The House at the Edge of Night (2 page)

Unwanted now at the scene, he cleaned his instruments, packed them, and made his way through the dim passages of the villa and out into the light. The sun was breaking, with the quiet brightening belonging to the Mediterranean. It was just past six o'clock.

A figure came running between the palm trunks. Rizzu. “
Signor il dottore,”
the old man yelled in exultation, “you have a baby boy!”

In his extreme tiredness, he did not at first understand. “A baby boy!” cried Rizzu again, startling the doves from the palm trees. “Your wife is delivered of a baby boy!”

Cazzo!
He had forgotten. He met Rizzu at a run. “A very quick birth,” said Rizzu, his modesty forgotten. “One hour, and Gesuina said she could have delivered the baby with her eyes closed!” The old man reflected a moment. “Which is just as well. Ha! Praise be to God and Sant'Agata, praise be to all the saints—”

The doctor refused the tiresome donkey cart, and went at a run through the waking streets. The cicadas had begun to sing. Light entered the alleyways and the squares. A hundred widows in a hundred courtyards were sweeping with a brisk, impatient sound. As he ran, he felt a great converging of the light inside him and without him, so that the whole world seemed charged with it.

The bedroom smelled of blood and exertion. Gesuina dozed, straight upright, on a chair at the foot of the bed. The baby was sleeping, too, hunched in the fold of his mother's waist. “I'm sorry,
amore,”
he said.

“It was easier than I expected,” she said, with her usual practicality. “All that dreading, and it was over in an hour! Gesuina and I managed very well without you.”

He wiped off the last of the afterbirth. The child was a little stretching, mewling creature, as alien as a newborn kitten. He took the tiny weight of the boy and inspected the legs and arms, pressed the soles of the feet, separated the fingers and—with a thrill of pride—listened through his stethoscope to the birdlike beating of the heart. In the extreme joy that broke over him he waxed tender, even poetical. Oh, it was different to be a father than merely a lover—he saw it now! Why had he waited so long to beget a child? He understood that no other part of his life had mattered; all of it had only been a gathering of pace toward this hour.

But now there was the problem of the other baby. By afternoon rumors would be at large in every corner of the island, thanks to that witch Carmela—a miracle, twins born by different mothers, leaping into the world as though by agreement! He knew how they would talk.

His wife lay with the lassitude of a distance runner. He checked her all over, covering her with kisses—more than he would have given, true, if guilt had not been goading him. He knew that a storm of trouble was coming: The midwife and Pierangela had heard Carmela's accusations. A rumor like this would be enough to make an enemy of his wife, his neighbors, perhaps to drive him from the island. But just now all that he permitted to dwell within him was the light.

His own birth had been an obscure thing, uncelebrated, unrecorded.

In the city of Florence, above the Arno River, lies a piazza of dim lights and marine shadows. On one side of this piazza is a building with nine porticoes, and in the wall of this building is a window with six iron bars: three horizontal, three vertical. The bars are darkened with rust; on winter nights, they take on the chill of the air, its damp, its fog. Behind the window, in those days, stood a stone pillar; on top of the pillar lay a cushion.

Here the doctor's own recorded life began, one night in January, when he was unceremoniously shoved through the iron bars. A bell rattled. Both naked and alone, the baby began to weep.

Footsteps approached from within. Hands lifted him. He was folded against a starched chest and borne away into the light.

When the nurses of the foundling hospital unwrapped him, they found that his body was still tender: a newborn, in spite of the size. A saint's medallion, snipped in half, was looped around his neck on a length of red ribbon. “It might be San Cristoforo,” said one nurse. “See—two legs and three wavy lines, like water. Or some kind of southern saint.”

The baby seemed to be in good health. They assigned him to a wet nurse for the night.

At first he was unable to suckle, but the nurse, Rita Fiducci, a dauntless woman, continued to push her worn teat at his mouth until he began to take great sobbing gulps. Sated, he slept. Rita rocked him and sang to him, a little scoldingly: “
Ambara-
bà,
cic-
cì,
coc-
cò!” A song for an older child, but this baby seemed far too robust to Rita for ordinary lullabies. It was a song that would return to Amedeo, at odd moments, all the days of his life.

The director, before leaving for the night, looked in on the new arrival. Five babies in one night! It was becoming an epidemic. A third of all children born in Florence now passed through the iron window of the foundling hospital, to be parceled up, named, fed, cured of their ills, and sent back out into the world that had abandoned them. The director opened a new entry in the great yellow book
Balie e Bambini
and noted the time of the baby's arrival, the wet nurse who had been assigned to him, and a description of the blanket in which he had been found (“blue, somewhat bloodstained”) and of the medallion (“possibly San Cristoforo”). He also recorded the baby's abnormal size, ten pounds and eleven ounces, the largest the hospital had ever seen.

The director took the tin medallion, which he folded up in a square of paper and filed in the box marked “January 1875.” The box was already stuffed with other trinkets in square envelopes: a perfume bottle on a silver chain; a paper silhouette of a lady cut down the middle; tin medallions halved and quartered, like tickets at a left-luggage department. More than half the children carried something with them.

He considered for a moment, then assigned the baby the name “Buonarolo.” In the recent tide of babies—two thousand deposited in the previous year alone—the director, the chief nurse, and her staff had resorted to changing one or two letters at a time to fashion each child a surname: Thus tonight's five babies had become Buonareale, Buonarealo, Buonarala, Buonarola, Buonarolo. And “Amedeo” for a first name would suit this giant infant—a solid, God-fearing name. The director added it, then closed the book.

The baby woke again and sucked at Rita's teat, this time with a sense of purpose. Already unfurling within him was the great ambition of his life: to live, to grow up, and to find a home and a family.

NOT ONLY WAS HE
the largest baby the foundling hospital had ever seen, he also grew twice as quickly as the babies Buonareale, Buonarealo, Buonarala, and Buonarola. It took two wet nurses to feed him, and a special cot had to be purchased and placed between their beds, rather than the usual white-starched cradle, because Amedeo fretted whenever he was placed in the cradle, already straining against its sides. He grew up by great leaps: “an ungainly little thing,” his second nurse Franca said (“a blessed angel” was what Rita called him). Rita held him on her knee and sang “
Ambara-
bà,
cic-
cì,
coc-
cò,” so that sometimes he forgot that she was not his real mother.

When he was a little older, Rita told his fortune from a torn pack of
tarocco
cards. The director caught her and forbade it. Amedeo remembered nothing about the fortune, but he remembered the cards and loved the stories furled within them: the Hermit, the Lovers, the Hanged Man, the Devil, the Tower. He begged for others. Instead of the card stories, Rita taught him a tale about a girl who became an apple, became a tree, became a bird. She taught him a story about a cunning fox. Afterward he longed for a little fox to sleep beside him on the stone floor of the dormitory. His thirst for stories grew. Franca taught him two: the first about a demon named Silver Nose and the second about a sorcerer named Body-No-Soul. After these stories, Amedeo had to shut himself uncomfortably up in Rita's bedside locker, in case the demon and the sorcerer should come for him, but he still loved the tales.

When he was not yet quite grown, Rita went away, and no one said anything more about her. For a while he was sent to the country, to a little house with a dirt floor, where he had a new foster mother and foster father. If you stood on the seat of the latrine and peeped through the window, you could see the bowl of smog that was the city of Florence, where he had been born, and the shiny serpent that was the Arno.

It cost too much to feed him, his foster mother said; she claimed the boy grew out of his clothes. He was sent back.

By the time he was six, there were mostly girls left in the foundling hospital, and Amedeo. The window where he had been delivered was shut up now. Babies had to be brought to an office in a basket, because that was what his nurse Franca called “civilized.” Otherwise, she said, bad people abandoned their babies out of convenience. Amedeo, as he grew, wondered if he had been abandoned
out of convenience
(he took the phrase to mean “by accident”). He developed the habit of stationing himself on the steps beneath the closed-up window, in case his real mother should ever come back for him.

ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY,
the visiting doctor found Amedeo there on his way to inspect the babies. Always, the visiting doctor had kept a special eye on Amedeo. The boy's abnormal size caused him pains in his legs and made him prone to all kinds of accidents, bringing him under the visiting doctor's care more often than the doctor would have wished.

“Now, my little man,” said the doctor (who had difficulty addressing the children sensibly once they passed nine months), “no injuries in the past few weeks, eh? That's good progress. But what's to become of you?”

Amedeo, on this particular afternoon, had been troubled by a vague melancholy that now found a focus and a shape. He took the question rather more seriously than the visiting doctor had intended, and wept.

The visiting doctor was discomposed, in spite of himself. He rooted in his pockets and offered the boy in quick succession a violet pastille, a
lira
coin, a used theater ticket, and a handkerchief with the letters “A. E.” on it (this last Amedeo wetly accepted). “There there,” said the doctor. “They aren't quite your initials, but they'll have to do. The first one is right—an ‘A' for Amedeo, see, for my own Christian name is Alfredo—but not the second. Can you read yet? I don't suppose you can. My surname is Esposito. A good name for a foundling like you; it means abandoned. Of course, one wouldn't be allowed to give that name to a foundling nowadays for fear of prejudice.”

“Were you a foundling, too?” said Amedeo, leaving off his crying for a moment.

“No,” said the doctor. “I think perhaps my great-grandfather was, since we don't have any record of him.”

Again, the boy cried, as though personally insulted by the fact that the visiting doctor was not a foundling. “Take a violet pastille,” urged the doctor.

“I don't like them,” said Amedeo, who had never tasted them.

“What
do
you like?” said the doctor.

The boy, still crying, said, “Stories.”

The visiting doctor cast about in his memory and brought forth a story that he half remembered his own nurse telling him. It was a story about a parrot. This parrot wanted to prevent a girl from betraying her husband, and managed this by means of a fantastic, ever-expanding tale. The parrot flew in the girl's window and told her this tale, and it kept her so absorbed that whole days and nights passed in its telling. Her husband came back and all was well. Or something like that.

Amedeo sat up, wiped his eyes, and said, “Tell me the story properly.”

The visiting doctor could not remember it. But the next week he brought Amedeo a copy, transcribed into a red leather notebook by his housekeeper, Serena, who knew the story well, at least in the particular version belonging to her grandmother's side of the family, who were known to be formidable storytellers. Why he had taken the trouble of getting the story for the boy, he could not quite tell. The notebook had a gold fleur-de-lis on the cover. It was the single most beautiful thing that had passed through Amedeo's hands. Seeing his joy, the doctor made the boy a spontaneous present of it. “There,” said the doctor, satisfied. “You can add more stories to it, or practice your reading and writing.”

After that, Amedeo developed the habit of listening to everybody's stories—nurses, nuns, the priests of the Santissima Annunziata who passed by the steps of the foundling hospital, visiting benefactors—and whenever they pleased him, he recorded them in his book.

When they asked him, at thirteen, to which trade he should like to be apprenticed, he told them he should like to be a doctor. He was sent to a watchmaker. The watchmaker sent him back after three days: The boy's large fingers broke the tiny mechanisms. Amedeo was then sent to a baker, but the baker found himself tripping over the gigantic apprentice, and after several months of tolerating the boy he sprained his ankle in this manner and would tolerate him no longer. Next, Amedeo spent several months with a printer. This he liked, but he was returned to the foundling hospital on account of his unfortunate habit of pausing in his work ten times a day to read the stories, which was costing the printer clients and money.

And so the boy was without trade or calling. He was sent back to school, though he was really too old. Here he finally distinguished himself, finishing every year in first place ahead of the small sons of clerks and shopkeepers in whose ranks he labored. Still he persisted in his wish to be a doctor. He would be the first child from the foundling hospital, as far as anyone could remember, to study medicine, and the director consulted the visiting doctor Esposito for advice. “Could it be done?” he asked.

“It could,” said Esposito, “if someone were to pay, and someone else were to take charge of his guidance and education. And if his clumsiness can be overcome, but I daresay it can if the boy puts his mind to it.”

Under pressure from the director of the foundling hospital, a benefactor offered to pay for part of Amedeo's medical studies, another to supply his books and his clothes. Another two years were lost in military service, but when Amedeo returned, Dottor Esposito submitted to the inevitable (he had really become quite fond of the ungainly boy over the years), and allowed Amedeo to be sent home to live with him. The boy would board in the little box room at the back of the doctor's house, and eat his meals with the housekeeper Serena, and the doctor would oversee his medical education. The boy was almost twenty-one years old and could be expected to look after himself for the rest. The doctor arranged for him to attend lectures at the surgical school of the hospital at Santa Maria Nuova, and in the evenings to earn his keep by washing glasses in a bar between Via dell'Oriuolo and Borgo degli Albizi.

The arrangement was a success. The boy was accommodating, rushing to light the fire or rearrange the doctor's chair as he came in, in a way that the doctor, a bachelor on the edge of old age, found touchingly filial. Amedeo was also a satisfactory companion in conversation, on account of the fact that he studied daily every page of the newspaper and was working his way systematically through the doctor's library. All in all, Esposito was glad that he had taken the boy in. Sometimes, the doctor invited Amedeo to dine opposite him in his dark study, where he was accustomed to take dinner at his desk, surrounded by a mess of scientific periodicals. The doctor was a collector, and the study was full of specimens: butterflies, white worms in jars, sculptures of coral, stuffed Polynesian rodents, and other curiosities of nature that he had gathered during his long and solitary life as the last in a lengthy dynasty of scientific men. The boy was especially fascinated by a medical wax of the human eye, the surface peeled back to reveal the network of veins beneath, which stood on the hall table beside the umbrellas. Dangling alarmingly above the staircase on two wires were brushes from the mouth of a whale. Amedeo was not unnerved by these relics; on the contrary, he grew as fond of the collections as of the old doctor himself. And he privately resolved that one day he would have collections of his own: a parlor full of scientific specimens and a library full of books. His red notebook was filling up with stories, and his head with the longings of a half-educated man.

When at last he qualified (everything, in Amedeo's experience, took twice as long when you were a foundling), he became not a hospital surgeon like his foster father, but a
medico condotto.
In deference to his foster father, Amedeo took the surname Esposito. He could find no permanent job, but practiced his trade in villages where elderly doctors had died or overworked doctors had fallen sick. He had no horse or bicycle. Instead, he walked between the stone cottages in the rain-laden dawns and chill nights. On the hillsides below Fiesole and Bagno a Ripoli, he bandaged the broken ankles and gored shoulders of peasant farmers and delivered the babies of their wives. He sent letters of application to every village in the province, looking for a place, without success.