The House at the Edge of Night (7 page)

He went to Pina's house and walked in without knocking. Pina was at the stove, her hair pinned up, preparing a chicken. He waited, dry mouthed, attempting a polite smile. At last, he knelt at her feet (she had no living father or brother to ask for permission), and asked her to be his wife. “Or at least consider it,” he said, his courage failing.

Pina, to his surprise, consented immediately and with tears in her eyes: “I don't need to consider; I already have my answer; oh, Amedeo!”

They agreed to be married at once. On the last day in November, Father Ignazio bound their hands before the statue of Sant'Agata and the whole island.

IT WAS PINA WHO
was responsible for the first recorded photograph of Amedeo. A few days after the wedding, she ambushed him with the folding camera at the top of the stairs. “Stand still!” she cried. “Stand still! Let me capture you!” Amedeo, startled, posed a little self-consciously with one hand on his waist. Just back from his morning rounds, he had yet to put down his medical bag. He had with him also his book of stories—the widower Donato, whom he had treated that morning, had just finished recounting to him a tale about his aunt's visitations by the saint during the festival of 1893. In the photograph Amedeo seemed aflame with happiness, possessed by it, his whole being angled toward the woman behind the lens. For Pina, it turned out, possessed within her the depth of passion he had been lacking all this long while. He had not found it in Carmela. He had found it in the schoolmistress with a face like a Greek statue; it was here.

They had made no wedding journey, though in honor of his new bride he had set aside all work except emergencies for five days. After the wedding, Pina, with her small neat trunk of belongings, her crates of books, had followed him to the House at the Edge of Night, which was now beginning once more to be habitable. The house was fragrant with the purple scent of bougainvillea, its rooms sonorous with the noise of the sea. Happiness hung in the air, hummed inside the walls; now it seemed a thing that was attainable. That first night, Pina had climbed through the house, exploring every half-forgotten, dust-sheeted room, throwing open every window. Amedeo followed in her train, picking up the pins that fell from the rope of her black hair. Then, at the top of the house, suddenly mischievous, she removed her bridal crown of oleander and set the rest free. The glossy ropes of it filled the room with their perfume, and he found himself seizing them in great handfuls. They pursued each other through each room of the house. It seemed for the first time to be a place of joy again, as it had been before the war.

By some good fortune, there were no serious illnesses that week, and they passed it blissfully undisturbed. He was thankful that he had never brought Carmela to the House at the Edge of Night, that he had now broken all ties with her. He resolved to be a better man. And to his gratification he found that as his passion for Pina grew, during those wondrous days of makeshift honeymoon when they ate their dinner off old cracked saucers and out of coffee cups like fishermen at sea, and never opened the shutters until noon, and made love wherever they found themselves—on the newly sanded floorboards, on the dust-sheeted sofa in his study, on the straw mattresses in the spare bedrooms—during those days, the memory of Carmela became smaller, less significant, like something seen through a gray veil, belonging to another time, to his life before the war.

But Carmela had not been easy to break with. She had turned vindictive at the news of his engagement, had threatened to reveal their association to her husband unless Amedeo submitted to her advances one last time, and a last, and one more. Reluctantly he had continued to play the part of her lover, breaking the thing off painfully, gradually, rather than all at once as he wanted to do. He had last visited the caves by the sea—it caused him hot shame even to confess it to himself—on the eve of his wedding. Then, at last, in the darkness full of the spray of the churned autumn ocean, he had managed to break with Carmela for good. On his wedding night, Pina wondered why he sneezed so, in what damp place he could have caught such a cold.

Shortly after their wedding, Pina became pregnant. And in the joy of this news, the affair with Carmela was forgotten; it became something he regarded dispassionately, as though it had never happened to him at all. He did not want to consider it. For when he did, a dark fear possessed him that Carmela might at any moment take it into her head to tell her husband the truth. He gave thanks that the count was always absent in those months, and absorbed himself instead with Pina.

Had he felt some dim sense of foreboding at the news that Carmela, too, had given thanks at the shrine of Sant'Agata, for the conception of a child? He could not now remember. Everything in those days had been fogged by his love for Pina, and his own happiness. But by continuing to vacillate between the two of them—out of weakness, out of fear of scandal!—he had somehow got into this predicament. He had hoped that the affair with Carmela would go unnoticed on the island. Now he saw that it could become a thing of monstrous size, impossible to shake off, a thing that could pry his whole life apart.

By noon on the day of Pina's baby's birth, it was rumored across the whole island that the doctor had delivered two babies, one his wife's and the other his lover's. It was the greatest scandal ever to sweep Castellamare. It was also the most thrilling entertainment, and several people took the day off work especially to follow its development.

When Pina heard, she wept, turning her face to the wall. She refused at first even to nurse her child, so that Amedeo was obliged to carry the wailing baby from room to room. The count raged in the streets, making an exhibition of himself; the priest and the mayor had to be summoned to coax him out of the public square; and Carmela, despite the exhortations of her friends, her midwife, and her servants, sat up in bed and refused to retract her story. For the first time in her marriage, she had the upper hand over her husband, and she was not about to relinquish it. Her baby, she repeated, was Amedeo Esposito's. She and the doctor had been lovers for half a year, only ceasing their meetings the night before his wedding day. “If the baby belongs to my husband,” she said, “why have we been married six years with no child, so long, in fact, that he accused me before the whole town of being barren?”

This, no one could answer—least of all Amedeo, who cursed himself for never considering the possibility that the difficulty had been
il conte
's.

In the circumstances, one path of action presented itself.

“I never met with her,” he insisted (his desperation lent the words a certain credibility). “I never did any of those things she claims, as God and Sant'Agata are my witnesses!”

Pina would not be consoled. Carmela would not retract her story. In the House at the Edge of Night, all was disorder and weeping.

Amedeo was thankful when his duties allowed him to flee the house. The sound of his beloved Pina sobbing now permeated the walls at nights (he had been banished upstairs to sleep on the damp sofa, under the tarpaulin). Yet soon, during those first days of his son's life, he began to feel himself unwelcome not only in his own home but in certain corners of the island. When he went to the ancient Signora Dacosta's door to check her rheumatic knees, the old woman merely answered that she was “quite well, thank you,
dottore,
” and closed it, clearly still limping. Gesuina, he noticed, slammed her shutters with unnecessary force whenever he crossed the piazza. The grocer Arcangelo, with whom he had sat on the town council since before the war, excused himself when Amedeo entered the shop and sulked in the back room until he was gone.

Meanwhile, the fishermen reported that the count's doctor friend had been summoned from the mainland. With bottles of wine and boxes of Palermitan marzipan, he came. The two of them could be heard late at night raising their voices on the terrace of the villa, the count drunkenly roaring, the rich doctor consoling. Carmela, apparently, was shut up in her room with the baby, and the count would not see her.

On the third day, the mainland doctor examined the baby and, after some consideration, declared his characteristics to match those of
signor il conte
in every way.

Amedeo knew that it was possible to draw blood from a child and from the suspected father, to ascertain their blood type and (somewhat unreliably) to test the paternity that way. The mainland doctor, clearly, did not read the latest medical periodicals. But in the light of this evidence, the count now underwent a violent reversal.

“She means to shame me,” he raged to his friend. “I see it now. The whole thing was calculated to shame me. She means to take my son from me, and make me the laughingstock of the island, by claiming an affair with this Esposito, this bastard doctor with holes in his shoes with whom she has hardly exchanged a word in her life! I won't stand for it. Bring me the child.”

The baby was taken from Carmela's breast and brought wailing to his father. The count kissed him and made much of him, and after some thought chose for him the name Andrea, his own first name. “There,” said the count (who was holding his son at arm's length because the boy was now frothing in an unappetizing, milky fashion). “Take him back to his mother. It's settled. The boy is mine.”

The news spread around the island that the baby was the count's after all. There had never been any affair between the doctor and Carmela, and the whole thing was a slanderous lie on Carmela's part designed to discredit her husband.

But most of the islanders preferred the first story. Rizzu had come to life again in his wonder over the week's events. “It's a miracle of Sant'Agata,” he told the priest. “Two babies, born on the same night! A miracle. The miracle we have waited and prayed for since the start of the war—longer—since the saint mercifully cured the legs of Signora Gesuina!”

Father Ignazio, who was pruning the oleander bushes in his yard with his soutane rolled up, merely raised an eyebrow.

“Twins—miraculous twins!” continued Rizzu in his rapture. “Twins born by different mothers on the same night, to the count's barren wife and to Pina, a woman far too old to bear a child.”

“Pina is hardly more than thirty,” said Father Ignazio. “And it's not a miracle for two babies to be born on the same night, merely a matter of statistics. It's never yet happened in my time on the island. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I've seen both children, and they don't look alike.”

Something troubled Rizzu. “Look,
padre,
do you believe this tale about Amedeo and
il conte
's wife carrying on with each other in the caves by the sea?”

“No,” lied Father Ignazio, and inadvertently hacked a dozen buds from the oleander bush.

The next day, the doctor himself came to visit. Amedeo wept with his head bowed, and Father Ignazio found himself playing the uneasy role of comforter, when really it was Pina whose side he inclined to in this matter. “There,” said Father Ignazio, thumping the doctor's shoulder. “There, now. You'll have to hold your head up, you know, Amedeo. When a rumor takes hold in a place this small, with nothing else to talk about, it can be the ruin of a man; it can drive you from the island, if you let it.”

“It's Pina I mind about,” said Amedeo. “It isn't what everyone else is saying, it's that Pina believes I did those things.”

“Talk to her,” said Father Ignazio. “Tell her the truth about it, one way or the other.”

Amedeo raised his head. “
Padre,
the truth…”

But here Father Ignazio raised his hand. “No, no,” he said. “I've never been your confessor. I know you aren't a religious man. I think it's better that you make your peace with Pina, and leave the rest of us in the dark about the matter. Don't add to her humiliation.”

When Amedeo got home, Pina was sleeping, with one hand stretched above her head, exposing her nightdress and the brown curve of her right breast. Her eyelashes were wet; her rope of black hair, unwound, spread itself over the pillows. He could not now remember how he had loved Carmela—if, indeed, he had loved her. A great homesickness overcame him for the first time since he had set foot on the island.

But at last he had a son. He had not been allowed to hold the boy since that first morning. Now, he took the baby and bore him away to the top of the house. So tiny the boy was. His hands, his pink little face, his small barrel of a chest rising and falling.

He longed to offer the boy some gift, some token. And so, in a whisper, he offered the first thing that occurred to him: He told his boy the story of the island.

THE FIRST NAME GIVEN
to the island was Kallithea, he told his son, by a group of Greek sailors in search of a homeland. The name could mean “most beautiful” or “auspiciously burning.” Either was a possibility, for the island was volcanic; the sailors of Siracusa claimed to have seen it glow and shoot up flame. Now, it shone like a beacon and the travelers steered their ship by its light. As they made safe passage across the waters, the island's summit smoldered and went out.

The travelers landed and passed the night in a series of square caves cut out of the cliffs. The island was a place of black water and many stars. In the early hours, the moon came out and illuminated the sea, and the travelers were woken by a clear sound of weeping. It seemed to surround them, to come from the rocks of the island itself. Groping in the dark, they found hard white skulls and heard under their feet the click of bones. The caves were not caves but tombs. Clearly, something terrible had happened here.

The new islanders prospered, but for one thing: They were disturbed each night by the sound of weeping, which provoked in them troublesome dreams. Gradually, the situation became so unbearable that the islanders decided not to sleep at all. So the first settlers in their town of stone huts became a wakeful people. They gathered on nights full of flame and stars, and sang and shook tambourines to drown out the weeping. But whether it was the wailing voices or the isolation of this place with its black sea and many constellations, all their songs were melancholy. No one could write a joyful song, not even the greatest of their poets. Even now (the doctor told his boy), the folk songs of Castellamare sounded to the stranger so mournful that, if you listened to them long enough, they might turn you mad.

(Hesitantly, murmuringly, so as not to wake Pina, the doctor sang to his boy the most beautiful and least melancholy of these songs.)

He had been going to tell his boy the rest of the story, how the curse of weeping was lifted: how a girl named Agata, a peasant's daughter, saw visions of the Madonna; how the islanders, stone by stone, rebuilt their town. But here the boy stirred and let out a cry, and Pina, downstairs, awoke with her son as though by instinct. “Amedeo!” she called. “Where is my son?”

He caressed the boy's face. “Time to go down and talk to your mother,” he said.

Pina, when he entered the room, was still for a moment disoriented—he could tell by the way she languidly smiled at him, as she had on her first morning in the House at the Edge of Night. Then she recalled their present trouble, and her face altered. “Give me my baby,” she said.

He put the boy in her arms. The arch of her shoulders made him unwelcome, but he remained. “Pina,” he said. “I need to speak to you. I've done wrong by you, Pina.”

Now she did not weep but was straight and unyielding. “Yes,” she said. “You have.”

He became beseeching. He had not meant to, but he did. “Pina,” he said. “
Amore.
Tell me how I can make it right.”

“It's the lying I mind most of all,” said Pina, hard-eyed and quiet.

So he told her the truth.

It was a long time before Pina had anything to say. “You've disgraced me before everyone,” she said at last. “Our neighbors, our friends, the whole island. Do you think you can behave so badly and expect everyone to forget it? This isn't a big city like Firenze. Once people know a thing, they remember! There's nothing else to talk about. Now, everyone will know—and their children's children—how you went with another man's wife on the eve of your own wedding.”

“I'll make it right,” he said. “It's you, Pina, I love. I'll show it to be true.”

“Can't we go away somewhere?” she said. “To the north, to Firenze! Can't you find another position, in some big town where we know nobody?”

“And leave the island?” said Amedeo. In spite of himself, he shed tears of self-pity. They struck the baby like great raindrops, making him look up in wonder. “Isn't there some other way, Pina? Ask me anything except that.”

Pina dismissed him.

THAT AFTERNOON, ARCANGELO'S TEENAGE SON
appeared on his bicycle on the dust road above the Rizzus' farm. Amedeo was in the Rizzus' kitchen, inspecting the children's skin infection. The boy took flight down the hill in a fog of dust, and, propping the bicycle outside the gate, removed his hat and entered the kitchen. “You're wanted
, signor il dottore,
” he said. “A special meeting of the town council.”

After Amedeo had finished bandaging the children, he made the climb back to the town. On the slope between the prickly pears, the dust was silken, the heat like a weight on his back. Arcangelo, sweating, waylaid him on the steps of the town hall. “You're to wait outside,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘outside'?”

“In the lobby. You aren't wanted at the meeting. We've your position to discuss.” Arcangelo took out a handkerchief and polished his forehead. “After this week's events, we need to consider your situation on the island. Therefore
il conte
has called for a special meeting, and you're to wait outside for our decision.”

The count's motorcar drew up with a retch. Up the steps came the count in his mayor's sash and suit of English linen. Without a word to Amedeo, he caught Arcangelo by the elbow and drew him into the darkness of the building.

Quick in pursuit, alight with fury, came Father Ignazio. Amedeo met him halfway up the steps. “What's this?” he said. “You're discussing my position. I was told only to come to a special meeting; I wasn't told anything about this.”

“I've only just heard it myself,” said Father Ignazio.

“Am I merely to wait outside?”

“We'll fight it out, Amedeo,” said the priest. “I certainly intend to.”

On the varnished bench in the entrance of the town hall, Amedeo waited. From within he heard shouting, roaring voices: the count's voice and—to his surprise—the priest's. “Damn you!” he heard the priest shout. “Do you think you'll find someone else to take his place? And what about when the Mazzus were laid low with that fever last Christmas? And the idea of draining the swamp—not a child's succumbed to malaria since! Why, your own wife would be dead now, d'Isantu, and your newborn boy, if it weren't for Amedeo Esposito!”