From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(10)
“Yes.” He made me feel as though I could walk barefoot on hot coals.
“Tonight has been busy, I could not come down to say hello.” He was unguarded, his ease alluring. “I’ll come by your school tomorrow.”
“Sì.” Monosyllabic responses were all I could summon up. Then Saro reached out and gave me a kiss on the cheek. His skin was dewy, sheened with olive oil and perspiration. Our cheeks made a little suction sound when he pulled away, an audible marker that we had indeed touched. I was hoping we could leave it at that. One kiss was delightful. Two kisses just might do me in. He had already filled me with his food, his creativity. Now having to take him in the flesh—his eyes, nose, mouth, and gentle brow—made me rock back slightly on my heels. But no. He wasn’t done with me yet. He reached for the second cheek and whispered in my ear, “I am happy to do this again and again. Just tell me when.”
I tumbled out onto Via dell’Acqua just after midnight, hypnotized by his skin, his food, how his hand had met the small of my back when we had said good-bye. I took the long route home, riding alongside the Arno River, always my favorite place to ride at night when the city was asleep. I rode across the Ponte Vecchio and stopped to look into the still waters of the river below. The bridge was lit in amber, and the waters reflected the night hues that shone from streetlamps and a smattering of windows.
As I left the Ponte Vecchio toward home, I rode past the corner of Borgo San Frediano and Piazza del Carmine, and I looked up at the church across from my apartment. It boasts a fresco believed to be the first known work of the teenage Michelangelo. Firsts are no small things, firsts hold the beginning of something great. I suspected I had just fallen for a bicycle thief chef: and as clichéd as it might sound, it was love at first bite.
* * *
Love, as a lasting thing, was a concept that was elusive to me. My parents separated when I was seven, divorced by the time I was eight. My mother remarried when I was nine, my father when I was twelve. While I was in Florence, my mother was divorcing again after nearly twelve years with my stepfather. Throughout my childhood, I had lived in five different houses over the course of ten years. This parent’s house versus that parent’s house. Mom’s second house, Dad’s place as a new divorcé or the one he had as a newly remarried man with a child on the way. When my college friends talked about “going home,” they often referred to a specific place with a bedroom in which they had lost their first tooth or first sneaked a boy inside. That version of home was foreign to me. I didn’t have a fixed place to which I could attach memories. Sure, there had been houses, homes even, but they came with emotional caveats. I had had a kind of bifurcated childhood, trying to fit into whatever configuration of my parents’ life was presently in formation. It was common to my generation of baby boomers’ children. My parents, Sherra and Gene, were no different.
They had met as young university students thrust headlong into the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and ’70s and the Pan-African Liberation Movement, which we had grown up calling “The Movement.” My parents were desperate to reshape the United States into a more just and equal place. They married at the ages of twenty and twenty-two. They didn’t know themselves, and it’s safe to say they didn’t deeply know each other. I assume they liked the promise of each other. He was a student activist; she was the dean’s-list beauty who stood front row when he spoke on campus. They were idealists remaking the world.
As a result of their countercultural endeavors, my parents both had files with the FBI. My father had been jailed for inciting a riot. My mother had organized labor from within at a factory job while holding her position on the dean’s list at the University of Houston. I spent late nights with them at the African Liberation Support Committee, the former nuns’ residences of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Houston’s Third Ward. They typed leaflets while smoking cigarettes. The Staples Singers played on an LP in the background. My dad traveled with Stokely Carmichael, the former Black Panther, to Tanzania and Zaire to try to teach revolutionists on the Mother Continent the same resistance techniques they were using to take down the Man in America. It was a heady time, one that could easily subvert a marriage. And it did.
My name, Tembekile, was given to me by none other than Miriam Makeba, who at the time was married to Stokely. Makeba was the exiled South African folk singer known as Mamma Africa. She was also public enemy number one for the South African government. She sang about freedom, advancing an anti-apartheid agenda from Paris to Japan to New York City. By the time I was old enough to understand who she was, I began to spend hours wondering about this woman, this hero, this person who had chosen a name for me before I had even taken my first breath.
But it was learning about her in the fourth grade that made me first understand what it meant to be exiled. To be cast out of home. To have no home. I was not exiled, for sure, but as a kid I didn’t always feel rooted. At times I even fantasized about making a home with Miriam Makeba. I saw her as the godmother my atheist parents hadn’t given me. In my childish fantasy, she and I could be two exiled people, flung around the globe.
By the time my parents had turned thirty, the Movement was dissolving, and the Reagan Era was on the horizon. They, along with many of their generation, took a step back from the picket lines and began to figure out how to make a living in a United States that wasn’t all that willing to change. By now Sherra and Gene had two children—my sister Attica was born three years after me—whom they took along with them as they each, in their own way, began to reconfigure their own idea of family. They were already redoing adulthood in their formative years, already parents, already having experienced lost dreams.