Robert Carr?” he said at last, but Robert pretended not to understand his English, and with smiles and nods made his escape along an alley. He took Concetta's shortcut, through the scrub and between the prickly pears, reaching the road by this means unobserved. He went at a jog past the Mazzus' farm, supporting his shoulder with one hand because really it was not as strong as he had thought, and hotter with pain, now that he was in the open air. He almost wished that he had allowed the priest to intercept him. The Mazzus' dogs barked, flinging themselves to the ends of their chains, but no one stirred from behind the shuttered windows.

When he was almost at the quay, he heard quick footsteps at a distance. Maria-Grazia, running. The very thing he had dreaded, for now he would be obliged to explain himself. He watched her approach, the cat Micetto streaking in her wake, Concetta scrambling through the scrub yelling, “Wait, Maria-Grazia!
Wait!”
Maria-Grazia stopped before him. And now, from her mouth, poured a great tide of English: “You leave,” she said. “Why you leaving now, Robert? We all want you stay. It's grace that brought you here, everyone think so. Grace of Sant'Agata. Why you leaving just for get killed in another battle?” She gave a dry sob. “I thought you coming up to my room. That was what I ask of you. And instead you turn and leave—it was something I do or say, Robert? You make my mother and father very sad now. You make all of us sad.”

Robert said, a little roughly, embarrassed, “You're speaking English.”

“Yes, yes. I always know to speak English. Only I was too shy, before. Today I ask you, in Italian, to come up to my room, and instead you go and leave us.”

“Why didn't you ask me in English, since you speak it?”

Maria-Grazia, eyebrows fierce, said, “Why you no tell me you love me in Italian, since you know it? I see you leave that page open on your table, again and again.”

“Well, I'll tell you so now,” said Robert, still more roughly than he had intended. “
Ti amo. Ti adoro.
But I have to go.”

“Your shoulder isn't healed. You not able to fight anybody with that shoulder, Robert—you will die.”

“It's healed enough for me to walk until I find my regiment.”

Maria-Grazia wept. “You will die,” she repeated. “Everyone think so. I wish to God and Sant'Agata that the wound reopen—anything that stop you going back to that war.”

“I'll go,” he said. “I'll go, and I'll come back. Haven't I said I love you?”

Maria-Grazia followed him along the dust road, weeping.

At the quay, he discovered a curious thing: Not one of the fishermen—Bepe, or 'Ncilino, or even Agata-the-fisherwoman in her borrowed boat—was willing to carry him to Sicily. All of them flatly refused, standing guard over their oars and shaking their heads. Agata-the-fisherwoman launched a stream of dialect at him with such ferocity that he recoiled. “Why is she angry?” he asked Maria-Grazia, almost tearful at the way Agata, one of his rescuers, had turned on him. “She not angry,” said Maria-Grazia. “But she not willing to take you, either.”

“What does she say?”

“She say you cannot leave now that the war is over,” said Maria-Grazia. “She say you're good luck to us, you bring good luck. She say they catch nothing but good
sarde
and large tuna since you come here—that's just her superstition, of course—”

But Agata-the-fisherwoman had not finished. “What's she saying now?”

“She say…she say this island, it lose enough good men already.”

Robert, driven a little mad by all this, decided there was nothing to be done but to swim to Sicily. Holding his rifle above his head he made a run and launched himself from the quay. Maria-Grazia, the fishermen
,
the girl, and the cat stood in a row watching him, stunned at last into silence. He got as far as the rocks, grunting at the pain in his shoulder. At this point, he was forced to lower his rifle.

Dimly, he heard shouts behind him. When he turned, he saw a great crowd assembling at the end of the quay. There was the doctor, Amedeo; and Pina, and the priest, Father Ignazio; and Rizzu's granddaughter leading Gesuina by the hand; and the elderly
scopa
players; and even the grocer Arcangelo, who had barely exchanged three words with him and until a month ago had been a Fascist. “The townspeople declare,” Arcangelo called across the water, hesitantly, whispering to Pina for a translation, “that if you not stay of your own free will,
il conte
and I will be forced to make you—
come si dice?—
prisoner of war. Come back now, won't you please, Signor Carr?”

As Robert trod water, gasping in the spray and the salt air, a little dizzy at this exertion, the hot pain in his injured shoulder narrowed, intensified. He raised his hand. A sticky residue messed his fingers. The wound had opened and begun to weep. It wept until the three fishermen, Bepe, 'Ncilino, and Agata, had forged through the water, taken him in their arms, and borne him safely to shore.