The House at the Edge of Night (43 page)

“
Sì,”
said Maria-Grazia, without ceasing in her weeping.
“Il conte.”

Bepino's translucent ears turned a fierce pink. “No one was supposed to say anything about it,” he whispered.

“Now, Bepino,” cried the ancient Valeria, seizing him by the wrist. “You're to tell us everything.”

“I'm not supposed to,” said Bepino. But Valeria was the oldest person on the island, and neither did he dare to disobey her. “He sent Santino Arcangelo down here with a lot of cash,” he confessed at last. “To give back to everybody. So you don't lose what you're owed when the bank fails.”

“Why?” asked the widow Valeria.

“Aren't all your businesses in difficulties? Don't you all need this money back?”

It was true—but all the same,
il conte
?

“He beat the fisherman Pierino,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, in blank incomprehension. “He's not a good man. Not like his father, the old
conte
. If he means to make amends, it's much too late.”

All at once, Maria-Grazia was seized with a pity so profound she felt she could taste it, like a storm coming in off the sea. “He's never been such a bad man as you all think,” she murmured. “He doesn't deserve this blame.”

“You should know that best, Maria-Grazia,” said Valeria. “If he's a good man, why have you been wandering up there at all hours of the day and night, skulking about in the alleyways and
vaneddi
like a lovelorn girl?”

But now here was Robert, a little breathless, who had come up unobserved at the edge of the crowd. “Now, Signora Valeria,” he said. “What kind of accusation are you making?”

The old woman reeled a little, for never had Signor Robert spoken so forcefully to anybody on the island. “Nobody here is making accusations,” she mumbled.

“Mariuzza,” said Robert, touching her wrist. “Tell her the truth.”

Maria-Grazia said, “
Il conte
is sick. He's dying. I went to him because I was anxious about him, and as it turned out he needed my help, so I kept visiting. He has no family. He'll be the last
conte
. He has no one to leave his belongings to, and so it will all be seized—the villa and his father's hunting ground and the bank and the buildings around the piazza that have belonged to his family for three hundred years. And when he came back to the island and saw these troubles coming from across the sea, he decided to sell everything, to help everybody a little with their debts. Perhaps to make amends for the beating of Pierino, for Lord knows how everybody's made him suffer for it.”

“Go on,” said Robert. “Go on.”

“It was he who had the idea of leaving gifts about the island in secret, the tiles and the outboard motor and the stacks of money, so that you'd think it was the saint. But how could he do that on his own, when he's been confined to bed for months? How could he know who was in trouble on the island, who needed his help, when none of you speak to him any longer—when none of you have, since his father died almost fifty years ago?”

“But why you, Maria-Grazia?” complained Valeria. “For he could have asked anybody. Santino Arcangelo, or his foreign assistants.”

Concetta, understanding, said, “None of them would do. It had to be someone who knew everyone else's troubles. Who else but Mariuzza?”

For always, from a girl, Maria-Grazia had been the repository of the island's secrets, since she had led the wild Concetta into the bar and tamed her with kindness and
limonata.

“And you've been doing this, Signora Maria-Grazia?” said Valeria.

“Signora Maria-Grazia and I,” said Robert.

Valeria was still dissatisfied. “There's some ungodly connection between the two of them,” she mumbled. “Something not right. You've been visiting him, Maria-Grazia, since long before these troubles started. Every Sunday afternoon, if rumors are to be believed.”

Maria-Grazia, drawing herself up like her mother, Pina Vella, said, “Of
course
there's a connection between us. We're half brother and sister. And all of you know it, so you might as well come out and say it, instead of gossiping about it in corners as you have for ninety years.”

The elderly
scopa
players, feeling themselves to be very modern, murmured about the need for DNA tests and blood samples before any judgment was made on the matter. “We've done all that,” cried Maria-Grazia, allowing her irritation to get the better of her. “We did a DNA test three years ago. It's all done with. Robert knows. Now can't you all just let us be?”

“Well,” said Valeria, launching a final halfhearted challenge, “what were you doing there tonight?”

“I went to the villa because
il conte
is dying,” said Maria-Grazia. “And there's not one person in this godforsaken little place who's willing to visit him.”

Maria-Grazia felt herself to have gone too far in her anger, to have been uncharitable—for really she loved the island as much as any of them. But Robert took her gently by the wrist. And the fact remained, Andrea d'Isantu was dying. Eighty-eight years old—the same age to the day as the ghost of Uncle Tullio, whose youthful portrait still hung on the stairs of the House at the Edge of Night, whose presence haunted the goat paths on still evenings—Andrea had been diagnosed with a persistent cancer of the liver, and now it had all but used him up. He had been too sick even to attend their festival.

Now the widows of the island murmured in pity, thinking of the dying man in the villa at the edge of the town, unvisited, unmourned. The music had stopped, and no one knew anymore what to do or say. Even Valeria fell back a little, chastened.

“We must go and see him, Mariuzza,” said Concetta at last. “We must bring him gifts, as we used to do for his father,
il conte.
How can we have neglected that part of the celebrations?”

“He's very sick,” said Maria-Grazia. “The priest and the mainland doctor are there with him—it's too late now—they won't want us all there.”

“We must go anyway,” said Concetta. “It's the proper thing to do.”

IN THE PINK AND AMBER ROOM
with the cherubed ceiling, Andrea d'Isantu lay in the same bed in which he had been born. A rosary wound his right hand. Father Marco proffered holy water. Beside him, the doctor was making ready to leave, unlooping her stethoscope with an old weariness Maria-Grazia recognized from her father's late-night returns when there was nothing more to be done. Into this room came the islanders, unannounced, dripping rainwater over the tiles.
“Signor il conte,”
cried the widow Valeria. “We're here to bring you our festival offerings. We know the truth now. We know the truth about what you've done for us.”

Immensely old, like a tortoise, Andrea d'Isantu strained up from his pillow, his neck a rigging of taut wires. He surveyed the islanders before him. Then he fell back and closed his papery eyelids again. All at once, someone broke ranks and came forward with a tray of baked aubergines, depositing it in his lap. Someone else advanced, bearing a chicken in a cardboard box, and shoved it into the arms of the doctor. Concetta held forth a great slice of tuna wrapped in plastic. And then a tide of islanders, bearing gifts, braved the disapproval of their neighbors to approach the ancient man
,
Castellamare's last
conte.

The old man raised his head again briefly and gripped in turn each of his islander's hands.

So it was that the bailiffs who lurked across the ocean, when they returned at last, would find in Andrea d'Isantu's great villa not one stick of furniture to be seized, not one ancestral painting or silver candlestick, not one crystal remaining on the cut threads suspended from the chandeliers—for all had been sold, all had vanished into outboard motors and patched roofs, fishing boats and ancient houses. The villa at the end of the avenue of palms was to be sold to developers, and the bank and the hunting ground and the empty houses cut into pieces and turned over to other hands. But the remnants of
il conte
's great wealth had been swallowed up in the earth that made them, returned to the descendants over which his father had once ruled, and nothing now remained of them anymore.

MARIA-GRAZIA AND ROBERT WALKED
home arm in arm, by the alleyways and
vaneddi.
The rain had stopped at last. A procession of lights was advancing up the road from the harbor. The visitors from the mainland. Enzo had got ahead of them. “Quick—get ready!” he cried, from behind the counter. “It's going to be the biggest Sant'Agata festival we've ever seen!” Maria-Grazia, sinking down on the edge of the veranda, sat for a long time instead with her hand in her husband's. He gripped her wrist with a calm pressure, as he had once gripped it when he was a young soldier and she a girl just out of leg braces, in the shadow of the war. “I've only ever cared for you, you know,” she said.

“Lo so, cara,”
said Robert.

MEANWHILE, LENA, WORKING IN
a great frenzy, had prepared the bar. She had mopped the rainwater from the floor, stacked bottles of
arancello.
She had heaved tables and chairs. She had polished the condensation from the mirrors until each one shone. Now, one by one, she dropped the rice balls into fat so that they should be crisped and burnished to perfection. Her father and her uncle she ordered about like schoolboys, to the great amusement of Zia Concetta, who busied herself with setting out the veranda chairs on her return from
il conte
's, so as to be out of the way.

Into the piazza, slowly, as though making a pilgrimage of their own, the visitors came. They plunged into the night that now whirled again with the music of the
organetto,
surrounding themselves with the warm dark
.
They saw what Amedeo had seen a century before: a small shut-up place, fragrant with wet basil, beyond the dark edge of the world. And miracles, too: a saint lit red from beneath by a thousand candles; an extraordinary house balanced at the edge of the town. In their faces, Lena saw the wonder he, too, must have felt, the old doctor, to find at the end of his long journey an island such as this.

The visitors crossed the threshold of the bar. Lena plied the tables. She served coffee, chocolate,
limoncello, arancello, limettacello,
the
limonata
her grandmother had taught her how to make—unsugared, fragrant with honey, belonging to the war. She served endless
cappuccinos,
which had never before been ordered after eleven in the morning in the House at the Edge of Night. She served, in spite of the chill that still lingered a little, so much ice cream that Sergio and Giuseppino had to be set to churning a new batch, in a rush, in the bar's back room. She served rice balls and pastries, which the visitors lapped from greased paper, as greedy as the girl Concetta.

“Why so many people?” marveled Bepe. “And not even tourists—not all of them—for some are quite ordinary people from the mainland.”

“It was like this after the war,” murmured Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Any hint of trouble in the world, and people renew their interest in miracles.”

It was true that the visitors this year were of a different kind: shabbier, more ordinary. And yet they ate and ate. In tips alone, which Lena amassed in the old box with the rosary and wax candles, she found that she had made up almost what they owed the savings bank for the month. “I wish we could have served them all for nothing,” said Maria-Grazia, a little sadly, her hand in Robert's. “That's what we did in the old days when a person in trouble came to our door.”

“Why didn't
signor il conte
give you money?” asked Robert. “That's what I've been wondering all these months. For he helped almost everybody else.”

“I think,” said Maria-Grazia, “that he knew we'd be all right without him. The bar always has been, after all.”

Lena appeared at the edge of the veranda. Setting down her tray of drinks, she approached her grandmother and grandfather.
“Nonna,”
she said, “I'm sorry I believed that gossip about you and Signor d'Isantu. And I've something to tell you. Grandpa knows already. I want to stay here and manage the bar.”

The girl could have been a doctor like her great-grandfather. And yet, in the great noisy thrill of the saint's festival, to give things up did not seem to Maria-Grazia the loss it would have been in city places. What could Lena do but return, like a ship cast off upon the waters, like the
Holy Madonna,
as though drawn by an invisible compass to the shores of this place? Something in her granddaughter had settled, altered. Strange it was, that in this island where everybody knew your business before you knew it, where the widows burdened you with prayers and the elderly
scopa
players scolded and the old fishermen knew you by name before you were even born, it was possible still for a person to be as deep as the ocean, as unfathomable as the dark beyond the bar's four walls. She understood now that Lena would go on returning to this place all her life. As Amedeo had, and Pina the schoolmistress, and Maria-Grazia herself—all of them, living and dead. Lena would return always, to walk the same goat paths her great-grandfather Amedeo had walked, with his medical bag in one hand and his head full of stories, foundling, founder, drainer of swamps, healer of sicknesses, sworn protector of this place.

All at once, with a gray brightening, the night became crepuscular. And then, at every window, a great unfurling. Into the rain, the islanders hurled fistfuls of bougainvillea and white oleander, trumpet vine and plumbago. Flavio Esposito, who stood trembling on the edge of the piazza, came forward at last into the hail of flowers
.
The air was clogged with them; the hired spotlights were extinguished. The dancers stumbled in the onslaught, blind, reeling. The
organetto
sang in the depths of it all. Wild with the noise, the two youngest Dacosta children flung firecrackers. And through the freshening dawn, the ghost of Pierino and the spirit of
il conte
took flight together, green, translucent, in search of other shores. The stone saint was heaved aloft by slow degrees, borne up on the shoulders of the fishermen—until at last they stood triumphant, slick with rainwater, and Sant'Agata swayed once more over Castellamare, all miracles upheld in her right hand.