The House at the Edge of Night (38 page)

“No one wants a library,” said Sergio.

But the elderly
scopa
players shook their heads at this. “Every town wants a library,” Bepe repeated. “Here—I'll even lend you the money to set it up if you'll make me a shareholder.”

“I need to talk to my wife,” murmured Sergio. “She doesn't want to stay long-term.”

“What's ‘long-term'? You could run it twenty, thirty years and still go to England to retire when the baby is grown up—keep her happy that way.” Bepe hauled a stack of notes from his back pocket and deposited them on the counter.

The next day, he brought Sergio a bookstore catalog from the mainland, zipped carefully into a plastic freezer bag to protect it from the damp sea air. “Here,” he said. “You can choose all the books, and I'll ship them over for you. Why, you were the one who last modernized the bar, Sergio. You installed the first television, and the football table. Everyone remembers that.”

Then something stirred in Sergio and he remembered how, driven to ambition for the first time in his life by the departure of his brother, he had worked all night to put together the first football table with a screwdriver, and climbed on a stepladder to oversee the hoisting of the neon sign. Why not a library, too? And maybe, by the time the library was established, Pamela would have come to love the island. “The idea of a library is a good one,” said Maria-Grazia, gratified despite herself to find that her son was, after all, a businessman. “But you must have Pamela's blessing first.”

“You go through the catalogs for me,” said Sergio. “Then it won't be as if it was all my own idea.”

Maria-Grazia, against her own better judgment, agreed. “We could have books of folk stories for the children,” she said, turning the catalog's pages. “And Sicilian books—
Il Gattopardo.
Pirandello
.
English books, and history. We'll draw up a list.”

Sergio and Maria-Grazia sat up late that night going through the catalog, and the next day he ordered two hundred books. He arranged them at the back of the bar, under the spotted photograph of Amedeo. Thus the business became the House at the Edge of Night Bar and Lending Library: membership one thousand
lire.
On the first day, fifty islanders signed up. By the end of the month, Bepe was repaid for the first two hundred books.

“How long do you expect me to stay?” Pamela confronted him that night, brittle with fury. “We were supposed to leave for England. The baby's due in eight weeks.”

Sergio found himself pleading. “I might as well improve the business while I'm here. The library will start making money, and we can put it toward anything we like—the plane tickets to England—”

“If that's so,” she said, “you've got a month to buy the tickets. And we can't go by plane anymore.”

“We'll go once everything is in order here,” he pleaded. “I can't put a time limit on it.”

Pamela walked away, slapping up the stairs in the sandals she had been wearing since the summer.

At nights, she cried on the telephone to her mother, weeping in fast English while her mother's staticky voice on the other end could be heard, over and over, embarrassingly amplified by the echo in the hallway: “Come home, love. Leave him. I never thought he was right for you, love. Come home.”

THE PROMISED BABY WAS
forecast for the end of the year, and arrived during the second week in November. On that morning, Maria-Grazia found herself pacing anxiously between the door with its Chiuso sign and the kitchen where Pamela stood bent over a chair, cut through with labor pains. Back and forth Maria-Grazia paced, looking for the doctor. Sergio knelt before Pamela, massaging her back, caressing her hot arms.

“She'll come,” soothed Sergio. “She's on her way.”

Below, at the bottom of the tumble of scrubland, the sea was wild, showing its white breakers. “The ferry won't be able to carry the doctor back in time,” Maria-Grazia fretted to Robert, concealed behind the curtain of the bar, “and the baby will be born too early, like all the Esposito children have been since time began, no matter what we do to stop it.”

“No,
cara,
” said Robert. “She's here.”

For here came the doctor at last, windblown, at a run, with her bag and her little plastic shock machine in case of emergencies, and the midwife after her. Sergio's daughter, baby Maddalena, was delivered half an hour later, born like her grandmother all in a rush, within the walls of the House at the Edge of Night.

O
nce
there were two elderly people who were very loyal to Sant'Agata. Every year they celebrated her feast. They had no money, only a little grandson whom they loved more than anything in the world. But one year, after a bad harvest, they found themselves penniless and with nothing to sell in order to celebrate the saint's festival. So they decided to take the little boy across the sea and sell him to a foreign king, to raise a few
lire
and ensure that the child had a chance of a richer life. The king offered them a hundred gold pieces and took the little boy in.

The
little boy, 'Ncilino, grew up in the king's palace alongside the king's daughter, and very soon she fell in love with him. The king, seeing this, grew anxious, for he didn't want to marry his daughter to a penniless youth from an island at the edge of the known world, and so he resolved to send the boy away.

When
the boy was eighteen, the king told him, “Now listen, 'Ncilino, I am going to send you on a trading expedition, and you have a day and a night to load your boat.” Then the king took out his oldest boat, full of holes, and gave it to 'Ncilino to sail.

On
the following morning, 'Ncilino set off. But no sooner was he out upon the open sea than his boat started leaking and began to sink. 'Ncilino wept. “My poor grandmother and grandfather,” he cried. “My poor island, which I'll never see again.” Then he thought of the saint whose festival his grandmother and grandfather had always celebrated. Surely she must have been a great and powerful saint, for they had sold him, the thing they loved most in the world, in order to celebrate her feast. The boy decided to ask the saint to rescue him: “Dear Sant'Agata,” he cried, “please help me!”

Then
all at once the saint appeared in a solid gold ship, and lifted up 'Ncilino and bore him away to the island, where his elderly grandmother and grandfather were waiting to welcome him, and from which he would never stray again all the days of his life.

A STORY I HAVE
heard many times in various versions, which seems to have its roots in a tale of Saint Michael belonging to the west of Sicily. This version was told to me by Agata-the-fisherwoman, circa 1970.

It was the child Maddalena, in the end, who brought the bar back to Maria-Grazia.

The change of year had been tempestuous, dominated by crisis. Sergio and his wife had not been able to reach any kind of accord, and now there was some graver, darker difficulty. In the weeks after the baby's birth, Pamela sat on the windswept veranda looking toward England. In her arms lay the infant Maddalena, staring at the sky. Even when Pamela consented to sit with her family-in-law in the kitchen, she placed herself a little way off from Sergio, allowing the baby to feed from her without encouraging her one way or the other. Often, the baby went disregarded. Then Maria-Grazia took the child and sang to her, “
Ambara-
bà,
cic-
cì,
coc-
cò
!
,” the song her father, Amedeo, had sung when she was a child. Or Robert would chant for her English songs with their odd nonsense words: “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,” “Rock-a-bye baby.” The baby's face would light with recognition, with a sudden dazzling smile. They turned to Lena as to a bright fire, feeding off the distraction that the baby provided from the trouble that was hanging over their house.

Before Christmas, Maria-Grazia was so concerned for poor Pamela that she summoned Concetta from the blue house with the orange trees. While Enzo prodded baby Maddalena, Maria-Grazia and Concetta drew Pamela from the shadows and set her to work with them rolling rice balls for the Christmas Eve celebrations. Maria-Grazia offered the girl an early gift, a pearl bracelet that had once been Pina's, and when Maria-Grazia fastened it around her wrist, Pamela's eyes welled at the kindness. “England very beautiful at Christmas,” Concetta said. “England I like. Lovely place. Kensington Gardens Park. Queen Elizabeth. Yes?”

Pamela, tearful, told them that she wasn't used to the loneliness here, the dust, all the vegetables, plates and plates of them covered in oil and salt, which they were obliged to eat each evening, the ferocious stray cats that ambushed Maddalena's pram as she pushed it about the village, the island dialect she couldn't understand—though she had
tried
to learn Italian when she and Sergio were first married! Soon, her voice became wailing and insistent, unlocked by the two older women's sympathy, a rising tide of grief: “The truth is I hate it here—and I can't look after the baby—and Sergio doesn't understand—and the lizards everywhere, the dust, the sun, and so cold in the winter—I'm sure I've never been colder, not even in England—all those old women staring at us when we walk down the high street—I don't love the baby—I don't love Sergio anymore—”

“I'm sorry for the vegetables,
cara,”
said Maria-Grazia in regret. “I would have cooked you English things.”

“It's not that,” wept Pamela. “It's not that.”

“Postnatal depression,” said Concetta knowledgeably, dropping the rice balls in breadcrumbs. “Also my mother she have this problem, though no one diagnose it properly in the old times. But you get help from proper doctor, maybe you feel better,
cara.
And the old women not mean any evil, you know, when they stare. And the cats, they timid really. You give them one flick with your handbag and they no bother you no more. They learn.”

“I know,” cried Pamela. “I know. But I can't stand it here any longer.”

“Then you must go to England,” said Concetta. “What game is Sergio playing, not letting you?”

Maria-Grazia had asked herself again and again the same question. “Now, Sergio,” she told her son at last, early in the new year, “you're to talk to your wife one way or another about when you're going to move to England.”

Then, too late, Sergio attempted to make amends. “Be patient, Pam,” he murmured into the warmth of her unresponsive back that night. “Give me another month or two.”

Pamela huffed over the narrowness of the bed, pulling the covers this way and that. He found himself desperate, pleading, like a hurt child, “Don't you love me?”

“I can't stay here,” she said at last. “That's all.”

“
Just for a few months more.”

“But you won't ever come with me to England,” she said. “That's the truth of the matter. You won't ever leave this damned island. At least do me the decency of admitting that.”

“I can't,” said Sergio, his stomach constricting. “I can't leave, Pam. I'm sorry.”

The next morning, Sergio was aware of Pamela's weight leaving the bed beside him, and the water in the bathroom turned on and then off again, leaving a dim echo in the pipes. By the time his mother woke him properly, Bepe's ferry had sailed, with Pamela on board. She had taken everything with her except the baby.

NO ONE HAD CONSIDERED
that Pamela might leave without her child. That night, Maddalena was afflicted by a bad case of colic; she screamed and screamed, blotchy faced, for relief. It was Maria-Grazia who took the baby's soft weight. She shut up the bar, pulled the blinds, and carried her granddaughter from room to room. The baby had peaked English eyelids and lovably oversized ears. And yet her eyes belonged to Castellamare, eyes of an indeterminate opal color with bristling lashes that seemed the softest thing, like the legs of a caterpillar. Maria-Grazia found herself reeling with love for the child.

“Pam will come back for her,” said Sergio. “And I'll sort everything out then.”

But what if Pam didn't come back? Maria-Grazia asked herself this half in fear, half in hope. Didn't the baby, for her part, love the island? Already she had grown fat, her skin a little burnished. She wrestled spiritedly with Concetta's Enzo, and grasped for the lizards as they traversed the walls above her cot. The sounds she had begun to make, Maria-Grazia believed, were half English, half those of the island dialect, and she tilted her head and listened to both languages with equal attention. She would soon sit in thrall to the island's stories if she were allowed to remain—she would run on the goat paths with Enzo and the other children, plunge fearlessly into the ocean, and learn every one of the wailing Castellamare songs.

She was destined to remain, in fact, for Pamela did not return to collect her.

When the baby finally quieted that first night—this Maria-Grazia never told anyone except Robert—she stopped before the picture of her father, Amedeo, and took in her heart a private vow to protect Maddalena.

SO, FOR EVERYBODY'S SAKE,
Maria-Grazia resumed once again her old post behind the bar. While Sergio carried the colicky baby from room to room and Robert attacked the chaos of the past decade's bookkeeping on his wife's instruction, determined to get the accounts in order now that they had a child's future to worry about, Maria-Grazia took over the running of the House at the Edge of Night. She instigated a strict schedule for the posting of
lire
into the little box with the crucifix each Friday, in order to get the mortgage paid off sooner, and systematized the contents of the lending library. She also replaced the old spluttering coffee machine with a new one that made
americano
and
caffè macchiato
and great soupy bowls of
cappuccino,
for that was what the tourists wanted now.

Often, Maria-Grazia thought Lena must have been born with a love for the place in her veins, a side effect of having been accidentally born between its four walls. The infant staggered her first steps between the tables and chairs, was lulled asleep under the counter by the blue hiss of the sea and the rattle of the swinging door. Once she was up and running, she tore in and out of the rooms of the old house and unearthed strange objects—Amedeo's forceps and surgical scissors, Uncle Flavio's war medal with its Fascist insignia, the leg braces in which her grandmother had once been imprisoned. Maria-Grazia took the braces in both hands and showed Lena how they had fitted. She told the child the story of Flavio's war medal, and Robert's.

Seated beside her grandfather in the great stone kitchen, Lena polished and repolished the medal with a little Brasso on a tissue until the face of King George was shiny and zealous again. And Robert, who had never spoken of such things since the summer when he told Maria-Grazia the stories of his youth in order to win back her heart, consented to talk a little again about the war. “Why did you never tell me these things?” asked Sergio, entering the room to hear Robert recounting the sinking of the glider. “That you jumped from planes, that you were wrongly imprisoned for three years?”

And Robert, blinking, said, “I never knew you wanted to hear.”

A change had come over Sergio since the birth of Maddalena. He had emerged from the ruins of his marriage no longer an overgrown boy, no longer discontented. After Pamela's departure, he had thrown out the graying polo shirts of his high school years, and when the widow Valeria had prodded his stomach with a mocking tone one Sunday afternoon, he had taken the matter rather too much to heart, in his mother's opinion, swimming lengths of the bay each morning until the fat around his middle was all gone. Now everyone was forced to admit that a steadier Sergio had emerged, a man whose marriage might have disintegrated and whose business sense might never have matched that of his mother, Maria-Grazia, but who was possessed with an earnest desire to acquit himself as a father. He taught his daughter to read, and carried her to school on his shoulders, and the elderly
scopa
players and the widows of Sant'Agata stopped referring to him as
il ragazzo di Maria-Grazia,
Maria-Grazia's boy, and instead called him plain Sergio Esposito. Even—occasionally—
signor.
Perhaps it had been the child, not the wife, that had been lacking all along.

For a wonderful thing it was, thought Maria-Grazia, to have a child like Maddalena in the house, so alive with the future and yet so in love with the past. From the photocopied sheets that were all that remained to them of Amedeo's book of stories Sergio read to her Amedeo's fantastical tales. Lena heard tell of the girl who became a tree, became a bird, became an apple. She heard of giants cut up in pieces; of a demon named Silver Nose and a sorcerer named Body-No-Soul; of brothers who repaired each other's severed heads with magical ointment; and—in a little-known story Amedeo had gathered from Concetta's great-aunt Onofria just before she died—of a boy whose head got back to front somehow, and who was so alarmed at the sight of his own backside that he fell down dead. At this tale, the girl screamed in horrified delight.

Lena and her Papà lay on winter afternoons among the shelves of the lending library, immersed in its volumes. The library's patrons filled in little pink request forms, on which they ordered from Maria-Grazia romances, thrillers, and long and protracted epics of great foreign families in which everybody seemed to have the same name. But though the elderly islanders consumed these books with a fervor, none of the foreign stories ever seemed to Lena quite as good as those belonging to Castellamare. By the time she was five, she knew by heart each one of Amedeo's tales. She knew in detail, too, the episodes belonging to her own family, for Maria-Grazia herself had told her granddaughter as soon as she was old enough about the time Uncle Flavio plunged into the sea in escape from the island, the time her uncles, one by one, left for war. The day her great-grandfather Amedeo had first set foot upon the island. The twins born by different mothers. The man from the ocean. The warring of her father and Zio Giuseppino. If only Lena herself had been alive when those legends walked the island—Gesuina and old Rizzu and Father Ignazio and the ghost of Pierino, Pina the schoolmistress with her rope of black hair and Amedeo with his book of tales! To her, their spirits still hung about the goat paths and the alleys, as important as the presence of the saint. For the island itself seemed alive to her, a place where the earth heaved with stories.

The day before the Sant'Agata festival of her sixth year, the enterprising Lena wrote a cardboard sign, “Museo dei Miracoli,” in felt-tip capitals, and arranged a handful of precious family relics beneath it on the veranda—the two war medals, the leg braces, the little tin medallion that had arrived at the foundling hospital with Amedeo, the photocopied pages from the book of stories. “A thousand
lire
!” Lena yelled at the tourists, in English and Italian. “A thousand
lire
to see the wonders of the island! A thousand
lire
to see the Museum of Miracles! Or a dollar, or whatever you have.” Enzo knelt on the pavement beside her and sketched with chalk a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa,
which he had seen a real artist doing when he had been sent to visit his mother's family in Rome.

Whenever the tourists stopped to look, Lena went up to them with her relics and artifacts, and explained to them the stories belonging to the objects: “This was what my grandfather Robert won from the English government, during the war, before he was shot down in the ocean….This one my uncle won from Mussolini….This was the book of stories my great-grandfather wrote, when he used to be a
medico condotto….
This lucky Sant'Agata rosary is mine….” By midnight, when the two children fell asleep under the museum table to the whirling of the
organetto,
she and Enzo had made thirty-seven thousand
lire,
two dollars, and a British pound. After that, they repeated the enterprise every year.

For Lena seemed to be the first Esposito who had been born with no wish to leave Castellamare. In the bar, her grandmother let her carry the round trays with the logos of the coffee company, which she heaved above her head in both hands to get between the tables. Solemnly, she took orders on a little hologrammed notepad she had won as a school prize. Robert drove her in the three-wheeled van to the cash-and-carry warehouse on the mainland, and together they rode back on Bepe's ferry with the van full of cigarettes and coffee jars and mainland chocolates. “Will the bar be mine one day?” she asked her grandmother, when she was six years old.