From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(2)

His death put pan to flame once again. All the strength I had gathered as a woman, mother, and lover wilted, instantly and completely. It was like being flung onto jagged rocks at low tide, belly up at high noon on the longest, hottest day of the longest year of your life. There seemed no bottom to my grief, no way out, just through. Through darkness, isolation, and the deprivation of his touch. But it was my final promise to him that had brought me, months later, to this orchard in the heart of the Mediterranean, desperate for a sliver of light.

The last church bell rang, and I held the ring box of ashes in my hand. Amore, l’ho fatto—I did it. I have brought us this far. I got out of the car.

The setting sun reminded me of our first road trip together through Sicily, when we had driven the remote interior. There had been nothing to see but mountains, wheat fields, cows, men on donkeys, and untold olive groves. We couldn’t get radio reception, so we ended up talking for hours along the winding roads, with interludes of silence and the endless downshifting and upshifting of the tiny Fiat. I remember that the afternoon light was another passenger in the car, witnessing two lives in motion. Now the sun was again my witness, as I finally stood free of the car and fully erect. The earth felt slightly loose beneath my feet.

Before me stood a large iron gate and colonnade of country stones, compacted earth and clay, stacked on top of one another to flank the gate. It created an impressive but simple rustic entrance. Along either side of the main entrance ran a barbed-wire fence atop a stone retaining wall. It separated the family land from the road. I looked at the fence and walked a tiny bit of the perimeter in the hopes of finding an easy opening. There was none.

Suddenly exhausted, I sat down on a haphazard pile of rocks that formed an impromptu retaining wall and stared at the town below. I could see the church cupola and beyond that fields that dropped precipitously into a valley that led to the sea. Then I heard a tractor approaching in the distance.

I didn’t want to be seen in that moment, I didn’t want to explain to a passing farmer moving along the road, returning home with the day’s harvest, why I was standing outside the all but abandoned orchard. Worse yet, I didn’t want word of it to get back to the small town that the black American wife had been spotted in a place no one else ever went. So I stood up and quickened my pace. I desperately searched for an area of loose stones, the result of shifting earth and rains, so I could force my way under and push my way in. I’d try to find the exact spot where we’d picked pears off the tree and Saro had held our daughter up to get the fruit closest to the sun the previous summer.

In Sicily, love, truth, and grief are neither simple nor straightforward. Each runs as deep as the roots of the olive trees that have dotted the island for centuries. Secrets often run deeper. What I was about to do not only was secret, but technically it was probably illegal. In rural Sicily, cremation is rare to nonexistent. We had already had the official interment in the town cemetery weeks earlier. Putting ashes, even a portion of them, anywhere but in a cemetery probably violated religious and civic law. But my life was well outside convention as I scrambled along the earth looking for a way in.

Had I thought a bit in advance, had I planned this better, had I not had to lie about my whereabouts to everyone close to me back in town, I could simply have procured a key for the gate. I felt particularly unsettled about my mother-in-law not knowing. She was, after all, a woman with whom I had not always been on the best of terms. Saro’s parents had declined an invitation to our wedding, less than thrilled that their beloved son was marrying an American, a black woman. Yet here now, my daughter and I were guests in her home, together, a bereaved family. Maybe I could have avoided the dirt and scrapes I was surely about to endure. I could have walked into this place in the open truth and then sat peacefully under the setting sun, falcons flying high above, the bray of a mule in the distance. But my grief and love didn’t work that way—and I had made a promise to the love of my life. So I got onto my knees, let the dirt coat my skin, and rolled under a barbed-wire fence. I was determined to follow my chef’s last instructions from scratch, in the hope that they might somehow lead me to take my first steps in reimagining my life without him.





Part One


BEFORE


Tutto sta nel cuminciare.

Everything depends on the beginning.

—Sicilian proverb





FIRST TASTES




I exited the plane in Rome, jet-lagged with a gaggle of fellow college coeds headed for customs and immigration, my passport in hand. I was twenty years old, and it was my very first time abroad. My exchange program from Wesleyan University to Syracuse University in Florence had begun.

In the terminal, I got my first sounds and smell of an Italian bar. It was teeming with morning patrons downing espresso and eating cornetti. I went up to the pastry case, put my hand on the warm glass, and then pointed like a preverbal child when the barista asked what I wanted. I held up three fingers. Three different cornetti in a bag for the road. One plain, one with cream filling, and one filled with marmalade. I didn’t know yet that a version of this bar existed on every street corner in Italy. That what I had in the bag was as common as ketchup in America or, more to the point, a doughnut. I was just happy in anticipation of the first bite.

Italy had never been in my grand plan. The only grand plan I had at the time was becoming a professional actor after college. I had wanted to be an actor since I remember being conscious. It was the big-picture plan of my life as I could see it, even if I had, as yet, no specific road map as to how to achieve it. It would be a leap. Nor had I planned to leave Wesleyan and its sleepy college town along the Connecticut River, except that I had stumbled into an Art History 101 class at the end of a difficult freshman year. The class was taught by Dr. John Paoletti, a world-renowned Italian Renaissance scholar. On that first day of class, when the lights dimmed in the auditorium and the first slide came up, a Greek frieze from Corinth circa 300 BC, I found myself spellbound. Two semesters of college finally came into focus. Within three weeks, I became an art history major. The next semester I was studying Italian, a requirement to complete my major. By the end of my sophomore year, I had taken up a tepid but steady affair with my Italian TA, Connor.