From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(72)
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The next morning, Nonna lit the fire and cooked arancini—rice balls with mozzarella at the center. As she made them, she told me the story of Saro’s birth. I didn’t know exactly what prompted it. But I had enough experience to respect that memory comes unbidden and it has to make its rounds to completion.
“He had the mark of a strawberry where his hairline gave way to his forehead. Com’era bello. L’ho baciato ogni giorno.—How beautiful it was. I kissed it every day.”
She was uncharacteristically open and forthcoming. I sat silent. Whatever would come next needed to be said.
“He had a birthmark, the stain of coffee, on his butt, the right cheek,” she continued, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand before getting back to mixing the rice balls.
Suddenly I remembered part of the man I loved, a detail I had forgotten. His birthmark. I had loved that birthmark on his ass. How had I already forgotten that?
She told me how when she was pregnant, in the last stages, it was voting day in town. She had gone with Giuseppe to vote, and someone had offered her a coffee as they waited in line.
“I was too ashamed to take a coffee in public. Back then decent women didn’t do that. Only men drank espresso in public. I wanted it, but I refused and I sat down. I leaned on my right side for comfort.” She pointed to her right hip. “That’s how he got the birthmark.”
Saro had been marked by her unrequited desire for coffee.
She told me all this while adding mint to peas that looked fresh from the fields. Then she was done talking, and she returned to the repetition of small domestic things that made the big world outside seem somehow petty with endless ambition. A world that held little interest for her, except in the ways it affected her family, the price of bread, or a tax increase on television services.
Then she switched gears. “Tomorrow morning you’re going to see the attorney.”
I thought I had heard her wrong. “Attorney? What attorney?”
“I am giving this house to you and Zoela. Franca will take you to sign all the papers.”
I was standing at the landing of the staircase, star-crossed lovers on the TV next to me making a stilted but soap-operatic declaration of their love for each other. I turned back to Nonna, who was still in the kitchen, still processing what I thought I had heard. “What did you say?”
“The house. It’s yours. I want you to have it. It would have been Saro’s, and now it is yours.”
TERRA VOSTRA
The arid Sicilian countryside rolled by as we drove to the notaio—notary—three towns away. I sat in the back, silent and hot. Cosimo flipped through radio stations. Franca was quiet. On my lap were all the pertinent documents: my passports (American and Italian), marriage license translated and stamped, Saro’s death certificate, his passport with a stamp from the Italian government declaring him deceased. If Italian bureaucracy maddened me, Sicilian bureaucrats could bring me to the point of tears. I had learned that the law required that this sort of land transfer must happen within one year of the death. However, because I lived in another country and hadn’t known that, we were four months past the official cutoff date. To my knowledge, we’d have to plead our case, outlining the extenuating circumstances to the notary, who functions as a probate attorney. I wondered how we would handle the logistics, what I needed to say or not say to move the process along. As I looked out on the hills, I decided it would be best to say nothing. I may have been becoming a Sicilian landowner, but I was far from home, way outside my sphere of knowledge about how any of this worked.
Franca, however, was a veritable master at surmounting bureau-cratic intricacies and the cultural nuances they necessitate. She knew when to push, when to deflect, how to defer, exactly the moment to pay respect, lie, or exaggerate, if needed, to move the whole thing along. Cosimo acted as her wingman. Years earlier, I had seen him stand just behind her opposite an official’s desk, arms crossed, waiting to pounce with a brisk “Scusi” if the official used the wrong tone or pushed back where not warranted. They were a dynamic duo, alternating good cop/bad cop when the situation called.
Saro always said that his sister had a quiet but fierce stubborn streak. When they were children, if a family decision was made that she didn’t like, she had the capacity to batten down the hatch and prepare for the long haul. She could easily (and seemingly effortlessly) go three weeks without uttering a single word to anyone in the house. Her protests had become another character in the house. Her silent streaks with her father were infamous. Saro had often chided her about that when they were adults, the way only a sibling can. They’d laughed about it, and she had reminded him that his response to family difficulties had been to leave. “What do you remember from up there in Florence?” she’d ask. I suspected that she’d gotten the residual emotional fallout of two parents who didn’t understand where they had gone wrong, why their son was so hell bent on being different from them. Whereas Saro had set himself free in far-flung places, Franca had rooted down deeper. The daughter. The quiet one. The one who lived in the same square kilometer she had been born into. Now she sat in front of me, doing the work of family, helping her brother’s widow once again.
I was so taken aback by the abiding love shown by this unexpected gift that my heart broke open, tender and raw with a mixture of gratitude, stupor, joy, even a tinge of an inexplicable feeling that came close to guilt. The latter feeling surprised me. Do I deserve this? My mind raced all night. The echo of Nonna’s words, “It would have been Saro’s,” lingered. There was a restless tension between my longing and wanting to belong and a deep sense of how bittersweet it was. Then, when I felt exhausted by the odd collision of competing feeling and mind churning, my heart would pop free with gratitude once again.