From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(78)

I started at the top of the first street in town and began the slow meander down the cobblestoned thoroughfares. It was a Sunday nearing lunchtime, hardly a wise hour to set out on such a pilgrimage. Everyone’s windows and doors were shuttered tight as a defense against the heat. The relentless summer sun hung high.

There is a sudden wind in Sicily that swoops in dry, determined, and carrying with it air from the mountains of North Africa. It is called a scirocco. And although I had lived through two scirocco summers, that day it was different. It was gentler, bringing with it little to no dust. There was no sand covering the cars, and its gusts did not carry grains miles away, effectively destroying crops.

Along the descent, I passed street after street of contiguous, centuries-old stables, stone structures that with the passage of time had evolved into modest stuccoed houses. Within their thick walls were the rooms where generations of family had been born. I descended farther, passing the abandoned grain storage building that had served as Saro’s first-grade schoolroom. Farther along, I passed defunct communal fountains where his grandmothers had collected water for laundry, cooking, and bathing husbands after a day in the fields. I passed the public square where tomato paste had been sent to dry. With each descending step, the past and present separated effortlessly and then came together again. The hot air was pregnant with jasmine and eucalyptus.

I passed the church steps. I greeted the butcher, the baker, the cheese maker. I passed a mule tied to a tree, scratching his hooves near a dwarfed palm. His tail swatted flies. As I walked, the town began to recede, opening up into fields that unfolded toward a distant valley. I looked out on the byzantine network of hereditary strips of farming land, impervious soil that, for centuries, had required rigorous cultivation. Still the land spits up wild fennel, almonds fall from trees, and capers grow unbidden from under rocks. Fennel and the dry North African wind were my pilgrimage companions.

Once I arrived, it took little effort to push open the iron cemetery gate. As easy as picking up a book. As if I were there to reread the particular sections where my old story line had ended and an unpredictable new one had begun.

On the other side of the gate, the sun was hidden by walls and the air was cooler. Corridors of marble walls shadowed me. They tamed the winds that came up from the sea. For a moment, summer was all but gone. It could have been spring, fall. This entrance to the cemetery was a seasonless place. The only thing certain was that at the cemetery I was wife, widow, the lover who had brought a husband’s ashes halfway around the world because he asked.

I continued farther away from the gate and smiled as I wondered if some part of the poet-chef husband who still made love to me while I slept had foreseen this moment. If he had envisioned me, perfumed by the Sicilian summer, walking the stone ancestry to reach this place at the edge of his town. His easy, wise laugh came to mind. He knew. He wanted me to do exactly what I am doing. He wanted me to stand amid marble smoothed by time and find him again here, in the foothills of a foothill town. He wanted me to find him on an island in the heart of the Mediterranean.

As I stood in front of the tomb, my first act was to move the sturdy but weather-worn wooden stepladder into position against the mausoleum wall. However, at that hour, there was no one around to help me. It was a Sunday nearing lunchtime. Any native informant would have told you it was the worst time of day to go searching for memories. High noon in a Sicilian July only intensified everything. Other women, wiser widows than I, were somewhere else. They were at a stove top, putting the finishing touches on a lunch of eggplant and just-picked zucchini. They had set the table and sliced the bread. But I didn’t cook in Sicily. So I continued to move the cumbersome stepladder slowly, dragging one side diagonally across the cement and then the other until I succeeded in positioning it against the wall bearing Saro’s name.

My first step up always felt unsteady. I looked down to see a few loose nails holding the boards of the stairs in place. But I knew it wasn’t loose nails that were making me shaky.

Once at the top, I saw the stone bearing Zoela’s handwriting on the ledge. I was eye to eye with Saro’s headstone picture, next to the one of his dad. The expression on his dad’s face, posed for all eternity, reminded me of one spring visit in the first years of the family reconciliation.

Saro’s father had just come home from working the fields and handed me a large string of garlic, a gift. “Puoi fare una foto—You can take a picture.” He liked it when I photographed him or the fruit of his hard labor. So we stood in the middle of Via Gramsci, centered on the cobbled stones. The African American daughter-in-law, educated and urbane, taking a picture of the garlic-farming father-in-law, a man who stitched money into the waistband of his pants so he could have the feel of it against his skin while he labored in the fields. In the picture, he is clutching a kitchen knife with a weathered, arthritic hand, holding it at the center of the string of garlic. As though he could break it in two or leave it whole. The choice was his.

We kept that picture framed at home in Los Angeles. In the weeks before Saro had passed, he had asked that I bring the photo downstairs and place it on the entrance table in the foyer. They say when a person is nearing death he will speak of deceased loved ones, recall them, even ask to see them. I hadn’t known that at the time, but now it was all I thought of when I saw his father’s picture.

I whispered a love message into the stone I’d found and placed it on the ledge. It was not a remarkable stone in any way, just flat and gray. Though stones of antique yellow, black lava, and red agata could be found on the island, gray-colored stone I had heard referred to as the pearl of Sicily. Finally I stepped back down to earth, sensing it was time to get home for lunch. I was sure Zoela was up. Nonna would be poking her head out the front, waiting to see me making my way up the street so that she could launch the pasta into the boiling water.