The House at the Edge of Night (5 page)

And there were a thousand petty town battles on which one must take sides (for already he had been persuaded onto the town council in an advisory capacity); there were several cases of typhus; eight babies due or imminent. When Italy entered the war, he was on his way to inspect the swamp to see whether it could be drained in order to reduce the risk of malaria, and somehow the swamp and the malaria seemed of more import than the declaration of war, this war here on Castellamare against pestilence and stagnant water a thing more worth fighting. The island seemed a separate country to him, not a part of the Italy in which he had passed his solitary youth.

On Sunday afternoons Father Ignazio taught him to swim, plunging ahead of him into the waves in a black woolen bathing suit. On the terrace of
il professore
's house each evening, once the schoolmaster had fallen drunkenly asleep, Pina Vella told him every story belonging to the island.

“A small place like this is an oppression,” warned Father Ignazio. “You don't feel it yet, but you'll come to feel it. Everyone who visits without having been born here thinks it delightfully rustic. I thought so, too, myself. But anyone born on Castellamare will fight by any means possible to get off the island, and one day you'll be the same. It hit me about the tenth year.”

But Amedeo, who had always felt himself to be weightless, at risk of floating off from the earth altogether, now welcomed the solid heft of the place, the narrowness of its borders. He was amused at the way his patients knew all his business an hour before he did; he was unperturbed when the widows watched him from the wooden chairs outside their houses with narrowed, appraising eyes; he found comfort in the fact that it was possible, from the window of any of his patients' houses, to look upon the same blue line of the sea. The island was five miles long, and in his daily rounds he walked all over the face of it. He discovered the hollows where wild goats slept at noon, and disturbed the nests of lizards in the ruined houses outside town, so that they ran like water up the walls. Sitting outside old Rizzu's bar, he made a map of the island on a scrap of blotting paper, the old man nodding approvingly, pointing out flaws.

At the beginning of the spring, he sent a letter to his foster father with an invitation to drink
limoncello
with him at the House at the Edge of Night—for there really was a terrace with bougainvillea, he wrote eagerly, exactly as the elderly doctor had foretold.

But when summer came again, he did not sit with his foster father under the cool vines. Instead, a telegram ordered him away to the north.

He was sent to the trenches at Trentino.

Shorn away from the island, two things became vital to him: the photograph of Sant'Agata's Day and his book of stories. Some of his fellow medical officers had brought their folding cameras with them, against regulations. He had left his own on the island, knowing there would be nothing he wanted to record. All he wanted was the existing picture, with which he would navigate his way home. He pinned it to the inside of his cap, to protect it from the mud. Always it was mud, and when it wasn't mud, ice, and when it wasn't ice, water, and when it wasn't water, gas and fog. It seemed a world composed of elements, where men were divided into their component pieces, men frothed, men screamed. At the surgical school of Santa Maria Nuova, he had received no training in how to put men back together.

In the inside pocket of his battledress, he kept his book of stories. The gold fleur-de-lis on the cover wore away; the leather became dull. But stories, he found, like the photograph, bore witness to the truth that there was another world than this. Chiefly, his duty was to remind his patients of this fact when nothing else could be done. To a shell-shocked captain in a mud-splattered field hospital, or a gassed infantry officer recovering his sight, he could merely ask about the man's home, his infancy, his family, and a spark would burn behind the eyes of his patient, a change would come upon him: Hesitantly, words would emerge, the patient's particular story unfurling by degrees, filling the space between them, a shared light against the dark.

He did not record these stories. He did not want to remember them. But sometimes no words came from the patient's mouth, and then he would tell his own stories instead, fanciful stories from his book of tales, stories that had evolved over centuries in the mouths of the poor, calculated to take one far from the gray world: the story of the girl who became a tree, became a bird; the story of the two brothers who met and did not know each other; the story of the tale-telling parrot. Across the whole region, he became known as “the story-collecting doctor of the field hospital in Treviso.”

Occasionally, he told his patients about the island. Always the tale that burned in his own mind was the account he told himself of surviving this war and getting back to Castellamare. By the time it was over, Castellamare had become the only place he still believed in. Everything else had fallen behind the gray veil the war had interposed.

HE HAD A GREAT
wish to see his foster father. As the war progressed and regressed, subjects had emerged that could no longer be spoken of between them, great gulfs in their experience that threatened to make them enemies. “Perhaps because you are a foundling,” the elderly doctor had written, “you lack the natural patriotic feeling of your comrades, and this war is more difficult for you to bear.”

“Perhaps because I am a foundling,” wrote Amedeo, “I see its falsities more clearly.”

He had received no letters from the elderly doctor for more than a year. Now, on the preprinted army postcards he wrote simply, “Love, Amedeo.” The war ended, and still he was detained. There were troops with influenza, villagers with influenza. More variations of that same dying he had witnessed in the trenches: dying of the young and the healthy as well as the old and the weak, with swollen surprised faces and white-filmed eyes. It was 1919 by the time he got free, and he was forty-four years old. Riding the crowded train south to Florence, through villages empty and shuttered, he was seized with a feeling of waste so profound he could taste it, like a rot in his mouth. Still, he would see his foster father, he would return to Castellamare, and life would begin again in some form or another.

He went directly to his foster father's house. A sticklike woman opened the door at his knocking, not the housekeeper he remembered. “Esposito?” she said. “The old doctor, you mean? He's dead. He was carried away last winter. Influenza.”

His foster father's real relatives had already descended from Rome and carried off all his things. The woman returned to Amedeo only his bundle of army postcards.

She allowed him to walk through the rooms of the house. Gone were the snakes in jars, the masks, the whale brushes over the stairs. Only a few wires and squares of discolored wallpaper remained where the exhibits had once been suspended. “We've all lost people, you know,” she said, slightly scoldingly, when Amedeo wept.

IN THIS GREAT DISORDER
of mind he returned to Castellamare. It seemed that his previous journey, in the Neapolitan steamer, had taken place in a different life, and the war was the only real thing that he had lived: He had never dwelt with his foster father at the house like a museum, never been licensed as a
medico condotto,
never been apprenticed to the watchmaker or the baker or the printer, never been a foundling, never been born.

But Castellamare. He had lived that. The memory of Castellamare endured.

Father Ignazio had written to him when the war ended. “Things go very badly here,” he had said. “Many of the young men are gone—at least twenty-seven at my count—and others still missing, and others threaten to leave in the general fever for America that now seems to be sweeping the island. The war has made this place more cramped, a good deal hungrier. You will find us much reduced.”

Amedeo discovered from the priest's letter that Rizzu's brother was gone, departed for America. The bar was shut up, for no one wanted the place. Professor Vella the schoolmaster had been killed. Two of Rizzu's grandsons had been killed. Only the household of
il conte,
who had been invalided out of Trentino in 1915 with a leg wound, was unaltered. Carmela, wrote the priest, had fallen out with her husband and left for the mainland shortly after his return, but she had been retrieved. Some matter of a lover. (“Be careful of Carmela,” Pina would warn later. “This war has made her restless.”)

In spite of Father Ignazio's letter, Amedeo had not expected to see the town itself so diminished. He arrived during the siesta hour, and the houses on the main street were shuttered. But some, he saw, were closed up entirely, their doors and windows boarded. Objects were abandoned outside them: a chair with a missing seat, a dry basil plant in a cracked pot. Two children played in the dust. Dimly he recognized them, children he had delivered, twins belonging to the Mazzu family. “Maddalena,” he called. “Agato.”

They came, tentatively. “Where is the priest?” he said, for a great wish had come over him to see his old friend again, to check that Ignazio at least was not altered. The children did not know.

Amedeo walked the route he had trodden his first night on the island. The House at the Edge of Night was shut up as the priest had written, its veranda sagging under the untended vines, its front steps already rife with weeds.

HE TOOK AGAIN HIS
old room in Pina's house. He tacked the photograph of the island to the stone wall inside the closet. Pina was the only person on the island who seemed to walk straighter and taller since the war. After her husband's death, she had been appointed the schoolmistress. Late at night, the two of them sat up with Father Ignazio, around a bottle of spirits, making plans for the rescuing of the island from its abandonment. They needed to modernize. They needed a ferry service, a two-room hospital. They needed a second classroom for the school, a system of funeral insurance for the elderly. Il Conte d'Isantu had been elected mayor again, complained the priest, and nothing now changed on the island. D'Isantu was always on the mainland, pursuing his own advancement in some obscure way with friends in Catania, spending long months at his Palermitan estate, when here things needed to be done. The bar rotted, the missing did not return, and no one played
scopa
in the square or danced to the music of the
organetto.

When Amedeo saw the beautiful Carmela again, some weeks later, it was reassuring to find her so unaltered. Waylaying him on the sea road, where she had been walking in her Sunday clothes, under a parasol, she made a pouting display of her displeasure. “
Dottore,
you've never come to pay us a formal visit,” she said. “And they say you've been back a month. Things have been dull here, and I don't mind telling you. No clothes, no decent food. No visitors, during the influenza. But I'm glad you're back safely—and probably a war hero, too, unlike my husband.”

Amedeo, who had not been aware that she cared one way or the other about his safety, sought about for a reply.

She invited him to go with her to look at the caves, which were a historical oddity he had never seen before the war. Still in the same mood of bemused curiosity, he consented. As soon as they were in the shelter of the damp dark, she began to kiss him, to caress him.

Reeling, Amedeo supposed that she meant to appoint him her lover as Pina had warned.

“Don't worry about my husband,” Carmela murmured in his ear. “I've never loved him, and the whole island knows he's a tyrant and a fool.”

Amedeo got free of her and excused himself, mumbling about the feverish Mazzu children and the elderly widower Donato he had promised to visit before noon.

For a fortnight she kept up her pursuit, intercepting him on his rounds in silent corners of the island. On the fifteenth day, he acquiesced and they made love on the cold stones of the cave. Why, he did not know, but she was insistent, and afterward he found that he did not, in fact, very much regret it. It was difficult to feel anything in particular.

Dressing in the dark, stumbling about, something clicked under his feet. Kneeling, he unearthed a cache of whitened bones.

“Don't be alarmed,” said Carmela, with a laugh. “They've been here two thousand years. Did you think the caves full of white skulls were only a charming folk story? Go further in and you'll see them. The fishermen won't enter this cave, for fear of curses.”

He stumbled away instead, into the light. They clawed the sand out of their clothes and hair; he fetched her parasol. Buttoning her underclothes, fastening the little waist of her jacket—which, despite her complaints about the lack of new clothes, still smelled of dye from the tailor—she was elegant once again. She took out a silver mirror and by the cave's dim light repinned her hair. She had an ability to compose herself that he found both alluring and frightening. He was damp with perspiration, disheveled, giddy; she had not even broken a sweat. She replaced her hat, adjusted the angle, and regarded him calmly from behind its visor of dotted tulle as though they were strangers again, all propriety restored. “Dottor Esposito, I've detained you,” she said, “and you'll be late for your next patient.”

On the way back up to the road, she showed him a second cave, in which there were not bones but hundreds of luminous white stones. These he recognized, for the island's fishermen nailed them to their ships as talismans. “We'll meet in this one next time,” she said, “if you like it better.”

They returned to the town separately, Carmela by the main road, he by paths and alleys, getting burrs stuck in his good wool trousers. Pina looked at him strangely when he entered the house, but had nothing to say.

AFTER THAT, CARMELA BEGAN
to summon him to the caves once or twice a week, and then, when
il conte
was absent, to the villa. Amedeo found himself making a circle of the town on these nights, first talking to everyone, maintaining the pretense in his own mind that he was at liberty to choose whether or not to answer Carmela's summonses. The truth was he was not free; he never refused. But on such nights, his lengthy detours around town meant that he approached the villa only long after nightfall, when he could be certain that he would not be observed. As he made his journey, creeping up the avenue of palm trees, Carmela would appear in the window with a lamp. She would admit him silently to her room with its mock-baroque cherubs, its ceiling of peeling clouds, so as not to alert the servants to his presence. The count was thinking of installing electricity, she told him. For now their encounters took place in a dim light of pink and amber. Carmela dictated the terms of all their meetings, and always sent him away before dawn.

Once, he raised again the matter of her husband. “My husband is a fool,” said Carmela. “I've been unfaithful before, you know. I even left for the mainland, but he got me back here. He said if I had another affair it would be the death of him. Well, good. I hope it is.”

Her levity frightened him. “But, really, Carmela—”

“Don't worry about him finding out. He doesn't see anything. He hasn't looked at me in months. He's too busy being an important political man, and I'm glad to be rid of him. I'm not sure he spends his nights alone, either. No, it suits us both very well. He only found out about my last affair because I told him. Anyway, Amedeo, you'll hear him coming.”

For the count had recently bought a motorcar, the island's first (and destined, in fact, to remain the island's solitary motorcar for thirty years). He'd had it shipped from Palermo, and unloaded at the little quay by ropes, with much gesticulating and shouting. Now he drove it about the island's dust tracks and stony roads, and from the driver's seat, sweating in his leather cap and goggles, he inspected the work of his tenants in the fields. The old men made the sign of the cross when
il conte
approached in his great metal box with its formidable coughs and growls.

Once, as Amedeo left Carmela's house at dawn and started out along the avenue, he heard around the bend the motorcar's gruff roar. With a painful clenching of the gut he threw himself into the grass, watching the motorcar churn the dust and illuminate the trunks of the trees as it passed by.

He seemed to be living a life not of his own devising in those days, an odd, dreamlike existence.