From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(27)
On that fragrant April day, perched above the valley in which sat one of Europe’s most revered and storied cities, he quietly and politely deferred to me. We would have a wedding in The Duchess’s home. He calmed his nerves by telling himself we were already married. The idea that our marriage was already done allowed him to distance himself from the stark reality that his wedding was happening in Italy and his parents wouldn’t be there.
* * *
My boisterous black American clan descended on Florence with a sugar high of excitement, as if they were tasting homemade buttercream icing melting on an oven-warm cake on my grandmother’s back porch back in East Texas. The combination of Italy, food, nuptials, and fashion thrilled them. They were prepared to shop Ferragamo and Gucci with frightening determination. It was the late nineties, after all. The dollar went far against the then Italian lira.
As I was dressing myself in my wedding gown in a room just off the gran salotto of Villa di Maiano in Fiesole, my sister kept coming back to report on the goings-on in the other side of the villa. Saro and the best men were readying themselves. He had been on edge as our trip to Italy approached and the festivities were coming into focus. Once we got to Florence, his anxiety had really taken flight.
To make matters worse, he had a persistent and nagging toothache that, just two days prior to the ceremony, had landed him in the hospital. He had an abscessed molar and required immediate emergency oral surgery. As a result, on the morning of our wedding he was on painkillers and sporting a swollen left jaw.
Light filtered through the six-foot-high windows that looked out onto the garden, and I was full of anticipation and delight that it was all really happening. I could see the chairs that had been set up. A single bouquet of flowers sat on the end of each aisle. There were going to be about fifty guests in total: twenty Italians, all friends from Florence, and thirty or so Americans. My sister alternated between giving me the blow-by-blow of events just outside the room where I was getting ready and taking pictures of me and my mom, who was responsible for helping get me into my dress. All I could think of was how Saro and I were pulling off something magical and unprecedented for both of us. Nothing in either of our personal histories would have lead us to believe that we should or even could be here, in Fiesole, among breathtaking stone and marble. Yet there we were, in a living film set, about to get married.
That it was also my twenty-fifth birthday made the day somehow more transcendent. My sister had gone to great pains to get me a white gardenia to wear above my left ear, à la Billie Holiday. It was a nod to the voice that had kept me company as a new exchange student cleaning toilets in the bar where I would first get to know the man I was about to marry. My grandmother had gifted me delicate antique rhinestone shoe clips, a throwback to her time in East Texas attending education and holiday banquets. She had used them for years as a way to dress up her regular shoes and make them seem “new and sparkly” for a special occasion. She had never had money for luxury. Wearing her shoe clips as “something borrowed” was the most special part of everything I wore that day. And I had my sapphire blue engagement ring (something blue) and my discounted dress by an Ethiopian designer, Amsale Aberra, that I had found for a third of the price when a swanky Beverly Hills department store was going out of business (something new).
My dad appeared in the anteroom of the villa’s dressing room. He stood beaming in an earth-tone linen suit and cowboy boots. Dad had only two kinds of shoes: cowboy boots and running shoes.
“You ready to do this? Ain’t no time like the present to start your life,” he said. My father was full of self-coined truisms, folksy East Texas speak that he was constantly refining. “I’m ready to walk my daughter down the aisle in Italy, twenty-five years to the day that I first laid eyes on you, girl.” He offered me a big smile that radiated love and pride.
“Dad, please. You gonna talk the whole time we walk down the aisle?”
“I might.”
“Okay, then, let’s get started.” I took him by the arm and held on tight. In pictures from that moment, my eye still travels to the center of the frame, where the folds of linen in the crook of his arm tell the tale of my nerves. I am practically squeezing with all my might.
Aubrey sang the soul classic “Flesh of My Flesh,” a capella as I walked down the aisle.
After we said “I do” and kissed, we turned to jump the broom, an African American wedding ritual dating back to slavery. Jumping in unison signals the leap into matrimony. I hoisted my dress with one hand and held Saro’s hand with the other. When we landed, I noticed four faces on my walk back down the aisle that I had not seen earlier. It took a second for it all to register. The woman had a face that was almost a replica of Saro’s mother’s face. There was a man seated next to her. I glanced at Saro and saw a tender look of recognition on his face. They were his aunt Rosa, his mother’s sister, and her husband, Uncle Peppe. They had come from Switzerland with their two kids. I grabbed Saro’s hand even tighter.
Unbeknown to us, they had driven down using the address on the invitation I had sent them. They had told no one they were coming, not Saro’s mother, not Saro’s father. To do so would have been a family betrayal. Still, there they were. Saro was speechless, moved to tears by their gesture. And for the first time, I sensed what we had missed in not having his parents there. My heart opened wide.