The House at the Edge of Night (15 page)

At the beginning of the war Maria-Grazia had been fifteen years old. That year a change had come over the male youth of Castellamare, a kind of fever: Even the most innocent of her female classmates had begun to be desperately claimed by the boys who would soon be leaving, as though all of them were laying down a deposit on future wives and sweethearts. For weeks the girls and their lovers had hung about in alleys and in the caves by the sea, to return at dusk with necks mottled like the skin of flounders, earning scoldings from their grandmothers. But no boy came to claim Maria-Grazia, and as she sat on the steps she understood bitterly that her own place on the island was still a separate one. She would always be a different kind of person: a person to be prayed for, not fallen in love with.

For these and other reasons, Maria-Grazia now failed to realize the simple truth that would have been evident in a larger town: that she was beautiful.

Yet, during these years of the war when great gray ships flung tidal waves onto the shores of the island, when ceaseless planes like mosquitoes—British, some said, and others German—traversed the great blue sky overhead, she saw that from her stewardship of the bar came a grudging, hard-won respect. For everyone saw how she managed the business, carefully, like the captain of a fishing vessel, steering it from ruin and loss into safer waters. She spoke kindly to the elderly
scopa
players and the widows of Sant'Agata; she charmed the retired fishermen as completely as her brother Tullio had. And no one could deny that she stood on her own feet for eight hours each day, ten hours—as straight and tall (or almost) as any other girl on Castellamare.

Only at night did she allow herself to weep, brushing the cigarette butts and bent
scopa
cards from the floor—and not out of self-pity, but from the sheer exhaustion of these long days of work and solitude and endless waiting.

Then came the day of the ships.

Like a miracle, boats began to gather at the edge of the horizon, great gray ones like churches and tiny ones no bigger than the fishing boat of Pierino. The young fisherman Totò's sister Agata, who in his absence plied the deep waters with the same fearlessness as her brother, in his boat the
Holy Madonna,
arrived in the bar later that afternoon, her nose and cheeks a little scalded. Agata reported that she had got close enough to the ships to hear that the voices on board were speaking “some kind of funny
inglese
.” “How many ships?” asked the elderly
scopa
players. Agata reported that there were over a thousand of them by her count—“
Cazzo,
perhaps thousands and thousands!” And, she added, judging by all the guns and the cannons, they weren't amassing around Sicily for a tourist visit to the Greek temples.

At this a cheer went up—for the islanders had long since abandoned any pretense at Fascism or socialism or any other -ism, and instead favored anyone who might cut short the war so that their sons and nephews could come home.

Totò's sister, whom everyone referred to as Agata-the-fisherwoman, drained two glasses of water and two of
arancello
through lips as dry as the soil of the island. “I'd wish them better weather for it,” she said. “It's fiercely hot out there, but there's a
bastardo
of a storm coming, and they'll be seasick before they land, those
inglesi,
for I've heard most of them have never been upon the sea at all.”

Of course, there was no sign of a storm, but every ancestor of Agata-the-fisherwoman had possessed the same prodigious gift for predicting the weather, and no one contradicted her. Shortly after, sauntering like a boy in her baggy men's trousers and flat cap, Agata-the-fisherwoman left to return to the sea. “Clean your mouth out, young woman!” Gesuina called after her. “I don't want to hear your
bastardo
and
cazzo
in here again, thank you!”

“I'm sorry,
nonna,
” called Agata, abashed.

The customers crowded around the wireless radio, which was playing a Fascist marching song. Maria-Grazia tuned it to the BBC station. This station had something to say. Maria-Grazia listened, but the English voices had nothing to say about ships or the Mediterranean. “They're talking about the English weather,” she said.

“Do you think there really is going to be an invasion?” said one of the elderly
scopa
players.

“They wouldn't tell us about it if there were,” said Rizzu. “But will
our
island be spared—that's the real question? Will they leave Castellamare alone, or will we have to take up our pitchforks and our tuna gaffs and fight?”

“I doubt the English or the Americans have very much use for Castellamare,” said Father Ignazio from the corner, “even considering, of course, its strategic location in the Mediterranean and its evident natural charm.”

“
Ai-ee,
but we've been invaded and invaded since the first baby drew breath to cry on this island!” mourned Gesuina. “And it'll be our cursed misfortune to be invaded again—begging your pardon for disagreeing with you,
padre.
”

“
That's quite all right,” said Father Ignazio, and covered his face with his handkerchief. The priest was becoming an old man now, and spent his afternoons dozing on the veranda of the bar. But even he could not sleep through the continuing uproar of this particular day.

Maria-Grazia knocked on the door of the stone bedroom beside the courtyard, and the room at the top of the house. “Mamma,” she said. “Papà. Wake up. They say the
inglesi
and the
americani
are coming.”

Her father roused himself at once and followed her into the bar. But here the marching songs were still playing, the ceiling fan still whirring, and all looked as it had every day for the last year. And so her father returned to the top of the house and to his book of stories. Around six o'clock, just as the heat was leaving the courtyard and the piazza, he called her up to him. “Maria-Grazia, you're right,” he said. “Look at the horizon.”

Her father was bent over an old pair of binoculars that had once been Flavio's, a
Balilla
prize. Now that the heat haze had lifted a little, the ships were quite plain. Along the edge of the sea they were gathering, arrayed like raindrops on a wire.

All of this unsettled Maria-Grazia a little—made her wander from room to room and out onto the veranda, when she should have been minding the bar's counter.

Standing there beneath the cool mat of vines, she heard the voice of a child. She searched under the tables and unearthed the girl Concetta, who was trying without success to entice Micetto out from the bougainvillea. “He doesn't want to play with me,” said Concetta.

“Come inside for a glass of
limonata
,” said Maria-Grazia. “Or an
arancino
if you're hungry.”

“Everyone in there is pushing and shoving over the wireless.”

“I know, but come with me. I'll find you somewhere to sit out of their way.”

Concetta, Arcangelo's daughter, was a child who seemed to belong to no one; neither her father nor her mother knew what to do with her. Dirty of face, draggled of hair, she roamed the island like a boy, catching lizards in her pinafore and hitting things with sticks. The girl suffered from violent seizures—as a child of three, she had fallen down in the piazza and convulsed until foam came out of her mouth, and ever since then she had been afflicted. Though Amedeo had examined her and diagnosed an epileptic condition, the town's old women insisted on capturing her as she roamed about the streets, and hauling her to the church where they would say endless Ave Marias and Our Fathers for her troubled soul.

Recently, to escape their ministrations, Concetta had taken to hanging around Maria-Grazia at the bar. “Yes, please, a
limonata,
please,” she said, getting to her feet to expose a front entirely coated in the white dust of the veranda. “After that a rice ball. Or two?” she added, hopefully.

Maria-Grazia set a glass and two
arancini
on a napkin before her at the bar, and hoisted the little girl onto a stool. With great satisfied sucks, Concetta devoured the rice balls and drained the lemonade. She was Maria-Grazia's most appreciative customer. Concetta could not remember the fat rice balls from before the war, which had had the unquestionable advantage of being made with real rice and not rolled-up bread with grit in it; she was unaware that
limonata
was not meant to make you wince and suck your teeth but was supposed to be a sweet thing.

“There,” Concetta said, with satisfaction. “That's better. I had a pain in my stomach from being so hungry all day.”

“Where have you been today?” said Maria-Grazia.

“Over by the rocks and in the caves,” said Concetta. “And with the goats at the Mazzus'. But they were boring today because it's so hot. All they would do is lie and wave their ears.”

“You take care when you're about by yourself on the island,” said Maria-Grazia. “There are lots of ships out in the sea right now, getting ready for something that's happening in Sicilia
.”
She hardly knew what she was warning the girl against.

“I don't worry about the ships,” said Concetta. “Unless they do something interesting like start fighting. Then I'll go and watch.” She gave her empty glass a last great suck. “Why doesn't Micetto like me?”

“Oh, he's fierce like that with everyone. You mustn't worry. He's got a wild nature, not like us.”

“
I've
got a wild nature,” said Concetta, with perfect truth.

AS MARIA-GRAZIA SAT BETWEEN
her father and mother that night at the kitchen table, oppressed as usual by their separate silences, a storm approached. She heard it in the uneven crashing of the breakers, the snapping of the leaves of the palms. “Agata-the-fisherwoman was right,” she said, watching clouds mass at the window.

“What?” murmured Pina.

“A storm.”

That night, in her childhood room with its prim pressed-flower pictures, its home-developed photographs of Micetto, and its school certificates with yellowing edges, she could not get to sleep. This wakefulness infuriated her. She felt goaded by it, as if by a mosquito. Why would sleep not come? Outside, great winds tore through the palms, making Micetto yowl. Someone's shutters rattled on the other side of the piazza.

She went down and retrieved the cat, as she always did in bad weather, but he would not settle to sleep on the end of her bed. Instead he ran round and round her room, fur bristling, until she was obliged to put him out again. Then, for the first time in his life, Micetto bit her.
“Micettino!”
she scolded, but the cat was quivering under the oleander bushes, entirely wild.

When the storm quietened for a moment, she thought she heard, above the clouds, the high whine of planes.

SHE MUST HAVE SLEPT
a little because she was woken—all at once—by a great thunder as though the house were falling to pieces around her. “Mamma!” she called. “Papà!”

Blindly, in the dark of the stairs, she and her father found each other. “What is it?” she cried.

“Gunfire,” said her father. “Heavy guns.”

“Here?”

“No,
amore.
Further off than they sound. They're bombarding the coast of Sicilia
.”

She ran with her father to the top of the house. From there, the sea spread out beneath them. Great lights and explosions pierced the dark, and when the night was lit up she saw a wall of smoke obscuring the stars, like the boundary along a forest fire. Those tiny houses that had always stood as vaporous as something in a dream across the water had vanished under rolls of cloud. Plumes of water flew up, plumes of sand. And all over the surface of the ocean bits of wreckage were heaving, assaulted by the waves. “Airplanes,” said her father. “Those poor men in their airplanes must have been wrecked in the storm.”

“Do you think any survived?” she said. “Couldn't we send out ships?”

“They're too far off.”

Meanwhile, the island was thrown into confusion. Someone, startled out of bed, had got to the church before Father Ignazio could stop them and rung an invasion bell. Mazzu and his sons had gathered their pitchforks and hunting rifles and were in their boat and halfway out of the quay on a rescue mission before the rest of the fishermen stopped them: It was no good; in the heavy shelling they would certainly be sunk. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered in the piazza and a group of
il conte
's peasants had hauled out the statue of Sant'Agata. Gesuina and the other widows were addressing prayers to it, while the
podestà, il conte
himself, faintly ridiculous in his nightshirt, wool socks, and chapped boots left over from the Great War, was running about giving orders.

It was rumored that the prison guards had boarded their gray motorboat and fled, leaving the prisoners unguarded. Sure enough, when
il conte
went to summon the guards to reestablish some kind of order, they were nowhere to be found.

All that night, the great gray ships kept coming, disgorging men as small as grains of rice onto the coast of Sicily. And as the light came up, another great wonder appeared—ships like water creatures that drove straight up the beach and out of sight onto the distant shore.

Morning brought a lower rumbling, which suggested the
inglesi
and the
americani
had broken through into the depths of Sicily. There was nothing to do but open the bar, and this Maria-Grazia did. When she raised the blinds, she found a crowd of neighbors already outside, impatient to follow the proceedings on the island's only wireless.

All morning, to the sound of great guns, Maria-Grazia did a steady trade. Meanwhile, the wireless had nothing new to say, did not seem to know that a battle was taking place at all. Even when Pina came home from school at lunchtime, she could get nothing from the BBC station, which was too fast and too crackling for her to make out.

Thus it was that when the miracle of the man from the ocean took place, no one witnessed it except the girl Concetta.

ALL MORNING, EXHILARATED BY
the popping and thundering of the battle on the Sicilian coast, Concetta had roamed the island in search of a better view. By noon, she had reached the remote end of Castellamare, where the scrub dropped down to the caves. Now the sun was like a weight on her shoulders, and she took refuge in the first opening in the rock. The caves had never frightened Concetta, though she had heard about their strange weeping. She didn't believe in any silly Greek ghosts.

At noon the sea was oily, listless, blurry on its surface, Sicily just a faint shadow like water vapor. How she wished she had a pair of binoculars like those
Balilla
boys! What a glorious din and smoke it all made!

Concetta did not know what war was, but she certainly liked its noise and its chaos. Both appealed to her natural sense of things. She had always regarded the world about her warily, never sure if it was entirely safe. In her six years of life she had been doused with holy water and warded with the sign of the cross, subjected to endless ambushes by pious old ladies brandishing effigies of Sant'Agata, and bullied through the rosary by her father, when all she wanted was to run free and to be left alone! To Concetta the world was a rock in a hazy blue ocean and it had never occurred to her that it should make sense. She didn't know her age or the names of the other islands, and she agreed with her mother that the stars and the tides of the ocean were a great puzzle, just like her sickness. A world for clever people like Professoressa Vella and
il conte
to read about in books, not a world that ever intruded on her own.