The House at the Edge of Night (24 page)

Flavio, turned in on himself, shook his head and keened. He rubbed and rubbed at the stumps of his right hand. When she got up close and looked in his eyes, she could see that they were filmed like the elderly Gesuina's had been: Before him was not the sunlit piazza or the House at the Edge of Night but some desert place. It took her a long time to persuade him to take her hand.

As she led him back to the bar, shivering, clutching his flapping nightshirt to him like a girl caught in a high wind, someone let out a jeer. But a spirit of defiance had come over her now since the gossip over Andrea; she hauled Flavio along behind her without lowering her head. “Come on,” she said. “It's not everyone who fought as bravely as you, Flavio.”

After that day, the gossip about the island was that the Esposito boy had without a doubt come back from the war damaged in the head—but no one would hear anything said about Maria-Grazia.

AS THE TREMORS PERSISTED,
the island was afflicted with a religious fervor. It gripped Flavio worst of all. No one noticed until the Sant'Agata bric-a-brac from beside the bar's front door, to which none of them had paid much attention for a quarter of a century, began to go missing. First the holy water, then the rosaries, and at last even the great gruesome statue of the saint with bleeding heart. The statue was spirited away one night in April, leaving behind only a dust-free circle on the hall table to mark its passing. Pina, searching the house, unearthed the relics under a cloth in a corner of Flavio's bedroom, between two blackened candles. At nights Maria-Grazia heard him in his room below hers, mumbling prayers. Soon he began to absent himself from the bar for long periods, and could be found following Father Ignazio about the church, hounding him with earnest questions.

“Oh, I don't mind,” said the priest, when Amedeo apologized. “Sant'Agata knows I've always liked your children, Amedeo—though I'm afraid I can't teach Flavio anything very orthodox. I've forgotten most of it myself!” The priest set Flavio to work polishing the great brass crucifix behind the altar, a chore Father Ignazio had never relished. But Flavio applied himself with solemn devotion each morning, bending reverently over the tin of brass polish with the old shirt rag the priest had given him, pausing to look into the face of the metal Cristo on his cross and murmur private appeals.

Every lunchtime, Maria-Grazia would shut up the bar and walk to the church to retrieve Flavio—otherwise, he would have forgotten to eat. During these walks he harangued her without pause on the miracles of the saint, beginning and ending midsentence, as though the words were merely an eruption of his own disordered thoughts: “…and that's the thing about Sant'Agata, you see, the mystery, that no one knows who she was, perhaps a poor peasant girl, or a farmer's daughter, and yet she saw visions, true visions…” He had joined the Committee of Sant'Agata, sitting primly on Saturday afternoons in the widows' parlors with their dark wood and rose-scented handkerchiefs, discussing the candles to be ordered for the saint's festival, or the new kneeling cushions to be sewn for the Madonna Chapel. Among the boys who had once been his friends, now fishermen and laborers and shopkeepers, Maria-Grazia knew that Flavio was a laughingstock. “Leaving his sister to run the bar while he prays to Sant'Agata,” she had heard, “shutting himself up in secret with those old women.” Flavio sat alone now at the table under the palm tree—fasting, he drank only a little lemon water, sucking his teeth.

“It's a guilty conscience,” someone muttered. “It's the ghost of Pierino haunting him.”

For Flavio was still blamed by many for the beating of the fisherman. In those first earthquake-racked days, old Pierino had died. Though in the end he had reached a decent age, he had never recovered his speech, never gone out again in his boat, and several people swore they had seen the old man since his passing, kneeling beside his headstone in the cemetery, trying to dig himself back into the grave.

Now Flavio seemed to be retreating deeper and deeper inside himself, narrowing to a point. But sometimes, on their journeys home from the church, he would take hold absently of Maria-Grazia's forearm as they walked, and she let herself believe that he was getting better. And yet he had begun to be preoccupied with escaping the island. “I'll leave this place,” he told her once, clear-eyed. “I'll go back to England. Even if some of them treated me like a dog, they treated me better there than I'm treated here, among my own people.”

And Flavio, it emerged, had seen the ghost of Pierino, too. “He's green—transparent,” he muttered. “He wants me gone. I'll leave this place. I'll take flight.” What he meant by this, he would not say. But when Pina heard his muttered pronouncements, she wept, believing that her son meant by it some spirit world, some heaven. “I'll be bound by these shores no longer,” muttered Flavio cryptically, waxing the statue of Sant'Agata until it shone.

WHEN THE ISLAND SETTLED
after that first tremor, a small miracle came to light.

Il conte
's peasants, coaxed and bullied by Bepe, still tended the rocky southern field they had occupied two years before. Wheat had come up during the second year, the green blades scorched at the edges, starved of nutrition. This the peasants harvested, daringly keeping everything for themselves rather than delivering a quarter to
il conte
. A second crop had come up. Now it was time to thin it. As they marched up to the fields, no
organetto
now and fewer in number, glancing at
il conte
's villa as they rounded the bend in the road, Bepe exhorted them from his elevated position on the back of his uncle's donkey, trotting it back and forth along their ranks as though commanding an army. “March forth, comrades,” he urged. “The land is ours.”

But the land, when they got to it, had shifted, altered. A great eruption had occurred at its center, and something was attempting to surface. The seedlings lay scattered, uprooted, already burned dry in the sun. Young Agato made the sign of the cross. “A warning!” he cried.

“No,” said Bepe. “A natural phenomenon. We must investigate it further.”

But this phenomenon, whatever it was, was not natural. Digging in the sandy earth, throwing aside rocks, the peasants brought to light, by slow degrees, a wall of stone. Not a wall, no (as they dug further): a kind of seat or enclosure. It curved in a semicircle. Its touch was cold. When they went running for mattocks and spades and dug deeper, they unearthed a second ledge, and another beneath it, narrowing toward the bottom of a bowl like the stripes on a shell. “Look here!” cried Agato, digging a short way off. “An altar.”

The islanders drew back a little at this hint of heathenism and human sacrifice, but Bepe seized upon the corner Agato had unearthed and scraped bravely with his mattock. “It's not an altar,” he announced. “It's a stage. This is a theater, I'm sure of it. Greek, or Roman. I saw them on the mainland postcards when I visited my city cousin, little ones like this and great big ones the size of a football stadium.”

Shrewdly, Mazzu said, “This might be worth something.”

“
Il conte
doesn't know anything about it,” observed Bepe, “and it's our land by rights now.”

The peasants stood around the ghost of the amphitheater, holding this knowledge before them like the image of the saint.

BEPE CAME FURTIVELY TO
the bar that night, clutching his
organetto.
“I need to speak to
signor il dottore,
” he told Maria-Grazia. “Urgent business. Very important.”

“Are you here to play?”

“No, no,” cried Bepe. “This
organetto
is merely a cover. Fetch your father.”

Maria-Grazia summoned her Papà. She heard Bepe muttering at him behind the curtain of the bar: “We must find an archaeologist to come and tell us how much it's worth
.
This could be a good thing for the island, an important thing, only we need an educated man to explain it to us. It could bring wealth to Castellamare.
Lire
and
lire.”

“And will you be redistributing the wealth fairly?” Her father's voice, a little teasingly. “Or will you be forming a vanguard party to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat first?”

“Both, both,” said Bepe, in earnest. “But I need your help. You're an educated man,
signor il dottore
—educated enough, anyway. You must know an archaeologist we can ask. Back in Firenze or Roma, or wherever it is you come from
.”

But Amedeo knew no archaeologist. Neither did Father Ignazio, whom Bepe cornered on his entry into the bar that night and ushered mysteriously behind the curtain. “I've been on this island as long as you have,” said the priest. “I don't know anyone in the outside world any longer. I've become one of you, for my sins.”

The one person on the island who knew an archaeologist, to everyone's surprise, was Pina. “But we all know him,” she said. “Have you forgotten? Professor Vincio.”

“Who?” Bepe was brusque, expecting some joke.

“Oh, you were only a boy then, Bepe—you won't remember. Professor Vincio, the archaeologist from Bologna. He was a prisoner of war here. He repaired the veranda of our bar.”

“That
idiota
who put the beams on back to front?” said Bepe. “Signor Pierino had to fix it afterward, I remember.”

“Professor Vincio was an important archaeologist. He worked in Cyprus before the war, digging up early cities. He told me once that he dug up a woman and her child, skeletons in gold jewelry, perfectly preserved. An awful, wondrous thing, digging up the past like that. A thing you should respect, young Bepe. Why, anything might come to light. I don't know what's become of him now.”

“We'll write to him,” counseled the priest. “Care of the University of Bologna. And see if he's still living and whether, God and Sant'Agata willing, he can come and take a look at this ruin you've found. Say nothing about it to
il conte,
Bepe—not until we know more.”

The priest wrote a letter that night, and Bepe delivered it to the mainland. The amphitheater was buried again with mattocks and hoes, covered over with tarpaulins. All that month, the islanders held their secret close, going about with a thrill of expectation in their hearts while the island thrummed beneath their feet.

NO ONE RECOGNIZED PROFESSOR
VINCIO
. He arrived at the untidy end of spring, with white hair and a distinguished umbrella and an assistant to carry his bags. The archaeologist chartered Rizzu's donkey cart. But, as they climbed the hill, he bade Rizzu halt outside the walls of the town. Here he climbed down and stood for a long time before the former prison camp, which had returned to its old mess of scrub grass and thistle, haunted by lizards, bearing no trace of the past. At the House at the Edge of Night, he embraced both Pina and Amedeo with tears in his eyes.

Shortly after the archaeologist's arrival,
il conte,
who had somehow got wind of the appearance of an important city man in their midst, interposed himself. Sweeping into the piazza in his motorcar, he greeted the professor with one raised hand as though they were old friends. “Signor Vincio, allow me to extend a welcome,” he called, from the car window. “I have a proposition for you.” The archaeologist must stay at the villa, he insisted, where things were more comfortable. And he would dine daily at
il conte
's expense.

Professor Vincio said that he had already been installed quite comfortably at the House at the Edge of Night.

“Very well,” bristled
il conte
. “Then come for dinner.”

“No,” said Professor Vincio. “Thank you. I remember my time on this island well,
signor il conte.”

Il conte,
crushed and enraged, drew his head back into the motorcar and drove away.

The following morning, at dawn, the peasants escorted Professor Vincio to the buried amphitheater. The elderly professor got down on his hands and knees and began sweeping up the dust with a fine brush. Occasionally, he paused to cut away a piece of grass or soil, or to point something out to his assistant. The assistant carried a wooden crate like that in which the islanders transported chickens. Out of the crate came strange objects: something like a pasta colander, a set of toothpicks, a scrubbing brush.

Some of the islanders were indignant at this, suspecting ridicule. But Professor Vincio continued his scraping. “Is that all he's going to do?” burst out the boy Agato at last, unable to hold his disappointment. When it became clear that it was, the islanders drifted away.

Meanwhile,
il conte
had heard about the excavations. The next morning, when the little party from the House at the Edge of Night arrived at the site, escorting the archaeologist,
il conte
's two land agents were waiting for them. Between them stood Andrea d'Isantu. “This land is private property,” he said. “No one's to enter or leave it without my father's permission.”

“I certainly mean to,” said Professor Vincio, in that calm city way he had of speaking as everybody's equal. “We've excavations to do.”

Andrea took his walking cane in both hands. His eyes strayed toward Maria-Grazia as he spoke, then returned to the old professor. “No one's to enter this patch of ground.”

Bepe, enraged, dropped from his donkey and advanced three paces into
il conte
's land. “There you are, Signor d'Isantu,” he declared. “Someone just has.”

Andrea took the stick and tapped him across the shoulder. “Get back, Bepe. I've told you, no one's to enter.”

“It's common land now,” murmured Father Ignazio. “And in any case, Signor d'Isantu, wouldn't it be better to resolve this cordially, without coming to blows over the matter?”