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

inhabited the world as bare as he had come into it, with no wife, no friend except his foster father, no descendants. Couldn’t life alter? Hadn’t his life begun to alter already in making the journey here? He was almost forty. It was time to embark on the real existence he had always believed to be waiting for him.
    Since boyhood he had felt himself to be set against the tide, and so it was now: Looking back, he observed that all the steamers leaving the port of Naples seemed to swing to the north as though drawn by some invisible compass, while his own ship cut against the waves and plowed south, churning white moonlight under its prow. The steamer took in Salerno and Catania, then docked in Siracusa. From here, Amedeo saw Castellamare for the first time. The island was a low and brooding thing on the horizon, no more than a rock on the water. To carry him there, he could find no ferry or steamer, only one fishing boat, which bore the ominous name
God Have Mercy.
Yes, said the fisherman, he could take Amedeo to the island, but for no less than twenty-five
lire
because with this wind it would take all evening.
    An old man working at a pile of nets was drawn in by their conversation. He mumbled something about the island being a place of ill luck, plagued by a curse of weeping, and began a complicated story about a cave full of white skulls—but he was quickly hushed and sent away by the first fisherman, who believed himself on the brink of closing a deal.
    So he was, for Amedeo was not superstitious—and since he was unaccustomed to the south, neither was he inclined to barter. He paid the twenty-five
lire,
and with the fisherman’s help lodged his trunk of medical instruments under the thwart of the boat.
    The fisherman rowed and talked, rowed and talked. The people of Castellamare, he told Amedeo, scraped a living by herding goats and picking olives. Also they fished for tuna, which they bludgeoned to death with sticks. And other fish, all types of fish, ones you could bludgeon and ones you could hook and ones you could gaff with a spear under the gills. Amedeo, who had been seasick since Naples, kept his mouth firmly shut while the fisherman expounded upon these themes. At last, they approached the stone quay of Castellamare.
    The fisherman deposited him shortly after nine. As Amedeo watched the mast light of the
God Have Mercy
dip among the waves, a vast emptiness and silence settled around him, as though the island were uninhabited. Certainly, the few houses visible along its coast were unlit. The stone quay, which still held traces of heat, was scattered with petals of bougainvillea and oleander; a faint scent of incense hung in the air. Leaving his trunk, Amedeo went in search of some farm laborer or fisherman who might possess a handcart. But all he found was an old Arab
tonnara
with stone arches in which a few playing cards and cigarette butts lay scattered, and a white chapel, which also proved to be deserted. The altar bore the staring image of a saint Amedeo did not recognize; on either side of it were vases of lilies whose stems sagged in the heat.
    Amedeo’s letter from the mayor Arcangelo directed him to climb the hill, where he would find the town “past a stand of prickly pears and through a stone archway, on top of the rock.” He was becoming used to the dark, and now he distinguished the outlines of a settlement hanging on the edge of the cliff: thin shuttered houses, the peeling baroque fa ç ade of a church, a square tower with a dome in blue enamel that reflected the light of the stars.
    Amedeo could not carry his trunk up the hill. The only thing to be done was to make the ascent without it. He heaved it into the shelter of the chapel, which gave him some reassurance that it would be left undisturbed, and set out with only his suitcase. The road was stony and unleveled; on either side, lizards shifted in the undergrowth. The sound of the surf rose clearly through the dark, and looking down he