by Tembi Locke
But instead we sat in silence for a good long while. Nothing needed to be added to the moment.
Then she asked, “Did you get the flowers?”
“Yes, and then I walked back the long way.”
“Nothing will be longer than the walk her parents are making today.”
“I know.”
The wind blew the curtains hanging at the front door.
“Plus, with this wind, they will be weaker still.”
The afternoon wore on. Nonna sent Zoela and me upstairs to nap.
“Go rest. Too much sun and too much death in one day.”
* * *
As afternoon gave way to evening, the sun had relented and the wind had calmed. Zoela and Rosalia disappeared into play and friendship, making water “balloons” from plastic sacks and tossing them up and down Via Gramsci. I left to buy more bread and passed the edicola, the newsstand that also sold pens, toys, batteries, and sunscreen, then stopped by the cheese shop to put in an order for ricotta salata. I wanted to order it early because I knew it would need time to cure during my stay, before I could take it back to L.A. when the time came. On the way back, I bumped into an older woman with piercing blue eyes and crooked toes in orthopedic sandals. She was one of Nonna’s distant cousins, a gregarious talker. Her name slipped from me like soup off a fork. So I called her simply “Zia,” which made her smile.
After reciting her maladies and her displeasure at the ten-cent increase in the price of bread, she asked about my family in the States. I told her they were coming for a visit and would be in town for the feast of Sant’Anna. She clapped her hands together at her chest in an expression of pleasure and surprise. Then she grabbed my face in the palm of her hands. “The connection you are creating here is like a flower. It requires soil and sun, things that, thanks to God, are given freely. But it is you, all of us, who has to water the flower to make it grow. Without water, all relations remain small. They can’t open, and eventually they die.”
She took my face again and kissed it twice good-bye. Then she started up the steep cobblestoned street to her house.
Zia had been talking about family, Zoela, connection, and nurturing relationships. But I had dared to read something else into her words. What if my own life was like a flower, something I had to continually tend to and nurture? Sicily was the water and sun that fortified me to stand stronger in my life after loss. And maybe my leaving a rock at the cemetery as an act of remembrance had additional meaning; maybe it was a symbol of the lasting permanence of Saro’s love. His love, life, illness, and death had taught me so much, but it was the undergirding of his love that was my salvation in loss.
I continued back home, and when I passed the stone walls lining the street, I released a dream into mortar and crevices, into the stone diary that was my summer in Sicily. I will use the love of this place to fortify me. It is my stone inheritance, the gift of Saro’s life.
THE SAUCE
The days in Aliminusa moved at a repetitively graceful pace, and by our second week back Zoela and I had fallen into step with it. Each afternoon she devoured warm milk and two fistfuls of cookies and took off down the street.
“Watch out for cars in the piazza, and don’t go past the bridge at the edge of town,” I’d remind her.
I kissed her good-bye, secure in the knowledge that she would reemerge at lunch for hearty dishes of olives, pasta with fresh string beans, cheese, and bread. Then surely she would take off again after settling in for an afternoon siesta.
Meanwhile, my dad kept calling me in Sicily to update me on their arrival. Our conversations went like this:
“Wi-Fi access?”
“None.”
“What about an American coffee maker?”
“Dad, bring instant.”
“We’re renting a car.”
“Oh, no, you’re not. Let me come get you.”
“Tembi, I’ve driven all over Europe and East Texas. I can do this.” My dad’s enthusiasm for road trips was almost evangelical.
Aubrey jumped on the line and began their favorite back-and-forth teasing, “Drive, huh? In Sicily? You going to do that like the way you speak Portuguese?”
“No, this is for real. I can handle the roads in Sicily. My Portuguese is just for show.” It was a running joke in the family that Dad claimed to speak three foreign languages: Portuguese, Swahili, and “East Texas.” He claimed to have learned Portuguese in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau while traveling with Stokely Carmichael; Swahili while in Tanzania helping freedom fighters in 1974; and “East Texas” while picking cotton on the land near his grandparents’ homestead. Everyone in the family agreed that he could butcher five words in each language, at best. That is, with the exception of “East Texas.” He was absolutely fluent in that.
“Dad, it would make me feel better if you simply got a driver to bring you from the airport. Sicily is a challenge to navigate. Frankly, it’s not set up for tourists or non-Sicilians. Let me talk to your travel agent.”
“Yes, Gene, please. Let’s make this easy.” Aubrey was the sensible yin to his adventurous yang. Then she continued, “Actually, Tembi, we called because I need to know what we should bring for Nonna and Franca and Cosimo.”
Gift giving was Aubrey’s forte. In another life, she could have started a business buying insanely intimate gifts for the people in other people’s lives. She had a rare skill, like being able to sing above five octaves or juggle flames while walking on stilts. It was a skill I lacked. She wanted my Sicilian family to know how much the Texas family had loved Saro and appreciated their hospitality. I ran through a list of possible options for my nieces and brother- and sister-in-law. Then I got to Nonna.
“Bring her something for the house. Something that honors the memory of her son. That is all she will want. And maybe a black scarf.”
It was vague, and I was embarrassed that I still couldn’t figure out what to get the woman who was now like another mother to me.
My dad piped back in, “Also, we arrive the morning of your birthday. What do you want to do to celebrate?”
“Ah, Dad. I don’t know.”
I honestly didn’t. It wasn’t just my birthday, it was my anniversary. Two life events forever linked. Now, nineteen years after my nuptials in Florence, my parents and Saro’s family would be together on the anniversary of the day when a world of difference and mistrust had kept them apart. Now they would be together without the person for whom their togetherness, especially in Sicily, would have meant so much.
* * *
Summer was sauce-making season. The air smelled of wood smoke and tomato sauce. Around town empty dark green mineral water bottles and brown beer bottles were drying on racks and in crates on the sidewalks in the front of homes and i magazzini—the cellars and town garages that were used to store tractors, farming equipment, and cauldrons for the tradition of making tomato sauce. Tomatoes, the signature of summer, deep red San Marzano plum tomatoes straight from the fields, were made into sauce, as had been done for generations. Storage spaces and cellars all over town would soon be lined with enough tomato sauce–filled bottles to last the residents through winter. Sicilians say, “The greatest joy is knowing that in the dead of winter, you can open a bottle and make a pasta that tastes like the height of summer.”
Nonna had not made sauce in the years since Giuseppe had died, six years before. Her hundred-year-old copper cauldron sat wrapped in wool blankets next to Giuseppe’s tools for cutting artichoke and stringing garlic in the attic-like space between the tiled roof and the second floor of her home. She left the sauce making to Cosimo and Franca. Every year they made enough for her, thirty to forty one-liter bottles. But that summer Cosimo’s work schedule dictated that he wouldn’t be making sauce for another two weeks, after I would be back in Los Angeles. Instead, her cousins at the base of Via Gramsci were making it that very afternoon.
At the breakfast table that morning, Nonna made sure Zoela didn’t discard her single-serve bottl
es of pear and peach juice. She would wash them, boil them, and store them.
“We can use them for the sauce. These little bottles will fit nicely in your suitcase. They are perfect for a meal for two. When you come home from work, open one, and you and Zoela will have a meal.”
“I do the same for myself,” she continued. “The small bottles are all I need since I am alone.”
“If you want to see how it is done, go to Nunzia’s later today. Take Zoela.” I suspected that Nonna liked the idea of Zoela spending time with another of her cousins who lived on the main street that went through town.
Three generations and two tributaries of the Lupo family would begin the work of lighting the fire with wood collected from the fields, peeling the tomatoes, salting them, cutting onion, preparing the basil, manning the cauldron, then bottling and storing. The process took three days of prep (cleaning and sterilizing bottles, harvesting tomatoes), a long day of sauce making, then another day or two for the sauce to cool. Unlike other families in town, who began the work at 2:00 a.m. and worked until 10:00, the Lupo family made their sauce in the late afternoon and into the night because their cellar faced southwest on a hill. So by virtue of geography, they were spared the oppressive afternoon heat and received a cross breeze when they opened all the windows.
The “take Zoela” part of Nonna’s plan was tricky. Tearing her from Rosalia would take a mammoth effort. In general, the kids in town did not like making sauce. And they didn’t make it with any other family than their own. Making sauce was a family tradition that came with risks. It was incredibly labor intensive, and they were often not allowed to be near the cauldrons. Plus they often got tired and complained. It was one of the reasons so many families made the sauce in the night while the children slept.
As I washed out the small single-serve bottles, I poked my head out the door to chat with Zoela and Rosalia.
“Ro-zaa,” that was the nickname the women on the street called her, so I did the same. “Zoela and I will be at Nunzia’s house later today, making sauce. Want to come?”
She and Zoela were seated on the bench outside Nonna’s house, killing time making movies on Zoela’s iPad. The latest was a thriller about the coffins stored next to Nonna’s house.
“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.
“I see that now.” It suddenly struck him as a fact as clear as the Sicilian July day.
Then he turned to me, and, perhaps for the first time in the hour we had been together, he saw me—a black American woman seated at the table among the fa
ces of people she neither resembled nor defended but whom she seemed to understand.
“How the hell did you get here?” he asked.
I gave him the only answer that would explain it all: “I was married to a Sicilian man. I’m now his widow.”
He lingered for a moment, as if trying to process the sequence of life events I had laid out that had brought us to this moment. Then he offered his condolences. Ten minutes later I got him to agree not to pursue the insurance claim issue any further.
“Tell them your car was hit while it was parked. No one’s fault. Pay the fine, and enjoy the rest of your vacation,” I said.
“It’s a beautiful place,” he said referring to the rolling fields that led to the valley below. “Too bad about all this. I can’t say that I will be coming back. These people don’t make it easy.” I wanted to educate him about the fact that he was on an island that has been conquered and ruled by many outsiders throughout history. That the Sicilian instinct isn’t always to make it easier for an outsider.
I watched him drive away, up the winding road past the blackberry brambles, taking the series of curves that would lead to the country house he was renting. I was ready to go back home. The whole thing had been rather exhausting.
When I got home, Nonna made us afternoon coffee, and she shrugged her shoulders as I recounted the story of Calogero and the Englishman. Her purse was on the table. She was going to Mass soon. The priest from Burundi was back, and she wanted to get to the church to get a spot near the fans.
Calogero’s wife had stopped me as I was returning home and had given me a bag of dried garbanzo beans from the spring harvest in gratitude for my help. Nonna and I decided to clean them while we waited for the coffee to rise to the top of the caffettiera. The beans still had remnants of earth and bits of straw on them. Nonna rinsed them to remove the unwanted parts; I stood ready with the colander and a floral dish rag to dry them. We worked in silence, the smell of brewing coffee permeating the kitchen. I had a feeling that something was on her mind. After I dried the last colanderful of beans and put them into a shallow bowl to dry further in the sun, the coffee was finally ready. That was when she finally spoke up.