The House at the Edge of Night Read Online Free Page A

the birds. The stories that the poor loved best, it seemed, were sad ones. And stories still held a kind of magic for him. Returning home in the gray dawn to whatever temporary lodgings he inhabited at the time, he would wash his hands, pour coffee, throw open the windows to the reassuring sounds of the living, and transcribe the stories into his red book. He did this whether the fate of his patient had been life or death, and always solemnly. In this way, his book became full of the bright vistas of a thousand other lives.
    In spite of this, his own life remained narrow and shallow-rooted, as though he had never really begun it. A large and hawkish man with one straight bristle of eyebrow across his forehead, he was tall without being apologetic for his tallness, unlike most men of high stature. His height and the obscurity of his background made him out of place, a foreigner everywhere. When he witnessed the young taking photographic portraits in the Piazza del Duomo of Florence, or drinking chocolate at little bandy-legged tables outside the bars, he felt that he had never belonged to their species. His youth had passed and he felt himself to be at the beginning of middle age. He was a solitary man, grave of dress, reserved of habit, who spent his evenings in study of medical periodicals and his Sundays in his elderly foster father’s parlor, discussing the newspaper, examining the newest specimen in the old man’s collection, playing cards. As his hands moved, he remembered the
tarocco
tales of his childhood: the Hanged Man, the Lovers, the Tower.
    The old doctor had retired now. He still visited the foundling hospital, which had modernized in recent years and whose children now slept in specially aired dormitories, and played on great terraces full of drying linen, built particularly for the purpose.
    Amedeo continued to apply for a permanent position. He sent letters everywhere, to villages in the south whose names he had never heard before, to
comunes
in the height of the Alps, to insignificant islands whose inhabitants sent their replies by boat via neighboring villages because no postal service had yet reached them.
    Finally, in 1914, one mayor sent back a letter by such roundabout means. His name, he wrote, was Arcangelo, his town Castellamare. If Amedeo was willing to travel to the south, there was an island utterly without medical assistance that might have a post for him.
    The island was a crumb between the pages of his foster father’s atlas; south and east of Sicily, it was the farthest Amedeo could possibly have ventured from Florence without reaching Africa. He wrote back the same afternoon and accepted.
    At last, a permanent position. His foster father saw him off at the station, wept in spite of his intentions, and promised that in the summer they would drink a glass of
limoncello
on a terrace laden with bougainvillea (the doctor’s views of the south were vague and romantic). “Perhaps I’ll even move there in my old age,” said the doctor. He had come to look on Amedeo not as a foster son but as a son outright, although he could not find within himself the phrases to say so. Meanwhile, Amedeo sought about for thanks, but could only shake the doctor’s hand. Thus they parted. They were never again to see each other alive.

III
    Amedeo traveled steerage on a steamer from Naples. It was the first time he had been upon the sea, and he was dizzy with its hydraulic hiss, its vastness. He carried with him a trunk full of his medical instruments wrapped in bundles of straw, and a small leather case in which he had packed his few clothes, his shaving kit and pipe, and his book of stories. Also, a new Kodak folding camera, an unexpected gift from his foster father. Amedeo had resolved in Castellamare to be a different man, a man who had experiences of which photographs could be taken, a man who sipped chocolate on the terraces of elegant bars. Not a foundling, not a penniless jobbing physician. For he still