From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(51)

* * *



The rest of the day passed uneventfully as we moved from tourist shop to gelateria and back to tourist shop. She wanted a dolphin figurine fashioned from the black volcanic rock that was everywhere on the island. It was tourist kitsch, but I was happy to comply. We passed Rocco again at the edge of a crowd in the port. He stood sun-drenched in too-tight shorts, schmoozing with tourists. I pitied the duo of twenty-something blondes in bikini tops he was talking to. “Get on the boat, girls,” I wanted to say. “Trust me, he’s not worth sand up your ass.”

At sunset, Zoela and I climbed back onto the ferry. When it pulled out into the open sea, the captain allowed the vessel to idle as the sun turned the sky amber. From the crowded deck, we watched the volcano erupt. Incandescent liquid rock spouted into the sky, the earth’s inner core in full purgatorial glow. To be bobbing on the open water and watch the earth cough up its molten core, expelling it into the sky, opened my heart as wide as the day Zoela was born. It was perhaps the most spectacular experience in nature I had ever had. I was glimpsing the earth in progress, bearing witness to geological history. I held Zoela tight, I held Saro close in the locket around my neck. I felt he was with us, bearing witness to his wife and daughter in progress. We were survivors of a kind. We held, between us, a kind of secret of life and what mattered most. And that secret, that deep understanding of the constancy of nature and its opposite, human impermanence, was what I hoped would eventually help us regain our equilibrium.

After the sun had set and we were traversing the water once again, Zoela fell asleep on my lap. I stared out a portal window of the lower deck into the noir sea, illuminated only by an undulating streak of moonlight. Though it was impossible to see anything, I kept looking. In the darkness I saw a sliver of the moonlight dance on the water. It was a visual metaphor of that precise moment in my life—a fragment of light and darkness. I hoped that the next path in my life would be illuminated the way the moon brought light to the waves.





BITTER ALMONDS




“La lingua va dove manca il dente—The tongue goes where the tooth is missing,” Nonna said to me as we sat talking in the kitchen before her afternoon Mass. Zoela and I would be returning to Los Angeles in a week, and Nonna was telling me a story from her childhood about a boy who liked a girl his parents didn’t approve of. One day he took the girl, unchaperoned, into the fields outside of town. They spent the afternoon in an old mule stable and then he returned her to her parents that evening. In the Sicily of Nonna’s childhood, that was akin to eloping. It meant that the couple had to get married because the girl’s virginity was in question. There would be gossip and shame.

When the boy returned home, his outraged parents barred the door, banishing him. They tossed his clothes into the street and set them ablaze. He never went home again. And the girl’s family refused to let her marry him. He was destined to be alone. And he was until the day he died. Nonna concluded that ill-fated love story, a version of which existed in nearly every small town in Sicily, with a proverb about a tongue and a missing tooth.

I was intrigued as she recounted it to me. Its meanings were multiple, and coming from Nonna, given our personal history, it was undeniably significant. We had avoided the fate of that family, rising above lives that played out like characters in a Sicilian morality play. We had bridged estrangement; there were no clothes burned in the street. Where we stood that day, the piece of the story that was most relevant was that the boy had spent his life tracing what was gone: family, a girl, his dignity. She was telling me that throughout life, we revisit the empty spaces. That was her understanding of grief. That we are always trying to reconcile memory with reality. The tooth was a metaphor for all the missing things we lose in life.

Telling stories, particularly old stories and fables of Sicilian life, was a special connection Saro and his mom shared. They liked to revisit, through the oral tradition, a Sicily gone by. Now she was sharing a similar moment with me. And even though I had to ask her to slow down, repeat certain words in dialect, translate phrases into Italian, she was willing to do so. I wasn’t her son, but I could be her listener. It gave us a way to fill the silence we were learning to traverse. Nonna liked to dole out wisdom in the context of old parables. I guessed that the unspoken wisdom of that tale also had to do with good-byes and living with goneness. In one week, we’d be saying good-bye to one another. The pending departure was foremost in my mind. Earlier that day, she’d asked me if I’d started getting the suitcases ready. For an American like me that seemed excessive, but each summer she had encouraged us to have our suitcases packed two whole days before departure. “Think about what you want to leave here,” she had said. The statement dangled in the air.

After three weeks in her home, I had come to feel a new bond with her, one forged through shared circumstances and love for Saro. I had grown a tiny bit more comfortable with our periods of silence. I respected when emotions swelled up and she told me not to cry. “Se cominici tu, non possa fermare—If you start, I’ll never stop,” she had said several times during my stay. She wasn’t denying me my feelings, but she was also letting me know that this was hard for her. She was doing her best. I suspected that she preferred to cry alone, as I had once seen her do while reciting the rosary.

I was not doing much better, often crying at night after Zoela had fallen asleep. Good-byes have never been easy for me. But the idea of Zoela and me returning to Los Angeles to an empty house, to the slog of commercial auditions and dinners alone, was almost crippling, even if I was also ready to be back in my own bed, ready to see my friends and family. I was still leaving one of the most peaceful places I have ever known and relinquishing a certain closeness to Saro that could be found only in this community, in the presence of his mother, in her home, at her table. That indescribable closeness was overrun with loss, but it was also comforting. Part of me couldn’t take another day, part of me never wanted to leave. It was a duality that was difficult to make sense of. I kept thinking of something Vincent Schiavelli had once written of Sicily and L.A.: “It’s a strange conundrum. When I’m in Sicily, I want to get back to L.A. When I’m in L.A., I long for Sicily.”