From Scratch

by Tembi Locke

  I still woke up each morning in tears. Saro’s absence in the bed beside me gutted me before my feet touched the ground. I pushed through the days by sheer will, the primal pull of motherhood, and a sense that if I collapsed completely I might never stand up again. At night, I prayed that Saro would come to me in dreams. I wanted to make love to him. I wanted to see him. I longed for his voice, his smile. I craved his smell. When my grief became manic, I focused on the practical, such as doing feverish calculations on scraps of paper of how long Saro’s modest insurance policy could last with private school, two therapists, medical debt, and the inherent uncertainty of my work.

  I also started writing letters to him, one-sided conversations: Saro, my sweet, what will we do with all this loss? Help me put one foot in front of the other. Show me how to be a family of two, a solo parent, now that you are gone.

  But I had also felt a sense of urgency take hold in the months since I had called Nonna to say I’d be coming to Sicily. I had a restless, inarticulate desire that Zoela know home and family as something even greater than death. After all we had gone through to finally become family, life would seem unbearably cruel if it just snatched that away. As much as I wanted this for Zoela, I needed to know it for myself, too. I wanted to test its permanence, the idea that family is about whom you choose and how you love. I needed to prove it to myself and Zoela. I wondered if the connections for which I had struggled so hard, the family I had struggled to make, had the durability of love.

  Still, as we taxied to the jetway, for a brief moment I seriously contemplated collecting my bags and boarding a plane back to L.A. Because to continue moving ahead with Saro’s wishes—to both inter and scatter his ashes—would really mean that he was dead. Not just dead in L.A. but dead in Sicily, dead at his mother’s house, dead in the room where we had always slept, dead having morning coffee, dead at his mother’s table. It felt impossible to bear. Yet I pushed forward in the name of love.

  * * *

  The dry, salt-laden midday July heat confirmed that we were in Sicily. Zoela fell back asleep on my lap, in the back seat of the un-air-conditioned Fiat as Cosimo drove and Franca sat in the passenger seat. Zoela had awakened long enough to run her finger along the baggage carousel, hug her aunt and uncle, and walk to the car. I envied her sleep. I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and have whatever came next be only a dream.

  “Passami un fazzoletto—Pass me a tissue,” Franca said to Cosimo as he drove. She was otherwise silent and wrestling with carsickness as we headed to Aliminusa, Saro’s hometown. We passed the coastal towns that line up eastward from Palermo. We passed the long-ago-shuttered Fiat factory and the new Auchan supermarket. Then we turned off the highway and began our ascent into the foothills, passing a landscape I knew as well as my own back yard.

  We curved past the dilapidated Targo Florio car-racing stand, erected in the 1950s for European mountain racing. I watched the smatterings of stone farmhouses that sprang up in wheat fields and small family vineyards. I took in the amber hills that seemed to stitch earth to sky, searching for the familiar sight of sheep grazing at their base. But it was too hot; even the sheep knew when to retreat.

  Cosimo passed the time changing radio stations. We tried to catch up on what had transpired since we all had last seen one another in the spring—their first and only visit to L.A., just as Saro was going into hospice. They had left three days before he died, having said their good-byes in that particularly wrought-up way people who live halfway around the world carry the additional suffering of knowing that they will not be there for the final moment of transition, left forever wondering if their good-bye was enough.

  “Come vanno i maiali?—How are your pigs?” I asked Cosimo. His chickens, pigs, and olive trees were always subjects that urged him toward conversation.

  “I killed them for meat this winter,” he said with an elongated shrug.

  “And work? How is work for you?” I asked, hoping to cover the ride with more small talk, despite the fact that I felt shaky with fatigue and free-floating anxiety. Talking was a strategy to not fall apart, to hold it together for Zoela when she woke, and for whatever was to come when we reached town.

  “I lost my spot when I came to Los Angeles in the spring. I am waiting to see if they will need me this summer with all the tourists. But the city just declared bankruptcy.” He always dropped Italian and reverted to Sicilian when it came to discussing politics and its companion, corruption.

  I knew he’d had a rough time between working as a traffic cop in Cefalù and farming. Like many Sicilians, he grabbed on to whatever fate threw his way. In his case, it was part-time seasonal work in a recently bankrupt town.

  I looked at Zoela’s flushed cheeks and cinnamon brown skin as Cosimo drove and talked. I wondered if, in the future, she’d remember any of this. Would she remember the time we had gone to see her grandmother with her father’s ashes in a duffel bag at our feet?

  * * *

  La terra è vascia is the way local farmers describe this part of Sicily. Those words, “The earth is low,” are both a statement and a parable. They tell a visitor that to work this land, to survive it, to turn seed into harvest, you have to bend low. Very low. You have to labor tirelessly and often without promise. The earth is uneasy in this part of Sicily. It is difficult to cultivate, rocky, and often impervious to the plow. Those who rely on the land to sustain them must submit to backbreaking labor in order to survive. La terra è vascia equates labor and love as twin experiences. As we pulled into Aliminusa, I steadied myself, grabbing hold of the handle above the rear passenger door. I knew now that everything that came next was going to be about both labor and love.

  The first thing I saw when we turned left on Via Gramsci was a stoic brigade of aging women and widows lined up on a bench along the stone sidewalk. The widows, as is customary, were dressed in all black. Of varying heights and girths, they sat in front of Saro’s childhood home waiting for us. They were prepared for mourning. They had done this before, many times—for themselves, for family, for neighbors, perhaps since the dawn of time. Sicilians were accustomed to welcoming home the dead.

  When we had passed the final pizzeria in the neighboring town of Cerda, Cosimo had phoned ahead, as he always did. It was an act of consideration so that my mother-in-law, Croce, a beloved woman whose given name means “cross,” as in the cross on which Jesus was crucified, would not have to sit on the bench outside her home too long in the midday heat, waiting. Her name is weighty like her character, an unquestionably biblical name for a woman of uncommon reputation and affection in a town where betrayals and transgressions can follow you for generations.

  The women of Via Gramsci—Saro’s mother, her first cousin, another third cousin through marriage, and neighbors—always emerged from their homes to greet us when we arrived. They insisted on being there to witness Saro’s homecoming.

  As we made our way up the street, Cosimo deftly maneuvered his Fiat around a tractor parked partially on the sidewalk in the middle of the steep one-way street. He passed two more shuttered houses and brought the car to a halt in front of Nonna’s narrow two-story house nestled halfway up the street before it dead-ends. We were there. And so were the women.

  Before I could wake Zoela and lift her head from my lap, the door was flung open. My mother-in-law’s arms reached in.

  “Sei arrivata—You have arrived.”

  In a flash, her small but strong seventy-nine-year-old hands were on my shoulders. I was still emerging from the car when her cheeks came flesh-to-flesh with mine. At their plushness, I wilted into a deeper realm of loss. Again, time suspended. We each took a moment to linger, or an eternity. Time was again elastic. We stood there, disbelieving that this, the moment we had known for years might come, was happening.

  Then she released me and reached past me back into the car for Zoela, her beloved grandchild from her only son.

  “Amore mio. Amore mio.—My love. My love.” Her voice trembled. She raised a t
issue to her damp eyes. She helped Zoela from the car and took her in her bosom. Zoela was waking up exhausted, hot, disoriented. In her grandmother’s embrace and so far from home, she began to cry and reach for me.

  “È stanchissima—She’s very tired,” I said in Zoela’s defense, worried that Nonna would be offended. Then the chorus of mothers, mourners, and grandmothers surrounding the car echoed in agreement. “È stanchissima, certo.”

  I suspected that Saro’s mom might have thought Zoela was crying because of her since they hadn’t spoken in months. Nonna had never, in all her grief, forced me to bring Zoela to the phone. Instead, she just asked every day when we spoke, “Come sta la bambina?—How is the child?”

  Now Nonna got to the reason we were all standing outside, encircling a car in the middle of the day: “Dov’è?—Where is he?”

  She wanted the ashes. She wanted her son.

  I reached into the car, lifted the bag from the floorboard, and gave it to her. Her face went from stoicism to the pallor of paper at the sight of my carry-on. The child she had birthed, reared, fed, and loved was inside.

  Emanuela, her first cousin who lives across the street, held Nonna up. “Entrate, entrate—Enter, enter.” She shuffled her toward her front door, away from the street scene, with the efficiency of a first responder. She moved to shelter her from the sun. Then the chorus of widows broke their circle around the car and in unison ushered Zoela and me inside, moving us all as one mournful herd.

  As the widows of Via Gramsci ushered Zoela and me into Nonna’s home, I suddenly felt as though I had made a big mistake. Surrounded by a cluster of aging widows, I felt overwhelmed and suffocated, as though there might suddenly not be enough oxygen for myself or Zoela. I reached for my purse. In it I had enough Ativan for one pill a day for thirty days. I worried that that would not be enough.

  The entrance of Nonna’s house was adorned with traditional hand-sewn lace curtains and shutters on a fading stone facade. You stepped through it and landed directly in the living room, straight from the street to the living quarters. Her home, like all the others on the street, had originally been an animal stall. It had been built more than a century ago to keep pigs, a mule, chickens, and barrels of olive oil. Families had slept on the wooden floorboards of a loft above their animals. By the time Nonna was married, electricity had arrived in town. By the time Saro was a child, there were running water, a semifinished bathroom, and ceramic floors to make it the home that I had come to know. The space had not been designed with transitions in mind. There is outside, and there is inside. The world of fields, sun, and wind and then, without fanfare, the world of home—a shelter without pretense, just function.

  It was dark inside her home, not uncommon for a Sicilian house in summer. To push back against an antagonizing sun and elements of summer—winds that bring the sands of North Africa, a sun so intense it can dry clothes and make open-air tomato paste in an afternoon—the houses in town are shuttered closed during the day. The cooler air created by the combination of stone walls and low light was a relief. But also, the house seemed smaller, hollow, sad. It was emanating loss. The air was ripe with it.

  A red candle with Saint Padre Pio painted on its glass burned on a lace centerpiece on the dining room table in the middle of the room. The dining table was now an altar.

  Nonna placed the carry-on beside the table and instructed me to take the ashes from the bag. I did so. They were in a special travel box directly from the funeral home in Los Angeles. The box was adorned with a blue silk case that buttoned around it like an envelope. She put Saro’s remains on the table next to the candle. The light in the room seemed to grow dimmer as more people arrived, crowding the room and blocking the light entering from the open door. For the first time, I noticed that the couch and chairs had been pushed to the perimeter of the room. They were assembled to encircle the table, which was also not in its usual place. Nonna took a seat closest to the table, closest to Saro. She told me to sit next to her. Zoela folded into my lap. I heard someone at the periphery of the room on a cell phone: “Chiama il prete. È l’ora.—Tell the priest it’s time.”

  For the next thirty minutes, the room filled with more people, some staying briefly, others settling in. The most elderly sat in chairs, while the youngest stood on their feet. The doors remained open, with only the lace to protect us from the world beyond our collective grief. I had never witnessed a Sicilian wake. I had only heard about them from Saro. He explained how the dead were laid out in the living room of the home. Saro’s cousin Giacchino is the town carpenter and also its coffin maker. The storage unit he uses to store some ten to twelve coffins at a time is next door to Nonna’s house. She is often the first in town to know that someone local has died, which is anytime she hears Giacchino open the unit with a skeleton key. He retrieves a coffin and then takes it to the grieving family. The body is placed inside by relatives, and the mourning ritual begins. In the old days, it often lasted all night. At daybreak, the body is carried to the town church for a Mass and then borne through the streets to the cemetery at the edge of town. People emerge in their doorways to watch the funeral procession go by.

  As I sat there, I began to realize that not only was I witnessing a Sicilian wake, I was very much in the center of it. Sure, I knew we’d be taking Saro’s ashes to the cemetery the next day. But I’d had no way of knowing that so many neighbors and next of kin would descend on Nonna’s living room to pay respects, say a prayer, offer condolences to Saro’s child and me, his new widow, right away. I had assumed that after a day of international travel, I’d arrive at my mother-in-law’s house and be able to rest. I’d sit alone with her. We’d eat, we cry, we’d talk as we had done before. But now a son and husband was dead. Nothing was normal.

  Amid all of this, my mother-in-law sat saying the rosary, audible only to herself. And she rocked. Other women, old and young, did the same. They were in a chorus of prayer. More people came in and kissed her on both cheeks. They offered her condolences. She didn’t rise. She didn’t look up. She never stopped praying. None of them did. Not her cousins, not my sister-in-law, Franca, not the widows and wives of Via Gramsci.

  Within a half hour the priest arrived. He, too, began to pray. His prayers meant that the official lament had begun. The wailing, the tears, it all formed a shrill and guttural song of loss that seemed to reach back to the ancient world. Zoela rocked on my lap, half asleep, half aware. My body shook gently. I cried new tears, tears I had never cried in L.A. Tears that could find me only in Sicily. And as the intensity of the lament became almost trancelike, a callout to all the losses of all time, I wanted to fall over. I wanted to lie on the floor. I wanted to howl at the top of my lungs. I wanted to run mad through the street. My husband was dead.

  Instead I sat there jet-lagged, holding Zoela and unsure how this mourning ritual worked. Saro and I had never attended a funeral in Sicily. Weddings, yes. Funerals, no. I began to watch the box of ashes on the table closely, as if this had all been a mistake. He couldn’t be dead in two places, two realities. My mind told me he might walk down the stairs of his mother’s house at any moment, see the scene, and tell me how young Sicilian widows behave. He’d tell me the protocol. In another imagining, he’d come down and ask, “What’s all this? Put up your tears. I’m right here.” We’d smile and head out for a long walk in the countryside. He’d show me the mulberries in season. But none of that happened.

  I pulled Zoela closer, and I grabbed the locket hanging from my neck. In it I had my own connection to Saro. Attica had given me a locket, and in it we had put some of his ashes for me to carry around my neck. It was a sisterly and sacred act.

  My therapist had suggested that I take a bit of his ashes and scatter some privately while in Sicily. She knew the trip was causing me anxiety. She suggested that I do something just between Saro and me. After my session with her, I had had a dream about being in an orchard with Saro at my side. The next day, a friend had called to tell me that she, too, had dreamed
of Saro. In the dream, they had been eating apricots. I took the confluence of my therapist’s suggestion and the dreams and visions to mean that I should scatter some of Saro’s ashes under an apricot tree in a place he had once shown me last year. For that reason, I’d had his ashes divided into three separate parcels: one for interment in L.A., one for his mother, and one for my own personal ceremony.

  As I sat in my mother-in-law’s house listening to Catholic prayers that were also tethered to the Arab and Jewish world, I knew this moment was for Saro’s mother, his sister, his neighbors and cousins. This moment was for a town of Sicilians who had lost one of their own. We had had a memorial, a celebration of life, in Los Angeles. This was the funeral my mother-in-law had been waiting to give her son. I drew Zoela closer, feeling overcome as the sounds that emerged from the collection of voices around me spilled out, a heartbreaking chorus of lament that rose to the rafters above.

  * * *

  Just before the first sign of morning light, I awoke upstairs in Saro’s parents’ matrimonial bed. The faint first light of day filtered through the second-story shutters. I could hear sheep bells in the distance. The herder was moving his sheep to lower ground. Zoela slept at my side.

  From downstairs came the sound of the soft, familiar choreography of Nonna in her kitchen. I knew she had been up for a while. She wanted to sit with her son alone in the room where she herself had been born. She needed to do so before burying a part of her own motherhood forever. And she had undoubtedly already made the pasta sauce for our midday meal.