From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(80)

At the sight of her, I suddenly felt faint. She perhaps recognized the look on my face and had already pulled out a chair for me to sit next to her. So I did.

Grief in Sicily is not an individual experience but a communal one where people are called upon to witness and support one another. The way certain African cultures use drumming as an active means of dealing with their grief—the rhythm is played continuously for days, day and night, over and over, as a constant reminder to the community of its loss—in Sicily the story of the deceased is told over and over. I was prepared to sit and listen to Nonna bear witness.

But instead we sat in silence for a good long while. Nothing needed to be added to the moment.

Then she asked, “Did you get the flowers?”

“Yes, and then I walked back the long way.”

“Nothing will be longer than the walk her parents are making today.”

“I know.”

The wind blew the curtains hanging at the front door.

“Plus, with this wind, they will be weaker still.”

The afternoon wore on. Nonna sent Zoela and me upstairs to nap.

“Go rest. Too much sun and too much death in one day.”



* * *



As afternoon gave way to evening, the sun had relented and the wind had calmed. Zoela and Rosalia disappeared into play and friendship, making water “balloons” from plastic sacks and tossing them up and down Via Gramsci. I left to buy more bread and passed the edicola, the newsstand that also sold pens, toys, batteries, and sunscreen, then stopped by the cheese shop to put in an order for ricotta salata. I wanted to order it early because I knew it would need time to cure during my stay, before I could take it back to L.A. when the time came. On the way back, I bumped into an older woman with piercing blue eyes and crooked toes in orthopedic sandals. She was one of Nonna’s distant cousins, a gregarious talker. Her name slipped from me like soup off a fork. So I called her simply “Zia,” which made her smile.

After reciting her maladies and her displeasure at the ten-cent increase in the price of bread, she asked about my family in the States. I told her they were coming for a visit and would be in town for the feast of Sant’Anna. She clapped her hands together at her chest in an expression of pleasure and surprise. Then she grabbed my face in the palm of her hands. “The connection you are creating here is like a flower. It requires soil and sun, things that, thanks to God, are given freely. But it is you, all of us, who has to water the flower to make it grow. Without water, all relations remain small. They can’t open, and eventually they die.”

She took my face again and kissed it twice good-bye. Then she started up the steep cobblestoned street to her house.

Zia had been talking about family, Zoela, connection, and nurturing relationships. But I had dared to read something else into her words. What if my own life was like a flower, something I had to continually tend to and nurture? Sicily was the water and sun that fortified me to stand stronger in my life after loss. And maybe my leaving a rock at the cemetery as an act of remembrance had additional meaning; maybe it was a symbol of the lasting permanence of Saro’s love. His love, life, illness, and death had taught me so much, but it was the undergirding of his love that was my salvation in loss.

I continued back home, and when I passed the stone walls lining the street, I released a dream into mortar and crevices, into the stone diary that was my summer in Sicily. I will use the love of this place to fortify me. It is my stone inheritance, the gift of Saro’s life.





THE SAUCE




The days in Aliminusa moved at a repetitively graceful pace, and by our second week back Zoela and I had fallen into step with it. Each afternoon she devoured warm milk and two fistfuls of cookies and took off down the street.

“Watch out for cars in the piazza, and don’t go past the bridge at the edge of town,” I’d remind her.

I kissed her good-bye, secure in the knowledge that she would reemerge at lunch for hearty dishes of olives, pasta with fresh string beans, cheese, and bread. Then surely she would take off again after settling in for an afternoon siesta.

Meanwhile, my dad kept calling me in Sicily to update me on their arrival. Our conversations went like this:

“Wi-Fi access?”

“None.”

“What about an American coffee maker?”

“Dad, bring instant.”

“We’re renting a car.”

“Oh, no, you’re not. Let me come get you.”

“Tembi, I’ve driven all over Europe and East Texas. I can do this.” My dad’s enthusiasm for road trips was almost evangelical.

Aubrey jumped on the line and began their favorite back-and-forth teasing, “Drive, huh? In Sicily? You going to do that like the way you speak Portuguese?”

“No, this is for real. I can handle the roads in Sicily. My Portuguese is just for show.” It was a running joke in the family that Dad claimed to speak three foreign languages: Portuguese, Swahili, and “East Texas.” He claimed to have learned Portuguese in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau while traveling with Stokely Carmichael; Swahili while in Tanzania helping freedom fighters in 1974; and “East Texas” while picking cotton on the land near his grandparents’ homestead. Everyone in the family agreed that he could butcher five words in each language, at best. That is, with the exception of “East Texas.” He was absolutely fluent in that.