From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(12)

As she and I sipped cappuccinos and sampled pastries in a café across from the Boboli gardens, out of nowhere she began a quiet but very determined inquiry into why I was studying in Italy at all. To her way of thinking, I was the child of activists, people who had instilled in me a sense of cultural pride and political awareness. I had been raised to sympathize with the challenges facing people of color across the African diaspora. Why, then, had I come to Italy, the heart of European culture, to study abroad? Why was I not in Kenya, like the daughter of her friend Mary from her former Movement days? Mary’s daughter was on a Fulbright and teaching Kenyan children English as part of her studies at Wellesley. Why was I not more like Mary’s daughter? And why in God’s name was I continuing to hook up with “white boys”? She wanted something more for me. And she took her time telling me so as we sat eating and drinking.

“But, Mom, I’m an art history major. My graduation requirement includes being proficient in either French, German, or Italian. Studying in Kenya—”

She jumped in before I could continue. “It’s about the bigger-picture life choices you are making. By being here you are virtually excluding yourself from the possibility of being with someone who is nonwhite.” Her Afrocentrism came with conditions, and at that moment those conditions included black first, second, and always.

“I don’t know what to say. I like being here, and I am not excluding anyone or anything.”

“Yes, you are. By virtue of where you are, you are excluding.”

It was a conversation from which there was no out. I would never win. I was the daughter of a black activist who was suggesting I had sold out. Pass me another slice of pizza, please. I knew she was having her say.

Once I began dating Saro, if my parents talked about it with each other, they spared me the details. Ultimately, when it came to affairs of the heart, each of them was wise and intuitive enough to keep a distance. They were willing to say their piece and then let their children either sink or fly when it came to love. No matter what opinions they might have had, at the end of the day, I believe they wanted me to be happy. And if it was a chef from Italy who made me happy, they were willing to support that. If nothing else, they had raised a daughter who knew how to follow her convictions and was also learning how to follow her heart. Somewhere, deep down inside, they might have even celebrated my bravery. The odds against our love were so improbable, so steep, but they had taught me to fight for what mattered.



* * *



By March, I was still renting a room in the penthouse apartment in Piazza del Carmine. One night I was waiting for Saro to get off work, and I sat up most of the night talking to a new American roommate, Cristina, from San Francisco who had filled me with stories like a tumbler of whiskey. By the time we adjourned, it was after midnight. My plan was to lie down just for a few minutes, rest, and wait for Saro to arrive in the piazza below sometime just after 1:00 a.m. It had been four months since he had bought me the bike and we had shared the ride across the Arno. We had a routine at this point that when he finished work at Acqua al 2, he left Florence’s center and rode across the river to Piazza del Carmine to wait outside my apartment. He would stand across the street from my building and wait for me to come to the front window. Upon seeing him, I would buzz him in. He couldn’t ring the bell because of one of my roommates, whom Cristina and I jokingly called “The Den Madame” but who was, in fact, a Canadian trust fund transplant whose name was on the lease on the rooms we sublet. She was famous for discontinuing the tenancy of any girl who took up with bothersome boyfriends. Ringing the bell after 10:00 p.m. qualified as bothersome.

When I awoke three hours later in a Chianti-induced sweat and full of panic, it was 3:30 a.m. I had gone so far and deep into sleep after my roomie’s tales of woe that I had lost sense of time and place. I sat upright in my tiny twin bed and immediately realized that something was desperately wrong. I sprang from my bed and nearly broke my neck running along the marble floor through the corridor to the front windows of the apartment, thinking I know he won’t be there. I’ve missed him.

When I got to the window, flushed with anxious nerves, the first thing I saw was that it was pouring rain. Shit! Really? Could this be any worse? As I peered out into the night and looked down, there he was. My Saro. His coat was drawn tight, his hair was a wet, soaking mess. He was looking up at the window of our apartment.

One look at Saro, and something new about him came into crystalline focus. This man, this chef, was showing me who he was deep down, the persistence of his character, his unflinching willingness. He had declared his love, he had laid out his vision, but now he was making that love an action. Standing in the rain, it was as if he were drawing a line in the sand. On one side of it, he showed me the kind of love I could have in my life with a man who was undeterred in his commitment, unafraid, clear about what he wanted—someone determined above all else to stand for love no matter what, no matter how. No matter.

On the other side of that line was another life. It was the one I had been leading before taking up with Saro, one rife with middling commitments and ambivalent relationships. The line was as clear and as black and white as any frame out of Neorealism. There was my new lover, a man kept waiting, standing in the rain past the point where it would have been understandable to leave. He was a man in love with me down to the bone. To wait for someone in this way, in this circumstance, was an extraordinary act of faith and love. But more still, it was the act of a man who was persistent, whose character was unshakable.