From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(70)
Suddenly I realized that I had had three marriages to Saro: the one we had experienced as newly-in-love married people; the one we had spent in the trenches of surviving cancer; and the one I had with him now, as his widow. In the decade that I had cared for Saro, I had lost parts of myself, my natural effervescence, my sense of my own sexuality, my sense of optimism. The ups and downs of years of cancer caregiving seemed to have leached those things from my life. And although caregiving had taught me how to draw from the well of my strength, how to love deeply and unconditionally, how to see the big love that exists all around us at all times, it had also dimmed my everyday light a little, grief perhaps even more. I was tired of being tired. The thing that terrified me was that I felt I might never be able to laugh effortlessly again, so hard that it hurt my sides. I worried privately that it might be years before I made love again. Things I had once done regularly that now felt outside of my reach. Nobody had told me that widowhood would be so full of fear for what might never be. I was terrified that this aspect of my grief might have the solidness of a temple’s stone pillars.
I was beginning to understand that the last marriage with Saro would ultimately be our longest. He was no more gone from my life than the moon is gone from the sky in daylight. He was everywhere, yet unseen. Learning to exist in that kind of love would take time. Time is maybe the most critical aspect of loss.
On the drive back home through Sicily’s rugged interior, I looked out the window, feeling as though I’d lost track of how many days we had been there. Time had a way of eluding capture. Much like the Sicilian landscape, it played tricks on my mind, giving me valleys of verdant groves one moment, then taking it all away, leaving barren, jagged mountains. Since I had arrived that summer, more than ever I couldn’t attempt to measure time in nice neat half and quarter hours. There were days with long stretches of endless sun and nothing to do but observe that morning and afternoon were petulant twins, each demanding their time. Then there were the twilights that came on quickly and lingered as if they were loath to submit to night. I realized then that I’d have to take the remaining days slowly, just as I did Sicily herself.
* * *
I craved the taste of sea salt at the edge of my mouth and sand between my toes. I wanted the gentleness of the Mediterranean to take me as I floated on my back, belly to the sun. I needed to feel my body become light, effortless, drifting wherever the water would take me.
So two days later, Cosimo let me borrow his Fiat, and I drove Zoela from the foothills to Cefalù by the sea. As we moved along the two-lane coastal road going into town, we passed the turnoff for Hotel Baia del Capitano. For a fleeting moment, I almost turned to Saro to reminisce about when we had sipped espresso in the garden and waited for his family. Memory is tricky that way. But I kept driving, imagining the feel of his palm on my knee and focusing on the moment at hand, a day in Cefalù with our daughter. His life was being lived through us now.
When we arrived in Cefalù, two things usually happened. Zoela and I would stumble up to Lido Poseidon because the place had three wide, deep freezers of eye-popping gelato, and I would order pinot grigio or an espresso seaside, depending on how my day was going. That day it was wine.
From our many trips here before, Zoela knew the drill. She swaggered right up to the hostess and requested two lounge chairs and one umbrella. She paid the twelve-euro rental fee and then told the twenty-something cigarette-smoking lifeguard in a red Speedo exactly where she wanted our chairs to be in relation to the sea. “Mia mamma vuole leggere—My mother wants to read.” What she meant was that I wanted a chair close to the shore so that I could watch her as I rested.
We were fortunate to be assigned chairs one row back from the shoreline, and then Zoela took off for the sea, periodically turning back to make sure I was following her.
I set off behind her, trailing. When I reached her, we stood together in the shallow waters. I told her, “In my dreams, I will tell Babbo how absolutely beautiful and spectacular you are. You are the pearl of his beloved sea.”
She splashed water into my face and asked, “Do you think he can see me?”
“I believe so.”
“Would he be proud of me?”
“Absolutely.”
She smiled. My words seemed to ease her. I resisted an urge to take her little body in my arms and call on the gods to suspend time, help me hold on to the grace of that moment. Talking about her dad and making her smile at the same time was rare in our new life. I submerged my body. When I came up, the air felt new, warm.
Around us were intergenerational families; bronzed, high-pitched children; flirtatious couples; duos and trios of friends from seemingly all over the world. They swam, they relaxed. They, too, were drawn to the sea. On the beach, North African and Bangladeshi immigrants walked among the throng of visitors selling their wares: towels, sunglasses, cell phone cases, swimsuit cover-ups, inflatable plastic dinghies in the shape of dolphins. A pair of Chinese women offered massages beachside. The world had closed ranks here. Our countries of origin and economics aside, we were all part of a seaside tableau. I thought of all the invaders, conquerors, quest seekers who had come to these shores over the centuries. I thought about the refugees coming from Syria, Libya, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa to Sicily each week. They were fleeing civil war, and the ensuing humanitarian crisis had brought people with many stories of unforgettable pain. It was the migration story of our time. Sicily was changing, but it always had.