From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(32)

I pulled Zoela closer, and I grabbed the locket hanging from my neck. In it I had my own connection to Saro. Attica had given me a locket, and in it we had put some of his ashes for me to carry around my neck. It was a sisterly and sacred act.

My therapist had suggested that I take a bit of his ashes and scatter some privately while in Sicily. She knew the trip was causing me anxiety. She suggested that I do something just between Saro and me. After my session with her, I had had a dream about being in an orchard with Saro at my side. The next day, a friend had called to tell me that she, too, had dreamed of Saro. In the dream, they had been eating apricots. I took the confluence of my therapist’s suggestion and the dreams and visions to mean that I should scatter some of Saro’s ashes under an apricot tree in a place he had once shown me last year. For that reason, I’d had his ashes divided into three separate parcels: one for interment in L.A., one for his mother, and one for my own personal ceremony.

As I sat in my mother-in-law’s house listening to Catholic prayers that were also tethered to the Arab and Jewish world, I knew this moment was for Saro’s mother, his sister, his neighbors and cousins. This moment was for a town of Sicilians who had lost one of their own. We had had a memorial, a celebration of life, in Los Angeles. This was the funeral my mother-in-law had been waiting to give her son. I drew Zoela closer, feeling overcome as the sounds that emerged from the collection of voices around me spilled out, a heartbreaking chorus of lament that rose to the rafters above.



* * *



Just before the first sign of morning light, I awoke upstairs in Saro’s parents’ matrimonial bed. The faint first light of day filtered through the second-story shutters. I could hear sheep bells in the distance. The herder was moving his sheep to lower ground. Zoela slept at my side.

From downstairs came the sound of the soft, familiar choreography of Nonna in her kitchen. I knew she had been up for a while. She wanted to sit with her son alone in the room where she herself had been born. She needed to do so before burying a part of her own motherhood forever. And she had undoubtedly already made the pasta sauce for our midday meal.

The night before, she had told me we would rise early to head to Mass by 7:00 a.m. We would be at the cemetery by 8:00 a.m., in time to have a private ceremony before the cemetery was open to the townspeople. That last detail, “before it was open,” was important, because interring ashes was uncommon here. She didn’t want to draw attention. Franca had sought help at the town’s city hall to handle all the Italian Consulate’s paperwork. It had to be completed to Italy’s exacting specifications in order for me to transport and inter his ashes. On my end, I had had numerous conversations and emails with her telling her that I needed an address and tomb number for the final resting place, neither of which she could provide because the cemetery in Aliminusa was situated on a street with no official name at the far edge of town. As is common in much of the rural interior of Sicily, cemeteries dating back to the Greeks and Arabs were placed just outside of a town, often on secondary roads downhill of winds, leading to a dead end. The people who lived there knew where it was, and that was all that mattered. Outsiders weren’t buried there. Only an outsider would need a street name.

To make bureaucratic matters more complicated, at the time of Saro’s death there had not been a tomb available in which to place his ashes. Construction had halted in the cemetery as a result of economic austerity or perhaps some indirect Mafia influence. The plots that were available were already taken, prebought by well-off families long ago for the generations of dead to come. Saro’s family didn’t have an empty tomb. They were not the only family in town to find themselves in this predicament. As a result, a de facto practice had arisen: people had begun “lending” a tomb to those families who needed it, the agreement being that, in the future, when a new space became available, the remains would be moved to a new crypt within the cemetery. At least that was how it had been explained to me back in L.A. as I had struggled to make sense of it and get all the travel documentation into order. It felt surreal, exactly the kind of Italian bureaucratic shenanigans that made Italy the punch line of many jokes.

I wanted to have no trouble transporting Saro’s ashes into Italy. I was excessively meticulous about that. Perhaps my hypervigilance came from a childhood spent with parents who had taught me how to avoid confrontation with authorities. As an adult, I had faced the reality of being a woman of a certain color and age traveling into Rome. I had often been profiled. I had been pointed out by the carabineri and immigration police on more than one occasion. I fit the ever-changing face of European immigration. I could be a woman from Morocco or Cuba or Ethiopia or Brazil, depending on which stubble-faced official was looking at me and what the authorities had been told was a current threat. Over the years, I had learned to stay close to Saro through the corridors of the baggage claim and at immigration. I had learned to keep my American passport out and visible so that there would be no holdups or delays jeopardizing our connecting flights.

Carrying Saro’s ashes with Zoela at my side was not the time to risk even a tiny margin of error. Before the trip, I had had nightmares about a search and seizure, of Saro’s ashes being detained or, worse yet, taken from me in front of Zoela all because I had failed the bureaucratic task of crossing all my T’s. I would not, under any circumstances, travel with an undocumented box of dust. Besides, Italian law strictly forbade the clandestine transport of human remains. Ashes required their own travel documents.