From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(46)

It was maybe 2:30 p.m. Siesta time. The hours when a Sicilian village is a ghost town of shuttered windows and the faint sounds of dishes being put away before rest.

We sidled up to Pasticceria al Castello looking for two things: a restroom and a break from each other. From its open door, the intermingled aromas of vanilla, almond, and sugar emanated from within. I let Saro break the beaded doorway hang first. No matter how much we were annoying each other, I was still a black woman in the interior mountains of Sicily. Not that I expected anything to happen. But I always let Saro be the first point of contact, just as he let me be the first point of contact when we drove the back roads of East Texas to the sharecropping land my people hailed from. We are practical even when irritable.

The baker and owner, Pino, allowed me access to the restroom while Saro caught some of the soccer game on a small screen. We didn’t hope for more than espresso and maybe directions to a still-open trattoria.

Saro and Pino began speaking in dialect. Within seconds it was established that although he was a native of Sicily, Saro in fact resided in Los Angeles with me, his wife, an actress. Pino’s face lit up, and suddenly his eyes swung in my direction. “Do you know Vincent Schiavelli?” He spoke to me in a rough, rushed Italian that I could mostly follow. I knew that Vincent Schiavelli was the famous character actor from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ghost, Amadeus, and Batman Returns.

“Yes, of course. Not personally, but I know him,” I answered in Italian.

“This is his grandfather’s hometown. He comes here often. You have to take something to him from me.” And before I could protest, he had disappeared into his lair of pastry ovens behind the display case. Saro called after him, “Of course we will.”

Pino reemerged with a round flat cake on gold-faced cardboard. It was not just any cake but the traditional cake of Polizzi Generosa, he explained. Cake made one way in one town in the remote mountains of Sicily, in a town that didn’t see a lot of visitors. A cake Saro had never heard of. A cake I didn’t want but knew immediately was coming with us. “Sure, of course we will,” Saro redeclared our commitment to deliver the cake as Pino wrapped it up in pink paper and adorned it with gold ribbon, attaching a card with his phone number. Before I could tell him that I didn’t know the first thing about how to track down Vincent Schiavelli, the cake was in my hands and we were walking out the door. I turned to Saro and gave him a look that said, “Really? You know this cake is never leaving Sicily.” To which he retorted with a nonverbal “Don’t worry, I’ll carry it.”



* * *



I don’t know what happened between the time Franca returned to Aliminusa and we returned from Polizzi. However, the next day, our final day in Sicily, we sat down for our afternoon espresso, dressed up, and were ready to receive guests when a car pulled into the gravel parking lot and Franca filed out, behind her Saro’s mom.

In the emotional overwhelm of Saro seeing his mother, I didn’t register the large figure walking behind her. Until Saro grabbed my hand.

“Tembi, that’s my father,” he said. His grip was so tight it almost made me shriek. Then he quickly let go, rose from his chair, and went to his mom. I couldn’t take my eye off Saro’s father.

Giuseppe had made his way to our hotel to meet the son he hadn’t seen in years under an arch of bougainvillea in the hotel garden. I let out an audible “Fuck!” I didn’t know who to greet first, I hadn’t even thought of what I would say. Before I could collect myself, he was upon me. There was a cordial hug. I offered a tentative smile.

“Ti presento mio padre—May I present my father.” Saro was speaking to me as though we were on the floor of the United Nations.

Giuseppe was taller than I had imagined with a face weathered from a lifetime of field work. He wore creased dress pants and a collared button-up shirt under a suit jacket. He was dressed as if he were going to church. And he wore the same hat that he had worn in the photo I had seen of him. “Salve,” he said simply, his voice gravelly with cigarettes and understated emotion.

At his side, was Saro’s mother, Croce, wearing a dress skirt and floral top. She clutched a small black purse that looked rarely used. She broke loose from her husband and went straight to Saro. She beamed with joy at the sight of her son, overcome at being able to hold him again. There was relief in her face, too. I would later learn that it was she who had turned the tide and brokered the meeting. She had woken up that morning, our last day in Sicily, dressed herself in her Sunday finest, made her husband coffee, and announced that she was getting a ride with her cousin to drive down to the coast to see her son. She pointed to a plate of room-temperature pasta and told Giuseppe that he could stay or he could go but her mind was made up. She would not live a day in peace if her son got back onto the plane bound for America without her ever seeing him, without her laying eyes on the woman with whom he had chosen to spend his life.

After Croce finished hugging Saro, she turned to me. Her face broke open with a tender, toothy grin. Before me stood a determined woman who carried my husband’s smile. She leaned in and said, “Grazie.”

That night we concluded our time in Sicily with our first family dinner at a roadside trattoria adjacent to the Greek ruins of Himera. It was a place his father could comfortably afford and far enough from their hometown that it would create no further gossip. We broke bread as a tenuous New World/Old World biracial, bilingual family.