From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(41)

The merchant stopped the Piaggio minitruck in front of Nonna’s house, leaning his body out of the driver’s-side window, microphone in hand. It’s an old tradition in Sicily, the roving vendor calling out his goods in the form of song. Saro once told me that perhaps it dated back to the Arab rule in Sicily.

He stopped midway up the street, right in front of me. The location allowed the women who lived down the street to walk up to purchase and women from the houses at the top of the street to walk down. It was egalitarian, it was fair. Also, his speaker was cheap and didn’t work well. From that point on the street the sound carried best. Even the women who had televisions blaring while they cooked could hear what he was offering. He continued singing out his wares: plums, pears, nectarines. I knew immediately that he wouldn’t get much business. He was late in the day to be selling fruit. No one, I suspected, was going to step away from her stove to inspect, discuss, and then purchase fruit, especially since many of the varieties of fruit he was selling had already been gathered from nearby orchards by the husbands, sons, and sons-in-law who tended to the land. In Nonna’s kitchen, I had noticed a small wooden crate of fresh pears on the counter. It must have been left while we were at the cemetery. Her house was always unlocked. The pears, I assumed, were from her cousin Cruciano’s farm.

The man got out of the cab of the tiny truck and approached me. “Buongiorno, signora.” He extended his hand. I saw soil under his nails. When I grabbed hold, his hand was rough to the touch. “Condoglianze per suo marito—My condolences about your husband.” And just like that I wanted to fall into his hairy forearms. Something inside me softened. This was what a small town could give me that L.A. never could. The guy at the grocery store in Silver Lake didn’t know my husband was dead even though I have shopped there weekly for years. Here, a fruit vendor whose name I couldn’t remember knew and remembered that my husband had died.

“Grazie.” My knees suddenly felt like noodles, and I was surprised by the sound of vulnerability in my voice.

He steadied his arm to brace my body, which was leaning on its axis.

“Ma che si può far? La vita e così. Si deve combattere. Punto e basta.—But what can one do? Life is like that. We have to fight. That’s enough.”

I nodded in agreement, and something more broke loose in me. My eyes formed pools of tears. He neither flinched nor looked away. Instead he nodded back. “Sì, è così—Yes, it’s like that.” Then he took a step back, turning to his fruit truck. He reached for a susina—a Sicilian plum, small, tender, and oval with a purple that boasts blues and reds. He put two fistfuls of plums into a bag and gave them to me.

“Grazie, Salvatore” I heard over my shoulder. My mother-in-law had been standing on the threshold unbeknown to me.

“Signora, ha bisogna di qualcosa?—Do you need anything?”

“A posto—I’m good,” she said.

With that, Salvatore returned to his vehicle, grabbed his mic, and started once again calling out fruit as though it were a serenade. Within seconds, he was backing down the street, hanging his torso out the window and lighting a cigarette all at the same time. His engine sputtered in reverse.

I turned back into the house with my bag of plums.

“Banane e Patate viene più tardi,” Nonna told me. The vendor they all called “Bananas and Potatoes” would come by later. He was called that because those were the first words he called out as he rode up the street to sell his merchandise. I hoped to be asleep later in the day when he passed. Suddenly I needed to lay my head down. It would take everything I had to make it through lunch before stumbling upstairs to bed for a nap.

Back inside, I saw Nonna set the plates out on the kitchen table. Eating in the kitchen was always the case for breakfast. But for lunch and dinner we had always, for as long as I could remember, eaten at the dining table in the other room. The table sat under an oblong frame with a copy of a nineteenth-century romantic oil portrait of Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus. The baby Jesus sat full and upright like a man but with a teenager’s face. He was extending to Joseph a cluster of lilies still on the stem. In the shallow background, there was a valley, then fields, then mountains. I knew from my art history studies that the lilies represented purity, chastity, and innocence. But lilies could also represent resurrection. The painting told me of innocence but foreshadowed the resurrection that would come after that innocence was lost. I had always liked it. I found its obvious pastoral romanticism the most optimistic piece of art in a house full of crucifixes and photographs of popes. But it was its handcrafted frame that I really loved. It had always reminded me of a similar frame my great-grandmother had in East Texas. Hers framed a trio of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. That was a different kind of romantic optimism. A different kind of loss. Eating at the dining table in Nonna’s had always been a private link to another life I had thousands of miles away. And I’d enjoyed that connection. But today that table was not set. Instead it served as the altar for a burning votive candle on a handmade lace trivet.

Back in the kitchen, Nonna moved a pot of lentils to the back burner. Prepared earlier that morning, before Zoela had awakened and asked to see the ashes, they were simmering again. I smelled garlic. I knew there was mint from the terra-cotta pot she kept under the bench on the sidewalk outside her house. We would have the lentils with the pasta, I suspected. They were grown here. I had never eaten lentils growing up. In fact, I don’t think I knew what lentils were until I was past the age of twenty-five. It was Saro who had taught me how to enjoy them and later understand that in Sicily, they are more than a staple. They are fortune, and they are fate. From a culinary point of view, they are eaten for sustenance, especially in times of drought or scarcity. From a cultural point of view, they are known to bring luck to travelers, good fortune at the New Year. But they are also a mourning food. Lentils bring the full human experience to the table. Lenticchie were the food this family turned to for comfort and sustenance when life gave you something irreparable.