The House at the Edge of Night (23 page)

Her father came forward and with one swift blow broke the boy's grip on her wrist.

“Out!” he cried. “Out!”

Andrea retreated before the yells of the incensed Amedeo, his cheeks inflamed. “You are not to see my daughter,” roared Amedeo. “You are not to pursue my daughter. You are not to speak to her.”

Flavio, roused, sprang from his room and followed his friend down the stairs in a sweat of embarrassment
.

Now, in the room still ringing a little with what had just taken place, Amedeo rounded on Maria-Grazia. “What were you doing with
il conte
's boy? What was he doing in your room?”

“I wasn't doing anything. He came for Flavio—the rain—I had to invite him into the house to wait—”

“It's some damned game he's playing—it's some wicked game—”

“He came by mistake. He was looking for Flavio.”

Amedeo gripped her by the elbows. “You are not to have anything to do with
il conte
's son.”

But that night, when Maria-Grazia tried to sleep, her dreams were odd and disordered—dreams of the forceful Andrea pinioning her against the chest of drawers as Robert once had, or pressing her up against the wall of the caves by the sea, so that the marks on her back were the imprints of skulls. She woke and washed in cold water, and went down into the bar. When she unlocked the door and stepped out onto the veranda, Andrea was waiting there, a single trumpet vine flower in his hand. The way the light slanted, the flower glowed as though it were a light source of its own. “I made a poor impression yesterday with your father,” he said, “an ugly impression. Can I make amends?”

In the space during which she hesitated, unsure of how to rebuff him, Andrea took her wrist and closed the flower in her palm. It recalled to her the moment when she, a girl behind the bougainvillea, creaking in leg braces, had beheld the poet Mario Vazzo pressing a single trembling vine flower on her mother, Pina Vella, without understanding the meaning of what the prisoner-poet did. Now, she understood it.

She put the flower in a glass of water on her nightstand, and when she looked at it she had a feeling like nausea, but not exactly unpleasant. Her father, when he saw Andrea's gift, threw water and glass from the window so that the vase exploded in a thousand needles. For weeks afterward they were treading on crushed glass as they went about the veranda, and Andrea remained at its edge again: banished, pensive, sallow of face, constantly watching.

Maria-Grazia had never seen her father behave in such a manner. She heard him raging in a whisper at Flavio behind the curtain of the bar some nights, wound in a knot of fury: “I don't trust that friend of yours with Maria-Grazia—not one bit, not even a little!”

ONE EVENING, AFTER THIS
had gone on for several months, her father called her up to his study. Here he took her hand, kneaded it between his own great wrinkled ones, smoothed her hair, and spoke at last. “Would you like to leave the island, Mariuzza? Do you want to go somewhere else? Is that what troubles you?”

“Leave the island,” she murmured, thrown off-balance by the question.

“You could go to university, or train as a teacher,” her father said. “Go to a big city, Roma or Firenze. You've been shut up in this house for so long, taking care of your poor Mamma and Papà in their old age.” The attempt at jocularity fell flat between them, leaving a painful silence.

“Why do you ask me?” she said. “Is it something I've done? Does Flavio want the bar?”

“No,
cara.
Nothing like that. You've never done anything but be a blessing to us.” Her father gave a great sigh and went on, “But Andrea d'Isantu—”

Indignant rage brought tears stinging to her eyes. “What about him?”

“Cara mia. Principessa.”
He stroked her hands, but Maria-Grazia would not be consoled.

“I've done nothing wrong,” she raged. “Nothing happened, Papà.”

“You've heard the rumors about Carmela d'Isantu and me. You can't be ignorant about what happened between us, before you were born.”

Loyalty compelled her to turn away from him, maintaining silence, watching a great liner move along the horizon with slow grace, lit up like a city in the distance. “Look at me, Mariuzza,” said her father. “Don't be ashamed. It's I who should be ashamed, for I was the one who did those things—though God knows I wish I could lie to you and tell you I didn't. I can't stand the thought of being diminished in your eyes,
cara.
But I must speak. Look at me, Mariuzza.”

She looked at the books on the shelves—books of folktales, old leather-bound medical periodicals—at anything rather than her father. “I thought they proved Andrea wasn't your son,” she murmured at last. That was the story she had heard, whispered behind her back in the schoolyard—that a doctor had come from the mainland and done a special test. At the time, the rumor had only bolstered her fierce conviction that her father was innocent.

“That test isn't worth anything,” said her father, with an impatient click of the teeth. “That's no sure way to tell.
Cara,
I don't like the way he looks at you, following you about with his eyes. It's no good, that look. It means trouble.”

“No one else looks at me,” she said. “No one else notices me. No one else on this damned island cares whether I live or die.”

“I've heard of this phenomenon before.” Her father had adopted his doctor's tone—she couldn't bear it! “In my practice on the mainland, when I was a young man, there were a half brother and sister who were separated as children, brought up in different houses at opposite ends of the village, who began living as man and wife, but it's a danger, Mariuzza. In such cases there can be a powerful attraction—not to mention the legality of the affair, the scandal in a small place—”

Humiliation brought her near weeping.

“Does it shock you, what I've confessed?” asked Amedeo. “Does it make you think less of me,
cara
?”

“No,” lied Maria-Grazia, her face turned away.

“What about Robert?” said her father gently. “We all loved Robert.” Here his voice came apart a little, but she felt in her misery that she could not bear it if he were to cry, too, and so she shook him off and went farther away, and said, with as much indifference as she could manage: “Well, what about Robert? We haven't seen him in four years.”

“What about Robert, you say? Cristo, Dio! You loved him, Maria-Grazia, didn't you? But you've never once spoken his name since he went away. He came to us out of the ocean—like a miracle, like a son! Don't you love him, and he you? Isn't he coming back?”

Rage, in the end, brought the infuriating tears to her eyes. “Ask
him
if he's coming back!” she wept. “Ask
him
if he loves me! I've waited, haven't I? For four years I've waited! Now I'm to be humiliated, a laughingstock, an old spinster in everyone's eyes, the only girl left alone! I loved Robert! Why won't you all see that I loved him—that I waited and waited and waited for that worthless
stronzo,
and he never came back for me?”

Her father reached for her, but she fled him, inconsolable. She escaped the town by the nearest route, tumbling down through the olive groves, and lost herself among the caves by the sea.

ANDREA D'ISANTU, AMEDEO DECREED,
was never again to enter the House at the Edge of Night.
Il conte
had also curtailed Andrea's freedoms, and later that year arranged for a friend from the mainland with five daughters to spend Christmas at the villa. Andrea escaped while they were all having dinner on the first evening, and threw sand at Maria-Grazia's window. “Maria-Grazia!” he shouted, drunk. “Why won't you see me? Dio, are you trying to drive me insane?”

Maria-Grazia, with the weight of her father's warning on her chest, could not bring herself to open the window. From behind the curtain she watched instead, mute, as Andrea turned away, hunched over his walking stick, and crossed the piazza. At its four corners windows were opening, neighbors peering—alone in the frosted dark, Andrea seemed to her the loneliest person on the whole island, as solitary as that schoolboy had been, elevated above the others on his throne of four concrete bricks.

Rumors raced around the island and were back at the House at the Edge of Night before morning. The count's boy had been sick since the war—that everyone knew—but still doubt persisted in the minds of some of the islanders. Mustn't Maria-Grazia have done something or other to encourage him? Descending the stairs to the bar, she knew by the abrupt silences of the customers, the shuffling glances, that it was what everyone had been talking about. And she overheard ugly things in the following days: “He's quite besotted with her, Signora Carmela says—refuses to marry any of those city girls,” “In love,
gesummaria,
with a girl who might be his sister for all anyone knows,” “I've heard of this—my cousin on the mainland knew someone who married a first cousin—children with legs like octopuses, heads like
medusas,
with twelve fingers and five eyes—”

Andrea attended the Christmas Mass, between his mother and father, the city girls processing in his wake. From the front of the church, facing down the whole island, he twisted and fixed Maria-Grazia with his dark, uncompromising gaze.

Now, the elderly
scopa
players and the women on their wooden chairs outside the houses gossiped about her quite openly. The whole island seemed to have become a mass of lowered eyes. She was tainted like Flavio was, like Andrea; the desert dust of their war had left its trace on her, too. In those last days of 1948 she cried in frustration, pummeling the mattress of her narrow room in silent grief. Andrea was said to be sick. He no longer drank with her brother under the palm tree, no longer took his solitary walks around the island, and those peasants who still worked for
il conte
whispered that he had hung up his walking cane, taken to his bed, and refused to speak to anybody anymore.

None of this would have happened if Robert had come back for her. He had betrayed her so completely by his leaving, by his years of silence, that she felt sometimes that she simply could not care about him any longer. Andrea was right about one thing: This was an
isola di merda,
full of gossip, full of shame. She could not stand it. As 1949 began, her twenty-fourth year, she developed the habit of hoarding banknotes from the till and stuffing them down the back of her bed in an old Campari bottle. When she had enough, she'd be gone from this place.

That year, shortly after
Epifania,
Carmela paid a visit to the House at the Edge of Night. She must have made her way in when the house was still sleeping, for Maria-Grazia, rising early with the dissatisfaction that had possessed her since the beginning of this trouble with Andrea, found
la contessa
already waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. There she stood in her faded Paris suit the color of aubergines, her Sunday hat with its visor of dotted tulle purchased before the first war. It was the first time that Carmela had crossed the threshold of the House at the Edge of Night in twenty-eight years, since Pina had ejected her and her baby from the bar and sworn never to let them return.

“Signora d'Isantu,” said Maria-Grazia, coming to rest in the sunlight at the turn of the stairs.

Now Carmela spoke, her voice as thin and windblown as that of the late Gesuina. “Signorina Maria-Grazia,” said Carmela. “You have to help my son.”

Maria-Grazia found her heart constricted, her breath slight. “What's wrong? Is he sick? I'll wake my father—I'll fetch his medical bag.”

“No, no, no,” wept Carmela, shaking her head. “Don't fetch Amedeo. It's you I need.”

“Tell me what's the matter.”

“He's sick,” said Carmela. “He's sick for love of you, Signorina Maria-Grazia! All year he's been growing worse. He won't leave his bed, he won't eat, his tongue is dry and white, his eyes are yellow. I fear I'll lose him. Won't you give him some hope? My boy is dying for love of you.”

As though she were an actress lifting a mask, Carmela pushed back her veil, and Maria-Grazia saw that tears had washed the kohl from
la contessa
's eyes, and her cheeks underneath were gray-smudged like a bandit's. Pity moved Maria-Grazia. She took Carmela by the elbow and led her into the empty bar. Taking down two upturned chairs, pulling the blinds against the intrusive eyes of the early customers loitering in the piazza, she left the sign at “Chiuso” and began to rouse the coffee machine. “No, no,” said Carmela. “Something stronger—more fortifying—that
limoncello
Rizzu used to make, if you've got any left?”

Really, Carmela must be a little beside herself, thought Maria-Grazia, for that
limoncello
had been exhausted a quarter of a century ago. Instead she fetched a different bottle, and set two glasses between them. The clock above the counter stood at just after seven, but all the same, Carmela swallowed her dram of liquor in one bracing gulp and, like a woman in mourning, consented at last to sit down, feeling her way onto the edge of the chair.

“
Signor il figlio del conte
can't set his mind on marrying me,” said Maria-Grazia at last. “It's not possible. From what I've heard, anyway, Signora d'Isantu, it wouldn't be right.”

Here Carmela turned acidic, flashing her eyes with bitter amusement. “I know how they all talk about me. It's not true, what you've heard.”

Maria-Grazia found herself timid with hope: “Not about my Papà…or…or the caves by the sea?”

“Yes, yes, that's all true. I don't mean that.” Carmela dismissed this with one downward motion of her white-gloved hand. “But Andrea isn't your half brother. At least, I don't believe so. That's what I'm here to tell you. Maria-Grazia, I believe there's no barrier to your loving him. There's no barrier in the eyes of God or the law to the two of you being married. That's what I came here to say.”

When Maria-Grazia made no answer, Carmela reached forward and plucked at her sleeve. The
contessa
had an odd musk about her, a perfume of despair that hung about them in the air. “My boy is threatening to leave the island if you don't,” she finished.

At last, carefully, Maria-Grazia said, “How can you be sure he isn't my half brother?”

“I'm convinced of it,
cara,
” said Carmela. “It's true what they gossip, that my husband and I had never been able to conceive. But
cara,
he hardly tried.” Here Carmela gave one quick, disparaging laugh and reached again for the
limoncello.
“My husband put it about that I was barren when we were first married, until the whole island knew about it. It suited him, I suppose, to make a mockery of me and avoid his duties at the same time. The truth is,
he
never wanted
me
. It was a marriage made by arrangement, an affair of land and
palazzi
parceled out between our families. Never consummated—or hardly, nothing worth speaking of. I must be frank,
cara—
excuse me. The truth is, my husband never wanted any woman. Well, not until I began seeing other lovers. Then, I suppose, some lordly instinct came over him and he'd come back to me for a while. That was the only way to make him care anything about me. It was only after the affair with Amedeo that he wanted me,
cara.
Only after someone else did. So you see”—here Carmela caught Maria-Grazia's sleeve again—“Andrea isn't likely to be Amedeo's child. You're free to love him—you must. I allowed those rumors about the boy being Amedeo's—God knows why, some instinct for mischief, some wish to get the better of my husband—but it isn't true. At least, I don't believe it.”

Maria-Grazia looked into the misted depths of the
limoncello.
“But you don't know for sure,” she said at last.

Again, Carmela plucked at her wrist. “He has his father's weak ankles,
cara.
The same attacks of constipation once a fortnight. When the damp winds come in from the north, they both get agonies like needles in their knees, in their old war injuries, in just the same place. I've watched them together for twenty-eight years. I'm certain of it.”

“But you can't know for sure,” persisted Maria-Grazia.

“No,” said Carmela. “I can't know for sure.”

When Maria-Grazia maintained her silence, Carmela reached forward again and caught hold of her sleeve. “Please,
cara,
give my Andrea some hope or he'll be gone—I know it—I know he will, and leave me all alone here, with no one but my damned husband for company in this whole godforsaken town.”

“You can't command me to love him, just like that!” cried Maria-Grazia, panicked in the face of the
contessa
's grasping, her desperation.

“No, no, Signorina Esposito. No one's commanding you—I didn't mean that. But won't you give him an answer? Give him an answer at the end of the summer, when you've had time to think about it. Say six, eight months—ten if you wish! Take all the time you want to think it over, and let him court you, let him visit—”

But Maria-Grazia was overwhelmed: “No, no—I don't want him to visit—I don't want him to court me—hasn't there been enough scandal already?”

“Very well, then I'll order him not to visit you until you've had time to think it over. As long as you need,
cara.
Six months, a year! I'll order him not to come near.”

“And what if I have no answer by that time?”

But here Carmela dissolved again: “He's threatening to leave—he'll be gone, my only boy—”

“Very well,
sì, sì,
” said Maria-Grazia, who felt all at once that she could not bear another attack of weeping. “I'll think about it—I'll give him an answer in six months.”

“Tell no one I've been here,” said Carmela, gathering her purse, buttoning the little aubergine-colored jacket, dabbing methodically under her veil to blot the black rivers of kohl from her face. All at once she seemed herself again, the same cool column of a woman whom Maria-Grazia had only before encountered at a distance—passing her with lowered eyes at the Communion rail
,
or standing aloof at the saint's festival, dressed in clothes that had been new before the first war, a veil always covering her eyes.

“I won't tell anyone,” said Maria-Grazia.

“Someday years from now, when I'm dead…” murmured Carmela.

“I won't tell.”

Carmela took her wrist again, with a cool pressure. “You've a kind face,
cara,”
she said
.
“It's a relief to me to tell someone, after all these years shut up in those empty rooms, speaking to no one. And you've given me hope, for I see that you could find it in you to love him,
cara.
Tell me the truth. You could.”

“
Sì,
” admitted Maria-Grazia. “I could.”

Carmela gripped both her hands. It was a smooth grip, uncalloused as a child's, the kind of grip achieved only through a lifetime spent in white gloves. Then she was gone, so that Maria-Grazia, light-headed, watching her recede across the piazza, believed for a moment that she had only dreamed the encounter. The piazza was calm again. The palm tree's shadow moved listlessly across the tiles of the veranda, marking time like a sundial's needle. The lizards crept out from the cracks in the houses to seek the day's sun.

But Maria-Grazia found herself raging in a whisper as she went about the early morning business of igniting the coffee machine, rolling the blinds up, arranging the chairs. What claim did this Carmela have on her? Was she, Maria-Grazia, to become the repository of everybody's secrets? What was it they wanted from her, they with their shames furled within them, their guilty eyes, piling upon her these troubles that had occurred before she was born?

And yet the thought of Andrea sleepless, tormented, pained her as the fear for Robert once had. Did this mean love, or only pity? She could not love Andrea the way she had loved Robert. She knew that to be the truth; she had used up all her capacity for that kind of adoration. And yet Robert was gone and Andrea was here, and was sick with love for her. No one else had ever paid her that honor. For Totò and for the widower Dacosta she had been merely a potential wife, replaceable. Perhaps Robert had long since replaced her, too, with some English girl, some sweetheart from before the war. Not Andrea d'Isantu.

A tenderness persisted in her when she thought of his shattered leg, recollecting the shame of her own weak ankles, her own limping gait. And hadn't they really been companions since their youth, when she considered it: she and
il conte
's son, both friendless, united by the same dark intensity, the same solitude, the same studious hunch and high marks? Four years behind him in school, she had felt herself always to be following in his wake, for when she outstripped her own companions, Andrea's grades were the ones drawn out of the teacher's cupboard for comparison. Professor Calleja would murmur, “Now, Esposito, let's see how d'Isantu fared in this exam.” The schoolmaster had kept a running average of her marks alongside Andrea's. By his final year, her average had outstripped his. When Andrea was informed, he had merely smiled a little, inclining his head. She had seen this at the time as ungenerous. Why hadn't he consented to shake her hand? But might it not have instead been a kind of deference, the same deference with which he had tremblingly presented her the flower?

At the end of the summer she would give her answer. Until then, she would do her best to drive both of them, the Englishman and
il conte
's son, utterly from her mind.

EVEN THE ISLAND WAS UNSETTLED,
dissatisfied, in those days. It had once been a volcano. Though the islanders knew this, the volcano had lain quiet so long that they often forgot. And then sometimes it behaved oddly, smoldering with faint recollections of its past. Once or twice a decade a hole in the ground would open, releasing a jet of smoke, singeing a vine, or turning a mountain goat to a black heap of bones. At other times, warm water would well under the rocks at the edge of the ocean, moved by invisible currents. Then, if you plunged your head under the surface, you could trace a line of bubbles escaping from some chasm in the island's side. But these things were expected. The island, after all, was known to be a place of miracles.

The volcano had never erupted; its crater lay somewhere under
il conte
's villa. But it did shift itself sometimes, sending out shocks and tremors. Nineteen forty-nine was one of those years. The ceiling of the House at the Edge of Night opened with new cracks that January. By March, it was possible to lie on the floor of the bar and hear a sound like groaning coming up from the earth. This Concetta reported with delight, stretched flat as a sea star on the tiles, hissing at everyone to be quiet so she could listen. “An earthquake's coming, Maria-Grazia!” she announced. “An earthquake's coming!”

The child still had a disconcerting appetite for chaos and violence. “Sant'Agata preserve us from any earthquake,” Rizzu admonished her. “I'm too old for that.” And he attempted to terrify Concetta with fantastical tales of the former earthquakes, when all the houses had been floored except the House at the Edge of Night and old Mazzu's farm and
il conte
's villa, when great tidal waves off Sicily had assaulted the shores of the island, like the tale of Noah and his sons, and the islanders had fled to higher ground.

Concetta refused to be terrified. “Imagine!” she cried, eyes lit. “Everything gone! My father's stupid shop and all of it gone!”

Maria-Grazia was up on a ladder painting the front of the bar when she felt the first real shudder. A sideways tugging, like a fishing boat going aground. Descending, panic stifling her so that she could not have cried out if she wanted to, she collided with her brother. “Gesù!” said Flavio. “Gesù Dio!” He was barefoot, still in his nightshirt, as he ran across the square. “Flavio!” she called. “Come back!”

The earth subsided; the island once again lay calm. She pursued her brother across the piazza and cornered him in the shade of Gesuina's empty house. He cowered, on his knees. A crowd had gathered. “Flavio,” she said. “It's safe. The earthquake has passed over.”