The House at the Edge of Night (17 page)

The doctor said nothing, but he turned the stretcher party a little so that he and Bepe stood between
il conte
and the foreigner. “Arcangelo! Men!” said
il conte.
“Seize this enemy soldier. Apprehend him.”

“He doesn't look like he'll last the night,
signor il conte
,” said Arcangelo, twisting his hands. “Maybe we had better just let the doctor take care of him. Why don't we let the doctor—”

“This man is not the doctor,” raged
il conte
. “He's just the bartender. I'm surprised I have to remind
you,
Arcangelo, of that fact!”

“Then, since I'm no doctor,” said Amedeo, “you'll have no objection to my taking this injured foreigner home with me. To my bar, which is private property and nothing to do with your
fascisti
friends or your damned war!”

Il conte
reeled in fury.

“Please,” said Maria-Grazia. The soldier's hand around her wrist was becoming hot and dry, as though he was suffering a fever. “Please. Let us take the man up to the town. He's a prisoner of war either way, at least until we know who's won in Sicilia, and we have to treat him fairly. Especially now the
inglesi
and the
americani
are just across those waters. If anyone comes looking for him and finds he wasn't treated by a doctor…”

She would never afterward know what had compelled her to make this speech, but her father gave her one quick nod when it was finished.

Il conte
waited a long time before he stepped back, but at last he did. They went with the makeshift stretcher at a jog across the sand, Concetta still wearing the medal, the foreign soldier groaning, and Maria-Grazia gripping him by the hand.

“PINA!” YELLED THE DOCTOR
as they deposited the foreigner on the kitchen table, sending peaches rolling. “Come here! I need you to speak English!”

“What is it?” called Pina.

“I need you to talk to this man in English,
amore,
and find out what's happened to him. Fetch me the smallest tweezers, Maria-Grazia. And another bottle of antiseptic. All the grit and sand in his shoulder needs to come out. We'll see if he needs the morphine then. Pina! Come here and speak English for us, please!”

At the threshold, Pina halted and drew back a little. “Who is he?”

“We don't know. A foreign soldier. He was washed up on the beach. I need you to ask how he was injured, what happened, where he's from, and if there's anyone else who needs rescuing. Maybe the fishermen can take out their boats if so, though I doubt there's anyone left.”

Pina, whose English had always been more a matter of theory than of practice, sat down with a thump, stared at the man in bewilderment, twisted her braid in one hand, and finally said, haltingly,
“What your name? Who are you? Is there any person else?”

Concetta wrinkled her nose. “That's not English!”

But the man had turned his head at Pina's voice, and now he began to murmur.

“Robert,”
said the man.
“Carr. Robert Carr
.
Paratrooper.
No one else.”

“
What does he say?” asked Amedeo.

At last the man had loosened his grip on Maria-Grazia's wrist. His eyes opened. They were the coldest eyes she had ever seen, a blue like the northern ice in her brothers' picture atlas, and that coldness and strangeness made her recoil a little, though there was nothing unpleasant about it.
“Grazie,”
said the paratrooper Robert Carr,
“Grazie mille,”
and promptly fainted.

ON THE KITCHEN TABLE
of the House at the Edge of Night, Amedeo picked the grit and sand from the paratrooper and doused him with iodine. Meanwhile, Pina had roused herself from her trance for the first time in months. She boiled water and fetched clean sheets and opened the shutters of Flavio's room. Here on the bed the half-conscious Robert Carr was laid, still groaning. Amedeo set up watch at his feet, armed with Bepe's hunting rifle, which the younger man had left behind in case the remaining local
fascisti
should choose to pay a visit.

But the local
fascisti
were walled up in the town hall, furiously discussing their plan of action. For if the war was really over, then sheltering one of its victors might not be so impolitic after all.

Meanwhile, Gesuina and Bepe and Agata-the-fisherwoman had unleashed a storm of gossip on the island. “What's his name?” everyone was asking. “Who is he?”

“Wobbit, I heard.”

“Wobbit. That's an odd, heathen sort of a name.”

“No, no, Robber.”

“Rob-a-Car. From America.”

“I heard England. Near Buckingham Palace and Kensington Gardens Park.”

“I heard he's a spy.”

“Nothing of the sort—he's a Protestant.”

“I heard he's got a machine gun, and there are twenty others roaming about the island ready to attack us as soon as night falls.”

But dusk came, and no band of
inglesi
armed with machine guns came swarming up from the scrubland or appeared at the edge of the piazza. Instead, the
inglesi
and the
americani
passed the island at a distance, in a second wave of ships, with great guns, to bombard the coast of Sicily again. A fishing vessel, the
Holy Madonna,
was sunk in the bombardment and came to rest on the seabed between the island and the mainland. Agata-the-fisherwoman—who had gone out in search of more paratroopers to rescue—was hauled to safety by a passing crew of Sicilians just in time. Concetta, dancing up and down with glee, the captured medal around her neck, shrieked at the firework display that the warring armies had made of the sky above Sicily, its lights beautiful and fierce as shooting stars.

The distant bombardment woke Robert—woke him twisted in the bedcovers, scrambling for his gun with one hand.

Dusk. A cool room. Shelves grimed a little with dust, on which stood an odd collection of objects that together gave off a powerful odor of someone else's life. Unfamiliar football trophies, a collection of toy swords each on a separate square of brown felt, a disintegrating teddy bear with a pointed nose. A papier-mâché Etna, its slopes furred with dust thick as snowfall, wooden soldiers swarming over it. A pennant with the fasces symbol—this he recognized. A photograph of a group of dark, skinny boys in shorts and white vests, chests barreled out, receiving medals at a sports day. A photograph of the same boys in the uniform of some military organization: fez and knickerbockers. A photograph of a woman with a rope of black hair—this woman he dimly recognized as one of his rescuers. Robert, dry with sunstroke, his tongue clogged with thirst, lay back on the sheets with their scent of foreign soap, and considered his situation.

Somehow here he was, in a dark stone room, surrounded by all the trappings of someone else's childhood. Dimly, he knew that infernal noise of war was coming from wherever he was meant to be. He remembered very little. Now into focus, nearer, on the wall above the bed, swam a stern portrait of Mussolini. Robert made a concerted effort to locate the point at which his memory gave out.

Firstly, the camp in El Alamein—that he remembered well enough. A little before they boarded the glider, the sergeant had come into the tent, bearing a mess tin full of water, strutting with suppressed excitement. A little had dripped on the back of Robert's hand and he remembered noting that it was warm in that heat, like blood. “We're being mobilized,” said the sergeant. “For home, they say.”

Robert, who did not mean to be rude but was a scientific man to his core, said, “Who said so? And are you sure they know what they're talking about?”

But the sergeant became defensive at this, and refused to say anything more.

Still, a festival atmosphere had begun to reign in the camp. Robert remembered a little now about El Alamein, the light most of all, the way it burned you, made everyone screw up their eyes involuntarily at its touch so that they went about all day scowling.

Yes, El Alamein he remembered.

In the glider, as the American tug hauled them upward through air that was already, he could feel, a little choppy, he was handed a booklet called
A Soldier's Guide to Sicily.
Opening it at random, he read halfheartedly from the darkening pages: “Sicily in summer is decidedly hot….The bulk of the inhabitants are Roman Catholic and much addicted to Saints' Days….Morals are superficially very rigid, being based on the Catholic religion and Spanish etiquette of Bourbon times; they are, in actual fact, of a very low standard, particularly in the agricultural areas.” It was too dark by now to read the booklet, so he stowed it inside his battledress and resigned himself to the fact that they were not going home.

He had repeated to himself the odd formulas he had devised to keep proper thought at bay during the interminable glider flights. For instance, that this would be his 79th jump. That between them, the men inside the glider had jumped at least 1,975 times. That their current airspeed was 115 miles per hour. Their current elevation 3,500 feet. Of course, these last two were speculation, but he had a pretty good feel for the plane now, for the heft of it as it moved through the air, the catch of the cable as the tug hauled them skyward, the elastic snap of the tug releasing. This instinct was sometimes a comfort—on calm jumps, in smooth weather—and sometimes a worry, like today, when he could not help knowing from the moment that they launched that something was a little off.

Then the storm hit them side on. He remembered the jolt of it, knees smacking his chin. A few of the men were cantankerous at that jolt, cursing the tug pilot, not realizing this was the prelude rather than the main act. But he, Robert, had known at that moment with awful certainty that they were going down.

Strange, because he did not remember actually descending, only the smack of the water when it came up to meet them. Then the feeling of plunging and yawing under the waves, the way the body of the glider buckled. How some of the men were hacking with clasp knives and bayonets, others had got hold of a wooden hammer and begun beating the roof. And the absurd thought had come to him from nowhere that the Yanks called their gliders, beige and unwieldy, “flying coffins.” Then a hole rent itself in the canvas, and through that hole he had dragged himself, struggling and kicking blindly, the sea pouring in past him, his only urge the one for air and light. The splintered air brake, flapping off the wing, had ripped open his shoulder on the way up.

Straight as a knife he plunged, through water howling like the wind, to emerge on the surface of a churned black sea. He found himself utterly alone.

He remembered the rest only in brief moments—he had been losing blood, no doubt. How he had clambered onto the torn wing of another glider, and a great breaker had spun him full circle, slapping the air out of him. How exploding shells plunged wave after wave of air into his ears. How he had yelled for a far-off landing craft, drifting barge-like on the surface of the water, to come and take him. How when at last he reached it and pulled himself up by the ramp he found no one, only a great hole dragging it under by degrees, a sergeant, dead, on his face in the stern. He had let the man drift away from him. And later, when the sun came up, he had swum dream-like through calm waters, the sun a forceful hand on the back of his head. A rock had risen up ahead of him; it resolved itself, miraculously, into an island. Then he heard the voice of a child. He remembered crawling up a ramp of scalding sand. Lying flat under the sun while a crab worked at the sand, getting its claws bloody. How he had thought he was dying, had almost resigned himself to his death, when they came for him with the makeshift stretcher.

And now here he was, bandaged and feverish, in a room belonging to a foreigner's son.

Again he tried to move, and became aware of his shoulder. Pain like a net paralyzed his whole right side. He tried to get the bandages off with his left hand and his teeth, to see the extent of his injuries, but soon, shuddering, gave it up as a bad job. Instead he shuffled along the bed and drew back the curtains, dislodging a fine dust-like sand from their folds.

Between the slats of the shutters, a swaying paradise appeared before him. Olive groves, palms, the kind blue line of the sea. No sign of the battle he was supposed to be fighting. He would learn later that this room faced away from Sicily, and he was really looking back the way he had come, toward North Africa. Now, on the evening of his rescue, it only added to the wonder of the place. He could have been anywhere: in the South Seas, the Pacific, the setting of some boyhood adventure.

But they had spoken some kind of Italian. Dimly, he remembered that. The man with the alarming eyebrows, the woman with a few words of English, and the girl who had held his hand—all three of them had addressed him in Italian. With his good left hand he attempted to feel inside his battledress for
A Soldier's Guide to Sicily,
but found both book and battledress gone. Instead he was wearing someone else's nightshirt, an unnerving, billowing thing like the robe of a nineteenth-century ghost.

Someone's shadow crossed the doorway. Looking up, he saw the girl descend the stairs. The evening trapped her in its stillness. And a second miracle took place. Robert, who did not know that Maria-Grazia was the girl with the leg braces or the girl whom no one had fallen in love with or anything about her except that she was beautiful and had held his hand—Robert, who was usually a scientific man but just now was tearful with gratitude, a little delirious with fever, and under the influence, though he did not know it, of a formidable dose of morphine—Robert, seeing Maria-Grazia turn the corner of the stairs, did the inevitable and began to fall in love.

Footsteps. Into his eager gaze came not the beautiful girl but the doctor with the eyebrows. The man entered the room, put down a glass of water on the nightstand, then glanced at the stairs. “
Mia figlia,
” he said firmly. “Door-tair? Daugh-tair?”

“Daughter.
Sì, sì.”
Robert nodded furiously to show that yes, yes, he had understood.

“My wife speak leetle
inglesi
,” said the doctor.
“Io, no. Mi dispiace.”
He put a glass of cold water into Robert's hand, and closed Robert's fingers on it firmly. “Dreenk, dreenk.”

Robert drank. “I had a booklet,” Robert said, when the doctor released his grip. “A little booklet. English.
A Soldier's Guide to Sicily.
With some Italian words in it.”

The doctor's eyebrows quivered with effort. Eventually he shook his head—no, he did not understand.

“
A book? A little book?” Robert tried again, making a pantomime of opening and closing with his good hand. A few words of school Latin came back to him.
“Liber?”
he said.
“Liber?”

“
Ah! Un libro!
Yes.” The doctor left the room and returned some minutes later with a stack of books. “
Ecco—scrittori inglesi
. Shak-e-speare. Charldicken. Like thees you learning
italiano,
yes?”

It was no good attempting to ask for the booklet again. Instead, Robert allowed the doctor to deposit on his lap what seemed on closer inspection to be
A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield,
and
The Complete Works of Shakespeare,
all in Italian. “Wife,” said the doctor, with evident pride. “Tea-chair.”

“Teacher?” said Robert, and the doctor nodded. “But I know these books,” said Robert, ashamed to find himself close to tears. “Why, I could read these in Italian and know every damned word of the English.”

The doctor, catching Robert's enthusiasm if not his meaning, nodded eagerly. “Yes, yes,” he said. “English.”

Emboldened, Robert gestured at the room around him and attempted the question that had troubled him since he woke.
“Filius?”
he said, making a guess at the word. “Son? Where is he?”

But here the doctor's eyebrows descended.
“Morto,”
he said. He held up three fingers. “
Tutti e tre figli. Morto, morto, morto.
Disappear. War. Probably dead. All three son.”

Cradling the familiar books in his arms, Robert, with acute shame, found himself weeping. Great sobs racked him, made breathing impossible. He could not seem to stop it. The awful noise he was making drew the woman and the girl. The family was not discomposed by his fit of weeping; the woman merely gripped him by the shoulder with little murmurs of concern, while the daughter ran to fetch him more water. He took it with gratitude and drank. “Don't be ashamed,” said the woman, when at last he was finished. “I want please to say this: You must not be ashamed. We all here lost someone. We all here know how it is to lose.”

The woman trembled a little; her urge to say what was on her mind seemed at last to have unlocked her voice. “There,” she finished. “I have said. Maybe I not speak English so good, but I decide I must say.” She lifted the weight of the books and set them down on the nightstand. “Now you please sleep. And when you little better, you start to read these books and learn Italian. Not worry. My husband will guard with the shotgun in case the local
fascisti
try to come, but I don't think they come no more.”

Indeed, it began to become clear to the islanders of Castellamare in the following days that the star of the local
fascisti
was rapidly declining.
Il conte
and Arcangelo had put away their black shirts and disbanded the
Balilla
. Then, stirred by unfounded rumors that the
inglesi
would take away their sons' medals and army keepsake photographs and the letters informing their wives and mothers of their brave deaths in battle, all kinds of people crept out into their yards and fields and knelt in the earth to bury these relics out of sight. Even Amedeo took Flavio's medal one night, wrapped it in a scrap of leather, and hid it under the great palm in the courtyard.

The moon made the palm's leaves waxy, unreal, and silvered the fur of the sleeping Micetto. As Amedeo turned to go inside, brushing the earth from his fingers, he found that his grief had lost its edge a little, like the turning point of a fever, abating just enough to be borne.

PINA BEGAN TO RELAY
to them fragments of the foreigner's past. He was an Englishman, not an American, she said—which, in Amedeo's view, explained his flustered stammering whenever Maria-Grazia was present. He was twenty-five—two full years older than Tullio would have been. Though Pina had to consult the dictionary, and even then wasn't quite sure about it, she thought he had used the English word “foundling” about himself. “A foundling!” cried Amedeo in delight. “Why, then, he's already an Esposito!”

Pina looked at him with narrowed eyes.
“Amore,”
she said. “He isn't your son.”

But how could he not see the boy, somehow, as restitution? He had even begun to become daringly, tremulously hopeful that at least one of his boys might come home once the war had officially ended. For if this boy had been rescued, so might his have been, by some kind Englishman on some foreign shore.

In the days that followed, the islanders, too, began to regard the foreigner lying wounded in the doctor's house not as a curse but as a blessing. If the soldier's English comrades arrived, or the Americans with their jeeps and flags, wouldn't they see how well the islanders had treated their brother, caring for him as one of their own? And, besides, wasn't it a miracle of Sant'Agata, to have delivered to them at the end of all this fighting a drowned man out of the ocean? Now, from morning until night, the town's widows arrived at the door of the House at the Edge of Night, bearing platters of baked aubergine and bottles of homemade liquor for the foreigner. The fishermen delivered freshly caught
sarde
on their way back up the hill each evening. And even a few of the girls, girls whose sweethearts were absent, turned up in the lipstick in which they had not been seen since before the war, and asked Maria-Grazia if they could have a glimpse of the soldier.