The House at the Edge of Night Read Free

merely a lover—he saw it now! Why had he waited so long to beget a child? He understood that no other part of his life had mattered; all of it had only been a gathering of pace toward this hour.
    But now there was the problem of the other baby. By afternoon rumors would be at large in every corner of the island, thanks to that witch Carmela—a miracle, twins born by different mothers, leaping into the world as though by agreement! He knew how they would talk.
    His wife lay with the lassitude of a distance runner. He checked her all over, covering her with kisses—more than he would have given, true, if guilt had not been goading him. He knew that a storm of trouble was coming: The midwife and Pierangela had heard Carmela’s accusations. A rumor like this would be enough to make an enemy of his wife, his neighbors, perhaps to drive him from the island. But just now all that he permitted to dwell within him was the light.

II
    His own birth had been an obscure thing, uncelebrated, unrecorded.
    In the city of Florence, above the Arno River, lies a piazza of dim lights and marine shadows. On one side of this piazza is a building with nine porticoes, and in the wall of this building is a window with six iron bars: three horizontal, three vertical. The bars are darkened with rust; on winter nights, they take on the chill of the air, its damp, its fog. Behind the window, in those days, stood a stone pillar; on top of the pillar lay a cushion.
    Here the doctor’s own recorded life began, one night in January, when he was unceremoniously shoved through the iron bars. A bell rattled. Both naked and alone, the baby began to weep.
    Footsteps approached from within. Hands lifted him. He was folded against a starched chest and borne away into the light.
    When the nurses of the foundling hospital unwrapped him, they found that his body was still tender: a newborn, in spite of the size. A saint’s medallion, snipped in half, was looped around his neck on a length of red ribbon. “It might be San Cristoforo,” said one nurse. “See—two legs and three wavy lines, like water. Or some kind of southern saint.”
    The baby seemed to be in good health. They assigned him to a wet nurse for the night.
    At first he was unable to suckle, but the nurse, Rita Fiducci, a dauntless woman, continued to push her worn teat at his mouth until he began to take great sobbing gulps. Sated, he slept. Rita rocked him and sang to him, a little scoldingly: “
Ambara-
bà,
cic-
cì,
coc-
cò!” A song for an older child, but this baby seemed far too robust to Rita for ordinary lullabies. It was a song that would return to Amedeo, at odd moments, all the days of his life.
    The director, before leaving for the night, looked in on the new arrival. Five babies in one night! It was becoming an epidemic. A third of all children born in Florence now passed through the iron window of the foundling hospital, to be parceled up, named, fed, cured of their ills, and sent back out into the world that had abandoned them. The director opened a new entry in the great yellow book
Balie e Bambini
and noted the time of the baby’s arrival, the wet nurse who had been assigned to him, and a description of the blanket in which he had been found (“blue, somewhat bloodstained”) and of the medallion (“possibly San Cristoforo”). He also recorded the baby’s abnormal size, ten pounds and eleven ounces, the largest the hospital had ever seen.
    The director took the tin medallion, which he folded up in a square of paper and filed in the box marked “January 1875.” The box was already stuffed with other trinkets in square envelopes: a perfume bottle on a silver chain; a paper silhouette of a lady cut down the middle; tin medallions halved and quartered, like tickets at a left-luggage department. More than half the children carried something with them.
    He considered for a moment, then assigned the baby the name “Buonarolo.” In the recent tide of babies—two thousand