by Tembi Locke
She folded her soft, fleshy arms across her chest and looked toward the calendar of saints on the kitchen wall, “After health comes work. In life, it’s good to have both.” Then she took off one house shoe, to give her foot a vacation from the straps of leather that left an impression across her instep. “And school, are you able to pay for Zoela’s school?”
I thought she was going to ask how Zoela was doing in school. But she was fast-tracking the practical matters. There’d be time to talk about reading, writing, and arithmetic.
“Mi arrangio,” I said. “I manage.”
It was true, I was managing. My financial stability depended on a steady stream of new acting work; residuals from old jobs; the remainder of Saro’s small life insurance policy, which I used for large unexpected expenses and inevitable employment downturns; and finally, the reduction of his medical debt. It was a high-wire act, no doubt. But I had seen myself through worse. We still had our house, I could still send Zoela to the same school. We had not suffered the secondary losses that so many widowed families do. I counted my blessings. I crossed my fingers.
Then I asked her how she got by. “I keep the lights off. I reuse what I can.” It was true. She kept only two bulbs in the six-bulb light fixture that hung above her bed. “I have to save for when Franca will need help taking care of me.” She was practical to the bone.
Then we joked about how my being with her in Sicily during the summer actually saved me the cost of Los Angeles summer camps and offset the daily carrying costs of life in L.A. At the end of our time on the bench, we had gone so far as to agree to enroll Zoela in the town’s half-day kid camp. She could socialize with kids when she wasn’t running in the streets with her bestie, Rosalia. The enrollment fee for the entire month of July was a total of 15 euros, or $18.00. I could spend more than that in a single afternoon of snacks at Starbucks.
“Here there’s nothing to spend. We have food, we have shelter, you don’t need a car.” She said it so convincingly that for a nanosecond, I considered dropping off the grid; homeschooling Zoela; donning a kitchen smock; and getting my annual checkups compliments of the Italian government.
Then she asked me about my plans for the upcoming weeks of our visit.
“Well, at the end of the month, for my birthday, my parents will be coming to visit.” I had mentioned a while ago that they might come, and now it was confirmed.
“Good. Then they will get to see the town feast!” She said it with such enthusiasm.
On the second anniversary of Saro’s death, my dad had told Zoela that he would see her in Sicily one day. It had been another emotional milestone, especially for Zoela. Getting older for her meant more life being lived without her father; each year she remembered a little less, and it pained her. That day all my parents had come to visit me, and we had gone to the cemetery in Los Angeles. Attica had read a poem she had written for the occasion. Zoela had laid flowers and danced around in circles with her cousin. I told her to let her instincts lead the way. Dancing was a way of releasing energy and physicalizing what she couldn’t say. In that intimate group, we had found people who could hold space for us as time went on. All touched the memorial tablet and said a silent prayer, and later my dad told Zoela he would come visit her in her grandmother’s home. She had never had those grandparents in the same room together. The last time they had all gotten together was two years before Zoela had come into our lives.
Now it was happening. My dad and Aubrey would arrive on the day of the festival of the town’s patron saint, my birthday.
Nonna hadn’t seen them since her trip to Houston more than a decade before. “I have the house at the edge of town ready for them. Does your dad still like sausage?”
“Maybe even more,” I quipped.
She told me the plan was that they would stay across town at Saro’s aunt’s house, the same aunt who resided in Switzerland, who had come to our wedding, and whose husband had waved a napkin in the air with my relatives to Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman” at our wedding. Her husband had since passed away, but not before building a house in Aliminusa where they were supposed to have retired. It sat empty at the end of town, save twice a year, when she came down by train in the fall for the olive harvest and again in the summer for Ferragosto, the national Italian holiday on August 15, when half of Italy shuts down and goes to the sea.
“I hope it is not too simple for them, but it’s got a cross breeze and it’s quiet,” she said.
“It will be perfect. They will love it. Thank you.”
Excited and moved by the thought of our families connecting once again, I left her at the table and went upstairs to wake Zoela. We had roughly a month of mornings to enjoy being with Nonna. I didn’t want her to miss even one.
THE PROCESSION
Three days into our trip, I prepared myself to head to the edge of town, to a place where il silenzio parla col vento e ti porta ricordi—silence converses with the wind and brings memory. Outside Nonna’s house, a sparrow drank water from the topsoil of basil potted in crumbling terra-cotta. The leather-faced fishmonger drove away, a swordfish’s spear pointing west out of the back of his wagon. I lingered at the kitchen table.
I had not been to the town cemetery in a year. This year I was starting a new tradition: taking a stone with me each time I went. Back in Los Angeles, I had come across Carlo Levi’s Words Are Stones: Impressions of Sicily, a book on Sicily and the indomitable spirit of everyday people all over the island. Saro had it in his collection of books in our living room. The title reminded me that when Zoela was a toddler, Saro had passed time on the beach with her looking for stones. Ones shaped like hearts, one shaped like Sicily itself. In the years since his death, she had done that on her own at beaches everywhere. The previous summer in Sicily, she had found a heart-shaped stone and written “I love you” on it. Then I had taken it to the cemetery on her behalf. Now I wanted to take a new stone, and I imagined that in time, with many visits, there would be a collection—a little like the Jewish tradition of taking stones to the grave of a loved one. I was sure I would find one along the road on the way to the outskirts of town.
I started at the top of the first street in town and began the slow meander down the cobblestoned thoroughfares. It was a Sunday nearing lunchtime, hardly a wise hour to set out on such a pilgrimage. Everyone’s windows and doors were shuttered tight as a defense against the heat. The relentless summer sun hung high.
There is a sudden wind in Sicily that swoops in dry, determined, and carrying with it air from the mountains of North Africa. It is called a scirocco. And although I had lived through two scirocco summers, that day it was different. It was gentler, bringing with it little to no dust. There was no sand covering the cars, and its gusts did not carry grains miles away, effectively destroying crops.
Along the descent, I passed street after street of contiguous, centuries-old stables, stone structures that with the passage of time had evolved into modest stuccoed houses. Within their thick walls were the rooms where generations of family had been born. I descended farther, passing the abandoned grain storage building that had served as Saro’s first-grade schoolroom. Farther along, I passed defunct communal fountains where his grandmothers had collected water for laundry, cooking, and bathing husbands after a day in the fields. I passed the public square where tomato paste had been sent to dry. With each descending step, the past and present separated effortlessly and then came together again. The hot air was pregnant with jasmine and eucalyptus.
I passed the church steps. I greeted the butcher, the baker, the cheese maker. I passed a mule tied to a tree, scratching his hooves near a dwarfed palm. His tail swatted flies. As I walked, the town began to recede, opening up into fields that unfolded toward a distant valley. I looked out on the byzantine network of hereditary strips of farming land, impervious soil that, for centuries, had required rigorous cultivation. Still the land spits up wild fennel, almonds fall from trees, and capers grow unbidden from under rocks. Fenn
el and the dry North African wind were my pilgrimage companions.
Once I arrived, it took little effort to push open the iron cemetery gate. As easy as picking up a book. As if I were there to reread the particular sections where my old story line had ended and an unpredictable new one had begun.
On the other side of the gate, the sun was hidden by walls and the air was cooler. Corridors of marble walls shadowed me. They tamed the winds that came up from the sea. For a moment, summer was all but gone. It could have been spring, fall. This entrance to the cemetery was a seasonless place. The only thing certain was that at the cemetery I was wife, widow, the lover who had brought a husband’s ashes halfway around the world because he asked.
I continued farther away from the gate and smiled as I wondered if some part of the poet-chef husband who still made love to me while I slept had foreseen this moment. If he had envisioned me, perfumed by the Sicilian summer, walking the stone ancestry to reach this place at the edge of his town. His easy, wise laugh came to mind. He knew. He wanted me to do exactly what I am doing. He wanted me to stand amid marble smoothed by time and find him again here, in the foothills of a foothill town. He wanted me to find him on an island in the heart of the Mediterranean.
As I stood in front of the tomb, my first act was to move the sturdy but weather-worn wooden stepladder into position against the mausoleum wall. However, at that hour, there was no one around to help me. It was a Sunday nearing lunchtime. Any native informant would have told you it was the worst time of day to go searching for memories. High noon in a Sicilian July only intensified everything. Other women, wiser widows than I, were somewhere else. They were at a stove top, putting the finishing touches on a lunch of eggplant and just-picked zucchini. They had set the table and sliced the bread. But I didn’t cook in Sicily. So I continued to move the cumbersome stepladder slowly, dragging one side diagonally across the cement and then the other until I succeeded in positioning it against the wall bearing Saro’s name.
My first step up always felt unsteady. I looked down to see a few loose nails holding the boards of the stairs in place. But I knew it wasn’t loose nails that were making me shaky.
Once at the top, I saw the stone bearing Zoela’s handwriting on the ledge. I was eye to eye with Saro’s headstone picture, next to the one of his dad. The expression on his dad’s face, posed for all eternity, reminded me of one spring visit in the first years of the family reconciliation.
Saro’s father had just come home from working the fields and handed me a large string of garlic, a gift. “Puoi fare una foto—You can take a picture.” He liked it when I photographed him or the fruit of his hard labor. So we stood in the middle of Via Gramsci, centered on the cobbled stones. The African American daughter-in-law, educated and urbane, taking a picture of the garlic-farming father-in-law, a man who stitched money into the waistband of his pants so he could have the feel of it against his skin while he labored in the fields. In the picture, he is clutching a kitchen knife with a weathered, arthritic hand, holding it at the center of the string of garlic. As though he could break it in two or leave it whole. The choice was his.
We kept that picture framed at home in Los Angeles. In the weeks before Saro had passed, he had asked that I bring the photo downstairs and place it on the entrance table in the foyer. They say when a person is nearing death he will speak of deceased loved ones, recall them, even ask to see them. I hadn’t known that at the time, but now it was all I thought of when I saw his father’s picture.
I whispered a love message into the stone I’d found and placed it on the ledge. It was not a remarkable stone in any way, just flat and gray. Though stones of antique yellow, black lava, and red agata could be found on the island, gray-colored stone I had heard referred to as the pearl of Sicily. Finally I stepped back down to earth, sensing it was time to get home for lunch. I was sure Zoela was up. Nonna would be poking her head out the front, waiting to see me making my way up the street so that she could launch the pasta into the boiling water.
I moved back from the mausoleum wall, closed my eyes, and turned to begin the walk home. I didn’t attempt to put the stepladder back. Leaving it was a sign that someone had been to see the dead.
* * *
The next morning, I found Nonna, Emanuela, Benedetta, and Crocetta seated around the kitchen table talking in thick, hushed Sicilian. Their faces were downcast. Nonna was using a sale circular from the morning mail as a fan. A seventeen-year-old resident of Aliminusa had died.
From what I could gather, the girl’s illness had come on suddenly at midwinter. It was clear to doctors in neighboring Cefalù that her case was out of their league. She had immediately been transferred to Rome, where her parents had been living out of her hospital room for the last six months. Nuns from a neighboring church had fed them out of the convent cafeteria. Doctors from all over the world had come to visit her, because apparently she was one of thirteen people in the world known to have come down with the same symptoms; a rare, strange, mysterious malady with no name.
For months the priest had updated her case at Sunday Mass each week, asking for prayers for her and her family. Now word had arrived that she had made her transition. There was a pall over the town. Everyone had been rooting for her, “so young.” Grown men cried openly at the mention of her name. At the tobacco/newspaper stand, at the bar, in the piazza, among the overflowing file rooms at city hall, her death was the only conversation in town. The tragedy seemed to be compounded by the mystifying nature of what had happened, the inability even to name the murderous illness.
“Her family, the poor mother, she never left her daughter’s side,” said Benedetta.
“The pain of not knowing,” Emanuela said.
“Three babies were born, and thirty people died last year,” added Benedetta.
Those were the genealogical facts of Aliminusa.
“The scale has turned upside. Who knows what will become of us . . . this is how we found this world, and this is how we will leave it,” Nonna added. It was a saying as old as any of them could remember. Then they let silence fall over them, presumably contemplating the loss of a young life.
My heart went out to her family. I knew something about fighting rare and invisible enemies. I thought about how after ten years of caregiving I should have been prepared for what was to come. The specter of Saro’s illness had hovered above me at all times, but I had never been ready to deal with its whims. His cancer was constantly reinventing itself, and acute crisis was as close as the air I breathed. I had seen a calm Sunday breakfast of tea and fresh-baked croissants erupt into chaos due to an adverse drug interaction, which had resulted in a trip to the ER. I had seen him rise from the dinner table, saying he wasn’t feeling well, only to pass out in the bathroom moments later, his head hitting the sink on the way down. I had seen his moods careen and collide in manic spectacle, turning to sullenness or anger in a matter of seconds. I organized our lives around that fickle mechanism known as his immune system. Under assault, it might make a dramatic appearance one week and then retreat without warning the next. I had watched him crack a tooth while eating a baguette one day, his teeth brittle and fragile from radiation therapy. That was the kind of stuff for which I could never prepare myself.
“We need to take fresh flowers to the cemetery. The procession is tomorrow,” Nonna said to me.
“I will get them, of course,” I said, suddenly feeling faint. Maybe it was the heat, the mountain’s dry winds, maybe it was the emotion. I had been in Aliminusa for many occasions, feasts, weddings, hostile elections, but never a birth and never a full funeral. This was another important first.
After leaving the fresh flowers on Saro’s tomb the following day, I walked the forgotten road back from the cemetery, the one used long ago for mules. I was aware that I was on the road that Sicilians say makes a person seem like un’anima persa—a lost soul. But that was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want to see anyone, just me and the wind. However, as I neared the l
ast remaining working fountain in town, the one near the steps widened for mule and cart travel a hundred years before, I looked up to see that the processional for the young girl’s funeral had begun. The mourners had just started the march toward the church from the statue of the town’s patron saint, Sant’Anna, that greets visitors at the edge of town. The clock struck 11:00 a.m., and the wind made another push.
I continued my slow ascent up the steps, deciding midway to lean against the wall in the shade for support and respite. I was not dressed to go any closer. In red pants and a floral top, I was nobody’s mourner.
I watched the slender coffin pass by, carried on the shoulders of six of her classmates, teenage boys with pimples, gelled hair, and cell phones bulging in back pockets. The white-robed Padre Francesco walked in front of the coffin; her parents, slumped over but somehow on their feet, walked behind it. Behind them came a mass of townsfolk, each carrying a single white rose. The older women sang the lament while incense permeated the already summer-pungent, restless air.
When the last of the mourners had passed where I stood, I peeled myself off the wall and took the remaining steps up the main street. Some older women, those in black frocks and orthopedic socks, receded from their viewing place at the front windows of their homes. They knew how the rest would unfold, and presumably they would return to their straw chairs and pray some more.
By the time I made it home, Nonna was seated at the table. Tears were in her eyes, too. She had watched the scene from her doorway high above the main street.
At the sight of her, I suddenly felt faint. She perhaps recognized the look on my face and had already pulled out a chair for me to sit next to her. So I did.
Grief in Sicily is not an individual experience but a communal one where people are called upon to witness and support one another. The way certain African cultures use drumming as an active means of dealing with their grief—the rhythm is played continuously for days, day and night, over and over, as a constant reminder to the community of its loss—in Sicily the story of the deceased is told over and over. I was prepared to sit and listen to Nonna bear witness.