From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(30)

“I killed them for meat this winter,” he said with an elongated shrug.

“And work? How is work for you?” I asked, hoping to cover the ride with more small talk, despite the fact that I felt shaky with fatigue and free-floating anxiety. Talking was a strategy to not fall apart, to hold it together for Zoela when she woke, and for whatever was to come when we reached town.

“I lost my spot when I came to Los Angeles in the spring. I am waiting to see if they will need me this summer with all the tourists. But the city just declared bankruptcy.” He always dropped Italian and reverted to Sicilian when it came to discussing politics and its companion, corruption.

I knew he’d had a rough time between working as a traffic cop in Cefalù and farming. Like many Sicilians, he grabbed on to whatever fate threw his way. In his case, it was part-time seasonal work in a recently bankrupt town.

I looked at Zoela’s flushed cheeks and cinnamon brown skin as Cosimo drove and talked. I wondered if, in the future, she’d remember any of this. Would she remember the time we had gone to see her grandmother with her father’s ashes in a duffel bag at our feet?



* * *



La terra è vascia is the way local farmers describe this part of Sicily. Those words, “The earth is low,” are both a statement and a parable. They tell a visitor that to work this land, to survive it, to turn seed into harvest, you have to bend low. Very low. You have to labor tirelessly and often without promise. The earth is uneasy in this part of Sicily. It is difficult to cultivate, rocky, and often impervious to the plow. Those who rely on the land to sustain them must submit to backbreaking labor in order to survive. La terra è vascia equates labor and love as twin experiences. As we pulled into Aliminusa, I steadied myself, grabbing hold of the handle above the rear passenger door. I knew now that everything that came next was going to be about both labor and love.

The first thing I saw when we turned left on Via Gramsci was a stoic brigade of aging women and widows lined up on a bench along the stone sidewalk. The widows, as is customary, were dressed in all black. Of varying heights and girths, they sat in front of Saro’s childhood home waiting for us. They were prepared for mourning. They had done this before, many times—for themselves, for family, for neighbors, perhaps since the dawn of time. Sicilians were accustomed to welcoming home the dead.

When we had passed the final pizzeria in the neighboring town of Cerda, Cosimo had phoned ahead, as he always did. It was an act of consideration so that my mother-in-law, Croce, a beloved woman whose given name means “cross,” as in the cross on which Jesus was crucified, would not have to sit on the bench outside her home too long in the midday heat, waiting. Her name is weighty like her character, an unquestionably biblical name for a woman of uncommon reputation and affection in a town where betrayals and transgressions can follow you for generations.

The women of Via Gramsci—Saro’s mother, her first cousin, another third cousin through marriage, and neighbors—always emerged from their homes to greet us when we arrived. They insisted on being there to witness Saro’s homecoming.

As we made our way up the street, Cosimo deftly maneuvered his Fiat around a tractor parked partially on the sidewalk in the middle of the steep one-way street. He passed two more shuttered houses and brought the car to a halt in front of Nonna’s narrow two-story house nestled halfway up the street before it dead-ends. We were there. And so were the women.

Before I could wake Zoela and lift her head from my lap, the door was flung open. My mother-in-law’s arms reached in.

“Sei arrivata—You have arrived.”

In a flash, her small but strong seventy-nine-year-old hands were on my shoulders. I was still emerging from the car when her cheeks came flesh-to-flesh with mine. At their plushness, I wilted into a deeper realm of loss. Again, time suspended. We each took a moment to linger, or an eternity. Time was again elastic. We stood there, disbelieving that this, the moment we had known for years might come, was happening.

Then she released me and reached past me back into the car for Zoela, her beloved grandchild from her only son.

“Amore mio. Amore mio.—My love. My love.” Her voice trembled. She raised a tissue to her damp eyes. She helped Zoela from the car and took her in her bosom. Zoela was waking up exhausted, hot, disoriented. In her grandmother’s embrace and so far from home, she began to cry and reach for me.

“è stanchissima—She’s very tired,” I said in Zoela’s defense, worried that Nonna would be offended. Then the chorus of mothers, mourners, and grandmothers surrounding the car echoed in agreement. “è stanchissima, certo.”

I suspected that Saro’s mom might have thought Zoela was crying because of her since they hadn’t spoken in months. Nonna had never, in all her grief, forced me to bring Zoela to the phone. Instead, she just asked every day when we spoke, “Come sta la bambina?—How is the child?”

Now Nonna got to the reason we were all standing outside, encircling a car in the middle of the day: “Dov’è?—Where is he?”

She wanted the ashes. She wanted her son.

I reached into the car, lifted the bag from the floorboard, and gave it to her. Her face went from stoicism to the pallor of paper at the sight of my carry-on. The child she had birthed, reared, fed, and loved was inside.

Emanuela, her first cousin who lives across the street, held Nonna up. “Entrate, entrate—Enter, enter.” She shuffled her toward her front door, away from the street scene, with the efficiency of a first responder. She moved to shelter her from the sun. Then the chorus of widows broke their circle around the car and in unison ushered Zoela and me inside, moving us all as one mournful herd.