The House at the Edge of Night (42 page)

Maria-Grazia stepped forward now, took Giuseppino by the shoulders. “What do you mean?”

“I had to file for bankruptcy—the company closed—”

All at once, Maria-Grazia seemed a great-sized person, a giant like her father, Amedeo. “Bankruptcy!” she cried. “Look me in the face, Giuseppino! Explain to me what you've done.”

Her son, under the accusing eyes of his mother, became clipped and irritable. “I used to trade in futures, and now I don't, and the money's gone. The crisis. The business failed.”

“Your important job,” murmured Maria-Grazia, uncomprehending.

“It's not an important job,” said Giuseppino. “I buy and sell contracts. You islanders, thinking I'm some wealthy man! I've only ever been at the edges of all that! What do you think I can do—some miracle?” His voice became brittle with contempt. A few neighbors had gathered at the edge of the veranda now, drawn by the air of scandal.

“The apartment,” continued Maria-Grazia. “The big cars—”

“I bought all those on credit!”

“
Ai-ai-ai
, Giuseppino!” cried Concetta, in spontaneous lamentation. “What's become of you since you left this island?”

Giuseppino's head bent lower and lower, exposing the great bald circle on the crown that matched Sergio's. “Oh, Giuseppino!” cried Maria-Grazia. “If your grandfather Amedeo were here now, what could he possibly have to say to you?”

“Haven't I always sent you money?” cried Giuseppino, stung at last into retaliation. “That two million
lire
for the refurbishment. All the times I've put my hand in my pocket for repairs, to make up a shortfall in the profits, again and again, though Sergio shut me out of everything to do with this bar from the beginning. You've profited, Mamma! You and Sergio and Dad and all the rest of you! You wanted a van and you wanted to repair the roof, to buy new televisions—all of you wanted to be in on it, not just me!”

Sergio, who had been lingering in the doorway without speaking, now found himself fixed by the spotlight of the neighbors' attention, thrust into the unfamiliar position of the more successful son. He saw his brother cowed, reduced, and the triumph tasted sour in his throat, like spoiled wine. “Mamma, Zia Concetta, that's enough,” he murmured. “Giuseppino, come inside.”

Giuseppino rose from his chair. Into his mother's hand he put Amedeo's book of stories. “Here,” he said. “I brought this back. At least no one can accuse me of stealing it, for I always said I'd return it the next time I came to the island, and now I have.”

And in the end, it was a kind of relief to him to follow his brother through the door of the bar, embracing this homecoming like some wanderer in his grandfather's book of stories, diminished, penniless, cut down to his original size.

Maria-Grazia could not sleep. Instead, she sat at the counter of the bar and turned the pages of her father's book of stories. The story of the parrot and the girl who became a bird; the stories of Silver Nose and Body-No-Soul. And as she read further, seated behind the counter of the bar that cold dawn under her father's old damp-spotted portrait, she discovered, too, a strange wonder: stories she had not read before—tales her father must have remembered in the last days before his death, recorded in Sergio's scratchy teenage handwriting, carried off the island by Giuseppino before any of the rest of them had seen.

Maria-Grazia woke Giuseppino, who was sleeping on the velvet sofa in the room at the top of the house. “
Caro,
what's this?” she asked, indicating the unknown tales.

Giuseppino's neck turned red and blotchy, as it always had as a boy when he was caught out. “I didn't photocopy the last ones,” he muttered. “I ran out of money before it was finished printing. And I figured Sergio remembered those ones anyway. He was the one who wrote them down.”

But
she
had never known about them! And now Maria-Grazia discovered the last stories belonging to her father, as though he were with her again for a spell, whispering his island tales to lull her to sleep as he had when she was a small girl in leg braces. Turning over the pages, she read tales of the island, of donkey auctions and rescues at sea, of feuds between neighbors, of a spectacular catch of fish in 1913 (“told to me in 1922 by Signora Gesuina”), of a great landslide in 1875 (“passed down in the Mazzu family”), and then, on the final pages, a tale belonging to the saint. This one was marked with no date and no teller, and forever afterward she would associate it only with her father and with the festival, convinced he had written it for her to discover at this precise moment on the eve of Sant'Agata's Day, ninety-five years after the first one that he had witnessed.

Sant'Agata was once, wrote her father, sighted in the cemetery beside the swamp, when she appeared in a vision to the grave digger, rather alarmingly, hovering above the gateway with outstretched hands. When he went back to the grave, he found his shovel gone and the hole closed up as though it had never been opened. Most inconveniently, he was forced to give up his work and go home.

Those were earthquake-troubled times. Though the grave digger tried to dig again, he found the earth uncooperative, hard as marble, and one day, after a great tremor, he woke to find all the graves opened and gaping, a fearsome sight.

By this, he understood that the saint had either grown contrary, or else intended the burial of the dead in some other place.

The islanders called a meeting, and decided to obey the saint and move their dead to some safer lodging. But in those days, there was a great fear of disease, and the islanders refused to have the dead buried near their houses and their wells. And yet, refusing to obey the saint's wishes, the island became troubled anyway. The islanders were once again afflicted by a plague of weeping.

One morning, the saint appeared again to the islanders, on the road outside the cemetery. She seemed to be gesturing, and a group of fishermen followed. She led them all over the island, on a miraculous journey through fields and ditches and olive groves, until at last they came to the caves by the sea. Here the saint took up post at the back of the cave, and waited. The islanders, after some deliberation, decided there was nothing to be done but move their dead to the caves.

Here they found a second miracle: little compartments, full of bones already, in which to house their ancestors' coffins and funeral urns, and great stones, ready cut, with which to close them up.

The day of the procession was stormy. The islanders were uncertain, but the saint appeared all about the island, insisting that they carry their dead to the caves. The whole town gathered, and the procession took most of the afternoon, but at last they reached the caves.

Then, while the islanders were shut up inside the caves, an earthquake shook Castellamare to its roots. Great jettisons of lava sprung up beneath
il conte
's villa, and the island heaved and convulsed. The islanders, cowering in the caves, emerged to find their town on the horizon flattened, not one building standing except the church and the villa and the House at the Edge of Night.

Then they understood that the saint had protected not only the dead but the living, for not one islander died in that earthquake, and all of them were sheltered by the ancient rock of the caves.

And when the islanders had finished burying their dead, a third great miracle occurred. The rock at the back of the cave, which had tumbled during the earthquake, held the form of the saint. The artist Vincenzo cut it free, to make of it a statue, and forever afterward the islanders knew that the caves were not a cursed but a holy place.

“And that, Mariuzza
cara,
” her father wrote, “is how the islanders ended the curse of weeping.”

THERE WAS ROBERT.
He stood in the doorway, puffing a little at the exertion of walking the corridor—at last, she was forced to concede, an old man. Maria-Grazia put the book into his hands. “Someone should have written down all the other stories,” she said. For after her father, Amedeo, who had remembered to do it? What about Agata-the-fisherwoman's rescue from the ocean? What about Robert's own appearance? The day of the ships, when she and her father had witnessed them arrayed on the horizon like raindrops on a wire? The ghost of Pierino? The taming of Enzo; the building of the great hotel; the miracle of the bundles of money appearing after dark at the islanders' doors? What about all the tales that had gone unrecorded? Someone should have made remembrance of these things.

“Well,” said Robert. “Can't you write them?”

“
Caro,
I'm too old for that now. We both are. Look how the time has passed. There's barely time for anything left now.”

Taking him very lightly by the wrist she led him back to their stone room by the courtyard. As they walked, Robert leaned on her a little, a fact that still disconcerted her, for it had always been the other way around. But now she understood that her time had nearly gone over. Robert seemed to believe so, too, for he had his spectacles on, the reading lamp beside his bed was lit, and he had clearly been awake, too, thinking. Maria-Grazia closed her father's book and laid it on the nightstand. “Couldn't you sleep either?” she said.

“No,
cara.
I've been making plans.”

“What about?”

“We've got both the boys in the same place now, at last, and it seems to me it's time we talked to them about the future of the business.”

“What about the future?” said Maria-Grazia, a little startled.

“If Maddalena wants it,” said Robert, “they should hand it over to her. That's what I think now. She's loved the place since she was born. She's tough enough to navigate it through this crisis. The bar should be hers, as it should have been yours all this time. I always loved your father the old doctor, but that was one thing he got wrong.”

Some stubborn pride in her, some trace of the spirit of Pina Vella, still wished so fiercely for the girl to go to medical school. But, “She won't go,” he informed her, very gently, when she raised this objection. “She's working up the courage to tell you,
amore.
She's already told me.”

And something in her had known it already, that Lena, in her heart, was as ambitious as her grandmother and her great-grandfather before her, capable like nobody else of protecting the bar.

Sant'Agata's day dawned colorless, the sea obscured in mist. The morning's Mass, outside the church, was conducted under a phalanx of umbrellas. “Praise to be to Gesù and Santa Maria!” cried Father Marco, against the wind, shielding the plaster saint with his spread soutane. “Praise be to Sant'Agata and all the saints!”

The procession was a slippery, muddy affair. The statue, ancient, made in plaster by the great-great-great-great-grandfather of the artist Vincenzo, had never been out in the rain before. On the gravelly path down to the caves by the sea, a small tragedy occurred. The statue began to melt, her face tracked with black tears like those that had once fallen from the eyes of Carmela, her robe shedding its purple in rich streaks.

“Quickly, Rizzulinu, Matteo!” cried the priest. “Get the saint in at once out of the damp!” For Father Marco, in his old age, had become as great a devotee of Sant'Agata as any of them.

The fishermen, at a run, made for the caves by the sea. Scrambling in over the rocks, they bore the saint into the dry darkness, the rest of the islanders in pursuit. “Is she damaged?” cried the widows of the Sant'Agata Committee. Cigarette lighters flamed; mobile phones were illuminated. The saint, by a hundred lights, glimmered mournfully, her face shifting as though alive, a little paler than it had been before the storm.

“We can't bring her back out into this rain,” said Father Marco. “The paint will run; the plaster will fall apart. We'll have to keep her here and wait until the storm dies off.”

So it was that when the bailiffs from the mainland arrived on Castellamare to begin calling in the islanders' debts, they found not one house inhabited, not one knock answered, the whole island empty and every shop shut up as though the place were abandoned—and at last were forced to put away their warrants and papers and briefcases and leave.

MEANWHILE, IN THE CAVES,
there began to be some disagreement. “We'll be here until the end of the world,” warned Agata-the-fisherwoman.

“Another half hour,” said Father Marco.

The half hour became an hour, an hour and a half. An argument was just beginning to threaten when Concetta spoke up. “Enzo has a statue,” she said.

All at once, Enzo found himself at the center of the crowd's attention. A few people who had seen his great stone figure of Sant'Agata nodded in approval. Yes, yes. That was also a statue of the saint.

“Fetch Enzo's Sant'Agata instead,” said Concetta. “It's waterproof. It was planned by his great-uncle, the artist Vincenzo. It's almost finished. We can make the procession with that one.”

The elderly
scopa
players nodded. The other Sant'Agata could be used. After all, wasn't it an image of the same saint?

“It's too heavy,” said Bepe. “It's made of stone. The normal Sant'Agata is plaster. How are six fishermen going to lift it?”

“It can be lifted,” said Enzo. “It's volcanic rock. It's porous, like pumice. We'll find some way.”

At this, there were some mutters about the curse of weeping.

“Let's go and see the statue,” said Father Marco, guiding the old one farther back into the dry safety of the caves, where no squall could reach it.

It was another half hour before the fishermen returned across the bay, and when they did, there were cries of wonder. The fishermen had loaded Enzo's statue onto Rizzu's old donkey cart, which no one had thought of in twenty years. Now the cart came into view across the bay, slowly, falteringly, emblazoned with its green and yellow island tales. Between them they hauled her, the fishermen and their descendants: Tonino, Rizzulinu, Matteo, 'Ncilino, Calogero.

ALL AROUND THE SHORES
of the island, in the storm, the islanders bore their saint. Past
il conte
's villa, shuttered and closed. A few of the islanders glanced up at the windows, expecting to see
il conte
there to nod his blessings on the procession as his father used to, but no face appeared. The statue was borne on, the fishermen heaving at the back of the cart, bracing it against the slopes. Past the rocky south end of the island, past the Greek amphitheater, now overtaken by scrub grass and thistles, along the cliffs, above the caves by the sea, past the gates of the new hotel where the Mazzus' farm had once stood. The hotel was subdued, its plastic recliners by the pool overturned, its parasols heavy with water. But a few tourists appeared at the doors and joined the procession. Meanwhile, the saint, the water making rivers and torrents in the folds of her stone robe, swayed in the back of the donkey cart with one hand upraised. “Come on,” coaxed Maria-Grazia. “Not far now.” For she found herself breathless with anxiety, willing the statue to complete its pilgrimage as though it were the saint herself who swayed there in the cart, as though some metamorphosis had occurred during the miraculous hush of the night.

At the quayside, before the old
tonnara
and the rusted remains of the boat
Holy Madonna,
Father Marco prayed for the saint's good grace. Babies were brought forward for a blessing. The farmers' crops, moldering in the constant storm, were consecrated anyway. Father Marco tipped a bottle of holy water into the general downpour over the prow of the island's one new fishing boat, Matteo's
Provvidenza.

The rain drove trade to the bar that evening. “Why so many people?” wondered Maria-Grazia. “Has everyone taken pity on us and decided to buy an
arancello
each, to keep the place open another summer?”

Concetta came edging through the crowds, eyes lit with suppressed mirth. “I've just heard,” she whispered. “Arcangelo's place has been flooded out, just like the winter of '63 when we had those storms! My poor brother!”

“A miracle!” cried Agata-the-fisherwoman. “I told you! That's what all the rain was for!”

The bedraggled clients of Arcangelo's bar, a little shamefaced, sidled through the door in search of liquor and hot tea. Filippo Arcangelo hung about the veranda until Concetta took him by the arm and hauled him inside.

But it was not enough, Maria-Grazia understood as she watched her sons and her granddaughter tend the overcrowded tables. They needed more than a few ninety-cent coffees, a few single-euro glasses of liquor. The rain had made the veranda impassable, and the ice cream crystallized in the vats, unused. Even the tourists didn't want it in this weather.

In the square as night fell there was dancing all the same, wildly among the great pools of water, beneath the sodden pennants of the saint, which poured their lukewarm cascades onto the heads of the revelers. Under the great hired spotlights on their stands, the islanders whirled to the music of Bepe's
organetto.
Maria-Grazia, seated at the edge of the veranda beside Robert, under Giuseppino's great striped golfing umbrella, told him of her father's first night on the island. The story he had made of it for her as a girl: how he had marveled at the statue surrounded by a hundred red candles, the magical hush as
il conte
parted the crowd. How different from the festival now with its growl of generators, the flash of colored lights on the stalls, the pounding music to which the young gyrated in a corner, no longer enamored of the wailing island songs. And the tourists with their cameras taking a hundred thousand photographs when on her father's first night there had been only one, the very first, the photograph that held within it everything that was to come after. No
conte
this time
.
Though no one but she would admit it, least of all the members of the Modernization Committee, the festival was hollowed out somehow, without his presence.

But now, into the wet disorder of the piazza came Bepe and his nephews, running like young men. “There's an emergency,” Bepe cried. “The ferry has broken down!”

“Broken down?” asked Tonino.

“Damned flying fish—a great shoal of them—stuck in the motor. This
puttana
of a storm!”

“Leave the
Santa Maria,
” counseled Tonino, clapping old Bepe on the shoulder. “You're soaked through—I'll order you an
arancello.
We'll fix it tomorrow, when we're all sober and the rain has stopped.”

“No, no!” cried Bepe. “You don't understand. The
Santa Maria del Mare
has broken down, and there are people—lots more people—waiting to come across! We must fetch them!”

There was some confusion at this. Tourists, from
il conte
's big hotel? “No,” puffed Bepe. “All sorts. Visitors from the mainland. Islanders coming home—some third cousins of the Mazzus, so I've heard, who've traveled all the way from America to be here, and the Dacosta uncles from Switzerland! I think I even saw Flavio Esposito. Tourists, too. They've heard about our festival. They're queuing at the quay. They want me to bring them to the island to see the saint. And now the ferry has broken down and I can't.”

Maria-Grazia rose, possessed with a fierce conviction. “Flavio? My brother Flavio? He must be brought here—we must send out the little boats. Where are the fishermen? Matteo? Rizzulinu?”

Rizzulinu extracted himself from the dancing, wringing the ends of his wet jeans. “We can only bring five or six in the
Provvidenza,
” he said, when Agata-the-fisherwoman explained the difficulty.

“How many are there, Bepe?”

The old ferryman puffed out his cheeks. “I don't know. Far more than that.”

“Who else has a little boat?” cried Maria-Grazia. “Who else can help?”

The youngest Terazzus stepped forward, one or two others. That was all.

Now Agata-the-fisherwoman rose to a great height, hauling herself by the bar's counter. “We'll take the old boats,” she said. “We'll launch the ones stored away in the
tonnara.
The old boats, painted, with the white stones, that we used before the war. There are ten or twelve in there.”

The islanders began to stir themselves. Down the road to the quay they hurried, in cars and vans, on bicycles, on foot, bearing lanterns like little white stars. Maria-Grazia seized Flavio's
Balilla
binoculars, and together she and Lena took the three-wheeled van and followed them. In the dark that was all at once less storm-tossed, less rain-washed, the young men of the island launched the boats. On the waters of the harbor they rode again: the
Sant'Agata Salvatrice,
the
Trust in God,
the
Santa Maria della Luce.
The
Provvidenza,
the
Maria Concetta,
and the
Siracusa Star.

Lena and Maria-Grazia were left onshore with the rest of the islanders, watching the lights sail away from them. And here on the edge of the ocean, Maria-Grazia seemed to see the island as it looked to those ships leaving it, and must have looked to those Espositos who had left it: her son, her brothers, her granddaughter—a rock in a haze of water vapor, receding on the clouded surface of the water like a ship cast off. “Didn't you want to go in the ships, too?” she asked Lena.

“I'm going to stay here,” said Lena, “and prepare the bar for when they get back.”

But Maria-Grazia, finding herself pensive, wanted to watch the ships awhile longer in case, by some miracle, her brother really was brought back on one of them. Lena left her with the keys to the van and went home on foot, at a run, through the last of the rain. So it was that when the land agent Santino's son came running with a sodden note in Andrea d'Isantu's handwriting, summoning Maria-Grazia to the villa one last time, Maria-Grazia found herself alone.

WHEN CONCETTA STEPPED INTO
the piazza, to the abandoned music and the upturned chairs of the veranda, looking for her friend, she found a strange alteration. The savings bank was lit fluorescent white, its sliding doors open. Behind the counter sat Bepino.

The widows of the Sant'Agata Committee led the charge through its doors. The remaining islanders followed. Rain-soaked, jostling, they came to rest before the yellow counter. “Now what's all this, Bepino?” cried Valeria. “You're doing business, in the middle of the night, during the festival?”

“The bank is just open for an hour or two,” said Bepino, with a ceremonious little clearing of the throat. “I'm supposed to tell you that you'll get your money back. The money from your accounts that you all deposited here.”

“But the bank was failing,” said Concetta. “It can't be unfailing.”

“The bank is failing. But you'll get your money, as we promised you.”

But who could have paid so much? In wonder, the widows of Sant'Agata began withdrawing their savings and pensions. “Is it the foreign bank?” persisted Concetta. “Talk sense, Bepino. Is it them?”

“Not them.”

“Then who? Is it someone from overseas, investing money in our island?”

Bepino gave a quick flick of his head, for what foreign investor would have done that?

“I know who it is,” cried Agata-the-fisherwoman. “That same person who hid the money outside everybody's doors, the same person who gave 'Ncilino the tiles for his roof and Matteo the outboard motor.”

“Sant'Agata,” breathed one of the elderly
scopa
players.

Into this scene of consternation came Maria-Grazia at last, in the three-wheeled van. She stopped beneath the palm tree and got out, and Concetta was dismayed to find her weeping. “What is it, Mariuzza?
”
she cried.

But Agata-the-fisherwoman, who had not noticed Maria-Grazia's tears in the general damp of the night air, merely seized her by the shoulder and said, “Come and help us puzzle this mystery out. Somebody's given us back all our money, Signora Maria-Grazia. You're the one who's always known everybody's secrets. You must know who it is, if anybody does.”