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

statue as he went in or out of the house, particularly if called to attend to a birth or a death, for, as irreligious as he was, he felt now that he would gladly accept good fortune wherever he might encounter it. It was the same desperation, the same grasping after life, that had led him to acquiesce to Carmela and to purchase the house—a feeling that his life must change. And yet sometimes the statue, on nights when his rounds had taken him to the lit window of Carmela’s villa, seemed to greet him with sad, reproachful eyes. He sought a wife and a family, the statue seemed to scold him. And as yet what did he possess but this faltering connection with Carmela, which often, like the watery soup he drank on days when his patients had not paid him, left him hungrier than before?
    In penance, he sought out his old friends—the priest, the schoolmistress, the men of the town council—and threw himself with fervor into the task of repairing the house.
    One evening, sipping the syrupy remnants from one of the old Campari bottles on the overgrown terrace, Pina Vella told him the story of the House at the Edge of Night. “It’s the second-oldest building on the island,” she said. “The old people consider it unlucky. It was the last place where the famous curse of weeping still remained, all those centuries ago. The islanders tried to pull the house down. But the walls were too thick—they couldn’t do it. It’s survived four earthquakes and a landslide besides. It’s won a kind of respect.”
    “Then how can it be unlucky?” said Amedeo.
    “You can look at it in two ways,” said Pina. “To survive such things a house must either be blessed by Sant’Agata or cursed by the devil—one of the two. That’s what they say.”
    As for the old name “Casa al Bordo della Notte,” she did not know where that came from. “Some of the old people think they can remember an Alberto Delanotte living here,” said Pina.
    “So it could be that the original name was Casa di Alberto Delanotte.” Amedeo was a little discouraged by this unpoetic truth.
    “But I prefer to think of the name as meaning ‘at the edge of night,’ ” said Pina. “Because it
is,
if you look in both directions from here.”
    Amedeo looked. Illuminating the terrace was a single streetlamp, around which mosquitoes circled and inside whose panes lizards basked, sending their scuttling shadows across the tiles. Beyond it were the reassuring lights of the town, and in the distance the coast of Sicily, framing the island on either side, so that Castellamare could have been a peninsula, an outcrop of some greater mass. Look in the other direction, though, and all was sea and night, a vista of emptiness unbroken as far as North Africa. “It’s an odd place to put a bar,” said Amedeo.
    “It was always a bar,” said Pina. “The first count wouldn’t let them have a bar at the center of the town, for fear of drunkenness and gambling. Before the Rizzus took the business over, the house was standing empty for years. Some of the old people will never cross the threshold. And there
is
some bad luck that seems to cling to the place. Look at Rizzu’s brother. Two sons dead in as many years. You can see why people call the house cursed.”
    “It’s this damned war that has been the curse,” said Amedeo. “Not an old bar.”
    Pina said, quietly, “True.”
    Amedeo wondered if she was thinking of her husband. But Pina allowed herself to reflect only for a minute, twisting her cable of black hair in one hand, and then, straightening herself, she said, “Anyway, I must get home.”
    It had always been for
il professore
that she had had to get home. Amedeo wondered if she felt her solitude as he did, as she moved alone through the rooms of her old house by the church. On both sides her neighbors had immigrated to America. Even her beauty was of a handsome, far-off kind, as forbidding as a Greek statue. Perhaps this was why no suitor had approached her