by Tembi Locke
“I’m not coming down to the garden this afternoon. I’ll be in the room. Come get me if anyone comes.”
“Amore, please. Come with me. If no one is here in fifteen minutes, we’ll change and go to the beach. Then a sunset dinner.”
“Saro, this is completely absurd! And I feel stupid for ever thinking this could work. I don’t get this place, this culture, these rules. I mean, I love it here, it’s beautiful, but I also hate this.”
“I tried to explain it.” He was hugging me. When he let me go, I could see the hurt in his eyes. But I also saw a new, clear awareness. “We did what we came to do; the choice is theirs. I love you. This is on them.”
Fifteen minutes later no one had come.
It wasn’t until the fourth afternoon that Franca told us we would have our first visitors, Saro’s second cousins. The next day his dad’s brother and his aunt would come. It had taken days, but Nonna and Franca had devised a plan. Each day small groups of the extended family would visit, thereby putting pressure on Saro’s father. They were using Old World reverse psychology to create an environment that would make Giuseppe publicly seem like an obstinate, uncaring father, a man willing to watch his wife weep openly and refuse to attend Mass because he was keeping her from their only son. I liked the way these women worked.
Then came a shift. On the seventh day, Franca and Cosimo arrived with their girls. That was a sweeping gesture. Seeing her for the first time moved me to tears. She was so much like Saro, taller even, with a radiant smile and kind eyes. When she walked up to me and we kissed each other on both cheeks, I almost melted. I had given up on that moment ever happening. I instantly admired the woman who had been quietly working to achieve this moment. I knew what an act of defiance it was for her to be standing in a garden under a vine of bougainvillea, finally meeting her sister-in-law. She had chosen the love of her brother over continued allegiance to the way things were done. For that, she was heroic.
Still, Saro’s irascible sixty-something-year-old father, Giuseppe, refused to come. He had made a decision on which he doubled down. By that point, the whole situation was brimming with Sicilian pathos, and frankly I feared for the well-being of a man who could relentlessly commit himself to disowning a son. Still I tried to humanize him. I tried to imagine his position.
I imagined that somewhere inside he must have known or at least considered that if he didn’t see Saro then, he’d likely never see him again. America, distance, and a foreign wife who had done all she could might see to that. Somewhere inside, he must have known that by flying all the way to Sicily, we were extending perhaps the largest olive branch he’d ever see on an island with no shortage of olive trees.
* * *
In the late morning of the eighth day, Saro packed our Fiat rental and tossed me the keys. “Here, you drive. I want to find Polizzi Generosa. We’ll drive until we’re tired or too drunk on good food to turn back.” Polizzi, he told me, was a town he had heard of as a child but had never visited. Sounded good to me.
As an unspoken rule in our relationship, I was the driver and he the navigator when we traveled outside of L.A., mostly because I had been driving since I was a teenager and he had not gotten a license until he was thirty-five years old and living in the United States. We had learned that one of us was notoriously awful as a passenger: me. With my impatience and commentary, I drove him to distraction and then anger, often a combo platter of both. He had learned to toss me the keys and content himself to lean out the window and ask for directions when needed.
Two hours after leaving our coastal hotel, we tumbled into the mountain town of Polizzi Generosa. I was hypoglycemic, carsick, and generally a wreck. I had not anticipated the remoteness and the steep, narrow roads with stomach-turning drops into rocky valleys below. One look at the stone edifices rising from the rocky precipice of the mountain, and you could immediately see why Polizzi Generosa (meaning “generous city”) had been a high-elevation Hellenistic and later Norman outpost, strategic for defense. Getting there, even a thousand years later, was not easy. It took more than a notion.
As I clutched back and forth in the Fiat and left rubber on the road, I lobbed nonsensical threats at Saro, concluding with a promise to never have his children if he couldn’t find me a trattoria that could produce the best plate of local food and a liberal pour of the house wine immediately. He met my hyperbole and hypoglycemia with indifference and deflection. “You will thank me for this memory one day.” When I pressed him with more laments, he finally threatened to leave me in a trattoria to cool off while he watched soccer on TV at a local bar. It was the kind of irritated banter reserved for young married people who found themselves lost on an island that was both familiar and foreign. I finally put the car into park and hoisted my hunger from the two-seater.
It was maybe 2:30 p.m. Siesta time. The hours when a Sicilian village is a ghost town of shuttered windows and the faint sounds of dishes being put away before rest.
We sidled up to Pasticceria al Castello looking for two things: a restroom and a break from each other. From its open door, the intermingled aromas of vanilla, almond, and sugar emanated from within. I let Saro break the beaded doorway hang first. No matter how much we were annoying each other, I was still a black woman in the interior mountains of Sicily. Not that I expected anything to happen. But I always let Saro be the first point of contact, just as he let me be the first point of contact when we drove the back roads of East Texas to the sharecropping land my people hailed from. We are practical even when irritable.
The baker and owner, Pino, allowed me access to the restroom while Saro caught some of the soccer game on a small screen. We didn’t hope for more than espresso and maybe directions to a still-open trattoria.
Saro and Pino began speaking in dialect. Within seconds it was established that although he was a native of Sicily, Saro in fact resided in Los Angeles with me, his wife, an actress. Pino’s face lit up, and suddenly his eyes swung in my direction. “Do you know Vincent Schiavelli?” He spoke to me in a rough, rushed Italian that I could mostly follow. I knew that Vincent Schiavelli was the famous character actor from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ghost, Amadeus, and Batman Returns.
“Yes, of course. Not personally, but I know him,” I answered in Italian.
“This is his grandfather’s hometown. He comes here often. You have to take something to him from me.” And before I could protest, he had disappeared into his lair of pastry ovens behind the display case. Saro called after him, “Of course we will.”
Pino reemerged with a round flat cake on gold-faced cardboard. It was not just any cake but the traditional cake of Polizzi Generosa, he explained. Cake made one way in one town in the remote mountains of Sicily, in a town that didn’t see a lot of visitors. A cake Saro had never heard of. A cake I didn’t want but knew immediately was coming with us. “Sure, of course we will,” Saro redeclared our commitment to deliver the cake as Pino wrapped it up in pink paper and adorned it with gold ribbon, attaching a card with his phone number. Before I could tell him that I didn’t know the first thing about how to track down Vincent Schiavelli, the cake was in my hands and we were walking out the door. I turned to Saro and gave him a look that said, “Really? You know this cake is never leaving Sicily.” To which he retorted with a nonverbal “Don’t worry, I’ll carry it.”
* * *
I don’t know what happened between the time Franca returned to Aliminusa and we returned from Polizzi. However, the next day, our final day in Sicily, we sat down for our afternoon espresso, dressed up, and were ready to receive guests when a car pulled into the gravel parking lot and Franca filed out, behind her Saro’s mom.
In the emotional overwhelm of Saro seeing his mother, I didn’t register the large figure walking behind her. Until Saro grabbed my hand.
“Tembi, that’s my father,” he said. His grip was so tight it almost made me shriek. Then he quickly let go, rose from his chair, and went to his mom. I couldn’t take my eye off Saro
’s father.
Giuseppe had made his way to our hotel to meet the son he hadn’t seen in years under an arch of bougainvillea in the hotel garden. I let out an audible “Fuck!” I didn’t know who to greet first, I hadn’t even thought of what I would say. Before I could collect myself, he was upon me. There was a cordial hug. I offered a tentative smile.
“Ti presento mio padre—May I present my father.” Saro was speaking to me as though we were on the floor of the United Nations.
Giuseppe was taller than I had imagined with a face weathered from a lifetime of field work. He wore creased dress pants and a collared button-up shirt under a suit jacket. He was dressed as if he were going to church. And he wore the same hat that he had worn in the photo I had seen of him. “Salve,” he said simply, his voice gravelly with cigarettes and understated emotion.
At his side, was Saro’s mother, Croce, wearing a dress skirt and floral top. She clutched a small black purse that looked rarely used. She broke loose from her husband and went straight to Saro. She beamed with joy at the sight of her son, overcome at being able to hold him again. There was relief in her face, too. I would later learn that it was she who had turned the tide and brokered the meeting. She had woken up that morning, our last day in Sicily, dressed herself in her Sunday finest, made her husband coffee, and announced that she was getting a ride with her cousin to drive down to the coast to see her son. She pointed to a plate of room-temperature pasta and told Giuseppe that he could stay or he could go but her mind was made up. She would not live a day in peace if her son got back onto the plane bound for America without her ever seeing him, without her laying eyes on the woman with whom he had chosen to spend his life.
After Croce finished hugging Saro, she turned to me. Her face broke open with a tender, toothy grin. Before me stood a determined woman who carried my husband’s smile. She leaned in and said, “Grazie.”
That night we concluded our time in Sicily with our first family dinner at a roadside trattoria adjacent to the Greek ruins of Himera. It was a place his father could comfortably afford and far enough from their hometown that it would create no further gossip. We broke bread as a tenuous New World/Old World biracial, bilingual family.
I felt an intense relief that this was finally happening. But I also felt hyperaware of my every move. I was self-conscious about my Italian, my open displays of affection with Saro, even my choice of clothes: jeans, with a midriff-baring top. I wore a sweater to cover myself the whole way through dinner. I had never imagined that what they thought of me would matter. But it did.
Saro and his parents chatted in dialect; I caught fragments of what they were discussing. Saro turned to me periodically to translate. I held his hand under the table. I talked to Cosimo, seated on the other side of me, about the number of siblings I had, where my parents lived, the names of TV shows I had been on. When I wasn’t making small talk with him, I focused on the two sweet young girls who were my new nieces. They were both under the age of five, and I could speak to them freely without worrying if I was using the wrong verb tense or using a masculine article with a noun when I should have used the feminine.
As we passed bread, no one referenced the previous years. There was no grand apology or even gesture of regret for time lost. We just ate and carried forward as if starting our relationship from that moment.
I ate pasta with local capers and a simple tomato sauce that pleased my palate like no other. I gorged on eggplant caponata and grilled artichokes topped with sprinkles of fresh mint. I had after-dinner espresso at his father’s urging despite having recently discovered that it wrecked any chance of my having a good night’s sleep. I willingly removed any obstacles that would come between me and this tentative Sicilian bonding session. I even bypassed my aversion to grain alcohol to take a sip of pear grappa. I wanted everyone around me to feel at ease. I knew I could never be one of them, but I could be the kind of wife who supported her husband’s making amends with his people. That much I had proven. And it made me quietly triumphant, optimistic even. We had done it.
* * *
Back in L.A., I pulled a cake out of my suitcase. The cake from Polizzi we had carried across three continents. Pino had told us it was dry cake and could be kept wrapped and unrefrigerated for up to ten days. He assured us that once in Vincent’s hands in Los Angeles, Vincent would know what to do with it. Something about a liqueur that could be poured onto it or about it being like a panforte or an American fruit cake, neither of which I had tasted or held much appeal. So Saro became the cake’s custodian while I balked at the extra encumbrance when we boarded a train in Fez. I had pushed it to the back of our hotel room closet in Marrakesh. In my mind, there was just no way that cake would ever set foot on US soil. There was no way the acclaimed actor Vincent Schiavelli would ever eat a dessert brought to him by complete strangers.
We had barely finished handing over our customs form after landing in Los Angeles before Saro asked me, “So how are you going to get in touch with Vincent?” He asked it with a whiff of challenge, as if he had done his part and now it was my turn.
I let two days go by; then I called my agent to ask about Vincent Schiavelli’s agent with what I am sure sounded like a convoluted story about a cake and connection to Sicily.
Thirty minutes later, my jaw dropped when Vincent Schiavelli called our home phone. Two hours later, the actor was standing in our one-bedroom apartment, wearing round wire-framed spectacles and a pastel linen jacket on his six foot–plus frame.
“This is perfect, I am having a dinner party later tonight. This will make a delicious dessert.” He was delighted, beaming with incredulous joy that he was about to share a taste of his beloved ancestral land with his closest friends. That a stranger had taken the time to bring him cake.
We made small talk about where exactly in Sicily Saro was from, how long he had been in the States, how we had come to have the cake, how Pino had known to give it to us. I didn’t mention that I was an actor, too, which, in Pino’s world, meant that naturally Vincent and I were colleagues and would know each other. After fifteen minutes, I snapped a picture of Saro, Schiavelli, and The Cake just before Vincent sauntered down our steps and back into his own life.
Saro and I told that story for years. He used it as evidence of the tenacity and determination of his people. He used it as a way of educating Americans on what it means to hold on to a piece of yourself when you straddle two cultures, calling two lands home. Each time he told it, he referred to the protagonist in the story not as himself but as “Schiavelli’s cake.” The cake was the connective tissue that had brought a Hollywood star into an immigrant’s home. That’s how he saw the story. I saw the story as emblematic of the way Sicily made me see how home is a place we carry with us in our hearts.
The story he rarely told was the one of his father, the family strife, and our exile. That story was harder to tell because it was hard to live. And for years, the renewed connection with his parents felt as fragile as parchment near a flame. When we did eventually visit Saro’s childhood home for a vacation, then a family wedding and later a first Communion, I slept under Croce and Giuseppe’s roof as a guest content to pass the time conversing as little as possible, being unobtrusive, burying my face in a book until the trip was over. I respected Saro’s parents for the change they were willing to undergo. Many people never achieve that in a lifetime. But in truth, I also never expected to be close to them. The most I hoped for was a delicate reconciliation and civilized mutual respect. I could now expect to be notified if someone were sick or if there was illness. Little did I know that we would be the ones bearing ominous news.
VOLCANIC SAND
Two weeks into this monthlong Sicilian trip, our first without Saro, I boarded a ferry with Zoela in tow for the four-hour ride to Stromboli, a volcanic island and the farthest point in the Sicilian archipelago. I had been desperate to leave Aliminusa. The near-constant reminders of Saro—at Nonna’s house, in the town square, at the bar getting espresso�
��became dizzying. Being in town elicited a twin experience, by turns soothing and then triggering big waves of grief. A couple of days at the coast and a trip to a remote cluster of tiny islands seemed just the thing to satiate my growing wanderlust and give Zoela and me time outside the confines of the tiny town.
I suspected that Nonna needed a little time alone as well. The three of us had settled into a quotidian routine of abundant meals, long naps, and early evenings spent on the bench in front of her house, retracing our loss. In the kitchen, Nonna and I talked over coffee. I watched her dry fresh oregano from the garden, then sieve it by hand using the same plastic colander she had used since the days when Saro was a bachelor in Florence. Summer was ripe with flavor and memory. And the only time either of us had away from each other was when she went to Mass in the afternoon.
The line of tourists boarding the boat was two deep. I grabbed Zoela’s hand as we crossed the dock. “Sweetheart, we’re going to sit inside the cabin, not on the deck. The winds will be too strong, and it’s a long ride to see the volcano.”
“Can I watch a movie?” she asked, grabbing hold of the straps of her daypack just as I had taught her.
“No, it’s not like a plane, there are no movies on board. You can read or better yet, try to take a nap on my lap.”
Halfway into our time in Sicily, and she had not developed any discernable sleep pattern. The jet lag was crippling. Since Saro’s death, we had been sharing a bed. At Nonna’s house it was no different. Zoela needed it. I needed it, too. At night, she hooked her body close to mine. Maybe she was afraid that if she migrated to the opposite side of the bed, she’d lose me, I’d die in my sleep like her dad. So she stayed close. And her small form kept me grounded. I reached for her during those nights just as much as she reached for me. We were testing each other’s permanence. So having her sleep on the boat meant she would be less cranky when we arrived and I’d maybe have time to shut my eyes as well.