From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(26)
Still, his reticence about the whole affair bordered on near-corrosive fear. If he got past his images of his walk down the aisle—the prayers and the spectacle—his mind wandered to the reception. Friends and my family crowded into some hotel restaurant and dining on average food, that, if his family actually did come, guests would talk about for years to come. What they liked, what they didn’t like, the portion sizes, who had gotten indigestion, who had drunk too much. He didn’t want a wedding that, at the end of the day, was associated with gossip, sweaty armpits, and family who clung together at one table, fearful of the people on the other side of the room. Somewhere inside he hoped he’d be able to escape the whole affair or at least make it as low key as possible.
Except that I was a girl from Texas who had dreamed of being an actress and had fallen in love with an Italian chef she had met on a street corner. Having a summer wedding on my birthday in an Italian villa that stood next door to the one owned by the Ferragamo family seemed the most logical thing in the world. I was in magic-making mode. When I made up my mind about anything in this state, there was no stopping me.
“It could be fun. Trust me.”
* * *
I found our wedding venue, Villa di Maiano, in the back of a magazine. A palatial fifteenth-century villa with colossal Tuscan columns and sprawling groves of lemon and olive trees in the hills above Florence. It was a thing of Italian Renaissance fairy tales. The main house had in fact been used in a scene from the film A Room with a View. It was owned by a woman whom we called “The Duchess,” the title she inserted when introducing herself. Saro was the first to speak to her by phone. It was for the best. Even with some fluency, I still got nervous speaking Italian on the phone, in the absence of eye contact and gestures. Plus it was expensive to call overseas and I didn’t want to risk running up unnecessary minutes repeating myself for clarity, searching for some elusive verb that refused to leave the tip of my tongue. So it fell on Saro to make the first round of calls and set up our appointment with The Duchess on our upcoming trip to Florence.
His only resistance to our plan was the very real reality of his slight Sicilian accent. It could thwart all our plans. At the time, the social hierarchy in Italy relegated Sicilians to second-class status when compared to the perceived cultural superiority of their northern countrymen. When dealing with Florentines, Sicilians were looked at as barely a rung above “North Africans,” which was cultural code, a way of dismissing them as both non-Italian and non-European. It was intracultural discrimination on display, something with which Saro and I were familiar. Saro had, in fact, been discriminated against so often trying to find housing when he had arrived in Florence as a university student a decade earlier that he had paid all cash up front for a year just to be able to lay his head on a pillow at night in the city of the David and the Medici. He hated the Florentine bourgeoisie.
In April, we flew to Florence to finalize our plans, and we met The Duchess, La Duchessa, in person. She suffered the unique, and very European, plight of having the trappings of nobility (name, villa, and perhaps a chest of jewels somewhere) without the cash. She was forty-five, slim, very textbook Florentine in a cashmere twin set and Gucci loafers, auburn dye job, and tanned skin. She looked like she had just come from a weekend getaway on the island of Elba. Her bone structure was strong, chiseled. She resembled the tennis star Martina Navratilova but walked like Sophia Loren.
At the first sight of the upper garden with its groves of lemon and olive trees and its breathtaking view of Florence’s duomo in the valley below, I was close to tears. Its two-story stone-walled Tapestry Room with wraparound interior balcony made me gasp. Thank goodness we had negotiated the price beforehand, or else she could have taken me to the cleaners.
Saro, on the other hand, saw it differently. He could talk himself into a stupor about the petit bourgeois class and recount his university days as a strident Leninist. He said his friends would deride his choice for the capitalistic spectacle of it all. That always made me laugh. I reminded him that one of his best men, Antonio number two, drove a Lotus and also had a Maserati. So much for anticapitalistic ideals. Sometimes it struck me that I was marrying some younger, artistic Italian version of my father, who had spent his youthful days as an activist. The contradictions between our points of view had me in stitches, and I was quick to remind Saro that my life’s aspirations were decidedly bourgeois when seen through his eyes. I wanted kids, a second house, if possible, a career in the arts, and great vacations with a view of the sea. I was a suburban black girl from Texas whose parents had picked cotton for their grandparents, who had scratched against systemic oppression to become educated and generous citizens along the dirt roads lining miles of pine thicket. I was now in Italy. This was a moment my ancestors could not have imagined. It was my “look how far we’ve come” moment. I was going to enjoy it.
However, the second reason Saro drifted off to the periphery of the garden as I talked details with La Duchessa was more subtle and reflective of our internal differences. Saro was fundamentally understated to the exact degree that I liked to stand out. He was comfortable under the radar in direct opposition to my need to be out front, often while I was wearing a sundress and heels. He was the ground to my flight. The contrast suited us well as a couple. But it also made him nervous. No one among his family or friends had ever attempted to pay an aristocrat to throw a party in her house. He had no template for what I was attempting to pull off.