From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(34)
We passed fresh laundry hung on lines and sheep dung–coated cobblestones. The postman zipped by on his Vespa, headed to the next town before he’d circle back to Aliminusa on his way back down the foothills to the coast. As we rounded the piazza, the only square in town, I could hear a fruit vendor in the distance hawking his wares in a raspy dialect over a loudspeaker atop the cab of his small truck: “Pomodori e pesche, freschi, freschi, buoni, buoni!” The tomatoes and peaches he promised were fresh and not to be missed. I could see the pharmacy door being unlocked. The butcher was receiving his first customer, an old man wearing a coppola and snuffing out his cigarette before entering.
Nonna and I walked up the wide, smooth marble steps of the church and into the dark sacristy. We had been holding each other up during the whole ten-minute walk. Others were waiting inside. Now she broke away from me to give the priest the ashes and take her place in the pew nearest to the altar. I took the seat next to her. Looming above us all was a statue of Sant’Anna, the mother of Mary and patron saint of the town.
The priest said a brief Mass over the box of ashes. He sprinkled holy water over them, then he spoke of Nonna and her strength through his illness. He prayed for me and Zoela. I struggled through intense jet lag and fatigue to focus on his words. If I could only fix my attention on one thing, I could get through this moment. Instead, all I felt was an intense longing to have Saro next to me in that very pew. So I lowered my head and fixed my gaze on the table where the priest had put Saro’s ashes. It was humble, small with an ornate cloth. I didn’t take my eyes off of it until my mother-in-law grabbed my hand because it was time to go.
We walked back out the church, down the striated white steps to Cosimo’s waiting car. Driving would help us avoid the steep descent on foot and ensure that we didn’t risk encountering townspeople now that more people were surely out. The town’s groundskeeper was waiting with a key to open the cemetery.
At the archway that led into the main corridor of mausoleums, there was a gentle breeze. We were a small cluster of mourners: Nonna, Franca, Cosimo, two cousins, two childhood friends, a painter friend from a town nearby who had known Saro in early adulthood, the priest, and the groundskeeper.
Throughout the ceremony, I leaned against a cypress. I needed to be held up by something with deep roots. Birds gathered in the tree above as if to oversee this human drama or merely to seek shelter in the alleys of the mausoleums. Either way, they were what I could focus on. I felt as though I were floating above my body, in the sky with them. To be present in my body would mean that I’d feel the weakness in my legs, the aches in my hips. I’d have to suffer the light-headedness that threatened to cast me down onto the cobblestones. My body was an awful, fearful, unstable place to be. So I floated above it. And I listened.
I listened to what was being said first by the priest: more words, more prayers. Then I listen to the words of Vincenzo, the painter friend who had also been a close friend to Saro’s mentor Giuseppe “Pino” Battaglia, a well-known Sicilian poet. Vincenzo, the painter, began reading Pino’s words as a call to prayer. It was a poem for the dead but as I listened, I imagined that the poem was really for me.
Il mio nome è aria,
il vento che soffia.
Ora io vivo ancora in campagna
My name is the air the wind that blows . . . Now I live again in the countryside
Poetry would save me. It was more real and stable to me than my own body. In that moment I realized why I had returned here to this island of stone: I needed a kind of salvation. I desperately wanted, even for a moment, to shake off the ever-present sadness and fill my spirit. The poem was the love, the poetry a thread connecting me to Saro, Sicily, and my home back in L.A. where Pino’s books lined our shelves.
The groundskeeper gestured toward the ashes. That snapped me back into my body, as if a branch from the tree above had fallen and struck me on the head. I was almost crushed under the weight of a sudden crashing awareness. I understood for the first time that I was burying half my life in a tomb in Sicily. Every smile, every joy, every shared secret, a lifetime of aspirations. I was committing all of that and all of the me I had known with it to a marble tomb. The sounds of a distant mule, the scent of fresh-cut hay, salt from the sea in the air were my witnesses—the elements that would now watch over it all.
The groundskeeper climbed the handcrafted wooden ladder, fashioned from the wood of an olive tree and tied together with rope and what looked to be dried bamboo. The ladder, I imagined, had been made by the groundskeeper’s father or grandfather as a way for them to reach the upper levels of the mausoleum wall. He ascended nimbly, holding a sledgehammer. Through my tears I noticed that he was wearing old but starched pants. His hammer hit the cement facade, the layer between the crypt and the marble front stone, and it shattered the cement, sending small pieces falling to the ground below. The sound caused the birds above to squawk and fly away in unison. Their departure forced an opening into the otherwise quiet, still air.
I closed my eyes. Someone leaned into me. It could have been Nonna or her cousin or simply the town mourner, who was a fixture in such moments. “Tutto bene, forte stai—It’s okay, be strong.” Someone asked my mother-in-law for the ashes. She handed them to the groundskeeper, who descended a few rungs to get them. When I opened my eyes, he was back up on the ladder, and I saw him place Saro into the dark space behind the cement. I noticed that the cement facade had not completely shattered. He had deftly managed to create a small opening, just large enough to slip in the box. We all stood in silence as he reached for a pail of fresh cement and a trowel. In a matter of minutes, he had closed up the opening. Someone pulled at my arm to tell me it was over. It was time to go. I had done part of what I came to do. Saro was buried in Sicily. But I had yet to release him to Sicily.