The House at the Edge of Night (6 page)

SANT'AGATA'S DAY THAT YEAR,
too, was altered.

From dawn the heat was of a feverish, seething quality. The morning Mass, in a church so crowded not even a fly could pass between the shoulders of the islanders, was unbroken by a sigh of wind. Noon brought shimmering light and short shadows. Tradition dictated that the statue of Sant'Agata must be borne around every inlet and curve of the island's coast: along the edge of the fields belonging to the Conte d'Isantu, over the rocky crenellations at the island's head, through the bare villages of its southern coast, in and out of the sea caves (here at least the dark was cooler), and then into the port, where the statue was greeted with incense and a storm of flowers. But this year there were no young fishermen to carry the statue, and so the old men shouldered the burden. The statue weighed half a ton. On the procession around the coast the aged fishermen stumbled; wreathed in tidemarks of sweat, they had to be fortified with sips of wine and wiped with cold cloths. Coming to the end of their journey, the fishermen plunged with relief into the waters of the bay, but found that the surf was barely cool enough to satisfy them; it was listless, tepid, except around the rocks, where it seemed to froth and boil.

The ships were blessed, the year's three new babies baptized, and the islanders made the slow journey back up the hill. As the fishermen labored on the stony road, the sun at last descended. The islanders assembled in the piazza, relieved by the dark.

Old Mazzu dragged out his skinniest donkey to be auctioned, guitars were tuned and
organetti
dusted, and the widows emerged from Gesuina's kitchen, where they had been shut up since dawn, bearing plates of grilled anchovies and stuffed
zucchine.
But the House at the Edge of Night remained in darkness. There were no games of
scopa
on the terrace this year; no dancing; no drinking of
arancello.
The islanders were sober and in bed before dawn.

THAT AUTUMN, AMEDEO DECIDED
to buy the House at the Edge of Night. He could no longer bear to see it standing empty, and now that the island was half emptied of its inhabitants, houses were worth less than salt. Even a
medico condotto
could afford one.

A light had gone out of Rizzu since his brother's departure. “That house is crumbling,” he said. “It won't be any good to you. It's a bad-luck sort of a place.” In the end, Amedeo could only persuade him to accept five hundred
lire
and a chicken for it, and he had to barter the price up
.

Amedeo recorded the purchase in his red notebook and the date, the twenty-fourth of September, 1919. Now he had a home, and he hoped he could catch hold of the life he had been about to seize before the war interrupted. The house was indeed crumbling. He installed himself in the upstairs rooms and began to sand the walls and replace the sagging doors. He began collecting as his foster father had done. He gathered around him stories, artifacts, objects belonging to the island. Roman potsherds and coins, which the farmers threw away daily, he salvaged and bore carefully to the House at the Edge of Night. On the walls he hung tiles decorated in fantastic colors, patterned with sunflowers, fleurs-de-lis, the faces of lords and ladies. The images, some hundreds of years old, were painted in a hasty, swirling style that gave them the air of having only just dried. The artist Vincenzo had many ancestors who had painted more tiles than anyone ever needed, and Vincenzo dug them out of his cellar and gave them to Amedeo quite willingly—for the tourists had stopped buying them on his trips to the mainland, he said, and he was glad to be rid of them.

From the catacombs by the sea Amedeo brought back pocketfuls of white luminous stones, and lined them up along all the upstairs windowsills. Meanwhile, on the hall table, little trinkets belonging to Sant'Agata accumulated, for these were often the currency in which he was paid for the delivery of a baby or the setting of a broken arm, by those of his patients whose treatment was not paid for by the municipality. He gathered miniatures of the saint, holy water bottles, and one statue in which Sant'Agata tore open her chest to reveal a heart of red-daubed wood. For this statue, he felt both affection and fear. He had never found comfort in religion.

But he seemed at last to have begun to grasp, to inhabit a real existence. He plunged into the sea each morning before making his rounds—earning the ridicule of the fishermen, for no grown man of Castellamare would have swum in the water like that, for amusement, at the very edge of autumn, as though he were drunk! Climbing the hill, salt prickling in the folds of his skin, he would pause to pick up a white stone or a Roman potsherd to carry back to the House at the Edge of Night. In addition to collecting, Amedeo kept records of everything he purchased, as well as each improvement he made to the house. The downstairs rooms were still damp and uninhabitable, the upstairs bedrooms dark, their furniture mantled with dust sheets. It was slow work at first. He was obliged to sleep under a tarpaulin on stormy nights, and on these occasions he was something close to happy.

During these first weeks of autumn, he began to make a systematic study of the island's stories, for with the general altered state of the world, he had started to worry that the stories would be lost. It was not only Amedeo who was preoccupied with the disappearance of things. Stories poured forth, and all he had to do was go where they could be heard, to the places his daily rounds naturally took him: the dim upstairs rooms where widows pored over their rosary beads; the dusty sheds of the fishermen; and the abandoned houses, rocky and biblical, at the edge of the town that were haunted by the island's children. Stories, it seemed, were to be found in dark places. Returning from these places, he transcribed the tales into his book.

He installed his old folding camera in the one dry room, the little junk room under the eaves, full of old packing cases that had held, according to their labels, Modiano cigarettes and Campari liquor. In front of it he hung a red curtain, as though the room were a photographic studio. In his mind the House at the Edge of Night was a great tall museum like his foster father's house, full of books and curiosities, and although he had no wife, no children, still he longed to photograph the descendants, numerous as stars, whose pictures would one day adorn the hallway and hang along the stairs.

During that hot autumn after the festival, he began to feel less satisfied with his association with Carmela. He had formed the habit of deferring to the fearsome Sant'Agata statue as he went in or out of the house, particularly if called to attend to a birth or a death, for, as irreligious as he was, he felt now that he would gladly accept good fortune wherever he might encounter it. It was the same desperation, the same grasping after life, that had led him to acquiesce to Carmela and to purchase the house—a feeling that his life must change. And yet sometimes the statue, on nights when his rounds had taken him to the lit window of Carmela's villa, seemed to greet him with sad, reproachful eyes. He sought a wife and a family, the statue seemed to scold him. And as yet what did he possess but this faltering connection with Carmela, which often, like the watery soup he drank on days when his patients had not paid him, left him hungrier than before?

In penance, he sought out his old friends—the priest, the schoolmistress, the men of the town council—and threw himself with fervor into the task of repairing the house.

One evening, sipping the syrupy remnants from one of the old Campari bottles on the overgrown terrace, Pina Vella told him the story of the House at the Edge of Night. “It's the second-oldest building on the island,” she said. “The old people consider it unlucky. It was the last place where the famous curse of weeping still remained, all those centuries ago. The islanders tried to pull the house down. But the walls were too thick—they couldn't do it. It's survived four earthquakes and a landslide besides. It's won a kind of respect.”

“Then how can it be unlucky?” said Amedeo.

“You can look at it in two ways,” said Pina. “To survive such things a house must either be blessed by Sant'Agata or cursed by the devil—one of the two. That's what they say.”

As for the old name “Casa al Bordo della Notte,” she did not know where that came from. “Some of the old people think they can remember an Alberto Delanotte living here,” said Pina.

“So it could be that the original name was Casa di Alberto Delanotte.” Amedeo was a little discouraged by this unpoetic truth.

“But I prefer to think of the name as meaning ‘at the edge of night,' ” said Pina. “Because it
is,
if you look in both directions from here.”

Amedeo looked. Illuminating the terrace was a single streetlamp, around which mosquitoes circled and inside whose panes lizards basked, sending their scuttling shadows across the tiles. Beyond it were the reassuring lights of the town, and in the distance the coast of Sicily, framing the island on either side, so that Castellamare could have been a peninsula, an outcrop of some greater mass. Look in the other direction, though, and all was sea and night, a vista of emptiness unbroken as far as North Africa. “It's an odd place to put a bar,” said Amedeo.

“It was always a bar,” said Pina. “The first count wouldn't let them have a bar at the center of the town, for fear of drunkenness and gambling. Before the Rizzus took the business over, the house was standing empty for years. Some of the old people will never cross the threshold. And there
is
some bad luck that seems to cling to the place. Look at Rizzu's brother. Two sons dead in as many years. You can see why people call the house cursed.”

“It's this damned war that has been the curse,” said Amedeo. “Not an old bar.”

Pina said, quietly, “True.”

Amedeo wondered if she was thinking of her husband. But Pina allowed herself to reflect only for a minute, twisting her cable of black hair in one hand, and then, straightening herself, she said, “Anyway, I must get home.”

It had always been for
il professore
that she had had to get home. Amedeo wondered if she felt her solitude as he did, as she moved alone through the rooms of her old house by the church. On both sides her neighbors had immigrated to America. Even her beauty was of a handsome, far-off kind, as forbidding as a Greek statue. Perhaps this was why no suitor had approached her since Professor Vella's death. Her elderly father had been the island's schoolmaster at the turn of the century, Amedeo knew—Professor Vella had married Pina on the old man's death, inheriting both girl and schoolroom. Now she had no remaining family on the island except the fisherman Pierino, who was a sort of distant cousin.

Afterward, draining alone the dregs of red liquor, he wished that he had unburdened himself to her a little, for Pina was always so composed, a woman stronger than the walls of the old house. He wished that he had told her how the war had opened a grayness inside him, a grayness that he had sought to fill with the affair with
il conte
's wife, with the purchase of the crumbling house, but which still yawned and gaped on nights like this. Fitting that he now inhabited the House at the Edge of Night, for his own spirit these days could be precisely divided—half of it light and fathomable, half as dark and deep as the ocean.

ONE NIGHT IN LATE OCTOBER,
his friend Father Ignazio intercepted him outside the church. “Come and drink a coffee with me,
dottore,
” he said.

Amedeo was on his way to examine the infected eye of the Mazzus' goat (for he was treated indiscriminately by the islanders as both physician and veterinarian). But the priest's words were an order, not an invitation, and so he followed his friend under the austere arch of the priest's house, and into its courtyard, a dark place green with the scent of oleander bushes, a courtyard that never seemed to get warm.

Father Ignazio poured coffee, arranged cups and saucers on the little rusting table, and addressed Amedeo sternly. “It's time there was a wedding on this poor island,” he said. “That's what I want to discuss with you.”

Discomposed, Amedeo sat, stirring his coffee. “You and Pina,” said the priest. “I may as well come out and say it directly. The girl's got a great affection for you—anyone can see it. And look at you, a bachelor of nearly forty!”

Amedeo was forty-four, but did not say so. “I'd like to see her married again,” said the priest. “She's lonely, especially since you left her house to go and knock about in that old Casa al Bordo della Notte.”

Amedeo, uncertain how to reply, said at last, “I still see Pina very often.”

“Yes, but why not see her every day? As man and wife. Amedeo, you'd be a good husband for Pina. You wouldn't nag at her to give up thinking and reading, as less enlightened men would. She'd be willing to marry you, I'll bet ten thousand
lire—
though I can't say for certain that she loves you. But she'll come to, Amedeo. Her husband has been dead three years. It was a poor match to start with, made because of some family connection over a house and a lemon grove, not out of love. She's an outstanding woman, Amedeo—loyal, resourceful. She's young enough to bear children, with some luck. Why do you hesitate?”

Amedeo drained his coffee and examined the grainy depths.

“Unless there's another woman,” said the priest. “I can't deny I've heard some strange rumors, these last few months.”

“No,” said Amedeo. “There's no other woman.”

“Then consider it at least. It grieves me to see the two of you moping about in your great crumbling houses, both alone.”

Pina. He walked away dizzy with the strangeness of it.

That afternoon, he inspected the eye of the goat on the Mazzus' farm, receiving a sharp bite on the thumb for his pains. Mazzu always paid Amedeo in food, having no other currency, and he walked back to the town with his pockets stuffed with hazelnuts and white truffles from the Mazzus' olive grove. He checked a bad case of constipation on the Dacosta farm, and called in to inspect Rizzu's two smallest grandchildren, who were suffering from an itching complaint of the skin. He found them, still scabby, wrestling in a heap with an assortment of their brothers and sisters. He would be treating them all by Friday, no doubt. Always, children everywhere on this island. It gave him a pain in the chest, so that he could hardly look at them directly. Disinfecting the small, hot backs of the youngest Rizzus, comforting their tears at the sting of the iodine, he felt dizzy for a moment in the unseasonable heat, when really it was his own longing for a child that all at once overwhelmed him.