The House at the Edge of Night (34 page)

IT WASN'T THAT SERGIO
hated his brother—not really—just that there didn't seem to be space for the two of them in a place as narrow as the House at the Edge of Night, and that when they tried to settle matters between them everybody seemed to lament over it, as though there were some terrible omen in their fighting. It had been that way ever since he could remember, and none of his relatives seemed to understand it. It was clear from what everybody said that the natural destiny of the two of them was to become, like every other set of siblings on the island who stood to inherit a business, the joint proprietors of the House at the Edge of Night. Sergio loved the bar, but if he were forced to share it with his brother for all eternity he felt he would go as mad as his Zio Flavio and run about the island in his nightshirt, too.

That year, the day before Sant'Agata, the
scirocco
came. A wind from North Africa with a voice full of gravel, it sifted red dust over the town and made everybody's eyelids prickly and everybody's tongue dry and sour. It huffed on the back of the neck like bad breath and turned even climbing the stairs into an ordeal. In the bar, the ceiling fan was jammed with dust, and sweat ran down the refrigerator doors and condensed on the gleaming levers of the new coffee machine. The boys, irritable and niggling, were sent out of the house and down to the sea so that the adults could finish their preparations in peace. Even their father, their usual ally, was immersed in making an inventory of the stock in the back room and sent them away.

On their bicycles, bought by their mother out of the cashbox last summer in matching red—as though they were twins, fumed Sergio privately!—they dropped down the switchbacking road to the bay. The wind huffed in their faces at each bend but provided no relief.

Even the sea seemed listless today, rolling oily over itself to break against the red-silted rocks. It made Sergio's head ache to hear it. The boys wore homemade bathing shorts that bagged embarrassingly when wet. Sergio put his on and plunged into the water near the caves. A scattering of tourists lay across the beach, roasting their white skins. Giuseppino sat on the shore and eyed the sea warily, flinging stones.

Some impulse to provoke his brother brought Sergio back, swimming his best crawl. “Here,” he said. “Come in with me. There's nothing to be scared of. It's time you stopped being afraid of the sea, Giuseppino. You have to get over it.”

A short way off, on the sand, a cluster of northern tourists lay immobile. Now a girl with gold hair, awkward and lanky in a too-small pink bathing suit, turned toward them. Sergio had spoken in English, hoping to shame his brother a little. The girl detached herself from the others and approached. Shyly she flung a stone into the sea.

“Lots of people are scared of the water,” said the girl at last to Giuseppino. English, with a southern flatness, unlike their own accents, which belonged, by several degrees of separation, to the north. And yet to Sergio the girl's seemed the most beautiful voice he had ever heard. “How old are you?” Giuseppino said, evidently drawing the same conclusion.

“Eleven.”

“We're eleven, too,” said Giuseppino.

“I am,” said Sergio. “He's not.”

“Twins?”

“Brothers.”

“I'll swim with you,” said the girl. “I'm the best swimmer in my school. I won the house cup last year.”

Giuseppino did not know what this meant, but he agreed to follow the girl into the water a little way. “Maybe if you take my hand it'll help,” he tried, but the girl only laughed and flipped over in the shallows, giving them a glimpse of her skinny, inadequately covered backside. She surfaced again, streaming seawater. “Let's go to the tunnel,” said Sergio, seizing the girl by the arm.

“No,” said Giuseppino. “Wait. I'm not properly in yet.”

“Come on,” Sergio told the girl. “If you can swim well enough, I'll show you a tunnel.”

The tunnel, a natural archway in the rock, was dark and full of underwater shadows. Through this archway fish with blue and yellow stripes and staring silver eyes drifted on the currents, grazing on the rock's slimy underside. If you dived, it was possible to plunge through the arch and come up on the other side. Sergio knew full well that Giuseppino was frightened of the place. He swam ahead with the girl beside him, letting his brother splash and trip after them through the shallows, crying, “Wait! Wait!”

“Come into the water,” Sergio goaded. “Swim, Giuseppino. Don't splatter about on the edge.”

They reached the pool, at whose center Sergio trod water. “Wait for me!” called Giuseppino.

Already they were getting away from him. Giuseppino lowered himself into the water, curling his stomach in, and let go of the rocks. With a great ungainly splashing he descended and gained a purchase on the edge with one toe. Sergio, with a toss of his hair, dived and vanished, coming up on the other side of the tunnel, from which his voice penetrated echoingly, like it was floating up from the crypt of the church. “Come through!” he called to the girl. “There's a great big shoal of fish here!”

The girl dived. Her bare feet splashed and labored on the surface for a moment, then she, too, was gone.

Giuseppino balanced on his rock, alone now, listening to their shouting on the other side. He observed how the
scirocco
left a dusty film on the water, how the sky was becoming overcast and the waves were pounding a little stronger, so that his toes struggled for purchase. “Come on!” called Sergio's strangely echoing voice on the other side of the tunnel. “Come through, Giuseppino!”

A big wave buffeted Giuseppino; curling back off the rocks called Morte delle Barche
,
it hit him with a hard slap. The water was cold here in the shade, deeper than he had first expected. Giuseppino did not want to swim through the tunnel; he did not want to go near it. It made strange sucking and slapping sounds. Sea anemones like red jellies pulsed on the dark underside of the archway. He was tugged close enough to touch and drew back again in terror: It was icy, like the walls of the freezer in the House at the Edge of Night. The water here was endowed with a powerful undertow. His father had almost drowned in this ocean, years ago.

But he could hear his brother splashing on the other side, the girl's English laughter. “Swim through!” Sergio yelled. “Swim through! You can almost touch the bottom here!”

“Sergio!” Giuseppino called. “Come back!”

“Swim through! The sea's calmer on this side, I promise.”

Another big wave. The girl's high laugh. When Giuseppino put out his feet for the rock again he could not feel it. His feet kicked at nothing, dizzily, and he was slipping out and down, into the pool where he came up against the tunnel roof with a smack. He gulped water, sinking, scrabbling to get through the arch in the rock—yes, he would make it through the tunnel now!—he would show them!—and up again the sea brought him, grating his back against the barnacles, and down again, and under, and he was shouting and crying and gulping, flailing against the cold sea, and where was his brother? The sea had changed: It had become a fierce thing, the thing he had always feared it was at heart.

Sergio grabbed him around the waist and hauled him, pushing his head out of the water so that he heaved and honked and spluttered. “Swim,” Sergio was grunting, dragging him back toward the shore. “Swim, damn you. If you hadn't panicked you would have made it.”

Sergio hauled him out of the water and up across the sand and stood over him, black over the sun, hands on hips. “Why didn't you try properly?”

Giuseppino heaved and coughed. When at last he could speak, he said: “You left me. You didn't help me at all.”

“It's not my fault you're ten years old and can't swim.”

Giuseppino began, falteringly, to cry. He
could
swim. Hadn't he swum? Lungs burning from his ordeal, eyes hot with tears, he glared at Sergio and at the English girl who was hopping from foot to foot, embarrassed to be caught in the crossfire of their enmity. “You left me,” he accused. “I heard you splashing and shouting on the other side. You didn't care what happened to me.”

All at once they became aware of a chugging, and now a shout made them both turn. The fisherman 'Ncilino was out there beyond the rock; he had cut his motor and was bobbing up and down on the sluggish waves, his face wearing a startled, naked look without his sunglasses. “Boys!” he called. “Is this girl called Pamela?”

The girl nodded. “Her parents want her back. You two Espositos are going to be in trouble—the whole island's looking for her.”

“Look what you did!” cried Sergio. “I was taking good care of her, but you delayed us with your splashing and your crying and now we'll both be in trouble.”

Sanding himself off with the gritty towel their mother had sent, hauling his bike up by the handlebars, Giuseppino turned and began to run barefoot toward the road, shedding sand and water. Driving his bike ahead of him, sobbing, he climbed the hill to the town, Sergio following close behind, a little abashed at his brother's grief.

When they reached the bar, Giuseppino buried his head in their mother's waist, and naturally Sergio got the blame of it. And though Robert listened and listened to both sides of the tale, he felt he could no longer arbitrate between them, as though the boys had descended into some private battleground in which they must fight until one, at last, emerged the victor. “We should never have sent them to the ocean,” lamented Amedeo in private to his wife, that afternoon.

“There are some things that children must fight out alone,” said Pina, which only confirmed his worst fears about the matter.

THE TWO BOYS WERE
sent that evening to make their confession to the priest. Grandmother Pina had always been adamant about the Sant'Agata festival, and she felt that a little Catholic fear might improve matters now. “Go and talk to Father Marco, like your grandmother says,” Maria-Grazia ordered. “And come back ready to get on with each other. Didn't you agree at the beginning of the summer to be friends?”

Sullenly, both boys went to church. Father Ignazio was gone now: He had retired to his little house with the oleander bushes, replaced by a new and earnest man named Father Marco just out of the seminary. Father Ignazio's eyes, always a little mischievous, had been a reassurance during the long and protracted confessions preceding the Sant'Agata festivals of other years. They had reassured you that no sin was unredeemable if only you were to confess it. The eyes of the young Father Marco were pious and impossibly sad. Even before you confessed your sins, he looked disappointed in you. When Sergio found himself on the other side of the grille, behind the little silk curtain, looking into the mournful eyes of Father Marco, sobs of guilt rose up in his throat. He blurted out a confused, choking confession: “And I didn't mean to—I didn't want to kill him—only I was so angry at him that just for a moment I hoped, I actually hoped a little bit, that he would dro-o-own—”

Every widow of the Sant'Agata Committee was engaged in the ceremonial polishing of the saint's statue at the back of the church, and the separating of sprigs of oleander for her starlike crown. Thus, every widow of the Sant'Agata Committee heard Sergio's grief-stricken sobbing, and his long howl, and by nightfall it was known all over the island that Sergio Esposito had tried to kill his brother.

Like the rumor about Uncle Flavio and Pierino, it was one from which Sergio was never fully to recover.

“Why don't you both go to high school on the mainland?” suggested Maria-Grazia. “Bepe can take you across each morning on his ferry. There's a whole big world out there, and Lord knows there's space enough in it for both of you, if you can just bear each other's company until then.”

Why, mourned Amedeo, must everybody always be encouraging them to leave?

AFTER THAT YEAR'S SANT'AGATA FESTIVAL,
Giuseppino became quiet and secretive. He locked himself in his bedroom each afternoon, refusing even to play football with his friends Pietro and Calogero anymore, and studied with such ferocity it was as though he and the schoolbooks were engaged in a fight to the death. Sergio began to complain that his own books were going missing in those months, that Giuseppino was stealing them. But this was never proven, for the books were always found in their proper places when the house was searched. Giuseppino became so immersed in his studies that he emerged from his room only to eat and visit the bathroom, and even that he did reluctantly, rushing up and down the hall with a line between his eyebrows and a newly developed scholar's hunch. At the end of the year he passed his exams so conclusively and astoundingly, exclaimed the new teacher, Professoressa Valente, that she recommended he be moved up a year. He was the cleverest boy she had ever taught.

When Giuseppino's report was delivered to his parents, there were firecrackers on the veranda of the House at the Edge of Night. The tourists cheered and capered, believing it some local festival. Sergio stood at the edge of the party. For when had he ever been given such a celebration—when had firecrackers lit up the dark for him?

Thus, when the time came, Giuseppino went ahead of his elder brother to the mainland
liceo,
seated alone on the thwart of the
Santa Maria del Mare,
a neat parcel of books in his lap.

“I'll go to university,” declared Giuseppino, to approving murmurs from his elders. “I see that it's better to study hard now.”

“What about me?” raged Sergio to his mother. “I wanted to go to university, but Giuseppino's got ahead of me now, on purpose, to stop me doing it. I know he has.”

“Well, can't the two of you study?” asked Maria-Grazia. “Why does his studying stop you from studying?”