From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(79)

I moved back from the mausoleum wall, closed my eyes, and turned to begin the walk home. I didn’t attempt to put the stepladder back. Leaving it was a sign that someone had been to see the dead.



* * *



The next morning, I found Nonna, Emanuela, Benedetta, and Crocetta seated around the kitchen table talking in thick, hushed Sicilian. Their faces were downcast. Nonna was using a sale circular from the morning mail as a fan. A seventeen-year-old resident of Aliminusa had died.

From what I could gather, the girl’s illness had come on suddenly at midwinter. It was clear to doctors in neighboring Cefalù that her case was out of their league. She had immediately been transferred to Rome, where her parents had been living out of her hospital room for the last six months. Nuns from a neighboring church had fed them out of the convent cafeteria. Doctors from all over the world had come to visit her, because apparently she was one of thirteen people in the world known to have come down with the same symptoms; a rare, strange, mysterious malady with no name.

For months the priest had updated her case at Sunday Mass each week, asking for prayers for her and her family. Now word had arrived that she had made her transition. There was a pall over the town. Everyone had been rooting for her, “so young.” Grown men cried openly at the mention of her name. At the tobacco/newspaper stand, at the bar, in the piazza, among the overflowing file rooms at city hall, her death was the only conversation in town. The tragedy seemed to be compounded by the mystifying nature of what had happened, the inability even to name the murderous illness.

“Her family, the poor mother, she never left her daughter’s side,” said Benedetta.

“The pain of not knowing,” Emanuela said.

“Three babies were born, and thirty people died last year,” added Benedetta.

Those were the genealogical facts of Aliminusa.

“The scale has turned upside. Who knows what will become of us . . . this is how we found this world, and this is how we will leave it,” Nonna added. It was a saying as old as any of them could remember. Then they let silence fall over them, presumably contemplating the loss of a young life.

My heart went out to her family. I knew something about fighting rare and invisible enemies. I thought about how after ten years of caregiving I should have been prepared for what was to come. The specter of Saro’s illness had hovered above me at all times, but I had never been ready to deal with its whims. His cancer was constantly reinventing itself, and acute crisis was as close as the air I breathed. I had seen a calm Sunday breakfast of tea and fresh-baked croissants erupt into chaos due to an adverse drug interaction, which had resulted in a trip to the ER. I had seen him rise from the dinner table, saying he wasn’t feeling well, only to pass out in the bathroom moments later, his head hitting the sink on the way down. I had seen his moods careen and collide in manic spectacle, turning to sullenness or anger in a matter of seconds. I organized our lives around that fickle mechanism known as his immune system. Under assault, it might make a dramatic appearance one week and then retreat without warning the next. I had watched him crack a tooth while eating a baguette one day, his teeth brittle and fragile from radiation therapy. That was the kind of stuff for which I could never prepare myself.

“We need to take fresh flowers to the cemetery. The procession is tomorrow,” Nonna said to me.

“I will get them, of course,” I said, suddenly feeling faint. Maybe it was the heat, the mountain’s dry winds, maybe it was the emotion. I had been in Aliminusa for many occasions, feasts, weddings, hostile elections, but never a birth and never a full funeral. This was another important first.

After leaving the fresh flowers on Saro’s tomb the following day, I walked the forgotten road back from the cemetery, the one used long ago for mules. I was aware that I was on the road that Sicilians say makes a person seem like un’anima persa—a lost soul. But that was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want to see anyone, just me and the wind. However, as I neared the last remaining working fountain in town, the one near the steps widened for mule and cart travel a hundred years before, I looked up to see that the processional for the young girl’s funeral had begun. The mourners had just started the march toward the church from the statue of the town’s patron saint, Sant’Anna, that greets visitors at the edge of town. The clock struck 11:00 a.m., and the wind made another push.

I continued my slow ascent up the steps, deciding midway to lean against the wall in the shade for support and respite. I was not dressed to go any closer. In red pants and a floral top, I was nobody’s mourner.

I watched the slender coffin pass by, carried on the shoulders of six of her classmates, teenage boys with pimples, gelled hair, and cell phones bulging in back pockets. The white-robed Padre Francesco walked in front of the coffin; her parents, slumped over but somehow on their feet, walked behind it. Behind them came a mass of townsfolk, each carrying a single white rose. The older women sang the lament while incense permeated the already summer-pungent, restless air.

When the last of the mourners had passed where I stood, I peeled myself off the wall and took the remaining steps up the main street. Some older women, those in black frocks and orthopedic socks, receded from their viewing place at the front windows of their homes. They knew how the rest would unfold, and presumably they would return to their straw chairs and pray some more.

By the time I made it home, Nonna was seated at the table. Tears were in her eyes, too. She had watched the scene from her doorway high above the main street.