From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(82)

“No, I can’t come. I have a clarinet lesson.”

“That’s right.” In the last year, she had graduated to a spot in the town band. With the upcoming procession for the feast of Sant’Anna, she had to practice for the next few afternoons. “I can’t wait to hear you play.” Secretly I was thrilled, because it meant I would get little resistance from Zoela. I really wanted her to see where the tomato sauce she enjoyed almost daily at Nonna’s table came from. And I wanted to try my hand at this oldest of town traditions. It felt like the perfect culmination of summer.

The afternoon seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace. Rest after lunch, reading. I even had a plan to collect caper buds from the vine growing in the cracks at the top of Via Gramsci. It was Gianna, who lived in the house above the encroaching vine, who had told me what they were. I had never seen capers growing. She told me that some years the winds carried seeds, depositing them between the cobblestoned steps. I had plans to gather at least two cupfuls, salt them, and let them dry in the sun next to the tomatoes in front of the house. I’d be taking all of it back to L.A. when the time came to close my suitcase.

Then, in the early afternoon, the phone rang.

Nonna answered, irritated at having been roused from her nap. I could hear her clipped “Pronto?” bellow all the way upstairs. Seconds later, she called out to me, “Pigghia u telefono.” She was using Sicilian to tell me to pick up the phone. Not Italian. Whatever it was, it felt urgent.

There had been a car accident one street over. No one had been hurt, but one of the drivers was an English tourist. He spoke no Italian, and I was the only person in town who spoke English. A neighbor had called because they needed me to talk to the Englishman and hopefully translate and de-escalate a tense situation.

When I arrived, I found a forty-something man in slim jeans and a white linen shirt. He seemed shocked to see me appear from behind the wooden door of the pass-through between the two streets. He was in the middle of the street, visibly tense and surrounded by Sicilians. A scene was forming.

We quickly exchanged pleasantries and intros the way people of the same tongue in a foreign land can do. He was a music producer in rural Sicily on holiday with his young family. They were renting a farmhouse nearby. He had come into town to get bread, only to find that everything was closed. The man whose car he had hit, I soon discovered, was Calogero, the same affable farmer with a hearty laugh who gave me lentils each year from his field to take back to L.A.

As soon as Calogero saw me, he jumped to the quick “Parla con quello!—Speak with that one!” Then he threw his arms up in the classic Sicilian gesture signaling frustration, resignation, and rising indignation, a movement that told me everything I needed to know.

Before I could translate, the Englishman rushed to his own defense. He was adamant that Calogero had been at fault. One look at his Audi station wagon, and it was clear that he was probably right. Calogero had likely backed out of his driveway without looking. People rarely used that street. The Englishman was probably not expecting a car backing out of the shallow driveways and house fronts.

I asked the Englishman if we could speak away from the growing crowd.

“The man you are accusing of hitting the car is the mayor’s cousin,” I said. I was jumping to what seemed to me the most salient piece of information he needed to know.

He looked at me confused and irritated, as if to say, What the fuck does the mayor’s cousin have to do with anything?

But I was thinking like a Sicilian, which means considering the social hierarchy of a particular situation before the facts.

“Do you have rental insurance?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t think I’d need it. I just want him to sign the form in the glove box saying he hit me.”

It was hot, the middle of siesta. The scene grew louder, and the crowd outside the house grew larger. It seemed that everyone was eager to tell me what they had seen.

“Let’s go inside,” I said, pulling him toward Calogero’s front door.

Inside Calogero’s intimate, immaculate kitchen, three generations of my lentil connection’s family gathered at a kitchen table to testify to the innocence of their relative. We all sat at a plastic-covered table for four. The others hovered over us. A traditional Sicilian ceramic light fixture with a painted illustration of Moors and grapevines hung above us. A crate of tomatoes sat on a nearby chair, likely waiting to be boiled into submission.

I went back and forth between English and Italian, translating both language and culture for an Englishman who was suddenly realizing that the deck was stacked against him. In Sicily, fault is relative. Facts are always subject to how you see the events of the world. Still it took twenty minutes of back-and-forth illustrations on the back of napkins, attempting to re-create what had happened, before the Englishman gave up his pursuit of logic and submitted to the fact that he was in a town of Sicilians. People who would never betray one of their own. Whatever had actually happened was, in fact, irrelevant.

“You are not in Tuscany, you are in Sicily,” I said, reminding him that Italy was not a monolith and Tuscany was not a stand-in for a whole nation, despite what cinema might suggest. Tuscans had been welcoming tourists for half a century, absorbing hundreds of thousands of visitors with all the issues, questions, and unexpected mishaps that can happen on holiday. Sicily, especially the rural interior, had scant tourist infrastructure. English was not prevalent, and locals were not casting their gaze outward, inviting the world in.