From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(87)
“Already done, Dad,” I said with a smile and a wink. “I got this.”
My dad had never seen me speak so much Italian. He was watching me carefully, as if from on the other side of an invisible partition between us that until now he hadn’t known existed. His little girl had made a place for herself as far from East Texas as one could imagine.
“Ask Nonna if we can help her prepare anything,” Aubrey said, pointing to the pot boiling on the stove. Aubrey was ready to dive in. They did not want Nonna to have to do everything.
“It’s already done,” I said.
“Yeah, Nonna will never let you do anything in her kitchen,” Zoela piped in. “You are her guest, you just eat. That’s the way it is here.”
Thirty minutes later, we were seated at an abundant table. I was translating furiously as I twisted my fork around strands of pasta delicately coated with a sauce as unpretentious as the woman who served it. She wanted to make sure that my parents liked the food, that they were happy. I noticed Nonna zero in on Aubrey, who appeared to her to be eating very little.
“Lei non mangia tanto—She doesn’t eat much,” I said quietly into her ear to preempt any hurt feelings.
Nonna threw her hand back and turned directly to Aubrey, “Mangia! Eat more, we have lots of food here.” She began lifting plates in Aubrey’s direction. “Mangia!”
We toasted to Saro. I made sure my dad tasted homemade Sicilian wine left over from the days when Saro’s dad had made his own vintage: remnants of pulp and sediment on the bottom, sharp tannins on top, the robust flavor of fragrant grapes in the middle. Nothing passed through; it was unprocessed, home distilled. The kind of stuff that my grandmother used to say could put hair on your chest.
“Think of it like a Sicilian Ripple,” I joked, referring to the cheap alcoholic drink famous in 1970s black sitcoms and blaxploitation movies.
“Then I’ll have a sip but not more. You don’t want me speaking Portuguese, do you?”
The Sicilian novelist and essayist Leonardo Sciascia once said, “Translation is the other side of a tapestry.” It was something Saro had told me one day when he was attempting to translate a poem from Sicilian into English.
There at the table, it was clear that being with Saro had been like weaving a beautiful, complicated tapestry. After his death, being with his family was like looking at the flip side of that tapestry. The stitching showed, the bulky knots, the places where the fringe had frayed. But it was still part of the same beautiful piece.
* * *
After lunch, I walked my parents to Nonna’s sister’s house at the end of town, where they would stay. We passed people all along the way, each stopping to greet us and exchange hellos. They kissed dozens of cheeks and shook dozens of hands with the people who seemed as much to me like family as my own. Each offered advice to my dad and Aubrey, told them what it meant to be from Aliminusa, and I translated for them.
My favorite was the man who lived above the bank and had a bird’s-eye view of the comings and goings in the piazza. “We are all the children of God, just look at our hands.” He held up his hand, palm facing my dad. “But notice, each finger is different. One is short, one is long, one is crooked. They each do different things. But we are all part of the same family.”
Later, we passed Signor Shecco, nicknamed “Mister Mule” because he had one of the last remaining mules in town and often took her for a walk draped in colorful fringe, a tradition from the turn of the last century. He said to my dad, “Siamo quattro gatti qua, porta a porta col cimitero—We are just four cats here, door to door with the cemetery.” He held up four arthritic fingers and waited for me to translate. “We are four cats” means “Our numbers are small”; “door to door with the cemetery” means “old and dying.”
Then Signor Shecco continued, “Ma siamo buoni, buoni e stretti. Capisce? Sua figlia è una di noi.—But we are good, and we are close. Understand? Your daughter is one of us.”
My dad smiled and thanked the man.
As we walked away, Dad looked back at the man with the mule, he looked around town at the cobblestones and buildings seemingly as old as time, and he said to Aubrey, “Being here, I understand my son-in-law in a whole new way. But I really understand my daughter more than ever.” I was overcome by his words.
Late afternoon turned to dusk, and we readied ourselves for the procession of Sant’Anna. In filmmaking, we call that time of day “magic hour,” the moment when the diffused rays of the sun make everything more beautiful. Here the faded stone walls of the town become a canvas upon which every color of the Mediterranean can be celebrated. It is that time of day that gives Sicily its timelessness.
Zoela and I collected my parents and took them to the town square, where a crowd of townspeople gathered around the church steps. It was time to bring out the statue of Sant’Anna. I looked up at the church, the marble-and-limestone facade, the Roman-numeral clock, the bell tower. It was the same place where two summers earlier I had stood unsure if I could make sense of my life, let alone reimagine it, while the priest blessed Saro’s ashes.
Sant’Anna, I had since learned, was the mother of Mary, the grandmother of Jesus. In Catholicism, Anna is the matriarch of matriarchs, the embodiment of female wisdom. She was perhaps absorbed into Christianity from the pagan goddess of fertility, Anu, whose name means “grace.” Once a year, her statue is taken from the church in Aliminusa, hoisted onto the shoulders of men, and carried through town, a procession of townspeople trailing behind her. Women who are able to walk the length of the town proceed barefoot on the cobblestones immediately behind her with her shadow cast upon them in the setting sun. These women pray to her in times of difficulty and times of celebration. I had also learned that she was the patron saint of widows and travelers. I was born on her day, July 26. I was married on her day. For the people of Aliminusa, that meant she was my personal saint. “You drew a good card,” Nonna told me.