From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(45)

I felt as though I were in a parallel universe. Sicily seemed a place where individual free will had been abandoned and a town of people was under the spell of something greater than them—history, tradition, fear of reprisal. I had never been witness to a culture so willing to pledge allegiance to the group over an individual. Saro kept trying to explain to me that it was about keeping the peace. That families were forever divided when a wife or a daughter or a brother-in-law went against the head of the family. A visit could happen only with his blessing. Otherwise, it would all be rancor and tension with a hefty dose of gossip. He didn’t want that for his mom, he didn’t want it for his sister. So we just waited. And I held my tongue as my plan to take the mountain to Mohammad was going up in smoke.

On the third afternoon of waiting, I looked out our hotel window onto the dazzling blue waters, and I broke. I finally allowed the disappointment, hurt, and rejection to wash over me. I had flown halfway around the world only to have no one stand up and do the right thing. No one was willing to put Saro and his feelings first. I had brought myself into exile.

“I’m not coming down to the garden this afternoon. I’ll be in the room. Come get me if anyone comes.”

“Amore, please. Come with me. If no one is here in fifteen minutes, we’ll change and go to the beach. Then a sunset dinner.”

“Saro, this is completely absurd! And I feel stupid for ever thinking this could work. I don’t get this place, this culture, these rules. I mean, I love it here, it’s beautiful, but I also hate this.”

“I tried to explain it.” He was hugging me. When he let me go, I could see the hurt in his eyes. But I also saw a new, clear awareness. “We did what we came to do; the choice is theirs. I love you. This is on them.”

Fifteen minutes later no one had come.

It wasn’t until the fourth afternoon that Franca told us we would have our first visitors, Saro’s second cousins. The next day his dad’s brother and his aunt would come. It had taken days, but Nonna and Franca had devised a plan. Each day small groups of the extended family would visit, thereby putting pressure on Saro’s father. They were using Old World reverse psychology to create an environment that would make Giuseppe publicly seem like an obstinate, uncaring father, a man willing to watch his wife weep openly and refuse to attend Mass because he was keeping her from their only son. I liked the way these women worked.

Then came a shift. On the seventh day, Franca and Cosimo arrived with their girls. That was a sweeping gesture. Seeing her for the first time moved me to tears. She was so much like Saro, taller even, with a radiant smile and kind eyes. When she walked up to me and we kissed each other on both cheeks, I almost melted. I had given up on that moment ever happening. I instantly admired the woman who had been quietly working to achieve this moment. I knew what an act of defiance it was for her to be standing in a garden under a vine of bougainvillea, finally meeting her sister-in-law. She had chosen the love of her brother over continued allegiance to the way things were done. For that, she was heroic.

Still, Saro’s irascible sixty-something-year-old father, Giuseppe, refused to come. He had made a decision on which he doubled down. By that point, the whole situation was brimming with Sicilian pathos, and frankly I feared for the well-being of a man who could relentlessly commit himself to disowning a son. Still I tried to humanize him. I tried to imagine his position.

I imagined that somewhere inside he must have known or at least considered that if he didn’t see Saro then, he’d likely never see him again. America, distance, and a foreign wife who had done all she could might see to that. Somewhere inside, he must have known that by flying all the way to Sicily, we were extending perhaps the largest olive branch he’d ever see on an island with no shortage of olive trees.



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In the late morning of the eighth day, Saro packed our Fiat rental and tossed me the keys. “Here, you drive. I want to find Polizzi Generosa. We’ll drive until we’re tired or too drunk on good food to turn back.” Polizzi, he told me, was a town he had heard of as a child but had never visited. Sounded good to me.

As an unspoken rule in our relationship, I was the driver and he the navigator when we traveled outside of L.A., mostly because I had been driving since I was a teenager and he had not gotten a license until he was thirty-five years old and living in the United States. We had learned that one of us was notoriously awful as a passenger: me. With my impatience and commentary, I drove him to distraction and then anger, often a combo platter of both. He had learned to toss me the keys and content himself to lean out the window and ask for directions when needed.

Two hours after leaving our coastal hotel, we tumbled into the mountain town of Polizzi Generosa. I was hypoglycemic, carsick, and generally a wreck. I had not anticipated the remoteness and the steep, narrow roads with stomach-turning drops into rocky valleys below. One look at the stone edifices rising from the rocky precipice of the mountain, and you could immediately see why Polizzi Generosa (meaning “generous city”) had been a high-elevation Hellenistic and later Norman outpost, strategic for defense. Getting there, even a thousand years later, was not easy. It took more than a notion.

As I clutched back and forth in the Fiat and left rubber on the road, I lobbed nonsensical threats at Saro, concluding with a promise to never have his children if he couldn’t find me a trattoria that could produce the best plate of local food and a liberal pour of the house wine immediately. He met my hyperbole and hypoglycemia with indifference and deflection. “You will thank me for this memory one day.” When I pressed him with more laments, he finally threatened to leave me in a trattoria to cool off while he watched soccer on TV at a local bar. It was the kind of irritated banter reserved for young married people who found themselves lost on an island that was both familiar and foreign. I finally put the car into park and hoisted my hunger from the two-seater.