From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(44)

What I knew about Sicily was snapshot details trickled down to me in the stories Saro had told me. He had played soccer at the edge of olive groves in shoes borrowed from an older cousin. His family could afford only one pair at a time, and his mother had forbidden him to ruin the shoes. He had eaten apricots off his grandfather’s trees. The town, for many years, had boasted more heads of livestock than people. The kitchen in his family home had been a stall for the family mule until he was a teenager. And there had been but one television in town during his childhood. Although I hadn’t seen childhood photos of him, I could clearly picture Saro as a boy, knobby-kneed with a head of thick black hair and piercing curious brown eyes. He had been too clever for a one-room classroom, terribly sensitive, and capable of harvesting a row of artichokes as fast as boys twice his age. He had kept a book of poetry under his bed at night. But there was so much I still didn’t know.

Saro didn’t have high hopes for the trip. But he said that even if the meeting with his parents didn’t happen or, perhaps worse yet, if I met them and didn’t like them, he promised I would love Sicily. Of that he was certain. I wanted to believe him, because I knew how much my loving Sicily would mean to him. So I said, “Of course” while secretly setting my sights on Sicily as little more than a pass-through to Morocco.

As soon as we landed, though, I was hooked. Sicily beckoned with her sapphire blue sea, her rocky arid terrain that, without warning, offered up verdant fields of poppies.

We handed over our passports and checked into a small family-owned hotel on the northeast coast near Cefalù that we would call home for the next ten days. Me, the black American wife. Saro, the Sicilian son who had married a foreigner who hadn’t even bothered to take his name, legally or socially.

Hotel Baia del Capitano was our base to get over our jet lag and take our time building a line of communication to Saro’s family in a town forty minutes away. The restaurant in the hotel became our second living room. We read the newspaper there, hung with the staff, ate with the chef. The foods I savored felt like the very origins of flavor; everything up to that moment now felt like approximations of tastes. I devoured tomatoes, fennel, asparagus, and oranges baked, cooked, sautéed, and cured into dishes that were pungent but delicate, complex but simple. The island was getting me even further into its clutches, one bite at a time.

And there was nothing like seeing a part of the world previously unknown to me through the eyes of a native. It was sublime to see it through the eyes and stories of someone I deeply loved. Saro became my guide into the heart of his culture, his language, and his cuisine. I began to empathize with that part of him that was prone to reminisce after seeing Cinema Paradiso or Il Postino, each a cinematic portrait of Sicilian and island culture.

Now, in Sicily, we made love to the sounds of church bells in the early morning, then rose with an urgency driven by the desire for espresso and the pleasure of chatting with locals. We fell deeper in love as the man I had married crystalized into focus, like seeing a part of him that had been invisible to me until it was contextualized. Home was making him more himself. Whether I met the parents or not, this trip had hooked us into each other more fully. We had traveled together in the heart of the conflict as a team, risking rejection but willing and openhearted. I began to understand the hidden parts of him, which needed the light of the Sicilian sun in order to breathe. And suddenly that awareness made the idea of possibly meeting his family less fraught. In a strange way, they no longer mattered. At least not in the way I had imagined they would. On that trip, it was as though I married Saro again and also wedded myself to his homeland.

Still we remained hopeful for a reunion with his family.



* * *



The logistics of Operation Family Reunion went like this. Each morning we left word in town with Franca, telling her we would be at the hotel between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m., if anyone chose to come down the mountain and visit. Franca was desperate to see her brother in person. Since our arrival, she had been attempting to broker peace and convince their father to come with the family to meet us at the hotel. Family mores dictated that if his father refused to come, then his mother, as was the custom in the Sicilian patriarchy, would not come. And if her parents didn’t come, Franca couldn’t come. Going outside that ancient code of conduct would have been seen as a sign of disrespect, an act of defiance. Saro explained that it was a Byzantine arrangement, one that, if not handled carefully, could end in a jagged line down the center of the family, a war zone on both sides. Giuseppe, as was his right, was dictating the actions of the whole family, just as he had done two years earlier regarding our wedding.

In town, it was no secret that we were less than twenty miles away, patiently waiting in a hotel. News had spread, as it does in small towns. Saro’s mom had sought counsel from the priest, she had talked to her closest friends. From what Saro told me, Franca and his mom “were working on it.” We just had to give it time. Every time he tried to explain, I threw up my hands and told him to pour me more wine.

In the meantime, each afternoon we waited, sipping wine or espresso or both and biding our time in case anyone came to meet the prodigal son and his American wife. Those afternoons in the garden were surreal. We got dressed up. I put on makeup, styled my hair. I laid out the gifts we had bought as a gesture of goodwill. Then we waited like storefront mannequins with a Mediterranean backdrop until it was clear no one was coming.