The House at the Edge of Night Read Online Free

hospital, as far as anyone could remember, to study medicine, and the director consulted the visiting doctor Esposito for advice. “Could it be done?” he asked.
    “It could,” said Esposito, “if someone were to pay, and someone else were to take charge of his guidance and education. And if his clumsiness can be overcome, but I daresay it can if the boy puts his mind to it.”
    Under pressure from the director of the foundling hospital, a benefactor offered to pay for part of Amedeo’s medical studies, another to supply his books and his clothes. Another two years were lost in military service, but when Amedeo returned, Dottor Esposito submitted to the inevitable (he had really become quite fond of the ungainly boy over the years), and allowed Amedeo to be sent home to live with him. The boy would board in the little box room at the back of the doctor’s house, and eat his meals with the housekeeper Serena, and the doctor would oversee his medical education. The boy was almost twenty-one years old and could be expected to look after himself for the rest. The doctor arranged for him to attend lectures at the surgical school of the hospital at Santa Maria Nuova, and in the evenings to earn his keep by washing glasses in a bar between Via dell’Oriuolo and Borgo degli Albizi.
    The arrangement was a success. The boy was accommodating, rushing to light the fire or rearrange the doctor’s chair as he came in, in a way that the doctor, a bachelor on the edge of old age, found touchingly filial. Amedeo was also a satisfactory companion in conversation, on account of the fact that he studied daily every page of the newspaper and was working his way systematically through the doctor’s library. All in all, Esposito was glad that he had taken the boy in. Sometimes, the doctor invited Amedeo to dine opposite him in his dark study, where he was accustomed to take dinner at his desk, surrounded by a mess of scientific periodicals. The doctor was a collector, and the study was full of specimens: butterflies, white worms in jars, sculptures of coral, stuffed Polynesian rodents, and other curiosities of nature that he had gathered during his long and solitary life as the last in a lengthy dynasty of scientific men. The boy was especially fascinated by a medical wax of the human eye, the surface peeled back to reveal the network of veins beneath, which stood on the hall table beside the umbrellas. Dangling alarmingly above the staircase on two wires were brushes from the mouth of a whale. Amedeo was not unnerved by these relics; on the contrary, he grew as fond of the collections as of the old doctor himself. And he privately resolved that one day he would have collections of his own: a parlor full of scientific specimens and a library full of books. His red notebook was filling up with stories, and his head with the longings of a half-educated man.
    When at last he qualified (everything, in Amedeo’s experience, took twice as long when you were a foundling), he became not a hospital surgeon like his foster father, but a
medico condotto.
In deference to his foster father, Amedeo took the surname Esposito. He could find no permanent job, but practiced his trade in villages where elderly doctors had died or overworked doctors had fallen sick. He had no horse or bicycle. Instead, he walked between the stone cottages in the rain-laden dawns and chill nights. On the hillsides below Fiesole and Bagno a Ripoli, he bandaged the broken ankles and gored shoulders of peasant farmers and delivered the babies of their wives. He sent letters of application to every village in the province, looking for a place, without success.
    Meanwhile, he gathered stories with each year that passed. His vocation and manner seemed to invite confidences. The peasants told him of daughters lost at sea, of brothers parted who, reunited at last, mistook each other for strangers and slew each other, of shepherds blinded in both eyes who navigated by the sounds of