From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(69)

As they surveyed the parking lot of Agrigento’s archaeological ruins, clearly hungry, hot, and thirsty, I suddenly felt bad. I could see from their general lack of interest that I was putting them out, taking them from their routines, albeit bringing them to one of the most beautiful historical sites in Sicily, but one that I think neither of them cared much about seeing. We had all just spent nearly four hours in a cramped car. I had the subtle feeling that they couldn’t wait for me and my demanding American predilection for journeying here and there to wrap up. A lifetime could pass for them, as it had for Nonna, never seeing Agrigento. I, on the other hand, was pulled by desire, loss, hope, mystery. I wanted to know more and more about the island that I was now claiming as part of me, my past, my present, perhaps even my future.

“Zoela, come with me.” I pulled her close to me as she took a bite of the pear. I felt as though everyone else was on a short fuse and, except for me, had little interest in seeing ruins. Heat was the enemy. I was the only one who was willing to challenge it head-on. So Zoela and I began walking. I quickly decided that I’d start with the biggest and largest temple, the Temple of Hera. Everything else, if I saw it, would be a bonus. We’d leave my in-laws to wander at their own pace.

“Mommy, it’s hot.” Zoela hated heat, always had.

“I know, sweetheart.” I was conscious of the fact that she would be able to handle the heat, the sightseeing, for only so long. I’d need to spin this. “It’s hot because this is the place where Icarus fell after flying too close to the sun.” She loved the story of Icarus. Saro had read it to her countless times. She loved fingering the pages of the story in her book on Greek myths.

I delivered my version of the tale with the same enthusiasm that I used to perpetuate the fantasy of the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. “I think we can actually see where Icarus’s body fell.” If I couldn’t fool an eight-year-old, then someone should revoke my Screen Actors Guild card. I’d find a hole in the ground and point to it, if I had to. I needed to hold her attention just long enough for us to approach the Temple of Hera and touch the pillars. That’s all I wanted. And maybe to take a few pictures. And if I were lucky, I’d get to say a silent prayer into the waters facing North Africa.

Prayer at the seaside was the one thing I had taken from the twenty years that my mother had been married to her third husband, Abe, the Senegalese eldest son of a Muslim family who had grown up in Dakar and been educated at the Sorbonne. He had introduced me to the tradition of saying a prayer at every shore you visited. It was something he did without fail. When he came to Los Angeles for visits, he would travel to Santa Monica to honor his ancestors and the dead by offering a prayer into the water. Whether that tradition was a by-product of his faith or his culture or a personal affinity, I could never tease out. Frankly, it didn’t matter. I loved the idea and spirit of it. During Saro’s illness, it gave me peace to leave the oncologist’s office in Santa Monica during his treatments and drive two miles west to pour my worried prayers into the ocean. In the two years since his death, prayer at the seaside had become one of my rituals. That day in Agrigento I hoped to say a prayer that might reach the shores of northern Africa, which Saro and I had once visited. It was an illogical but heartfelt notion that if my grief touched all the places where my love had traveled, it might somehow help heal me.

“Franca, Cosimo,” I called back as Zoela and I were ascending toward the ruins. “Take your time. Zoela and I will go ahead. We can meet back here in an hour.” They were trying to figure out if the car needed a ticket to park in the attendantless, dusty gravel lot just below the archaeological site.

I took off without waiting for an answer.

For the next half hour, Zoela and I wandered among the pillars of the Temple of Hera. We touched a five-hundred-year-old olive tree. We circled an art installation of the fallen Icarus. An artist had rendered his bronze torso as large as a pickup truck, lopsided and fallen, sprawling on the ground. And there somewhere between the fallen Icarus and Hera, I started to feel a duality that was becoming familiar in my grief. Part of me was exalted by getting to experience this place again many years later; another part of me suddenly wanted to plunge myself into the sea. Grief did that still and often: it left me to wrestle with two contradictory feelings at once. In that moment, I felt a little like another character from mythology, Sisyphus, forever pushing his boulder uphill. My boulder was loss. And life after loss could be a repetitive loop of heavy lifting, pushing, and struggling to move to higher ground even while enjoying a view of the sea.

As Zoela and I wandered the archaeological site, the internal questioning grew deeper, darker. Had Saro and I been too ambitious in our love? Had we flown too close to the sun? Was cancer some cosmic challenge assigned to us by the gods? The randomness of life made no sense, giving and taking in equal measure. Though I knew we’d had a great marriage, a brilliant and dynamic love, I still wanted more and I felt cheated. Cheated of companionship, lifelong love, the joy of someone who had known me well enough to know that standing at the temple of the goddess of marriage would make me feel a little insane.

Then it was as if someone had turned on a blender and all my darkness began to churn at rapid speed. I felt jealous of all the couples around me on vacation in their shorts and sunscreen, celebrating new and old love. I was jealous of Cosimo and Franca, who still had each other. I was jealous of all the women who still had spouses, maybe even the ones in unhappy marriages, because at least they had help, their children still had dads. I had come to the southern side of Sicily only to be mad at Saro for dying. I had driven four hours to find a feeling as ancient as time: anger. There in Agrigento I quietly raged at Saro for being dead and leaving me to move through a morass of memory, questioning, a middle-aged woman who was desperate to stand in the presence of ruins in the hope of finding myself again. I was at the gates of an ancient temple trying to retrieve parts of my soul.