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

him when the war ended. “Things go very badly here,” he had said. “Many of the young men are gone—at least twenty-seven at my count—and others still missing, and others threaten to leave in the general fever for America that now seems to be sweeping the island. The war has made this place more cramped, a good deal hungrier. You will find us much reduced.”
    Amedeo discovered from the priest’s letter that Rizzu’s brother was gone, departed for America. The bar was shut up, for no one wanted the place. Professor Vella the schoolmaster had been killed. Two of Rizzu’s grandsons had been killed. Only the household of
il conte,
who had been invalided out of Trentino in 1915 with a leg wound, was unaltered. Carmela, wrote the priest, had fallen out with her husband and left for the mainland shortly after his return, but she had been retrieved. Some matter of a lover. (“Be careful of Carmela,” Pina would warn later. “This war has made her restless.”)
    In spite of Father Ignazio’s letter, Amedeo had not expected to see the town itself so diminished. He arrived during the siesta hour, and the houses on the main street were shuttered. But some, he saw, were closed up entirely, their doors and windows boarded. Objects were abandoned outside them: a chair with a missing seat, a dry basil plant in a cracked pot. Two children played in the dust. Dimly he recognized them, children he had delivered, twins belonging to the Mazzu family. “Maddalena,” he called. “Agato.”
    They came, tentatively. “Where is the priest?” he said, for a great wish had come over him to see his old friend again, to check that Ignazio at least was not altered. The children did not know.
    Amedeo walked the route he had trodden his first night on the island. The House at the Edge of Night was shut up as the priest had written, its veranda sagging under the untended vines, its front steps already rife with weeds.
    —
    HE TOOK AGAIN HIS old room in Pina’s house. He tacked the photograph of the island to the stone wall inside the closet. Pina was the only person on the island who seemed to walk straighter and taller since the war. After her husband’s death, she had been appointed the schoolmistress. Late at night, the two of them sat up with Father Ignazio, around a bottle of spirits, making plans for the rescuing of the island from its abandonment. They needed to modernize. They needed a ferry service, a two-room hospital. They needed a second classroom for the school, a system of funeral insurance for the elderly. Il Conte d’Isantu had been elected mayor again, complained the priest, and nothing now changed on the island. D’Isantu was always on the mainland, pursuing his own advancement in some obscure way with friends in Catania, spending long months at his Palermitan estate, when here things needed to be done. The bar rotted, the missing did not return, and no one played
scopa
in the square or danced to the music of the
organetto.
    When Amedeo saw the beautiful Carmela again, some weeks later, it was reassuring to find her so unaltered. Waylaying him on the sea road, where she had been walking in her Sunday clothes, under a parasol, she made a pouting display of her displeasure. “
Dottore,
you’ve never come to pay us a formal visit,” she said. “And they say you’ve been back a month. Things have been dull here, and I don’t mind telling you. No clothes, no decent food. No visitors, during the influenza. But I’m glad you’re back safely—and probably a war hero, too, unlike my husband.”
    Amedeo, who had not been aware that she cared one way or the other about his safety, sought about for a reply.
    She invited him to go with her to look at the caves, which were a historical oddity he had never seen before the war. Still in the same mood of bemused curiosity, he consented. As soon as they were in the shelter of the damp dark, she began to kiss him, to caress him.
    Reeling, Amedeo supposed that she meant to