The House at the Edge of Night (20 page)

He listened to the wireless, understood that the war was drawing to a disordered close. That a pair of great bombs had been dropped in Japan, whole cities flattened, an awful thing. Then surrender. Hitler dead, Mussolini dead. Soon, he knew, soldiers would be returning in ships, on trains, a great exodus across the known world in all directions, their enmities abandoned, like the migration of birds toward home.

MARIA-GRAZIA RECEIVED A POSTCARD
with a photograph of a redbrick English hospital on the front, in the autumn of 1945. Addressed only to “Maria-Grazia Esposito, the House at the Edge of Night, Castellamare Island,” it somehow found her.
“Sto pensando a te,”
it read. “I am thinking of you.” By this, she knew that Robert had survived.

The girl Concetta woke her before it was yet light. “Maria-Grazia, come down!” she called, her voice setting up an echo in the courtyard. Maria-Grazia surfaced from strange dreams, dreams of black caves, of falling. She fumbled for the window latch and put out her head. “Concetta?”

A light rain had fallen; the sky was dense with stars. “Maria-
Grazia
!” called Concetta. “Wake up! It's rained and the
babbaluci
are out. If we go now, we'll get the best of them.”

Maria-Grazia dressed in the dark and descended the stairs, past the shadowy photographs of her brothers. In the courtyard, drizzle was still hanging in the air; the night seemed saturated with it. Maria-Grazia picked up two metal pails, a little slime-ridden on the inside from the last time they had gone out to gather ground snails. Others would be out already, she knew: the Mazzus, whose harvest had been poor this summer;
il conte
's underemployed peasants. “Let's go to the ruined houses,” said Concetta. “No one else looks there. The
babbaluci
hide in the cracks in the walls, all stuck to each other in a ball. I've seen them. Come on, Maria-Grazia.”

Concetta, who had never been known to suffer from fatigue or low spirits, ran alongside Maria-Grazia through the wet dark. In the piazza, the peasant laborers were already stirring. Some were standing about waiting for
il conte
's agents to drive up in the motorcar and hire them as day laborers—it was what they had always done when there was too little work. But some of them were gathering now for a different purpose, looking furtive, bearing red flags, under the direction of young Bepe. “What are they doing?” said Concetta.

“Protesting,” said Maria-Grazia. “Come along—leave them.”

The trouble between the peasants and
il conte
had first started when Bepe had gone to visit his cousin in Palermo. He had come back agitated, running up the steps of the bar the night after his arrival with a Palermo newspaper under one arm and a store of righteous indignation in his heart. “There are new laws,” he announced to the peasants and fishermen sitting around the
scopa
table. “I've only just heard. My cousin told me about them. Land reforms. They've been in place for a year or more, but no one told us about it. But the new laws apply to us here, too, just as much as anybody else in Italy! We're to get a proper share of our grain and olives from now on, not the usual quarter
il conte
offers us. And those of you who aren't tenants or sharecroppers aren't supposed to stand about in the piazza each morning waiting for work—instead, you're to be given a proper contract. And any land that isn't cultivated is ours to take and occupy! Even
il conte
's unused land is ours!”

The peasants gathered grudgingly around Bepe's newspaper, unwilling to be taken in. But sure enough, the mainland newspaper confirmed what Bepe had said—and what was more, if the new laws weren't properly followed, claimed Bepe,
carabinieri
from the mainland would come and make
il conte
follow them, because the new minister for agriculture was a Communist and had said so.

“Yes,” confirmed Maria-Grazia from behind the counter. “It's been in all the newspapers here, too, only no one reads anything in this bar except
La Gazzetta dello Sport.”

“There's one important thing,” said Bepe. “We have to form a cooperative before we can occupy the land.”

“A what?” said the tenant farmer Mazzu, with suspicion. “I'm not cooperating with any of you.”

“We have to form an organization,” said Bepe. “That's all I mean. And we have to go out and occupy the land together. That way the government will listen to our claims. And”—Bepe whipped an expanse of red cloth from under his jacket—“we'll carry this Communist party flag when we go, and stick it in the soil on a little pole. There's a lot of uncultivated land, when you think about it—
il conte
's hunting ground, and that stony bit to the south no one ever bothers with. Which used to be common ground,” he added, and one or two of the older peasants, remembering, stirred with an old indignation.

Gradually, by degrees, Bepe went about the island and made himself heard. The year before, no one's harvest had been good; half the island was in debt to
il conte
and his agents. On the day that
il conte
and his wife left for their estate in Palermo, fleeing the late summer heat, Bepe at last succeeded in tipping the other peasants into action. The following Monday morning, the men—accompanied by their wives with great cooking pots on their heads and an excitable straggle of children—forayed out to claim
il conte
's unused land. The stony field on the south of the island, occupied until now only by wild goats and nests of lizards, was divided into strips with lines of taut fishing wire, and planted with autumn wheat.

At lunchtime,
il conte'
s agents, armed with hunting rifles, rode up on donkeys. “You're to leave this land alone,” they ordered.

The peasants left, but came back when the wheat sprouted, and subversively thinned the rows.

No one knew what would happen when the heat broke and
il conte
returned from Palermo. But now again the peasants were marching out to the fields to claim his unused land: the hunting ground this time. Concetta followed them for a few paces, drawn by the noise of Bepe's muted
organetto,
until their ways parted. Concetta and Maria-Grazia's path took them down the bare hillside, while the procession of peasants wound on along the road, the lights of their cigarettes brief fireflies in the dark. In their wake the music faded; all was darkness and rain. Maria-Grazia and Concetta, pushing through wet grass and clumps of thistle, reached the abandoned houses where the prisoners had once been kept. Sure enough, kneeling down among the rubble, Maria-Grazia found the
babbaluci
everywhere, poking out their heads.

Maria-Grazia felt a pang of regret as she dropped the snails into the bucket. Concetta kept a gleeful count: “Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three…”

“We'll make a stew,” said Maria-Grazia. “With oil and wild parsley and garlic, and a little pepper.”

With the dawn, the ruined houses shrank to ordinary proportions and the snails began to dig deeper underground. The two of them worked side by side without speaking, racing the sun and the day's heat, until one pail was full. “Maria-Grazia,” said Concetta, gazing into the bucket of snails. “What do you think has become of Signor Robert?”

Maria-Grazia stiffened a little at this question. “What makes you ask that?”

“Nothing especially. But what do you think has become of him?”

“I don't know. He's still in England, I expect. I showed you the card he sent.”

“That card,” said Concetta, “didn't have much to say, and it came more than a year ago.”

“I expect his shoulder was hurting again, so that was all he could manage to write.”

“Can't
you
write to
him
?”

Maria-Grazia shook her head. She had written to the hospital a year ago. No news, they told her. The patient had left. They did not know where he had gone.

Concetta lifted a snail and watched it put out its horns and retract them again, as though it were dancing. “Can't we go to England to find him? On a boat, or an airplane. Me and you, Maria-Grazia?”

“Oh, Concetta, you know what that would cost.
Lire
and
lire.
Anyway, he'll come back as soon as he can—I'm sure of it.”

The child disappeared behind the wall. Maria-Grazia heard her muttering to herself and scratching in the earth. The girl would be searching for the smaller snails, the
attuppateddi,
who lived an inch underground. “Don't put the
attuppateddi
in with the
babbaluci,
” said Maria-Grazia. “They'll only fight like last time, and the
attuppateddi
are bitter—they'll have to be soaked for a day or two in bran to get out the bad taste.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said Concetta, by way of grudging reply.

They worked until the sun was overhead, and all the remaining
babbaluci
were gone, buried in their crevasses and holes, the
attuppateddi
sunk deep underground. Concetta, covered in earth up to the elbows, dropped the last handful into her pail. “Can I eat one or two now?” she pleaded. “I don't
mind
them raw.”

“Oh, Concetta—wait until we cook them.”

Only as she straightened, hoisting the first pail, did Maria-Grazia become aware of someone standing a short way behind them, throwing a shadow across her back.

Perhaps it was because Concetta had just mentioned him, or because such things had happened a hundred times in her secret imaginings—but for a moment, as she turned, she was convinced it was Robert. Instead, here was a man in ill-fitting foreign clothes, with a dented cardboard suitcase and a face like one of her brothers'. A face a little compressed and lined but known to her somehow, with its spread nose and dark features and thick eyebrows under a mass of well-oiled hair. It dawned on her in a rush of terror: “Flavio! Dio, is it you?”

“Maria-Grazia,” said the man like her brother.

“Oh, Flavio. Is it really you, not your ghost?”

“Of course it is.”

“Where have you been? We were told you were missing in North Africa.”

“Aren't you going to greet me?” he said.

But when she embraced him, he held off a little, stiff and unyielding in her arms. “You were expecting someone else,” he said. “When you turned and saw me, you were disappointed.”

Now she found herself in tears. “No—it's just the shock of seeing you. Come home to Mamma and Papà—”

“Aurelio and Tullio? Are they back yet?”

“We haven't heard from them.”

She took his wrist and led him, Concetta stumbling behind with the buckets of snails.

Inside the town walls a few people seemed to recognize Flavio and murmured a
“salve”
or a
“buongiorno.”
But no one approached. Aware of this, she talked a little too eagerly: “I'm so glad—and you'll see things are just the same here—we've your medal, too—”

Concetta, struggling behind them, let go the buckets and called, “Hey!
Hey!
”

Maria-Grazia turned. “Sorry,
cara—
it's too much for you to carry. Give me one of those.”

Flavio put out his hand for the other. “What is it?” he said, drawing back a little from the roiling heap.

“Snails.”

“For eating?”

“What else? To tell the truth, there hasn't been much to eat lately. But thank God and Sant'Agata for the fishermen—I'm sure the people on mainland Sicily are starving much worse than we are, miles from the ocean in those dry stony places.”

She noticed all at once, when he took the bucket, that the fingers on his right hand were gone, except the first one and the thumb. She felt tears threaten. “What happened to your hand?”

“Oh.” He looked at his hand both ways, first the front, then the back, as though it were new to him. “Shot off,” he said eventually. “But there's nothing to say about that, and I'd rather not.”

All the way up the main street she tried not to stare at them, the poor lost fingers that had once danced over the keys of his brass trumpet, sounding bright notes.

Outside the house, she stopped and set down the bucket. “Let me go in first,” she said. “Let me tell them.”

Flavio nodded and stood stiffly, holding the bucket of snails.

While he waited, he allowed himself to be soothed by the drafts through the mat of bougainvillea, lulled by the familiar hiss of the sea. He heard the low murmur in the bar, the familiar music of voices. He heard his father's voice, his mother's. His sister again now: “He's here. He's standing outside. My brother, back from the war.”

He heard, unmistakably, his mother's screams of “Tullio? Aurelio?” Only after calling the names of both the others—and a foreign name that he did not recognize at all—did she say, at last, “Flavio?” Flavio heard this, and knew all at once that he would not be happy again on Castellamare.

AFTER THE WAR ENDED,
many of the young men had returned to the island. Some carried medals bundled up in suitcases; others returned in the ill-fitting civilian clothes of strange countries, smelling of foreign shaving foam and cheap hair oil. Just after Christmas, while the
presepe
with its life-size figures of the Madonna, the infant Christ, and the stooped San Giuseppe still stood outside the church,
il conte
had received the news that his son, Andrea, with a shattered knee, was returning from a prison camp in Indiana. At the celebration of the
Epifania,
his mother, now middle-aged, arrived at the church, leaning on
il conte
's arm. Carmela wept before the statue of Sant'Agata, raising her arms and declaring out loud her thanks to the saint. (“For all the world,” said Gesuina, “as if she were a common island woman.”) After that day, Carmela seemed at last to grow old like all the other islanders, her clothes just as tired and inelegant, her face just as worn.

While Andrea was still imprisoned in America, other islanders had also received letters and telegrams with Red Cross stamps and foreign postmarks, and a wave of boys had returned. But there had never been any letter for Pina and Amedeo. This unexpected return of Flavio jarred the House at the Edge of Night, a shock as great as his disappearance had been.

In fact, a crumpled Red Cross letter arrived a day or two after Flavio, delivered by Pierino's son-in-law to the door of the bar. Pina's cry woke the whole piazza, startled the orioles out of the trees, and brought her husband and daughter diving down the stairs—for she believed, for a moment, that it was news of one of her other boys. Instead, it was merely the missing communication they should have received about Flavio. “We are pleased to inform you,” it read, “that your son Flavio Esposito has made contact with us in anticipation of his release from Langton Priory Prisoner of War Camp, Surrey, England. During his time in Britain he has received treatment for an amputation to the fingers of the right hand and for psychological disturbances sustained during his service in North Africa, at the Addington Park War Hospital, Croydon, and also at the Belmont Prisoner of War Hospital, Sutton. He is recovering well, and in reasonably good spirits though not able to write at present. If you wish to enclose a message for him by return, we should be happy to convey it to him.” The letter was three months old.