The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner Read Free Book Online

of the fisherman Pierino, the Fishermen’s Guild invited him to the
tonnara
for the ceremonial presentation of a tuna.
    And there were a thousand petty town battles on which one must take sides (for already he had been persuaded onto the town council in an advisory capacity); there were several cases of typhus; eight babies due or imminent. When Italy entered the war, he was on his way to inspect the swamp to see whether it could be drained in order to reduce the risk of malaria, and somehow the swamp and the malaria seemed of more import than the declaration of war, this war here on Castellamare against pestilence and stagnant water a thing more worth fighting. The island seemed a separate country to him, not a part of the Italy in which he had passed his solitary youth.
    On Sunday afternoons Father Ignazio taught him to swim, plunging ahead of him into the waves in a black woolen bathing suit. On the terrace of
il professore
’s house each evening, once the schoolmaster had fallen drunkenly asleep, Pina Vella told him every story belonging to the island.
    “A small place like this is an oppression,” warned Father Ignazio. “You don’t feel it yet, but you’ll come to feel it. Everyone who visits without having been born here thinks it delightfully rustic. I thought so, too, myself. But anyone born on Castellamare will fight by any means possible to get off the island, and one day you’ll be the same. It hit me about the tenth year.”
    But Amedeo, who had always felt himself to be weightless, at risk of floating off from the earth altogether, now welcomed the solid heft of the place, the narrowness of its borders. He was amused at the way his patients knew all his business an hour before he did; he was unperturbed when the widows watched him from the wooden chairs outside their houses with narrowed, appraising eyes; he found comfort in the fact that it was possible, from the window of any of his patients’ houses, to look upon the same blue line of the sea. The island was five miles long, and in his daily rounds he walked all over the face of it. He discovered the hollows where wild goats slept at noon, and disturbed the nests of lizards in the ruined houses outside town, so that they ran like water up the walls. Sitting outside old Rizzu’s bar, he made a map of the island on a scrap of blotting paper, the old man nodding approvingly, pointing out flaws.
    At the beginning of the spring, he sent a letter to his foster father with an invitation to drink
limoncello
with him at the House at the Edge of Night—for there really was a terrace with bougainvillea, he wrote eagerly, exactly as the elderly doctor had foretold.
    But when summer came again, he did not sit with his foster father under the cool vines. Instead, a telegram ordered him away to the north.

IV
    He was sent to the trenches at Trentino.
    Shorn away from the island, two things became vital to him: the photograph of Sant’Agata’s Day and his book of stories. Some of his fellow medical officers had brought their folding cameras with them, against regulations. He had left his own on the island, knowing there would be nothing he wanted to record. All he wanted was the existing picture, with which he would navigate his way home. He pinned it to the inside of his cap, to protect it from the mud. Always it was mud, and when it wasn’t mud, ice, and when it wasn’t ice, water, and when it wasn’t water, gas and fog. It seemed a world composed of elements, where men were divided into their component pieces, men frothed, men screamed. At the surgical school of Santa Maria Nuova, he had received no training in how to put men back together.
    In the inside pocket of his battledress, he kept his book of stories. The gold fleur-de-lis on the cover wore away; the leather became dull. But stories, he found, like the photograph, bore witness to the truth that there was another world than this. Chiefly, his duty was to remind his patients of this fact when nothing