The House at the Edge of Night (33 page)

Pina, too, railed against the new developments. “That line of concrete villas,” she said, “why, they aren't worth anything, not like these old houses in the town. Anyone can see the first earthquake will knock them flat. And before long there'll be no view of the sea left, and no bay, and no space to graze goats, and more tourists in this place than islanders. And that new
conte
with his city ways will own everything.”

But Maria-Grazia could not deny that money flowed more easily in the bar now, that the cashbox (though its contents were still transferred to the backs of bookshelves and slipped between mattresses and pillows each Friday, not deposited in the new
conte
's savings bank) was fatter and more quickly replenished. The walls of the house were painted, the coffee machine replaced, and Concetta from her rising salary overhauled the furnishings of her Zia Onofria's house, painted it a pale blue all over, and planted orange trees in its front yard. Meanwhile, Robert worked long hours each Saturday repainting Tullio's and Aurelio's rooms, which Amedeo had finally relinquished, for Sergio and Giuseppino: discussing with the carpenter new furniture to be specially manufactured, sanding the doorframes, waxing the floorboards until they shone.

MARIA-GRAZIA NEVER ONCE SAW
Andrea during the months he spent on the island on that first visit. At the beginning of the second week, she had gone very early in the morning to the gate of the villa and rung the bell, with no clear intention. After some five or ten minutes' delay, the agent Santino Arcangelo appeared behind the wrought ironwork. “
Sì,”
he said. “What do you want?”

“I'm here to see Signor d'Isantu,” she said.

Santino disappeared. Without hurrying, he walked back up to the house, pausing to whip the long grass with a stick at intervals as though to demonstrate to her his utter unconcern for haste. It took him twenty-five minutes to return, and when he did, it was with an odd, satisfied sneer. “He won't see you,” Santino announced from behind the gate. “You're to leave at once, Maria-Grazia Esposito, for
signor il conte
has nothing to say to you.”

Walking home, she wondered why her steps were so heavy. What would she have found to say to Andrea d'Isantu anyway? They had not spoken in fifteen years. She had wanted him to know that she had never thought any the less of him after his confession about the beating of Pierino, that Flavio was happy in England, to judge by his unpunctuated missives, that the ghost of the fisherman was no longer seen on the island except under the influence of the widow Valeria's extra-strength
limettacello,
that all here, in short, was well. But how would she have brought forth the words to say all those things?

Back at the bar, she found Robert arbitrating a disagreement between Sergio and Giuseppino in the courtyard, his thin hair blown vertical by the spring breeze. “I know where you've been,” her father, Amedeo, said quietly. “It's all over the island already. Be careful,
cara.
Your husband's a good man not to question you about it.”

“Damn this place,” she said. “Damn the gossips and the spies—haven't they any proper work to go to? Must they always be poking about in other people's concerns?”

Then, for the first time, she fought with her father. “I don't understand what you can possibly have to say to that man,” said Amedeo. “And what business you can have going to visit him at dawn, in secret, in your best clothes. While your husband is here taking care of your boys, minding the bar—”

“He doesn't suspect me of anything, Papà. Maybe you should do the same!”

“Robert,” said her father, “has the patience of Sant'Agata. We all know that.”

Stung, she cried, “
Cazzo—
must I report everything I do to you? Are you my jailer as well as my father?” Which was unfair—even she felt it to be so. And yet, to save herself the humiliation of apologizing, she found herself storming instead into the bar, and starting up the coffee machine in a knot of fury.

So the argument was carried on in mutters about the bar all that day, and resolved only when she saw Robert walking toward her across the piazza at dinnertime, distorted by the heat mirage, a boy on the end of each arm. Then she ran out to him and buried her face in his neck and said, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It didn't mean anything, my visiting him.” And Robert said, “I know.” And Amedeo, witnessing, patted his daughter's arm in consolation as she returned to the bar counter, resolved to say no more about
il conte
's boy.

In a few months, Andrea d'Isantu was gone again. Maria-Grazia never once saw him, and in years afterward she would struggle to believe that he had ever really visited the island, picturing him only as a figure in the shadows, appearing and vanishing like the ghost of Pierino.

THE DEVELOPMENTS THAT ANDREA
had set in motion, however, were of a concrete nature. For instance, the matter of tourist accommodations. Currently, all visitors were obliged to make a great pilgrimage to get to the island, like devotees of the saint. To get here from the nearest mainland places, Noto and Siracusa, most had already traveled for a whole day from the airports in Catania and Palermo or on slow ships from northern seaports. So it was that the average visitor to Castellamare was still something of an explorer, interested in the history of the necropolis, attempting a little faltering Italian. “If only there were a proper airfield right here on the island, or just across the sea in Siracusa,” said Bepe. For he had heard from the foreign fishermen that the accessible islands of Greece, a short air-conditioned airplane journey from London and Paris, now lured thousands upon thousands of tourists to their blue waters.

Sometimes, in those heady years of development, great white liners passed on the horizon, blaring into the sea air, making the island children whoop and stamp in greeting. Through Flavio's
Balilla
binoculars, you could see little gold heads in sunglasses moving about on the deck, long pink bodies extended on recliners. “If only they'd stop here,” said Giuseppino. Both of Maria-Grazia's boys loved the tourists, with their air of other places and their cursory, brisk northern languages that seemed to speak of cities where important things happened, where things must be said in a hurry. Not like the dialect of the island, which dragged on and on by its nature, went round in epic, exhausting circles.

It was rumored that the new
conte
had bought the old farm belonging to the Mazzus, which had fallen into ruin when the old man died and the last son left for America. Carmela had hired mainland builders on her son's behalf to dig up what had always been the island's best field, the flattest one with a view of the harbor. The Mazzus' old farmhouse was knocked down.

“They're building a villa, I daresay,” complained Tonino, put out at being passed over for the contract in favor of those foreigners with their new cement mixers. “When it's finished, I believe our new
conte
is going to move there with his mother and knock down the old place altogether.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” said Pina. “Why, half the tourists stop by the count's villa for a glimpse, for don't you know it's partly Norman, Tonino, one of the oldest buildings on this island?”

The new building, a vision in pink concrete, was raised by degrees. At sunset, the light fell between its empty pillars and steel girders, making of it a burnished silhouette. By day, the builders labored under the full force of the sun. The building gained not only balconies and cornices but a swimming pool in the shape of a kidney, stained blue on the inside; a garden with palm trees, which were wrapped for protection in brown paper until the building dust settled; and, in the shade behind, a concrete wasteland for parking motorcars. The spaces in this American-style parking lot, reported Concetta, who had spied, were large ones, for foreign motorcars, twice the size of the little Cinquecentos and three-wheeled Ape vans favored on the island. And why should the new
conte
need so many spaces for his guests, for not a soul had visited him or Carmela since the death of his father (even supposing, muttered the elderly
scopa
players, he had the courage to come back to the island a second time)? Now the building rose and towered over the line of little concrete villas, which from the veranda of the bar looked no bigger than cigarette boxes. By the following summer, the great new building was ready to open its gates.

No one was clear on what the new building was meant for. “It's
signora la contessa
's new summer home,” speculated Agata-the-fisherwoman. “She'll drive down the hill in that motorcar of hers in April to spend the summer by the sea, and that will save her the fifteen minutes' switchbacking up and down each day.” For Santino Arcangelo bore Carmela back and forth daily in the German motorcar to her favorite spot at the end of the bay, where she sat alone under a parasol rubbing lotion on her papery arms.

“There's no telling what these rich people like to spend their money on,” said Bepe.

“Televisions, for instance,” needled Agata-the-fisherwoman.

“It's another bar,” said Concetta. “
Il conte
means to cut out our business, like Arcangelo.”

The pink building stood on the horizon, its gates open, its parking lot deserted.

“It's a hotel,” announced Tonino, settling the matter that evening. “I've seen the sign, and a little reception desk with a brass bell.”

ON THE ISLAND,
there had never been so many jobs as there were in the weeks before the hotel's grand opening. Jobs cleaning and polishing and sprinkling the grass of the new hotel with water out of a hose (“A shameful waste,” grumbled Pina), jobs carrying in the beds and wardrobes and dining tables the new
conte
had ordered from the mainland, jobs preparing island delicacies and foreign food in the great silver kitchen. Even the island's ancient band was hired, to provide a touch of local color. One morning, when the islanders woke, a great white liner hung like a miracle just outside the harbor, riding the calm waters of the bay. The children ran down to meet it. While they capered, the band tooted nervously through their island songs. The visitors were borne ashore, clutching suitcases and bags and boxes as though they had been rescued from some disaster at sea, muttering in their odd northern languages, unsure whether they should tip the ferryman or offer the children coins.

HERE A PROBLEM PRESENTED
itself. These new tourists preferred the air-conditioned salon and neon-lit veranda of Arcangelo's Beach Bar to the dark, old-century interior of the House at the Edge of Night.
Il conte
's company had partitioned a section of the bay for them, on which they lay on plastic recliners. The beach bar served American cocktails, and whiskey in crystal glasses. Between the luxuries of the hotel and Arcangelo's air-conditioned bar, there was no need for the new breed of tourists to make the hot climb to the town at all.

“But I can't understand why anyone would choose that bar over this one,” maintained Bepe. “Arcangelo charges a hundred and fifty
lire
for a coffee, and his tastes like donkey piss.”

“Seek out those tourists,” urged Robert to Maria-Grazia, ambitious on her behalf. “Encourage them to come here. They'll love the island, as I did when I first saw it, if only you can persuade them.”

One morning, two of
il conte
's tourists at last braved the climb up to the town. They were sighted in the piazza shortly after the Mass bell stopped ringing, hanging nervously about the palm tree. Emboldened, Maria-Grazia went to the door. “Welcome,” she called, in English. “Come in.”

After some heated discussion, the couple crossed the threshold of the bar. “Coffee?” offered Maria-Grazia. “Tea? Pastry?”

The new guests, gold-haired, a little sunburned, glanced at the elderly
scopa
players in the corner, at the wireless radio, tuned to a Sicilian station, at the sweating cold cabinets full of rice balls and pastries, at the coffee machine. The man made a gesture like opening a book.

“Menu?” he said.

“No menu,” said Maria-Grazia. “But we make whatever you want. A coffee, perhaps? A rice ball?”

The man shook his head and eventually asked the price of a tea. “Thirty
lire,”
said Maria-Grazia. “Three American cents.”

But the couple, after examining the rice balls one last time, merely shook their heads and wandered back out.

The House at the Edge of Night, Bepe explained, was charging too little. “Arcangelo has two price lists,” explained Bepe. “One for the tourists, one for the fishermen.”

“We couldn't do that,” said Robert, scandalized at this calling into question of his wife's honesty. “The House at the Edge of Night isn't that kind of business.”

“The tourists don't
like
to pay less than they expect. You've seen them yourself—the ones you get on your veranda, the archaeological ones who come to see the caves. You've seen the tips they give you—paying thirty
lire
for a coffee and leaving you eighty on top of that. You charge less than they expect, they think you're giving them inferior coffee. Or else that you're living in poverty, like some goatherder from before the war, and either way it makes them uncomfortable, Mariuzza.”

“We couldn't charge two different prices,” Maria-Grazia said. “It wouldn't be right.”

Arcangelo with his two price lists did a steady trade.

It was true, as Amedeo had judged, that Robert possessed the patience of Sant'Agata. This became evident in the early years of the boys' growing up. For Robert, who had lived three years in a military prison, who had waited five to return to the island, and another four to be Maria-Grazia's husband, evidently had something steely in him that could not be broken by a little childhood bickering. When his sons fought, he would listen in calm to each outpouring of discontent, arbitrate and mete out punishment, and remain composed throughout, as unbending as the schoolmistress Pina Vella had been before the disputes of her pupils. After such tiresome afternoons, he still had the capacity to seize his wife in an embrace behind the counter, or hum island songs as he went about straightening the tables, while Maria-Grazia felt herself worn thin just by listening to them.

Perhaps Robert's patience was the difficulty. Perhaps if he had been less tolerant of the boys' warring, perhaps if it had made him more miserable, they might have behaved better. But then again, they might have been much worse.

Meanwhile, Amedeo found himself seized by a kind of fever at the way his grandsons goaded each other, having forgotten the cruel battles that had once been waged between his own three boys in the courtyard and corridors of the House at the Edge of Night. He loved Sergio and Giuseppino more fiercely than he had loved any of his own children, except perhaps Maria-Grazia, and yet they had a far greater capacity to drive him to exasperation.

By four years old, Sergio could often be found puzzling over the pages of his grandfather's book of stories. His brother, still only three, had begun to decipher the words. To make them equal, Amedeo read the stories aloud to both of them on the veranda of the bar, plying them with ice cream and tales in equal measure. Sergio listened, his eyes on the horizon, spooning ice cream thoughtfully into his mouth and—occasionally—down his front. Giuseppino, meanwhile, swung his legs against the chair, refusing to sit still. He swung and swung until he kicked his brother and the storytelling dissolved in yells of rage. Yet when Amedeo questioned Giuseppino about the stories afterward, he would remember every one and could recount them at length: “And that was the one about the parrot—and he flew in at the window—and he told the girl about ten white horses with ten black-armored riders who were riding off to war—”

“That Giuseppino's an intelligent boy,” said Amedeo.

“They both are,” said Maria-Grazia fiercely. “Both of them just the same.” Then he saw that he had hurt her maternal feelings, and attempted to change direction: “
Sì, sì.
Of course, both of my grandsons are intelligent. I didn't mean that.”

But wasn't this part of the problem, this treating them both exactly alike? For the two boys seemed oddly separate at times, as though they were brothers by accident rather than blood.

From the time they started school, Sergio had been praised as a great scholar, and it was true that he achieved the higher marks. Amedeo knew this because he had scrupulously recorded every victory and milestone of each boy's life from the beginning: “Sergio now 65 cm in length,” he would write in his red notebook, with satisfaction, marking the date, or “Giuseppino first solid food: a pea and a spoon of mashed
carciofo
.” Then later, when school began: “Sergio 7 in arithmetic test (addition and subtraction)”; “Sergio appointed class pencil monitor 1961–62”; “Giuseppino awarded sports day running prize.” In all their endeavors except those of a sporting kind, Sergio emerged the victor. But it was Giuseppino, a formidable athlete like his father, who gave the impression of intelligence, who seemed to take everything in from behind eyes languidly half-closed, as though, if he went to the trouble, he could outstrip them all.

WHEN THE BOYS MADE
their First Communion, Amedeo presented them—half-jokingly, half in earnest—with a children's picture book which retold the Sicilian story of
The Two Brothers,
ordered from the bookstore in Siracusa and wrapped in red paper.

Sergio and Giuseppino loved the tale, as Amedeo had known they would. True, they dwelt more upon the parts about the sea serpent and the witch than on the miraculous reconciliation, which was the part with which Amedeo had hoped to capture their attention and instruct them on the futility of their tiresome quarreling. But he believed that this understanding would come. “The hero of the story is the younger brother,” maintained Giuseppino. “He was the one who showed mercy to the fish and he was the one who saved the day.” And, “No!” cried Sergio. “Wasn't it the older brother who won the princess in the first place?”

When each boy had listened to his grandfather reading the story, an urge came on him to possess the book exclusively. They fought over it, tugged it, and eventually tore the pages clean in two. Too late, Amedeo was sorry that he had given them only one copy to share. He ordered two matching replacements, but the damage had been done, and now both boys wanted the original, the one with their grandfather's looped schoolroom handwriting inside the cover: “To Sergio and Giuseppino on the occasion of your First Communion, with love, Grandfather Amedeo.”

This incident of the book was only one example of the way that, somehow, they all managed to get it wrong again and again, this matter of raising the two boys.

And yet, some of the time—mostly under the influence of their father—the boys were calm, and Amedeo wondered what he was getting so agitated about. Pina was inclined to agree. “What's a little childhood fighting?” she said. “I trust Mariuzza and Robert to manage them right.”

Like the villagers in the story, the islanders of Castellamare struggled to tell Sergio and Giuseppino apart. Despite Sergio's long face and Giuseppino's small red features and constantly searching eyes, the boys slept and woke at the same times, walked with the same gait, twisted the fronts of their hair with the same motion when they were reading, and quite separately decided to study at the same university in London, one or the other of them having seen its picture in Pina's encyclopedia as a small child and folded down the corner of the page. On Sunday afternoons, plunging into the sea at Robert's heels, glancing back to check that they were observed by their adoring mother and their Zia Concetta, they occasionally consented to play together and would remain immersed in intense, private games for hours at a time. Giuseppino, who roundly humiliated his brother every school sports day, who was the best football player and the fastest runner, had only one fear, embarrassing enough on an island of this size: the ocean. He would not stray out of his depth. Sergio, once, was observed taking his brother's hand and leading him out, and for days afterward Amedeo and Pina discussed it, as though it were the sign of some great change in the boys' comportment toward each other.

But both children disliked the island, to Amedeo's dismay. It was as though they had been born out of place—perhaps their English father's fault, he thought privately, though he would never hear a word openly said against Signor Robert. For really Robert was a kind of angel, the son who had come to them out of the sea when no other son was left, the only husband he could ever have pictured being the equal of his Mariuzza. But it must have originated somewhere, this dissatisfaction, brooded Amedeo, forgetting the restlessness that had driven him to seek his own life here on the island, and that had possessed his own teenage sons.

These two grandsons were forever complaining, this Sergio and Giuseppino! The bar was too stuffy for them in summer; the house too drafty in winter; they railed at the lack of books and the absence of a cinema and the endless, relentless sea. Besides, both boys were sensitive enough to be troubled by the gossip of the town, the tireless exchange of rumors at every shop counter and street corner, rumors that very often concerned the Espositos. For instance, people claimed that their grandfather had been involved in some scandal between two women, years ago, that their father's role in the war had been less than honorable, that Uncle Flavio had gone mad and run about the island naked, wearing nothing but his war medal. These rumors, which were really only the ordinary currency of gossip that had been circulating for half a century, depressed Sergio and infuriated Giuseppino; both were overcome by a great impatience to be gone from the place. As they grew older, Giuseppino began to talk only in formal Italian and Sergio only in English—“as if,” lamented Amedeo, “the dialect of this island wasn't good enough for either of them.”

“These are different times,” soothed Pina. “They've seen motorcars and tourists from England. They've seen moving pictures of men from America flying into space. It's natural that they want to be part of the rest of the world. You mustn't go taking it so hard,
amore.
”

But how could he take it anything but hard, when he had watched his sons depart one by one from the island, never to return? In Amedeo's mind, a plan began to form. “Supposing I instructed them in how to run the bar?” he proposed. “Like I did with our own boys? And put them in charge of it?”

“They'd hate it,” said Pina. “And besides, they want to see the world outside, these boys, and we'd do better to let them than to fight it and drive them away for good.”

Of course, as in all things, Pina was correct.

Nearly immobile now on account of her swollen feet, she sat on the veranda each day and read and reread the books she had loved as a schoolmistress: Shakespeare and Dante and Pirandello. Also new volumes that they could afford now to order from the mainland:
Il Gattopardo
and Danilo Dolci's work on poverty in Palermo, which made her suck her teeth, glad to belong to a smaller, kinder place. Though her feet pained her too much to walk about, she traveled great miles in her reading as Amedeo once had in his recording of tales. And in all disputes between Sergio and Giuseppino she had the capacity to reduce each rebellious boy to a meek infant with her schoolmistress's stern gaze. Things might have gone much worse in their infancy if it hadn't been for their healthy respect for the fierce judgments of Grandmother Pina.

NEVERTHELESS, BY THE BOYS'
eleventh year, Amedeo had begun to fear that there really was some great ill erupting between them.

It came to light, as all things seemed to, during the Sant'Agata festival in June. But the trouble had really begun that February. Just after Sergio's birthday, the boys had seen snow for the first time. When they woke, it lay dustily on the piazza. All was disorder beyond the doors of the House at the Edge of Night: The teenagers were waging violent war in the streets, the elderly customers refused to step out even into their courtyards, and six of the island's motorcars had rolled down the slopes and crashed into the houses at the bottom. Also, Arcangelo's Beach Bar had been flooded out by the winter storm, a victory for which the adults of the House at the Edge of Night refused to congratulate themselves.

The snow made the air odorless, and as sharp as glass splinters. His grandsons, Amedeo could tell, were enchanted. As the sun entered the courtyard the leaves of the oleander dripped a little, like the leaves of some alpine village. In the newspapers, which Robert brought in from the step in a snow-damp bundle to show his sons, they discovered photographs of English houses with snow piled on top like slices of
ricotta,
cars buried on the roads so that only their shiny roofs were visible. “Why couldn't I have been born there?” cried Sergio. “Instead of only a stupid English passport, which I never get to use! Why can't you take me there to see the snow?”

As Maria-Grazia poured the coffee for breakfast, Amedeo, wounded at Sergio's words, sought feverishly in his red book for tales of snow belonging to their own island. But the boys weren't interested. They kept jumping up at the window, jostling for space, and left their breakfast uneaten. Robert raided the disused pantry where they kept their winter coats, and came struggling out with his arms full of old knitted caps and gloves and furs from Pina and Amedeo's youth, into which he proceeded to stuff the two boys before setting them loose into the snow. “Play together nicely,” called Maria-Grazia after them, with an optimism Amedeo found admirable, given their record so far.

Sure enough, after little more than half an hour, Giuseppino trailed in sobbing, flinging off his gloves and scarf in a passion. Sergio—fuming in his wake—followed with a bloody nose. The boys, it emerged, had fought over a bucket of snow.

“He took it all!” sobbed Giuseppino. “He went out into the courtyard and took all the snow before I could get any!”

“But you only wanted it for snowballs!” raged Sergio. “And I was going to make a snow statue, and I'd gathered it all up, from the steps and the tiles and the leaves of the oleander, and you came and snatched the bucket and made it fall in the dirt!”

“Where's the snow now?” demanded Robert, getting to his feet.

“Go-o-one!” roared Sergio in a passion.

Giuseppino, kicking the baseboard, muttered, “There's no need to be such a baby about it.”

As usual—Amedeo judged privately—Giuseppino was the unhappier, Sergio the most wronged party. Limping outside, leading each of the boys by one ear (something Robert would never consent to do, not even when provoked), Pina found from the scene of the crime that they had fought in the pile of spoiled snow, rolling over and over, until there was nothing left. Pina attempted valiantly to make a lesson of the situation. “You see,” she said. “You fight over something, and in the end no one gets it.”

“I hate him,” hissed Sergio, through his punched nose. “I hate him. I want to kill him.”

All that morning (the school furnace had broken, and lessons were canceled), Amedeo roamed the town in search of more snow for the disconsolate boys, who had been confined sulkily each to his own bedroom. But the snow was gone or else spoiled, the town disgorging its remains soggily from every roof and branch. By afternoon Giuseppino seemed to have forgotten the argument. But Amedeo observed that something had altered in Sergio. All that spring, rage against his brother boiled and seethed in him, threatening to explode. They fought over everything that season: their marks at school, their places at the table, the games of football in the piazza. Behind it all, he feared, was some graver, deeper ill.