From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(68)
I told her I understood. She shrugged her shoulders, as if maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but at least now I knew. Then the fruit vendor’s baritone interrupted the moment as he made his way up the street. Nonna took that as a cue to return to ironing Emanuela’s nightgowns. “I do this because her daughter-in-law doesn’t like to iron. But people come to visit each day. It is needed.”
She left me standing in the bedroom alone as she went back to work. I was caught off guard, moved by what had just happened. She had shown me her most vulnerable self, invited me to see and contemplate her own mortality. I felt soft inside, as though I needed to sit down. We had never had openness between us like this before. In one day, she had shown us off to the priest and shown me her death clothes. I wasn’t sure how to respond to such an invitation of closeness, to being included in parts of her previously unknown life. In all our years together, this was perhaps the most intimate moment we had ever had. She had literally opened up hidden places, shared with me her wishes for what would happen when she no longer had the ability to make decisions. This was end-of-life planning, Sicilian style. But I also felt trusted, as if she had invited me into a new chamber of her heart and was encouraging me to stay. I felt like her daughter-in-law in a new way.
When I left the bedroom and passed her at the ironing board, pressing the creases out of Emanuela’s smock and bras, I was struck by something else. I realized I was witnessing another example of the way community functions so tightly here. For better or for worse. Each of the women on this street will be called upon and expected to participate in the illness or death of the others. They held one another up. It was a custom as ancient and alive as the ruins of Sicily’s Hera Temple—where Zoela and I were headed next.
HERA AND THE SAPPHIRE SEA
The ride to Agrigento devolved into a nearly four-hour, mapless road trip full of road closures and detours. Cosimo had offered to drive us, I think because there was a collective concern on the part of my in-laws that Zoela and my bisecting Sicily’s desolate interior without a local was a potential shit show in the making. Franca came along, too. Frankly, having endured many road trip mishaps in Italy and Sicily, I was relieved to have them with me. Most memorable had been five years earlier with Saro, when a gas station attendant had pumped leaded gasoline into the diesel engine of a car we had rented in Rome. Twenty minutes later, the transmission had gone out on the autostrada. It was the middle of the day in August. No AC, limited cell service, cars zooming by at ninety miles per hour; we couldn’t even let the windows down once the engine died. There was no AAA to come to our rescue. The Numero Verde, Italy’s national emergency response number, was a Kafkaesque nightmare of a single prerecorded voice telling me to “press one” for assistance over and over again for hours. Saro cursed the nation and declared Italian inefficiency a plague on mankind. I prayed for a miracle and peeled the oranges we had just bought to keep Zoela hydrated. We waited for help for four hours. Spending four hours stranded roadside on the loop around Rome in summer is like idling a diesel engine inside a sweat lodge. At the end of that trip, I declared Italy insufferable and threatened never to come back.
That memory was fresh in my mind as I planned our trip to Agrigento and considered the two major things that were happening in Sicily that summer: raging wildfires (likely due to arson) and the closure of a portion of highway A19, which leads from the northern coast toward the southeast to Catania. Still, Cosimo wanted to begin our journey on A19 because he was familiar with it and he wanted to avoid Palermo traffic before connecting to the main highway that leads to Agrigento. This meant that in order to get from Aliminusa to our destination, we’d have to go through the island’s interior on secondary roads. It was a trip that would take an hour and a half on a California highway, but in Sicily, traveling that same distance would take four hours. Still I was undeterred.
I had chosen Agrigento because Zoela loved tales of the gods and goddesses, their virtues, struggles, laments, humor. Saro had taught her about all of them, and she had readily entered into his deep thinking about the big struggles of human behavior. I wanted to travel with her there to the Valley of the Temples, the greatest archaeological site in Sicily. Saro had taken me there years before. We had kissed among the pillars of the Temple of Hera, the goddess of marriage. It was a place where my past and my present could perhaps meet. Closer to North Africa, the Valley of the Temples was sacred, ancient, evocative, a place where visitors must wrestle with the construct of time. Standing in the presence of the temples, you can’t help but contemplate what has been lost while also seeing the continuity of life. It was just the kind of place I needed.
When our carful finally arrived in Agrigento, I was a little carsick yet nonetheless optimistic. It was hotter than I could have imagined. When we filed out of the car at midday, the air felt like the inside of a pizza oven. To make matters worse, Zoela and I were both on the verge of crippling hunger. I wasted no time pulling crackers from my purse, along with a pear I had swiped from Nonna’s house for this exact moment.
My in-laws and I differ in many ways but none so much as the fact that I am more than willing to stop at a trattoria for a hearty lunch or a snack. I’ll even stop for a bit of respite before venturing out into a sweltering afternoon of monuments and tourist attractions. I am of the easy-does-it school of tourism. They, on the other hand, prefer to power through, inhale a home-packed sandwich, see the sights, and then hit the road home in the hope of arriving before dark. They will always choose to eat dinner at home. They rarely dine at a place they don’t know. Practically never. That day I was on their schedule.