The House at the Edge of Night (30 page)

After Robert had told Maria-Grazia his stories, he had asked her to recount to him everything that had happened to her since his departure. And now, telling her own story, Robert caressing the hand she permitted him to hold as they sat together in the little room at the top of the house, she understood that the girl who had loved him, a girl barely free of the trappings of adolescence, had been superseded altogether in her by a woman of greater stature. She was the mistress of the bar now, and the one who had laid the ghost of Pierino to rest and started the Modernization Committee. Here a difficulty presented itself. For who was a woman like that to be made a wife, like Giulia Martinello, who went about with pinned-back hair, hunched over a baby carriage, or the widow Valeria's daughter, one of the lipsticked beauties who had once simpered over Robert at the counter of the bar, whom she had seen out on her step with lye soap and a washboard, her hands scraped raw? No, that was not Maria-Grazia's intention.

And yet she loved him. That had become plain to her, she told him, when he had recounted to her the tales of his boyhood: The old feeling had returned, to make her restless at nights when she heard him moving about in the little room at the top of the house, so that she found herself unable to sleep, so carefully was she storing up in her heart every familiar sound. To hide this love any longer, to maintain her composure, was almost too much to bear.

“But then,” he said, “we aren't to be married?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“I'll wait,” he said. “I'll wait five years for you, if that's what you have in mind—I'll sleep up here, and be patient, and respectful, and wait five years to be your lover again.”

“But
caro,
” said Maria-Grazia, a little mischievous. “I never said anything about that.”

Robert glanced up into her face and saw that she was laughing, uncertain, like the girl she had once been. She took his other hand, and something in the way she seized it must have been different, more tremulous, for Robert allowed himself for the first time to kiss her, not on the face but on that hand she had offered, leaving a single burning impression on the palm.

Maria-Grazia, hardly knowing what she was doing, got up, turned the key in the door, and drew the curtains shut.

This had been their signal, before, during the siesta hour, and he half understood and came toward her, palms upraised, deferent, allowing her to unhook the back of her dress, to remove the pins from her hair one by one. But when she at last embraced him he was overcome: In a fever he was tugging all at once at his belt, his shoes, the braid that still fastened her hair. Half-dressed, they collapsed together on the mildewed velvet sofa, pulling the tarpaulin over them to keep out the autumn drafts. And now it was as though time folded like a heat haze and became less substantial—so that the hour they now inhabited might belong to that very first afternoon in her girlhood room, or else to some evening of their old age, fifty years from now. He worked at her in exaltation, inhaling deeply from her hair, finding their old rhythm. In this joyful silence, they remained locked together a long time.

Afterward, as she dressed, Robert said, “And you don't want to marry? You're certain?”

“Well, can't we be lovers, like before? What's the difficulty in that?”

Robert replaced the new spectacles and blinked through them in abashed surprise. “What about all the gossip,
cara
?”

“The gossip I can take,” said Maria-Grazia. “I've suffered worse.”

Without shame, she returned to the bar and served tables all that afternoon, meeting Robert's eyes from time to time when he lingered in the kitchen doorway. That night, she invited him back to her little room with the vista of palm trees for good, laughing a little at his great joy, his professions of adoration. “I'll accept a ring,” she told him. “I'll be your lover as before. I'll love you always, as I always have. All of that I'm happy to do,
caro mio.
But we'll marry some other time.”

And in the years that followed, though no one on Castellamare could have doubted that she loved him, though it was rumored scandalously that they lived as man and wife, though they ran the bar between them, making up the accounts in companionable quiet every night on either side of the counter, for all the world like a long-married couple, that was the only answer she would give to the prying of her neighbors: “We'll marry some other time.”

IT WAS NOT UNTIL
the spring of 1953 that she changed her mind. Maria-Grazia, on that particular morning, had returned to the bar from the widow Valeria's house behind the church, where she had successfully made a deal for a dozen bottles of
limettacello
to be ready in time for the festival. On that particular morning, she found Robert bent over the wireless radio, in tears, the customers clapping him on the shoulders as they did with the bereaved and drunk. “What is it?” she cried, seizing his wrist
. “
What's wrong?”

The wireless radio was tuned to English. Bepe nodded in its direction. But in her consternation she could not make out the words: They were utterly foreign to her once again, as they had been when she was a girl.

Eventually Robert heaved himself up on his elbows and wiped his eyes. Seeing her, he took both her hands and kneaded them between his own. “The deserters have been pardoned,” he said at last, in her ear, getting her face all wet with tears. “The deserters have been pardoned.”

“Signor Churchill has pardoned them,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, “and Signor Robert can go home.”

Then Maria-Grazia found herself, too, in tears, without at first knowing why. “Do you want to leave?” she said at last. “Will you go away again?”

“No,” said Robert. “No,
cara.
I promise you, I'll never leave this place.”

“More fool you,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, not really meaning it. “But Maria-Grazia, even I think you'd better marry poor Signor Robert now.”

Sì, sì,
the elderly
scopa
players protested—hadn't she made him wait almost four years, nearly as long as she had waited for him? Still, the thought made her despair a little, as it had in the midst of her joy when he had first returned. “I don't want to be a wife,” she cried, “and have to wash and clean and cook all day, and trail around with a baby carriage, and never be in charge of this bar any longer, this bar that's been in my family since the end of the first war—and who will take care of it then? You aren't a wife, Agata, for you've always sworn it would be a kind of death to you, and what if I feel the same way? What then? None of you think of that. If I marry, I'm forced to give up the bar.”

“If that's the only thing that troubles you,” said Robert, a little giddy, when they lay together that night in her room, “then
I'll
wash and cook and clean.
I'll
trail round with the baby carriage. Run the bar if you want to! Anything, Maria-Grazia, if you'll just say yes.”

“In that case,” she said, trying and failing to suppress her elation, for she knew he meant every word, “I suppose we had better marry after all. There's only so much gossip a person can bear in a lifetime.”

MARIA-GRAZIA AND THE ENGLISHMAN
were married by Father Ignazio, like her mother and father had been. Afterward, Robert signed his name in the grimy book the priest offered. To cut the thread of his old life, he took her name: Robert Esposito.

Then, for the first time since the war, there was dancing on the terrace of the House at the Edge of Night.
Il conte
did not attend to give his blessing and drink a sip of
arancello,
as was customary at the islanders' weddings. After the departure of Andrea,
il conte
and
la contessa
had entered a period of mourning. The shutters were kept closed, the façade of the house left unpainted, and the servants were under permanent orders to report to the villa in black. But nothing could disrupt the festivity of the House at the Edge of Night. Maria-Grazia had to be hauled away from serving the drinks and counting the takings. Then there was Robert, very English and flustered and a little drunk, holding out both hands for her to dance. As she whirled about in his arms, the island beyond him narrowed, became less significant than the man before her. “I'm glad,” she murmured.

“Of what,
cara
?”

“To have married you, in the end.”

By the light of the moon, to the strains of the
organetto,
they went on whirling, pinned in each other's arms. Inside her dwelt already the fingernail of life that would become the next Esposito.

T
wo
brothers were fishermen upon the sea, both very handsome and so alike that nobody could tell them apart, and both very poor. After a day of fishing without luck, they caught at last a tiny little sardine, hardly worth eating.

“Let's
eat it anyway,” said the elder brother. “It's worth a few mouthfuls.”

“No,”
said the younger. “Let's spare it. It's not worth killing.”

They
spared the fish and it brought them good fortune: two white horses and two bags of gold, with which to journey about the world, and a pot of magic ointment with which to cure all wounds. Since this could not easily be divided, the elder brother, who was braver and stronger, gave it to his younger brother to protect him from harm.

The
brothers rode away in opposite directions. The younger brother had no adventures—at least, if he did, the story does not mention them. The older brother rescued a princess from a sea serpent, cutting out its seven tongues and hacking off its seven heads, and for this labor won her as his bride. He saved a valley from the curse of an evil sorcerer. He journeyed to the bottom of the ocean in an enchanted ship and dug up pearls. His hair grew long, he married the princess, and he no longer looked like his brother anymore.

Then,
still not content, he went in pursuit of a witch whose evil was enchanting a whole country, whom no one could manage to kill. Riding up to her castle with his sword, he threatened to cut off her head. But this witch was cunning. Looping a single strand of her magical hair around the boy's throat, she took him prisoner. “Now,” thought the witch, “I will make him my slave, and he will defend me from these troublesome knights who come riding every day to cut off my head, and I will sit and eat roast meat and pastries all day.”

Meanwhile,
the younger man, growing lonely, was riding about the world in search of his brother. For many years he rode, asking everyone he met whether they had seen the man on the white horse with a face like his own. At last he came to the witch's valley, and heard tell of his brother's capture. “Now,” said the younger brother to himself, “the moment has come, and I must rescue him.”

On
the way, he met a little old man who asked him where he was going. “To free my brother,” said the younger brother, “who is under the power of the witch.”

Then
the old man told him what to do. Since the witch's power was in her hair, he must seize her by it and keep hold, and that way he might overpower her. “Then cut off her head,” said the little old man, “and do us all a favor.”

The
young man rode to the witch's castle. Out came a fearsome knight with flowing hair, swinging his sword, roaring in anger. With one blow the terrified younger brother cut off this knight's head. Then, seizing the witch by the hair, he drove his sword through her body and killed her, too.

But
now that the spell was broken, he saw that the fearsome knight he had killed, the witch's slave, had something familiar about him. Bending near, he recognized the face of his brother, and wept and wept at what he had done.

All
at once, he remembered the magic ointment. He ran to his horse, and returned with it to the place where his brother's headless body lay. Kneeling beside it, he rubbed the ointment on the body, and the skin healed and the dead man sat up. The two brothers embraced each other, and the younger asked forgiveness for the terrible crime he had committed. Then they went back to the older brother's palace side by side, and never again were they parted all their days on this earth.

AN OLD ISLAND TALE,
as told to me by the widower Mazzu, which bears similarities to the Sicilian tale of the same name and probably derives from it. Recorded circa 1961.