From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(81)
“Dad, it would make me feel better if you simply got a driver to bring you from the airport. Sicily is a challenge to navigate. Frankly, it’s not set up for tourists or non-Sicilians. Let me talk to your travel agent.”
“Yes, Gene, please. Let’s make this easy.” Aubrey was the sensible yin to his adventurous yang. Then she continued, “Actually, Tembi, we called because I need to know what we should bring for Nonna and Franca and Cosimo.”
Gift giving was Aubrey’s forte. In another life, she could have started a business buying insanely intimate gifts for the people in other people’s lives. She had a rare skill, like being able to sing above five octaves or juggle flames while walking on stilts. It was a skill I lacked. She wanted my Sicilian family to know how much the Texas family had loved Saro and appreciated their hospitality. I ran through a list of possible options for my nieces and brother-and sister-in-law. Then I got to Nonna.
“Bring her something for the house. Something that honors the memory of her son. That is all she will want. And maybe a black scarf.”
It was vague, and I was embarrassed that I still couldn’t figure out what to get the woman who was now like another mother to me.
My dad piped back in, “Also, we arrive the morning of your birthday. What do you want to do to celebrate?”
“Ah, Dad. I don’t know.”
I honestly didn’t. It wasn’t just my birthday, it was my anniversary. Two life events forever linked. Now, nineteen years after my nuptials in Florence, my parents and Saro’s family would be together on the anniversary of the day when a world of difference and mistrust had kept them apart. Now they would be together without the person for whom their togetherness, especially in Sicily, would have meant so much.
* * *
Summer was sauce-making season. The air smelled of wood smoke and tomato sauce. Around town empty dark green mineral water bottles and brown beer bottles were drying on racks and in crates on the sidewalks in the front of homes and i magazzini—the cellars and town garages that were used to store tractors, farming equipment, and cauldrons for the tradition of making tomato sauce. Tomatoes, the signature of summer, deep red San Marzano plum tomatoes straight from the fields, were made into sauce, as had been done for generations. Storage spaces and cellars all over town would soon be lined with enough tomato sauce–filled bottles to last the residents through winter. Sicilians say, “The greatest joy is knowing that in the dead of winter, you can open a bottle and make a pasta that tastes like the height of summer.”
Nonna had not made sauce in the years since Giuseppe had died, six years before. Her hundred-year-old copper cauldron sat wrapped in wool blankets next to Giuseppe’s tools for cutting artichoke and stringing garlic in the attic-like space between the tiled roof and the second floor of her home. She left the sauce making to Cosimo and Franca. Every year they made enough for her, thirty to forty one-liter bottles. But that summer Cosimo’s work schedule dictated that he wouldn’t be making sauce for another two weeks, after I would be back in Los Angeles. Instead, her cousins at the base of Via Gramsci were making it that very afternoon.
At the breakfast table that morning, Nonna made sure Zoela didn’t discard her single-serve bottles of pear and peach juice. She would wash them, boil them, and store them.
“We can use them for the sauce. These little bottles will fit nicely in your suitcase. They are perfect for a meal for two. When you come home from work, open one, and you and Zoela will have a meal.”
“I do the same for myself,” she continued. “The small bottles are all I need since I am alone.”
“If you want to see how it is done, go to Nunzia’s later today. Take Zoela.” I suspected that Nonna liked the idea of Zoela spending time with another of her cousins who lived on the main street that went through town.
Three generations and two tributaries of the Lupo family would begin the work of lighting the fire with wood collected from the fields, peeling the tomatoes, salting them, cutting onion, preparing the basil, manning the cauldron, then bottling and storing. The process took three days of prep (cleaning and sterilizing bottles, harvesting tomatoes), a long day of sauce making, then another day or two for the sauce to cool. Unlike other families in town, who began the work at 2:00 a.m. and worked until 10:00, the Lupo family made their sauce in the late afternoon and into the night because their cellar faced southwest on a hill. So by virtue of geography, they were spared the oppressive afternoon heat and received a cross breeze when they opened all the windows.
The “take Zoela” part of Nonna’s plan was tricky. Tearing her from Rosalia would take a mammoth effort. In general, the kids in town did not like making sauce. And they didn’t make it with any other family than their own. Making sauce was a family tradition that came with risks. It was incredibly labor intensive, and they were often not allowed to be near the cauldrons. Plus they often got tired and complained. It was one of the reasons so many families made the sauce in the night while the children slept.
As I washed out the small single-serve bottles, I poked my head out the door to chat with Zoela and Rosalia.
“Ro-zaa,” that was the nickname the women on the street called her, so I did the same. “Zoela and I will be at Nunzia’s house later today, making sauce. Want to come?”
She and Zoela were seated on the bench outside Nonna’s house, killing time making movies on Zoela’s iPad. The latest was a thriller about the coffins stored next to Nonna’s house.